No More Learning

? : cf. Confucius 23: ''? This ideogram for a spirit contains two elements to be watched. ''
57 Fang to EP (TLS-2; Lilly)
[Cambridge, Mass. ] Feb. 11 [1952]
Dear Mr Pound,
? is the standard form; the one with ? in place of ? is calligraphic
aVectation. The ideogram is composed of ? (hill-slope, on which (cave-)dwell- ings were dug out) and ? fa, which also gives the sound to the composite form. ? ? kan was the original form. (There are a number of triplets, e. g. ? 1/4 ? fen, ? 1/4 ? ts'u). It seems that some clever and oYcious fellow wanted to help the tyro (possibly his own son) pronounce the 3-women ideogram [? ]; he eliminated one female and put ? ? ka^n in her place. ? Eventually people got lazy and liquidated one more woman, and we have ? as a variant of ? . Originally ? meant the same thing as ? in the sense of ''to come into contact with some one with the intention of getting something out of him'', i. e. ''to touch someone''. As for ? ? , it has nothing to do with monetary reform. ? ? was a kind of coin put into circulation by Wang Mang ? ? , who once usurped the Han throne. (By the way, Canto LIV: '' . . . HAN PING/ simple at table, gave tael to
? ? ? ? a. fang and pound's bilingual confucius 79
? the poor'' refers to Wang Mang, i. e. ''HAN PING'' (P'ing-ti ? of Han) is to be read ''WANG MANG. '') This line
? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ?
in your Southern Anthology 13 <by Tung-fang Suo ? ? ? , 2nd cent. B. C. >, and
? //////, ? ? ? ///
in 8 are both imitated from Ch'u ? Yu ? an's (roll 1)
? //////, ? ? ? ? ? ?
inwhich? 1/4 ? ,? (1/4? ) 1/4 ? . Thatis? ? means''toalter,tochangefor the worse. '' I think Ch'u ? Yu ? an's whining merely means:
Truly the world is clever & smart; they depart from the norm path to bring about chaos.
By the way, in the current language ? ? has a classroom vocable: to correct mistakes in composition, taking ? in the sense of ? ? [mistake].
---------
Hope to send you musical notation for the tones soon. Meanwhile a super- Wcial note on radicals:
Shuo-wen ? ? (end of Han) 540 radicals. Yu ? -p'ien ? ? (Liang dy. ) 542 ? ? ? ? ? (T'ang) 160 ?
? (Sung) 89 ? ? ? ? ? (Ming) 360 ?
by ? ? [Xu Shen]
by ? ? ? [Gu Yewang]
? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ?
[Zihui]? ?
The last is adopted in ? ? ? and K'ang-hsi's Dict. (I am sure you will want more details, which I hope to give you after some study myself. Frankly the classiWcation into radicals does not seem to have any more value than the captions in Roget's Thesa[u]rus. )
Yours respectfully [signed] Achilles Fang
? //////, ? ? ? ? ? ? : quoted from Qu Yuan's Li sao in volume i of Southern Anthology. See Glossary on Qu Yuan.
Shuo-wen: see Glossary on Xu Shen.
FANG/
200 ? 314 ? 214 ?
by? ? ? MeiTing-tso
58 EP to Fang (TL-4; Beinecke)
[St Elizabeths Hospital] [Washington, DC] [20 February 1952]
80 a. fang and pound's bilingual confucius
Invocation to patience/
re/ Four tuan/ any idea WHAT speciWc ideograms Mathews had in mind? 6541. 8
Is M/ dead? or only at Harvard? or why do they print his dic/?
some bloke in that AWFUL east west HawaiLosophy wanted to trans/? as love ? ? embrace?
The one word of sense among those dead leaves was ole Jarge Santayana
against having icecream and soup in same plate simultaneously.
Vague recollection that you mentioned a passage in Mencius BUT it didn't Wt which is not to say that Mat/ mayn't have thought it did.
A cold in the head Wlls one with benevolence // UGH ///
Perhaps one shd/ start thinking of how to trans/ a few english words into
Chinese so as to make sense in the more venerable language.
(this is not to transcurar' vr/recd/response re ''decadence of the empire'' ? <or ? too limited> MANG/ iv, 2, xxviii/3 AI4
? ? ? sheep that going to be DUTY
me UGH/ ? li2
? chih1?
? has this enough weight?
guess it's O. K.
Mencius II, i. vi 4/5 has got tuans/ but they cant POSSSSibly be translated
love, DUTY, propriety, wisdom. propriety, wisdom/ O. K. BUT the other 2/ cd/ even Mat/ think so?
besides they are TUANs OF these things, at that point, not postulating the four as the tuan/s ipse.
the TUANs are the commiseration/ shame/ modesty/ ap/and disap-proving. as bases OF jen/i/li/chih
we cant fall back into the vanW/ Brooks era/ or the sewers of Babylon. ***
incidentally we hv/ a new prospective student on the west coast Miss Glory
produces-wheat-ear [Angela Chih-ying Jung]. (not to be confused with the local Gloria [French])
***
What about prospect of PRINTING some more stimulae to oriental studies?
?
Legge fusses round with TA (Mat 5956) and interpolates duties/ duties etc. 5. but nothing in Mat/ to indicate that TA means duty.
If only someone wd/ display a little sense of the meaning of words. Obviously there IS a chinese word for duty? ?
east west HawaiLosophy: see Letter 54 n.
Jarge Santayana: see Glossary on Santayana, George.
? ? a. fang and pound's bilingual confucius 81
? . . . AI4: ? (love) is taken from Mencius, 4. 2. 28. 2: ''? ? ? ? The benevolent man loves others'' and 4. 2. 28. 3: ''? ? ? ? ? ? ? He who loves others is constantly loved by them'' (Legge, ii. 333).
? ? ? : ? taken from Mencius, 4. 2. 28. 4 (Legge, ii. 333) is a homophone (not a synonym) of ? , the second tuan.
jen/i/li/chih: on ? ? ? ? , the four tuan, see Letter 42 n.
vanW/Brooks era: in America's Coming-of-Age (1915) Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) portrays an era
that values not cosmopolitanism but a native self-consciousness.
59 Fang to EP (TLS-2; Lilly)
Dear Mr Pound,
Not much information about REV. Robt Henry Mathews of China Inland
Mission. He certainly has nothing to do with Harvard.
The people here pirated his horrible dixionary during the last war--princi-
pally in order to make Yankee boys gabble in broken mandarin with the pretty lasses of Cathay. Serge ElisseeV told me that sometime after he played the pirate in the service of the Federal government, he was approached by a representative of CIM [China Inland Mission], who had to acknowledge his impotence when he was reminded that no books published in China had copyright outside China. (You know, China has never joined the Bern[e] convention. )
By the way, Mathews published Kuoyu ? Primer, a text book for missionaries, who would be foolish enough to convert the heathen Chinese in their national language ? ? , i. e. Mandarin. Revised from Baller's book again.
As you must have noticed from the preface, Mathews produced his scandal- ous dix. on the basis of Baller's (also a missionary). He should not be responsible for all those stupidities. As far as learning Chinese goes, none of the Aryan missionaries (like to believe that there isn't any semitic or crypto-aryan mis- sionary in China) can ever do the feat. Halleluja
Of course, M is downright stupid to equate the four tuan with the four concepts. But he did. Old Legge is also very idiotic when he states: tuan is explained by tuan- hsu ? , ''the end of a clue,'' that point outside, which may be laid hold of, and will guide us to all within (p. 79 note). When Chu Hsi wrote ? , ? ? ? he only meant that the ideogram tuan here is to be understood in the sense of term tuan-hsu ? , ''end of the thread,'' and not in the sense of other tuan-compounds. This end is U? aea? ? [beginning] and not o^Y? oi? o` [close]. In other words, the feeling of commiseration is the fountainhead of HUMANITAS (I can see old Babbitt turning in his grave at this equation of humanism with humanitarianism). L's rendition of tuan as Principle is not satisfactory, of course; I am sure old Baller or stupid Mathews was misled by ''principle,'' thinking that principle is the thing itself. So does the mind (if we may credit it to Xtians) of missionaries work.
[Cambridge, Mass. ] March 7, 1952
? ? 82 a. fang and pound's bilingual confucius
Tuan-hsu ? [? ? ], as I understand it, means one end of the thread, by tracing its provenience we may come to the whole skein or even the whole cloth; it is also possible to interpret it as the component (and essential one at that) of a fabric.
As for the meaning of the four concepts, I am really at a loss to suggest any sensible translation. Perhaps it would be best to not to try to translate them; after all, how is the attempted translation of ? oc? aei? a? ? i? A? [character or conduct of someone of sound, discreet, moderate, chaste, sober mind]?
Take the term i ? , usually rendered as justice. As far as I know, no Ch. writer has thought of the idea of an eye for an eye. As a Chinese I shall never feel smug when I have repaid your kindness or service to a T. No, I will hold myself to be an unwashed barbarian if I did not repay you to a T PLUS. Tit for tat is not Chinese conception of justice; it is rather two (or n) tits for one tat (in goodness, of course; vin[di]ctiveness is not even thought of ). To be concrete, if I borrowed an egg from the people upstairs, I am ready to return them more than one egg. (Corollary: I hate to borrow anything from anybody. )
Mathews p. 148 we have ? ? ? ? , which is a term used to denote a barbarian. ''Carefully compare it''? Lit. ''to compare or check the measure your pound against my pound,'' to see it that nobody is the loser by a fraction of an ounce. (The entry before that and the one still before that have just the opposite meaning: to be perspicacious or to hold to one's principle very carefully, i. e. in dealing with one's own self, without any relation with other people involved. )
It would be easy to say that i sounds like generosity. As I understand, generosity is a virtue, perhaps because it is exceptional. But i is not, in spite of what people say, a virtue; it is part and parcel of Chinese ethical outlook. (I confess, I shall not be able to end this paragraph happily and hence abruptly leave the question here. )
Of course, i means thousand other things. In the last analysis, it seems to be Quixotic for me to try to write about these Protean senses of a concept.
At any rate, I am convinced that it is almost impossible to ''sell'' the sane ethico-political Anschauung of the Chinese <A Chinese is nothing if not a homo politicus. > to the semites or aryans. Wonder if you will succeed <doing so>.
Expecting to get challenged, I stop here for this time.
Respectfully [signed] Achilles Fang
Serge ElisseeV: Serge ElisseeV, director of Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1934 to 56.
Baller: F. W. Baller, An Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary (1900); Sacred Edict (1907); A Mandarin
Primer (1933).
a. fang and pound's bilingual confucius 83
Babbitt: Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), Harvard professor and author of Democracy and Leadership (Boston: Houghton MiZin, 1924).
Chu Hsi: see Glossary on Zhu Xi.
60 Fang to EP (TLS-1; Lilly)
Dear Mr Pound,
Your DUTY does not exist in Chinese. Modern dix. renders it as pen-fen ?
? , which usually means ''one's lot'' (as in to be content with one's lot) and i-wu ? ? , which must have been coined by japs (gimu they say) and couldn't be intelligible to KUNG or MENG.
(As function, d[uty]. may be rendered with ? or its combinations ? ? ,/ ? ,/? ,/? , etc).
The nearest I can think of for DUTY is ? , but then it means a quite diVerent thing, as I wrote in my last.
-----------
As far as I can see, the Ch. have never thought of DUTY in abstracto. They have been plenty dutiful, without ever bothering about Categorical Imperative. Don't you think DUTY is a modern catchword in Indo-European thinking?
Thinking always in concreto and never bothering themselves with divine sanction, they must have acted as dutifully as any duty-conscious human beings.
The jewish-Xtian moralist teaches: honor thy parents if you will prosper (or something like that). The Ch. Wnd this very cheap and revoltingly utilitar- ian.
I wonder if there isn't some organic relationship between JUSTICE and DUTY. The TIT-for-TAT obsession is primitive, and must have been shared by early Chinese. But already in Chou times justice is relegated to decorum, etiquette, good manners: Chou-li ? ? [Rites of Zhou] supposedly formulated by Duke of Chou, is a treatise on the institutional life of the homo politicus sinensis. The section on justice or jurisprudence is in the fourth book, while the 5th & last is on handicrafts and art.
Why then does the Ch. act loyally, Wlially, etc. ? Tentative answer: only because it is sensible to act in those manners, as KUNG and MENG proved convincingly. I believe, Ch. have lived without the abstract concepts of JUSTICE and
DUTY. (God was thrown away by KUNG once for all. )
[Cambridge, Mass. ] March 13, 1952
84 a. fang and pound's bilingual confucius
Yours respectfully [signed] Achilles Fang
61 EP to Fang (TL-2; Beinecke)
[St Elizabeths Hospital] [Washington, DC] [18 March 1952]
Fang/ad interim/
will look up passages later/
duty/doveri dell'uomo/[man's duties] vs/Tom Paine's rights/
china not corrupted by greek glossing over <seldom acknowledged> slavery
under Aristotelian Anschauung. duty/serve/serve prince/serve parents/seems to me all Kung has implicit sense of duty/
ceremonies being the HOW the duty arising from human aVections, the insides of the ceremony/
this not what am writing about in hurry. will go seriously into A. F. 's last, at grtr/leisure. this started to say my son-in-row's kid bro. Igor
de Rachewiltz
Kleingemeinergasse 21, Salzburg, Austria
thanks me for A. F. 's pamphlets/and if I hv/any more will I please send them. ergo a Wt recipient for your new ones.
also the young Ig/in worrying how he can pay his rent and study chinese simultaneously/
he OUGHT to do an italian trans/of Mencius or the Analects/knows a great deal more of the language than I do/
Fang got any idea where Igor cd/hook onto any of these wasteful foundations that are blowing millions on useless etc?
I believe Tucci, head (or was) Inst.