GLOSSARY OF TERMS

TERMS COMMON TO ALL FOUR MAJOR TRADITIONS

This term is often translated as “the Way,” but the increasing use of the Chinese term in contemporary English makes it better to leave the term untranslated. In ancient texts, the word Dao actually possesses a wide range of meanings.

The earliest known forms of the graph for Dao include elements showing a foot, a crossroads, and an eye decorated with an elaborate eyebrow, an element that represents the word shou 首: head. The head element may have served only to denote the phonetic value of the word dao (the two words were related phonetically in Old Chinese), but the graph may also have been designed to convey semantic information, indicating an early use connected with magical incantations and dances performed by a shaman (a person able to communicate with the world of spirits) as he or she purified a pathway to be used in a religious procession. If so, then from this pathway connection, the word Dao derives its modern meaning of a path or way; from the formula of the dance, the word derives a meaning of “formula,” “method”; from the spoken element of the incantation, the word derives the meaning of “a teaching,” and also serves as a verb “to speak.”

All ancient schools of philosophy referred to their teachings as daos. Confucius and his followers claimed that they were merely transmitting a Dao — the social methods practiced by the sage kings of the past: “the Dao of the former kings.”

Texts in the tradition of early thought that came later to be called “Daoist” used the word in a special sense, which is why the Daoist tradition takes its name from this term. Daoists claimed that the cosmos itself followed a certain natural “way” in its spontaneous action. They called this the “Great Dao,” and contrasted it to the daos of other schools, which were human-created teachings, and which they did not believe merited the name Dao in their special sense.

Yi 義 (right, righteousness, appropriateness)

In its earliest uses, yi refers to an aesthetic or artistic appropriateness of appearance (the early graph provides little clue of the word’s early meaning: it shows a sheep above -- a graph form common in value-positive words -- and “me” below, a graph element which here serves only as a phonetic marker). Powerful leaders are sometimes said to possess “awesome yi,” meaning that their outward demeanor included some element of personal charisma or excellence. Later, the sense of “what is appropriate” came to carry a high ethical content -- appropriateness, what fits, was seen as an essential element of correctness or moral rightness.

For Confucians and Mohists in particular, yi was a central concept. It frequently denotes both propriety and ethical right in action, and those two schools argued pointedly about what the practical content of “righteousness” involved. For Confucians, yi was closely linked to ritual prescripts; for Mohists, the righteousness of an act was determined by its welfare consequences in the human world without regard for its aesthetic or ritual form.

De 德 (character, power, virtue)

De is a difficult word to translate; its meaning varies considerably with context. Its early graph shows an upward looking eye next to a half-crossroad, and the significance of this form has been much debated without much result. In its early uses, de seems to refer to the prestige that well-born and powerful aristocrats possessed as a result of the many gifts they dispensed to loyal followers, family members, and political allies (rather like the prestige associated with a Mafia godfather). Later, the term came to be associated with important attributes of character. Although it can be used to refer to both positive or negative features of person, it usually refers to some form of personal “excellence,” and to say that someone has much de is to praise him.

The concrete meaning of this term varies among different schools. Confucians use it most often to refer to a person’s moral dispositions (moral according to Confucians, at any rate), and in this sense, the word is often best rendered as “character” or “virtue.” Daoists, however, speak of de as an attribute of both human and non-human participants in the cosmos, and they often describe it as a type of charismatic power or leverage over the limits of nature that the Daoist sage is able to acquire through self-cultivation. As such, it may be best rendered as “power.” The title of the famous book, Dao de jing (attributed to an equally famous though probably mythical author named Laozi) means “The Classic of the Dao and De,” and in this title, de is best understood as a type of power derived from transcending (going beyond) the limits of the human ethical world.

Tian 天 (Heaven)

Tian was the name of a deity of the Zhou people which stood at the top of a supernatural hierarchy of spirits (ghosts, nature spirits, powerful ancestral leaders, Tian). Tian also means “the sky.” For that reason, it is well translated as “Heaven.” The early graph is an anthropomorphic image (a picture of a deity in terms of human attributes) that shows a human form with an enlarged head. Heaven was an important concept for the early Zhou people; Heaven was viewed as an all-powerful and all-good deity, who took a special interest in protecting the welfare of China. When the Zhou founders Shang Dynasty in 1045, they defended their actions by claiming that they were merely receiving the mandate of Heaven, who had wished to replace debased Shang rule with a new era of virtue in China.

All our philosophers use this term and seem to accept that there existed some high deity that influenced human events. Mohists were particularly strident on the importance of believing that Tian existed and was powerfully concerned with human activity. They claimed that the Confucians did not believe Tian existed, although Confucian texts do speak of Tian reverently and with regularity; however, Confucian texts also seem to move towards identifying Tian less with a conscious deity and more with the unmotivated regularities of Nature. When Daoists speak of Heaven, it is often unclear whether they are referring to a deity, to Nature as a whole, or to their image of the Great Dao.

Ming 命 (fate, destiny, command, lifespan)

The root meaning of ming is a command or order, and early on it became associated with the term Tian in the phrase we translate as “the Mandate of Heaven.” The original graph shows an open mouth directed down over a kneeling figure (a second mouth element was added later and is reflected in the modern character). The notion of “what is ordained” was carried over into a meaning of ming that conveys a limited sense of one’s personal fate: “lifespan.” The notion of “lifespan” conveys an association of ming with human limits (one cannot exceed one’s ming/lifespan, regardless of one’s actions, although one may, through dangerous behavior, meet one’s end prematurely). The notion of the political mandate, however, carried a strong prescriptive dimension, derived from the original sense of a command -- Tian’s mandate is a charge to act, and so expresses not limits but obligations and opportunities. The double-edged sense of ming as unavoidable “fate” (a negative, limiting sense) and as one’s social “destiny” (which conveys a positive, exhortatory sense) introduces complexity into certain debates in early Chinese thought, centered around the Mohist charge that Confucianism was “fatalistic.”

Qi 氣 (energy, vapor)

This important term is so difficult to translate that throughout this course, we will simply leave it in its transcribed form as qi. For us, the most important of the many meanings of meaning of qi is “bodily energy.” This has a very specific referent in experience. One way to identify the qi in your own body is to drink three cups of coffee before bed and then, as you lie awake two hours later, take note of the light feeling of nerves racing around, keeping you awake - that’s your qi. In ancient China, this qi was pictured as a type of vaporous substance that penetrated the cosmos - it made the stars shine and water flow, and in people, it was a powerful force (the original graph seems to suggest steam). If properly harnessed, qi could help people achieve great things in the world and could also nourish the body and keep it healthy. If dissipated through careless living or unfocused activity, it could sabotage the ability to follow through in action and undermine physical health. Qi cultivation was a basic aspect of the training of many schools, including Confucianism and Daoism. There were also schools whose Daos consisted of nothing other than qi cultivation. (An important product of such schools was martial arts training, both in the Classical period and later. Many contemporary East Asian martial arts still place qi at the center of their training.)

The Sage 聖 (sheng)

All of the major schools of ancient Chinese thought, with the possible exception of the Legalists, were essentially prescriptions for human self-perfection. These schools envisioned the outcome of their teachings — the endpoint of their Daos — in terms of different models of human excellence. A variety of terms were used to describe these images of perfection, but the most common was sheng, or shengren 聖人, which we render in English as “sage person” or, more elegantly, “sage.”

The original graph includes a picture of an ear and a mouth on top (the bottom part merely indicates the pronunciation, and was sometimes left out), and the early concept of the sage involved the notion of a person who could hear better than ordinary people. The word is closely related to the common word for “to listen” (ting 聽). What did the sage hear? Presumably the Dao.

The word “sage” is one of a group of terms denoting excellence. In Confucian texts, the phrase True Prince often performs the same function as Sage, though sometimes the sage is pictured as a more complete term, incorporating not only ethical perfection but also success in politics. Daoist texts speak of the sage often, but also use other terms, such as “Perfect Man” to refer to their ultimate ideal.

Heart/Mind 心 (xin)

In Chinese, a single word was use to refer both to the function of our minds as a cognitive, reasoning organ, and its function as an affective, or emotionally responsive, organ. The word, xin, was originally represented in written form by a sketch of the heart. Whenever you see the word “mind” or “heart” referred to (the translation will vary according to the context), it’s important to understand that there are really four aspects fused in that term. The heart/mind thinks rationally, feels emotionally, passes value judgments on all object of thought and feeling, and initiates active responses in line with these judgments. Sometimes, the heart/mind is contrasted with “unthinking” aspects of people, such as basic desires and instinctual responses, but other times, these are pictured as part of the heart/mind.

Shí 時 (timeliness); shì 勢 (strategic advantage; power array)

These two terms are transcribed with the same Latin letters, but their sounds are distinguished in Chinese by tonal intonation (indicated by the diacritic marks). They are not related etymologically, but they play parallel conceptual roles in early thought. The term shì/strategic-advantage seems initially to have been used reflectively in militarist thought, where it can denote the array of power relationships between two states, their rulers, ministers, generals, and armies, or it can denote the configurations of terrain, climate, logistical networks, and so forth, that can provide an army with a strategic advantage. As the conditions denoted by the term shì always are in potential states of change, the term is fundamentally dynamic. It relates closely to another word, differing in phonetic value only in tonal intonation: shí: “time, season, timeliness.” Shì/strategic-advantage and shí/timeliness are, in effect, spatial and temporal correlates of a single concept – the shifting circumstances of the experienced world which for the actual field for all applied learning. While certain concepts and values essential to right action can be learned through study, the skillful practitioner must develop the aesthetic sense that allows a perception of and responsiveness to the ever-emerging configurations of relationships in time, space, hierarchy, and so forth, that create the field of objective constraints on successful application of learning in action.

TERMS CENTRAL TO THE EARLY CONFUCIAN TRADITION

Ren 仁 (Humanity; Goodness)

No term is more important in Confucianism than ren. Prior to the time of Confucius, the term Humanity does not seem to have been much used. In those pre-philosophical days, the word seems to have meant “manly,” an adjective of high praise in a warrior society. Confucius, however, changed the meaning of the term and gave it great ethical weight. He identified “manliness” (or, in non-sexist terms, the qualities associated with constructive social leadership) with the firm disposition to place the needs and feelings of others and of the community before one’s own. The written graph of this term is a simple one; it combines the form for “person” on the left with the number “two” on the right; a person of Humanity, or ren, is someone who is thoroughly relational in their thoughts, feelings, and actions. (The happily illustrative graphic etymology is, unfortunately, undercut by recently unearthed manuscript texts of the late fourth century BCE, which consistently render the term with the graph for “body” placed over the graph for “heart/mind”; this may, however, have been a local scribal tradition confined to the southerly region of Chu.) Confucians often pair this term with Righteousness, and it is very common for the two terms together to be used as a general expression for “morality.” Other schools also use the term ren, but they usually employ it either to criticize Confucians, or in a much reduced sense, pointing simply to people who are well-meaning. The term is closely linked in Confucian discourse with the next one.

Junzi 君子 (True Prince)

This is a compound word composed of two written characters which separately mean “ruler’s son.” The ancient character for “ruler” (jun) showed a hand grasping a writing brush with a mouth placed by the side, illustrating the modes by which a ruler issued orders (the word zi basically meant “child/son,” the written character being simply a picture of a child; it also served as an honorific suffix meaning “master” in names like Kongzi, that is, Confucius, or Master Kong). In pre-philosophical writings, the word junzi was used to refer to someone who was heir to a ruling position by virtue of his birth. Under the changing social conditions of the Warring States period, the concept of birthright was replaced by the notion of an “aristocracy of merit,” and in the Confucian school, the term junzi came to denote an “ethical aristocrat” rather than a future king. Because in this sense of the term, there is an underlying sense that “real” princeliness lies in moral accomplishments rather than the chance circumstances of family position, the term might be translated not as “prince,” but as True Prince. For Confucians, the hallmark of the junzi was his complete internalization of the virtue of ren and associated qualities, such as righteousness (yi) and full socialization through ritual skills. A parallel normative term, shi 士 (gentleman), is frequent in Confucian texts as a type of prefiguration of the junzi ideal in a man of aspiration. Originally probably denoting a man of good birth, in the Warring States era the term shi comes to denote a man whose character exemplifies the social accomplishments once associated with birth – a change of meaning paralleling the evolution of the term junzi.

Li 禮 (Ritual)

Commitment to ritual was the distinguishing characteristic of the Confucian School. By “ritual,” or li, the Confucians meant not only ceremonies of grand religious or social occasions, but also the institutions of Zhou Dynasty political culture and the norms of proper everyday conduct. Although accordance with ritual was, in some senses, a matter of knowing the codes of aristocratic behavior (and knowing them better than the debased aristocrats of the later Zhou era), it was more importantly a manner of attaining full mastery of the style or pattern (wen) of civilized behavior. Confucians viewed these patterns as the essence of civilization itself. The great sages of the past had labored era after era to transform China from brutishness to refinement through the elaboration of these artistic forms of social interaction, and in the Confucian view, the epitome of human virtue was expressed only through these forms. Mastery of the outer forms was the path to inner sagehood. The ancient character for li shows a ceremonial vessel filled with sacrificial goods on the right, with an altar stand on the left.

Wen 文 (pattern, style, culture)

The word wen denoted the opposite of brutishness in appearance and behavior. A person of “pattern” was a person who had adopted the many cultivated forms that characterized Chinese culture at its best, in contrast to the “barbaric” nomadic peoples who surrounded China. Confucians believed that the patterns of Chinese civilization had been initially inspired by the patterns of the Heavens and the seasons, and that they represented a Heaven-destined order that human beings needed to fabricate within the sphere of their own activity, so that they could join with Heaven and earth in the process of creation and order. The original character appears to have pictured a costumed dancer, and music, sound, and dance were essential emblems of the Confucian portrait of the civilized society. Such patterns were the basis of ritual li. For Daoists, pattern symbolized the fall of the human species from its origins in the natural Dao. The Dao de jing attacks pattern and culture through its two most striking metaphors for the Dao: the uncarved block of wood and the undyed piece of cloth.

TERMS CENTRAL TO THE EARLY DAOIST TRADITION

Spontaneity, Nature 自然 (ziran)

Daoists pictured the essential quality of the Dao in terms of the dynamic processes of Nature (that is, the non-human sphere of the cosmos). In the human world, action was the outcome of planning and was generally undertaken in light of the actor’s self-interest. Daoists viewed the world of Nature differently. While portions of the Zhuangzi acknowledge that animals act out of self-interest, like people, the Daoists held that Nature itself, the creator of all in the world, was simply an unplanned spontaneous impulse of creativity, that did its work without interest in it and never took credit for its deeds. This automatic feature of Nature was described by the compound word zi-ran, whose characters literally mean “of itself so.” This world was also used as a noun to denote something very close to what we ordinarily mean by Nature when we point towards the world of animals and plants and its processes. The teachings of the Daoists urged human beings to give up their anti-Dao activities of thinking, planning, and scheming, and instead to learn to be guided by their spontaneous responses. What this meant in practice appears to have been different for the authors of the Dao de jing and Zhuangzi, but they shared the vision of human excellence as somehow capturing a Natural spontaneity that had been uniquely lost to the human species as it had become entangled in the worlds of language and values.

Wu-wei 無為 (non-action, non-striving)

The spontaneous action celebrated by the Daoists, by virtue of its unplanned nature and its abandonment of self-interest, was action that effortlessly responded to instinct or impulse. The word wei was used to denote consciously planned action, the end result of some effortful initiative. (The character itself originally showed a hand pulling an elephant, and you can’t get much more effortful than that.) Daoist text instruct us to be “without wei,” without effort or striving, without any conscious activity at all, in the manner that, say, a willow tree grows or a fish swims about after a full meal. Wu-wei (wu simply means “not,” or “without”) was the ideal to which all Daoists aspired. It is interesting that the concept was also adopted by Confucians, who claimed that the ritualized sage also acted effortlessly in implementing his ethical dispositions, and by the Legalists, who said that the ruler of a perfect Legalist state should simply do nothing at all in order not to interfere with the perfect spontaneous function of the law-guided population.

A TERM CENTRAL TO THE MOHIST TRADITION

Welfare/profit 利 (lì)

The meaning of this term was a matter of contention between the Confucians and the Mohists. The Mohists made it a key term of their utilitarian ethical system. Mohism is called utilitarian because it measured the rightness of an act according to the net utility, or welfare, that it generated in the world. Mohists claimed that the ethical person was the one who always acted so as to maximize welfare (the character for this word, lì, which sounds slightly different from the Confucian word for “ritual,” depicts a blade next to an ear of grain, indicating agricultural wealth). Confucians, on the other hand, interpreted this same term in a commonly used sense of “personal profit,” the goal not of the ethical person, but of the self-regarding or selfish person. The anti-Mohist nature of the Confucian text Mencius is signaled from the first passage, where Mencius rebuffs a king who asks about how to bring “welfare” to his state, by treating him as if he were asking how he could “profit” himself.