"Chase" writing in Oracle
, above is "
", is the left half of the traditional character "師", is also the omitting of the word "shi", the bottom is the "stop" character that indicates the footsteps followed. Oracle's "step by- and-for-one" writing
The word "豕" on the top means pig, and the word "stop" below indicates chasing wild boar on foot.
The Commentaries on the Interpretation of Words says: "Chase, chase, chase, chase." So, today we say that there is no difference between "chasing" and "chasing." However, the meaning of "chase" and "chase" in the oracle bone is not the same, the word "chase" is used when chasing people, and the word "chase" is used when hunting and chasing animals - this situation is the same in oracle bones and gold texts. There are many ways to write the word "one by one" in the oracle bone, in addition to chasing "豕", there are also
Indicates "deer",
It means "dog" and so on. The ancients hunted and chased what animals, and when they went back to record, they drew what animals looked like.
The use of the word "chase" for chasing people and the word "chasing" for chasing animals have a large number of remnants in Chinese. For example, the historical story of "Xiao He Yuexia Chasing Han Xin" that everyone is familiar with, if the "chase" here is changed to "chasing", it will feel inappropriate. Another example is "the crowd chasing deer", if you change "chase" to "chase", it is also funny.
From the perspective of history, human beings have evolved from hunters to farmers, and then from farmers to practitioners in various industries in modern society. We modern people still have the remnants of hunter culture, a person living in the world, will always chase something, there will always be something to pursue. What a person pursues can reflect his outlook on life, values and worldview. In real life, people's pursuits are all kinds and different, difficult to summarize simply, and it is not convenient to praise and deprecate at will. But if you dig deeper, the core content of people's pursuits can be boiled down to two aspects: Who do you follow? What are you after?
Who to follow, what to pursue, there are university questions. There is a story of "Ink Sorrow Silk Dyeing" in "Mozi", which means that Mozi once passed by a dyeing workshop and saw that the silk dyeer put the pure white silk into the dyeing vat and took it out to become colorful. Therefore, he said with emotion: Pure white silk, put in the cyan dyeing vat will become cyan, put into the yellow dyeing vat will become yellow, so the dyeing silk can not be careless! People, like pure white silk, are dyed. The kings of Shun, Yu, Tang, and Wu were influenced by the sages, so these four generations of kings were able to rule the country and the world. The four generations of Xia Jie, Yin Yi, Li Wang, and You Wang were infected by bad people, pursuing extravagance and pleasure, and not practicing virtue, so they harmed the world, and finally the country was destroyed and killed, and they were slaughtered.
The highest pursuit of traditional Chinese culture is to become a sage, so people are required to "see the wise and think together". Jingxing Weixian and Ke Nian as Saints - this is an important concept in the Book of Poetry and the Book of Shang. In the Book of Poetry, it is said: "The mountain is up, the scenery is walking", which means that the virtuous person, his morality is like a mountain worthy of everyone's admiration, and his behavior is like a road worthy of everyone's fulfillment. In the Book of Shang, it is said: "Only the holy mind is crazy, and the only mad mind is holy", which means that whether to be sanctified or to become crazy is all in the cultivation of the individual.
Traditional Chinese culture advocates the feelings of home and country. Zhang Zai, a scholar of the Song Dynasty, said in a passage: "Establish a heart for heaven and earth, establish a destiny for the people, continue to learn for the saints, and open up peace for all the worlds", which is considered to be a basic ambition of Chinese Confucianism. These four sentences should be understood philosophically. "Establish a heart for heaven and earth", how can people establish a heart for heaven and earth? The material world has no heart, and all the spirit is in people, so traditional Chinese culture calls heaven, earth, and people "three talents." The difference between man and all things is that man has morality, ethics, thinking, knowledge, and values, so the whole heaven and earth, the heart lies in man. Therefore, to establish a heart for heaven and earth, to establish a destiny for the people, and then to continue to learn from the saints and to open up peace for all the worlds is to contribute to human society. This is a very important point of view of Confucianism, and it is the value pursuit advocated by China's excellent traditional culture.
◎This article was originally published in the "China Journal of Discipline Inspection and Supervision" (authors Li Xueqin, Wang Zhixuan), the copyright belongs to the original author.