Wang ch‘ung lun-hêng philosophical essays Traduits et annotés par Alfred forke

2 Wang Ch‘ung is a better theorist than arithmetician. The square of 100,000 is 10,000 millions, not 1 million. Wang Ch‘ung supposes the earth to be an equilateral, rectangular square.

3 The same mistake. The square of 5,000 is 25 millions. 25 million square Li, about 8 million square kilometer is approximately the area of the Eighteen Provinces or China Proper.

4 225,000 square Li (225 millions), which number is based on Tsou Yen’s hypothesis that there are nine continents as large as China.

5 Wang Ch‘ung has calculated a million square Li (10,000 millions). The area of our Earth measures about 510 million square kilometer, not 2,500 millions (= 10,000 million square Li) as results from Wang Ch‘ung’s calculation.

1 Huai Nan Tse says 50,000 Li.

1 Night is here taken as something positive, something like a black veil, or dark air, not as the absence of light, which does not cause the disappearance of the sun, but is its consequence.

2 The dark fluid of night.

3 According to Chinese symbolism the Yin principle of darkness corresponds to the north.

1 Literally : Tung-ching, the ‘Eastern Well’, and Chien-nu, the ‘Herdsman’.

2 The two solstices.

3 The two equinoxes.

4 This cyclical sign denotes ENE 3/4N on the compass and corresponds to Gemini.

5 Hsü = WNW 3/4N and Aquarius.

6 Turning round with the pole.

7 The sun turning round the pole in Gemini and never disappearing.

1 The north is Yin, which is synonymous with female, here the female organ.

2 Viz. By heaven knocking against it in its rotation.

3 The Nine Streams regulated by Yü. See Mayers Pt. II, No. 267.

1 See above p. 255. On p. 263 Wang Ch‘ung says that our world lies in the south-east of the universe.

2 The sun sets in the west and passes through the north, before he rises again in the east.

3 To people living in the east of the universe i. e. below the farthest eastern limit reached by the sun in his course, the sun would appear to rise in the north, to culminate in the east, and to set in the south.

4 The context requires that we should read [] blended instead of [] look out of the text.

5 The light becomes invisible for those who look after him.

6 The great distance makes the sun invisible.

1 Because the sun and the moon, which are supposed to be attached to heaven and revolving with it, rise on the southern hemisphere, and go down on the northern.

2 I. e. China.

3 In Mongolia.

4 This problem is already enunciated by Lieh Tse V, 9 [Wieger] who makes two lads expose it to Confucius. They ask the Sage to decide between the two antagonistic views, but he is unable to give a satisfactory reply.

1 Wang Ch‘ung seems to think that daylight is distinct from the light of the sun.

2 Fu Sang has been identified with Sakhalin.

3 Hsi Liu must be the Mongolian Desert.

1 At the equinoxes. See above p. 258.

2 Vid. above p.259.

3 From right to left, facing the polar star which remains motionless and round which heaven revolves from east to west (cf. p. 267).

4 Their own movement being from west to east, opposite to that of heaven.

5 The Kilin, by Europeans usually called unicorn, whose prototype seems to have been the giraffe. The giraffe gallops like the fastest horse. The swiftest horses likewise said to make 1,000 Li a day.

1 Yiking, 30th diagram (Li), Legge’s transl. p. 237. — Our text slightly differs. It adds ‘and the stars’, and writes ‘fruits’ instead of ‘grains’.

1 Again the misleading symbolism. The moon represents the female principle, Yin, to which water corresponds, whence the naive deduction is made that the moon is water.

1 The Chinese expression is ‘to consume’, ‘to eat’. In the popular belief the sun at an eclipse is being devoured by the ‘heavenly dog’, an idea perhaps derived from India. In Wang Ch‘ung’s time it must not yet have been current, for otherwise he would most likely not have omitted to mention and controvert it.

2 Wang Ch‘ung here speaks of a partial eclipse. That the shadow of the moon in most cases covers only part of the sun cannot invalidate the right view, which Wang Ch‘ung rejects on unsufficient grounds.

1 Ch‘un-ch‘iu, Duke Hsi 16th year (Legge, Classics Vol. V, Pt. I, p. 170).

2 T‘ang-ku.

3 Shan-hai-king chap. 9, p. 1 v.

4 According to other accounts Yao ordered his minister Yi, a famous archer, to shoot at the suns, of which he destroyed nine.

5 The appearance of ten suns is mentioned in many ancient works : in Chuang Tse [Wieger ; cf. Granet], the Li-sao, the ‘Bamboo Annula’, the Tso-chuan, etc.

6 The ten cyclical signs.

7 The five elements are considered to be the substances of the Five Planets, which have been named after them : Metal Star (Venus), Wood Star (Jupiter), etc.

1 Cf. p. 330.

2 Presumably a coral-tree in the Persian Sea is meant.

3 The Chinese imagine that pearls are the produce of fish, not of shells or oysters.

1 If they were of the same stuff as our sun, viz. fire, they would have been extinguished in water, and have burned the wood of the Fu-sang tree. Since they did not do that, they cannot have been real suns like ours.

2 The one sun in the upper branches of the Fu-sang tree must have risen prior to the nine others still lingering in the lower branches.

3 As far as the nine suns are concerned, which were still below the horizon.

4 Cf. Ch‘un-ch‘iu [Couvreur] (Legge, Classics Vol. V, Pt. I, p. 79). The seventh year of Duke Chuang of Lu is 686 B. C.

5 A quotation from Kung Yang’s commentary to the Ch‘un-ch‘iu.

1 Had the distance of those meteors not been more than one foot from the surface of the earth, they would inevitably have collided with the elevations of the earth, such as mountains, buildings, etc. Therefore Confucius omitted the remark of the original text.

2 The meteors never measure a hundred Li.

3 Yiking, 55th diagram (Fêng), Legge’s transl. p. 336.

4 A constellation.

1 Quoted from the Ch‘un-ch‘iu (Legge Vol. V, Pt. I, p. 170). The event took in 643 B. C.

1 Kung Yang’s Commentary, Duke Hsi 31st year.

2 The highest peak in Shantung.

3 Shuking, Hung fan, Pt. V, Bk. IV, 38 (Legge Vol. III, Pt. II, p. 342).

4 Shiking Pt. II, Bk. VIII, Ode 8 [Couvreur] (Legge Vol. IV, Pt. II, p. 422).

1 Yen, Chao, Han, Wei, Ch‘i and Ch‘u, which in 332 B. C. made an offensive and defensive alliance to check the encroachments of the Ch‘in State, but by and by the latter overpowered and absorbed them all.

2 According to ancient natural philosophy. Consequently temperature cannot be the result of the feelings of the sovereign.

1 A quotation from Huai Nan Tse III, 2, with a slight variation of the text.

2 Therefore during a drought clay figures of dragons are set up and worship to attract the rain. Cf. Forke, p. 55, No. 47.

3 Viz. with the body.

4 Cf. p. 148 Note 7.

5 An attraction between joy and heat, anger and cold.

1 Ch‘in Shih Huang Ti.

2 When Tsou Yen, a scholar of the 4th cent. B. C., had been put into prison upon a trumped up charge, he looked up to heaven and wept. All of a sudden snow began to fall, although it was midsummer. See also p. 112.

3 A class of scholars, often mentioned in the Lun-hêng, who seem to have devoted themselves to the study of natural phenomena and calamities, such as heat and cold, inundations, droughts, famines, etc. to which, however, they did not ascribe natural, but moral causes, misled by the pseudo-science of the Yiking and similar works.

1 Of which the Chinese distinguish 24, beginning with li-ch‘un ‘commencement of spring’. They count from the days on which the sun enters the first and fifteenth degree of one of the zodiacal signs.

2 They are all natural phenomena.

3 Shuking, Hung-fan Pt. V, Bk. IV, 34 (Legge Vol. III, Pt. II, p. 340).

1 Ching Fang, a metaphysician of the 1st cent. B. C., who spent much labour on the elucidation of the Yiking.

2 Marked by broken and unbroken lines.

3 The 25th hexagram of the Yiking.

4 Quotation from the Yiking, 1st diagram (Ch‘ien). Cf. pp. 98 and 128.

1 The same force destroys the tree, the house, and the man.

2 The dragon is accounted a sacred animal.

1 Yiking Book V, Chên Hexagram (No. 51).

1 The mother of the emperor Kao Tsu. Cf. p. 177.

2 Heaven as a spirit was just then engendering Han Kao Tsu, the Son of Heaven.

1 In the case of joy as well as of anger.

2 Analects XIX, 19 [Couvreur]. The criminal judge Yang Fu having consulted the philosopher Tsêng Tse on the duties of his office, the latter advised him to pity the offenders, whose misdeeds were perhaps a consequence of bad administration.

3 This passage is not to be found in our text of the Shuking.

1 The first wife of Han Kao Tsu, who usurped the imperial power, and reigned under her own name against all custom from 187-179 B. C. Her son, the Emperor Hui Ti, whose nominal reign lasted from 194-187 B. C., was nothing but a puppet in her hands. Lü Hou was a fiend in human shape, who had always some poison ready for her enemies. One of her first acts, after she came to power, was to wreak her vengeance on her rival, Lady Ch‘i, a concubine of Han Kao Tsu, who had attempted to have her own son made heir-apparent in place of Hui Ti, the son of Lü Hou. Hui Ti, a very kind-hearted, but weak sovereign did all in his power to shield his half-brother from the wrath of his mother, who poisoned him all the same.

2 This story is abridged from the Shi-chi chap. 9, p. 3 [Chavannes, Mém. Hist. Vol. II, p. 409].

1 A city in Chekiang.

2 Names of constellations.

3 In China the regular executions take place in autumn.

4 It destroys the guilty on the spot, and does not delay judgment until autumn.

5 A deductio ad absurdum from a Chinese point of view, for the holy emperors, Yao, Shun, and the like, were perfect, and could not have omitted to punish serious misdeeds.

1 This seems to be an old adage.

1 Neither the Liki nor the Chou-li contains such a passage, as far as I could make out. On the old sacrificial bronze vases, called tsun = goblets, clouds and thunders i. e. coiled up clouds were represented. The thunder ornament is the Chinese Meander. Specimens of these goblets can be seen in the Po-ku-t‘u-lu chap. 7.

1 The ‘Plan’ appeared to the Emperor Huang Ti in the Yellow River. A big fish carried it on its back. Huang Ti received the Plan, which consisted of a combination of symbolical lines and diagrams like the Pa-kua.

2 The ‘Scroll’ was carried by a dragon-horse, which rose from the waters of the Lo, a tributary of the Yellow River, at Fu Hsi’s time. From the mystic signs on this ‘Scroll’ the emperor is reported to have derived the Eight Diagrams and the first system of written characters, which took the place of the knotted cords, quipos, then in use.

3 767-721 B. C.

4 764-746 B. C.

1 Quoted from Analects X, 15 [Couvreur].

2 Quoted from the Liki Book VI Yü-tsao (Legge, Sacred Books Vol. XXVIII, p. 5) [Couvreur].

3 Confucius in the passage quoted from the Analects.

1 Quoted from Hsün Tse.

1 Hukuang and Chekiang.

2 Hupei.

3 The country south of the Yangtse, now the provinces Kiangsu, Kiangsi, and Anhui.

1 Cf. p. 202.

1 Kang-hi quotes this passage, but does not say what kind of a fish the ‘to-shu’ is. It may be a variety of the shu, which seems to be a kind of sturgeon.

2 Cf. Shuking (Hung-fan) Pt. V, Bk. IV, 5-6 [Legge] [Couvreur]

3 Another instance of Chinese symbolism, which they mistake for science.

4 Cf. p. 120.

5 A place in Honan celebrated for its foundries. Vid. p. 377.

6 Chên=secretary falcon has become a synonym for poison.

7 The fifth and the sixth of the Twelve Branches (Duodenary Cycle of symbols).

8 The ‘Green Dragon’ is the quadrant or the division of the 28 solar mansions occupying the east of the sky. The ‘Fire Star’ is the Planet Mars. Mars in the quadrant of the ‘Green Dragon’ forebodes war i. e. poison ; nothing but inane symbolism. (Cf. Shi-chi chap. 27, p. 6v.)

1 The country north of the Yangtse, now the northern parts of the provinces Kiangsu and Anhui.

2 Which hang down likewise.

3 Which are soft and extensible. — To such ineptitudes even the most elevated Chinese minds are led by their craze of symbolisation.

4 The mischief done by the tongue in speaking, which is not only compared to, but identified with poison.

5 Shuking (Hung-fan) Pt. V, Bk. IV, 34.

6 Cf. p. 246 and above p. 300.

7 A half-brother of Shu Hsiang. His mother was a concubine of Shu Hsiang’s father.

8 An officer of Chin.

1 Being an exceptional woman by her beauty, she would give birth to an extraordinary son — a dragon, and it would be dangerous for an ordinary man like her son Shu Hsiang to be a blood relation of such an extraordinary person, since fate likes to strike the exalted.

2 Quoted from the Tso-chuan, Duke Hsiang, 21st year (551 B. C.) [Couvreur, p. 369-370].

3 Two noblemen of Chin, cf. p. 206.

4 A powerful, but unworthy officer in Lu.

5 Shiking Pt. II, Bk. VII, 5.[Couvreur] [Legge]

6 Modern commentators explain the expression as meaning ‘the four quarters of the empire’.

1 Huang Ti, Chuan Hsü, Ti Ku, Yao, Shun, and Yü are mythical or half legendary rulers of old China.

2 T‘ang, Wên Wang, and Wu Wang are the founders of the Shang and Chou dynasties.

3 Tan, Duke of Chou, a younger brother of Wu Wang, whom he helped to win the throne.

4 A minister of Shun.

5 Like the wings of a bird.

6 Ch‘ung Erh reigned as marquis of Chin from 634-626 B. C.

7 A famous statesman who in 333 B. C. succeeded in forming a league of the Six States : Yen, Chao, Han, Wei, Ch‘i, and Ch‘u against Ch‘in.

8 A celebrated politician of the 4th century B. C., in early life a fellow-student of Su Ch‘in.

9 A partisan of the founder of the Han dynasty, Kao Tsu, one of the Three Heroes, who in early youth lived in great poverty and subsequently rose to the highest honours.

1 Another adherent of Han Kao Tsu, also one of the Three Heroes, the third being Chang Liang. He was to be executed for treason, but was pardoned.

2 As anomalous features.

3 This passage occurs in the Shi-chi chap. 8, p. 2, which treats of Han Kao Tsu.

4 A place in Shantung.

5 He succeeded his father Kao Tsu in 194 B. C.

6 A river in Shantung.

7 Cf. Shi-chi loc. cit. which slightly differs.

1 A city in Shantung ; Playfair No. 1642.

2 73-48 B. C.

3 48-32 B. C.

4 32-6 B. C.

5 Huang T‘se Kung was prime minister of the emperor Hsüan Ti, died 51 B. C.

6 In Honan.

1 A parallel passage occurs in the Han-shu, quoted in the T‘ai p‘ing yü-lan 729 p. 4.

2 516-457 B. C.

3 457-425 B. C. Cf. p. 226 and Shi-chi chap. 43, p. 8 seq. [Chavannes, Mém. Hist. Vol. V, p. 42].

4 A military adventurer of the 2nd century B. C. His surname was originally Ying Pu. It was changed into the sobriquet Ch‘ing Pu ‘Branded Pu’, after he had been branded in his early life. He made his escape, joined in the rebellions which led to the rise of the Han dynasty, and was rewarded with the title and the fief of a ‘Prince of Kiukiang’. Mayers Reader’s Manual No. 926.

5 Quotation from Shi-chi chap. 91, p. 1.

6 Cf. p. 169.

1 Quoted from the Shi-chi chap. 111, p. 1 v.

2 Cf. Giles Biogr. Dict. No. 426, where the end of Chou Ya Fu is told a little differently.

3 The capital of the Chin State in Shansi, the modern Chiang-chou.

4 Han Wên Ti 179-156 B. C.