Ichthyosaur diving into the water is written - Chinese character assertion

Author: Bian Yufang

One

Day by day, I fiddled with Chinese characters, thinking about arranging seats for the oldest script in the world.

The boss is the cuneiform script of the Sumerians of West Asia. It was born in 3500 BC, like a "wedge" of the great drama of human civilization, which triggered the prosperity of the Tigris River- Euphrates River Valley. It was a fertile land in the shape of a crescent moon, just in response to "a round in the sky to be held out, and all the people on earth look up."

This is five hundred years, in the Nile Valley of Northeast Africa, the holy words of the ancient Egyptians have emerged from the beginning of the "king's prosperity", which is the second chair.

Then, after another three or five hundred years, the Yin people of the Yellow River Basin in East Asia issued a shout, showed the oracle bone that "shocked the world", and sat firmly in the third chair.

You see, the source of words has its own laws, highlighting that "the method of feng shui is the best in water".

Since then, the three legs have stood tall, the three factions have argued, the same pictogram, the same creation of the expression, the shape of the sound, this is in terms of macro narrative. Specifically, it is more irrelevant: the wedge-shaped text relies on clay plates, the holy writings rely on papyrus, the oracle bones rely on the tortoiseshell animal bones, and the "fish and dragons dive into the water", and they each sink and float, floating and sinking in the long river of time.

The script belongs to the language, the language belongs to the ethnic group, and the ethnic group belongs to the state. When the country is broken and the family is destroyed, the writing often suffers with it. After several great catastrophes of red dust and black, first Egypt fell to Persia, and the holy book was destroyed; Subsequently, Persia was destroyed in Macedonia, causing the destruction of the wedge;" Only our oracle bones, "the ashes of the ancient and modern", have been unbreakable all the way, advancing with the times, and evolving into the Chinese characters that shine with the sun and the moon today.

People say that it is easy to shake mountains, but it is difficult to shake Chinese characters.

People say that the endless life and renewal of Chinese characters show the great vitality of Chinese culture such as the sun, the moon, the heavens, and the rivers and rivers.

It is believed that Chinese characters are the fifth major invention contributed by the Chinese nation to mankind in addition to the "four major inventions".

Two

When I was a child, I read a private school, and when I first heard the ancient "Cangjie writing books, and the rain is raining, the ghosts cry at night". The little age was shocked, and he understood what it meant to be "earth-shattering, weeping ghost god".

Growing up, successively contacting relevant information, knowing that Cangjie was a historical official of the Yellow Emperor, born different from ordinary people, "Dragon Face Four Eyes", emphasizing that his eyes are like electricity, is a natural telescope and microscope, is to be able to look up at astronomy freely, look down on geography, melt the sun, moon, stars, mountains, grasses, trees, birds, animals, insects and fish in one furnace, creating a symbol of expression. He called it "word." This is what we now call hieroglyphs, and it is also the ancestor of the oracle bone.

Cangjie's creation of characters is definitely an information revolution that has changed the world and the earth. The words that flashed with electric light and stone fire one by one, rushed to fight bulls, alarmed the gods of the celestial realm, and specially sent down a luxurious gumi rain, "Xi Da Pu Ben"; And the glamorous rays that used to be enchanted by the long night, had a premonition that they were about to be illuminated by the sun of civilization, and they hugged each other in the pre-dawn darkness and wept.

If you ask, is there really such a person as Cangjie in history? Maybe. However, writing is a huge system project, which cannot be completed by a member of primitive society alone, so Cangjie should be plural, a collective name for countless wise people.

So, how to view the "four eyes" of Cangjie recorded in ancient books? I think we might as well think of it as a metaphor: when human beings master words, they have an extra pair of eyes on their foreheads that look at the mysteries of heaven and earth.

Three

One day in the golden autumn of 121 AD, a news broke in Luoyang, the Eastern Han Dynasty' Kyoto: Xu Shen, who was the former Nange Matsuri and now returned to his native Runan, took 21 years to complete a "Commentary on the Interpretation of Characters". Xu Shen had been working hard for many years and years, so he sent his son Xu Chong into Beijing to present the manuscript to the imperial court. According to the experts who participated in the review, the whole book counts 15 volumes, divided into 540 subheads, 9353 words, and 1163 variant characters. For this reason, the imperial court rewarded Xu Shen with forty horses of cloth and clouds.

Forty horses of cloth are nothing less than a huge amount of money, and what a reward from the imperial court, what an honor!

However, Emperor An of Han, who reigned that day, could not have imagined, Xu Shen himself could not have imagined, and all sentient beings could not have imagined that the influence and status of the Shuowen Jiezi in the language and writing circles of later generations could not be compared with forty horses of cloth!

Brief description: the Tang Dynasty listed it as a compulsory subject for the imperial examination; The Song Dynasty regarded it as a Confucian compulsory classic; The Qing Dynasty enshrined it as a hundred all-you-can-eat xianxue. And Xu Shen was also upgraded from "Xu Jun" to "Character Sage".

When history entered the 20th century, the Chinese characters that used to be popular suddenly became shrunken, both rubbing shoulders with handy typewriters and being blocked by a clever computer from the 26-key keyboard – looking like they had entered a dead end.

In the early 1980s, the first to overcome the difficulty of Chinese character input was Wang Yongmin from Henan and Xu Shen's compatriot.

Wang Yongmin told me that the original inspiration for the "five-stroke font" he developed was derived from Xu Shen's "single body for the text, and the combination for the word".

I wrote an essay for Wang Yongmin, "The Glory of Recasting Chinese Characters," which began by quoting one of Wang Yongmin's favorite quotes, which Francis Bacon wrote in His Book Progress in Scholarship: "Then we will see how the monument of wisdom and learning is far more immortal than the monument of power and force." Isn't that true that homer's epics have been circulating for more than 2,500 years without losing a single syllable or a single letter, and during this time countless palaces, temples, castles, and towns have been corroded or destroyed? ”

From this point of view, Xu Shen is even more admirable, and the scenery is stopped!

Four

It is said that Wu Zetian made 18 characters in his lifetime. Some are directly borrowed from ancient texts, and some are pieced together and matched.

For example, "guo", written "圀", a "mouth", framed the upper "eight" and lower "square", yuyi eight parties worship, the unification of the world. "Earth", writing "埊", "mountain", "water", "soil" overlap, the three elements of nature, one by one. "Man", writing on the "one" under the "birth", seems to be reminding, but also seems to be in the good drink: man, only this time life, Er wait for self-sake. "Subject", written on the "one" and "loyal", clearly reveals: the duty of the subject is to be sincere and loyal. "Nian", with the combination of "thousand", "thousand", "ten thousand" and "ten thousand", means that the Great Zhou Emperor she founded has a long life and no boundaries.

The most famous word created by Wu Zetian is "曌" (same as "照"). From the light, from the sky, the sun and the moon soared into the sky, and the light was under the heavens. Wu Zetian loved this word and simply took it into the name - Wu Cao.

Wu Zetian listed the creation of characters as a cultural project of the heavens and the earth, and with the authority of the empress, the words followed the orders and promulgated the four seas. However, when she died, those words were either cumbersome and complicated, or because of violations of the law, and most of them were eliminated; Only one "Cao", attached to her name, survived.

What stands in front of Wu Zetian's tomb is not so much a wordless stele as a symbol of all the "cao" in her chest but no stele face.

Five

The Song people like to play word games, play out the machine front to play the full hall of color, when counting Su Dongpo and Buddha Seal.

Buddha Yin as a monk of jinshan temple, but ru meat and alcohol, one day, he cooked a few Yangtze River anchovies, served in the plate, has not yet moved, just when Mr. Dongpo of who degraded Guazhou came to visit, embarrassment, he took a large chime on the Buddhist case, covered the fish plate. Dongpo smelled the smell of fish from afar, but when he entered the door, he couldn't see the fish, and he looked at a large chime on the table, and his heart was clear, so he said to the Buddha Seal: "Ask the master, what is the next sentence of 'Xiangyang Gate Spring is always here'?" "'Ji Shan People Celebrate More Than'!" "Haha!" Dongpo showed off the bottom card, "Since there are fish (Yu) in the chime (Qing), then accumulate some goodness and share it!" ”

Earn a meal of fish, can not be earned in vain. Another day, Dongpo informed the Buddha Seal and invited him to eat "Half Lu". Buddha Yin thought it was an unusual delicacy, but he knew it was just a home-cooked fish: "You said that you invited me to eat 'Half Lu'?" "This is 'Half-Lu'!" The top half of the word Lu is 'fish'. ”

After a few days, he also invited Dongpo to eat "Half Lu". It was nearly noon, and when I came to the monastery of the Buddha Seal, the door was closed. Knocking on the door, there was a loud response: "Wait! Wait a minute! Dongpo estimated that the old monk was cooking small fresh on the stove and ruling a big country, so he was at ease basking in the sun in the courtyard. When the Buddha Seal finally opened the door, Dongpo lifted his feet into the house, did not smell the fish, did not see any dishes, and asked: "What about the 'Half Lu' that you invited me to eat?" The Buddha Seal pointed to the sun in the sky outside the house, smiled and said, "You have already eaten!" Dongpo suddenly realized that a while ago, he invited the Buddha seal to eat the "upper half of The Lu" - "fish", this time, the Buddha Seal invited him back to "the lower half of the Lu" - "day".

Another public case of Dongpo and the Buddha Seal is particularly witty and ridiculous.

It is Richun and Jingming, and Dongpo takes a boat tour of Slender West Lake with Buddha Yin. Boat to the center of the lake, Buddha Yin took out a folding fan inscribed on the east slope, threw it into the lake with his raised hand, and teasingly chanted: "Water flow Dongpo poem (corpse)!" Dongpo raised his eyes and glimpsed a wild dog next to the small river by the lake, nibbling on the flesh and bones with relish, so he pointed his hand: "The dog chews on the (monk) bone on the river!" ”

The shape, sound and meaning of Chinese characters can be called colorful, wonderful, and magnificent, which is unattainable by pinyin characters. It is the dazzling Chinese characters that have created Su Dongpo and also reflected the Buddha seal.

Guangming Daily (2022-07-20 16 edition)

Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily