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An etymology of the ideograms Jia Ren.37

confucius

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Etymology of the ideograms Jia Ren.37






The first ideogram of Jia Ren.37 is composed of two parts. On top is the symbol for Roof. Below it the ideogram for Pig, Hog, or Boar…

For the longest time Jia was accepted by translators as explaining the Backcountry House, the house of the peasant who lived with his pig within that house. It was believed that the role of the Pig was to clean-up leftovers…although, we must assume that leftovers are quite rare in China…this concept is actually quite erroneous. It would be naïve to imagine that the intellectuals who composed the ideograms would have drifted so far about such an important concept.

The etymological reality has more to do with the spirituality of the family which is linked to the very core of the Chinese clan: the Cult of the Ancestors. This one half of the head of a Pig was the minimal expected offering to the cult of the departed.

From there the ideogram does not designate those that are bound by blood ties but, rather, by the link between those that sacrifice to a common ancestor: the Chinese family, whether that family be an intellectual group, a group of tradesmen…the Cult of the Ancestors helped to overcome the absurd idea of a life limited to the individual by including him within the greater context of a group, one that preceded him and one that will follow.

Rather than family, by which this term is usually described, the meaning of this ideogram should be House, in the medieval sense of the word. The term Clan seemed appropriate to evoke the multiple links of the big Chinese family.



The second part of the ideogram describing Jia Ren.37 is the general term used for the idea describing Humans. To express this idea the Chinese have chosen the characteristic that differentiates humans from other animals: they stand on their hind legs. However, this definition of human is relatively recent. The canonical form of this ideogram depicted a person in an attitude of ritual oration. That etymology leads one to suppose that, before being anthropological, the idea the Chinese had about man was spiritual.

Clansmen: of the sixty-four situations depicted in the context of the Yi Jing, only two are name in reference to the Human Being: Tong Ren.13 (Accord with the many) and Jia Ren.37 (Clansmen), each proposing a particular pole of human relationship.

Kinship and Friendship have always been the cornerstones of the social structure. Kinship is a knit stretched to the furthest possible vertical limits in time and Friendship is born from a multitude of fortunate horizontal meetings.

Here, with the Clan, the accent is on the vertical relationship of different generations within the big family. In Tong Ren.13, with the concept of Agreement, the accent is on the horizontal relationship between the people of a same generation. Each of these two points of view is represented by objects relative to food: here, the Pig in its most ritualistic aspect and, in Tong Ren.13, by a Bowl and its Cover, an every day food utensil.

Confucius















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