千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 6

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

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 5

Today's characters are:

寒來暑往
hán lái shŭ wăng

"Winter cold comes, summer heat goes."


Not a whole lot to this line, really. Together, 往來 can mean "come and go," as both verbs imply movement, and we've already seen that Chinese is fond of using paired nouns or antonyms to create a new word. Actually, "word" isn't quite right; "concept" is more like it. I haven't found 寒 and 暑 used together in such a manner, but their counterparts, 冬 and 夏, are, at least in modern Chinese, where they mean, unsurprisingly, "winter and summer." 春秋, or "spring and autumn," is the more famous seasonal pair: the "Spring and Autumn Annals" supposedly written by 孔子 Confucius about the state of 魯 Lu is the first thing that comes to mind. The phrase is also, as Kroll puts it, a "synecdoche for a year."

寒 and 暑, while signifying winter and summer, can represent their effects (i.e., cold and heat) alone, so another reading of this line is "cold and heat come and go." Either way, the emphasis on cycles and transience is something I've always appreciated about Chinese thought.

再見，看官.


微臣
史大偉