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The Chinese character luan (亂) bears two contradictory meanings: “chaos” and “order.” Scholar and commentator Guo Pu (郭璞, 276-324) was the first to note the phenomenon of a single character possessing two diametrically opposed meanings. Over the centuries, theories about the phenomenon have proliferated, a debate which has given rise to the scholarly term fanxun (反訓, enantiosemy).Those who resist the concept of fanxun claim that these contradictory meanings are more recently accreted additions that result from the process of jiajie (仮借, phonetic borrowing) rather than meanings that inhere in the character from the start. Supporters of the idea of fanxun -- especially contemporary supporters -- attempt to parse the contradictory meanings as a dialectical conflict.In contrast to these viewpoints, the present paper advances two claims. The first is that, when taking into account the conventions of character creation and the history of character development, the phenomenon of a single character bearing two diametrically opposed meanings is the result of the phenomena of zhuanzhu (転注, derivative cognates) and jiajie (仮借, phonetic borrowing). That is, this paper asserts, even if one accepts the claim that the second, contradictory meaning was a later accretion through the process of jiajie, the conventions of character creation make the appearance of fanxun inevitable. Meanwhile, zhuanzhu and jiajie are conventions of character creation that work to increase the number of characters and the meanings that they bear, and both are based in the same sources of sound and meaning.From this foundation, the paper offers an additional formulation: “opposite meanings, intimately entwined (相反相因, xiangfan xiangyin).” That is, the paper asserts that a character that bears diametrically opposed meanings is not to be understood as a dialectic, but as “opposite meanings, intimately entwined” (i.e., contradictions which exist in intimate relation to each other) -- an understanding of the phenomenon that is characteristically Chinese., 論文

What was the original image of the character 神 (Jp. kami: Ch. shén: Eng. “god, deity, divinity”)? And what did it mean to ancient Chinese people? Drawing on sources such as the poetry of Du Fu (712–770 CE), the Guanzi, the Mozi, and the results of recent studies in ancient Chinese archeology and paleography, this essay proposes one theory. It concludes that the Chinese character 神 and the attitude toward divinity held by the ancient Chinese was something very close to shamanism.As it is used in the poetry of Du Fu, the character 神 means something similar to “divine possession.” Body and spirit resonate in tune with the divine, the very soul quakes—Du Fu thought that it was this to which the best poetry should aspire.In the Guanzi and the Mozi, the character 神 does not denote a personal god with human characteristics like substance, a will, or individuality. It is, rather, functional. Yet, much as shamans do, humans must participate in particular practices and demonstrate certain virtues in order to gain access to the divine.The most recent classical Chinese paleographical research indicates that the character 神 originates in an image of a dragon with two mouths. The dragon—that is, the divine—granted life and death through these two mouths. The entity that communed with the dragon was the shaman.In ancient China, then, the relationship between the divine and the human was not one of domination and subordination. Rather, it was the intermingling, reciprocal sense of awareness that was paramount—an idea that has implications for contemporary humans contemplating the relationship between the human and the divine., 論文

Some pairs of the hexagrams in the I Ching (Book of Changes) may be viewed as having the structure of palindromes, and the elements that make them up may be viewed as palindromes as well. The hexagram 師, (shi, Leading), for example, is the reverse of the hexagram 比 (bi, Grouping), and each of that hexagramʼs six yao 爻 (the whole or broken lines that make up the hexagram) is the reverse of the corresponding yao. The first yao of the hexagram 比, for example, is the sixth yao of the hexagram 師, while the sixth yao of the hexagram 比 is the first yao of the hexagram 師. Whether it can be ascertained if there is in fact a reversible, palindrome-like relationship between these pairs of yao and their commentaries, and whether each of these paired yao shows a correspondence with and reversal of its counterpartʼs meaning is the question this paper takes as its subject. This essay looks at seven pairs of hexagrams in which each yao is the mirror image of that of its corresponding hexagram, and, on the basis of the commentaries on each of the forty-two yao, for a total of eighty-four, determines that almost all of the pairs show this palindromic conversion of meaning., 論文

Nothing expresses the essence and thinking of classical Chinese culture and literature better than the palindrome, although palindromes themselves are not highly ranked. Exhibiting the tendency of classical Chinese literature to present everything in dyads, and to highly value the never-ending cycle between two poles, palindromes are also recognized in the iconography of the Book of Changes (I Ching, 易経), in which the symbols of the 64 hexagrams are arranged as iconographic palindromes. It might be said that these 64 hexagrams represent the "Mandala" of Chinese cosmology. This paper examines and discusses the hypothesis that if it is true that a palindrome is hidden in this Mandala, then not only Chinese cosmology, but Chinese literature in its entirety as a cultural concept is characterized by the phenomenon of the palindrome., 論文 (Article)

My research into concepts of Chinese culture in the Chinese language seeks the contemporary meanings of those concepts by examining the relationships that connect the structure of Chinese characters to Chinese words and the characteristic features found in the modes of thought typical of the cultural and geographical regions that use or were influenced by the character. This research paper, focusing on painting, explores the relationships between various aspects of Chinese painting and Chinese cultural concepts as they occur in the Chinese language. Western thinking is very insistent on separating painting from poetry. In contrast, this paper concentrates on the connection between Chinese painting and poetry in order to argue that the origin of Chinese painting resides in poetry-that, Chinese painters do not imitate nature, but paint as if they were writing a poem. I argue, moreover, that a search for the primitive form of Chinese painting leads back to the patterns in oracle bone scripts and bronze ware., 論文 (Article)

Stories of animal spouses-marriages in which animals change their forms and marry human beings-are common to Japan and China, but the conclusions of these stories in each culture are quite different. In the Japanese stories, the creature (a fox or some similar animal) changes into a beautiful woman or a beautiful man, lures the human being into marriage, and then, through some strange turn of events, is revealed as an animal, whereupon the marriage collapses. In some Chinese stories, by contrast, the creature's true nature is known from the outset, or, in others, only strengthens the tie between the human and the animal when it is revealed midway through the story. These stories of creature marriage have attracted the attention of numerous psychologists because through them it is possible to understand how non-human species and their alien state of being is reflected in the human psyche, and in this way to approach the "self" of the storyteller. The late Harvard professor Chang Kwang-chih, in his research on animal patterns on Chinese bronze-ware, understood animals as the "alter egos" of human beings. This paper takes Chang's conclusion as its starting-place, and, distinguishing between the revealed self and the hidden self, reconceives Chang Kwang-chih's "alter ego" as the hidden self, and discusses the difference in modes of being between the revealed self and the hidden self in Chinese and Japanese people., 論文 (Article)

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