Confucian exegesis

[muckefuck]

Last night, I helped monshu decipher some seals. There's a particular vendor on eBay who offers a lot interesting ones at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, his translations are often...idiosyncratic. In fact, if he didn't provide Pinyin transcriptions, we'd often have no chance of deciphering the characters. I think his translation of the following phrase was "The scholar knows the truth".

君子不器

The first two characters are often translated together as "gentleman". However, this doesn't begin to convey the connotations it's been freighted with by the Confucianists, for whom it designates an ideal practitioner of Confucian philosophy, the "superior man". I suspected that the sentence was a quote from the Analects, so we went on a Googling expedition and found it in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, there's no more context to be found there than 子曰 "The Master said" (or "Confucius say" in Charlie Chanese).

Linguistically, I found it a bit puzzling. As a noun, the last character, 器, means "tool, utensil, vessel" and--by extension--"talent, capacity". From this is derived a verb, "to respect someone for his ability". The negative particle 不 demands a verbal interpretation[*], but "The superior man does not respect someone for his ability" makes no sense; the sentiment is compatible neither with Confucianism nor the seller's translation.

However, as I warned monshu, there are no fixed parts of speech in Classical Chinese. For example, the most common translation of 王 is "king". As a modifier, however, it can mean "kingly" or "royal", e.g. 王宮 "royal palace". As a transitive verb, it means "rule", e.g. 王天下 "rule the world" (lit. "rule [all] under heaven") and, as an intransitive one, "to act like a king, to behave in a kingly manner".

Since there is no expressed object of 器 in the sentence, it must be interpreted intransitively: "The gentleman does not act as a tool." This agrees with the translations given both by Muller ("The Superior Man is not a utensil.") and Ames & Rosemont ("The superior man is not a mere vessel."). The latter scholars go on to point out that Confucius sees an important distinction between training and education. When it comes to creating the "superior man", he is far more concerned with developing character than in passing on specific skills; the superior man is far more than just a means to accomplish specific tasks.

Since reading this, I've been trying to contemplate to what extent I allow myself to be a utensil or vessel rather than a fully-developed ethical actor. The nature of my work makes me especially prone to this: As long as certain external goals are fulfilled, does the constitution of my internal character matter? How might my job be different if I focused more generally on developing my substance and then let that manifest itself in the tasks I'm called upon to do?

[*] According to Pulleyblank, Classical Chinese negates predicate nouns with 非 (e.g. 非牛非馬 "Not ox, not horse" [cf. "Neither fish nor fowl"]).

Comments

[teapot-farm.livejournal.com]

"rule [all] under heaven"

I think I have just despaired of ever learning Chinese to a useable level. The amount of possible meanings for rule - heaven - under , with no grammatical markers, are just so huge... and I know context is vital, but much of it appears to depend on knowledge of idiom, literature etc, which is a whole extra world of knowledge.
Maybe I'll just learn Esperanto. Nice and finite...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Esperanto depends on your knowledge of conventions (grammatical, cultural, metaphorical, etc.) found in European languages. Yes, the fact that Chinese depends on a different world of references makes it more difficult, but it also makes it more interesting. There's a certain charge that comes from finally understanding a phrase that seemed utterly inpenetrable at first.

天下 is an excellent example of the importance of convention in language. Yes, each character has a wide range of meanings, but I've never seen this compound used with any other meaning than "the world". English is no different. Think of all the meanings for "low" and "down"--but "the lowdown" only has one possible interpretation.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I would read it as "The Esteemed is Unskilled" or "Kimiko is Unskilled" (useless, clumsy, etc)., but of course I laughed when I first read these, as with some imagination, a Japanese reader can easily interpret that as, "Your child's useless." :: giggle ::