Today's line of the Thousand Character Classic reads:
秋收冬藏
qiū shōu dōng cáng
"Autumn harvest, winter storage."
Alternately, "harvest in autumn, hoard in winter."
I want to focus on the final character, 藏. It's used, with a different pronunciation, in 西藏, Xizang, the Chinese name for Tibet. Taken literally, the characters can mean "Western storehouse," which sounds like a reference to Tibet's long Buddhist history, since 藏 can also mean "Buddhist scripture" (e.g., the Chinese Tripitaka, or collection of Buddhist sutras, is 大藏經). Hence Tibet as "the western depository of Buddhist sutras."
But nope, the etymology is totally different. According to Endymion Wilkinson's monumental Chinese History: A New Manual, the Mongols divided Tibet into three areas: Tsang, U, and Ngari, and "the Zang in Xizang comes from Tsang (short for gTsangbu meaning river), the valley of the upper Yarlung river."
Incidentally, the Dalai Lama's title comes from the Mongolian language, and means "ocean lama."
There's a lesson for anyone studying Chinese- just because something sounds logical (or worse, logical and cool) doesn't mean it's at all accurate.
Later, folks!
微臣
史大偉
No comments:
Post a Comment