{"id":1036,"date":"2009-01-23T08:35:35","date_gmt":"2009-01-23T13:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=1036"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:38:12","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:38:12","slug":"like-mixing-water-with-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2009\/01\/like-mixing-water-with-water\/","title":{"rendered":"Like mixing water with water"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students often come to classes on China looking for the Timeless Wisdom of the Easttm<\/sup> As a historian I tend to dislike giving it to them, since the point of history is not to take wisdom out of historical context and apply it to your life.1<\/a><\/sup> Still, I do like providing timeless wisdom when I can, and as we are talking about the origins of bureaucracy in China today I will be using this quote from the Zuo<\/em>2<\/a><\/sup> to talk about the difference between a minister and a toady. I suspect this will be one of the things that they can actually apply in their lives, if only as a great put-down.<\/p>\n

\n

Yan Ying on harmony and conformity<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span>“Only [Liangqiu] Ju is harmonious (he<\/em>) with me.”<\/p>\n

[Yan Ying] answered: “Ju conforms (tong<\/em>) with you; how can he be harmonious?”<\/p>\n

<\/span>The lord asked: “Are harmony and conformity different?”<\/p>\n

<\/span>[Yan Ying] answered: “They are different. Harmony is like a stew. <\/span>Water, fire, jerky, mincemeat, salt, and plum [vinegar] are used to cook fish and meat; they are cooked over firewood. <\/span>Then the master chef harmonizes them, mixes them according to taste, compensating for what is insufficient and diminishing what is too strong. <\/span>The superior man (junzi<\/em>) eats it to calm (ping<\/em>) his heart.<\/p>\n

<\/span>It is the same with the ruler and minister. <\/span>When there is something unacceptable about what the ruler considers acceptable, the minister points out the unacceptable in order to perfect the acceptability [of the ruler’s plan]. <\/span>When there is something acceptable in what the ruler considers unacceptable, the minister points out the acceptable in order to eliminate the unacceptable. <\/span>In this way the government is equalized (ping<\/em>) and without transgressions, and the people have no contending (zheng<\/em>) heart. …<\/p>\n

<\/span>As for Ju, he is not like this. <\/span>Whatever you consider acceptable, Ju also says it is acceptable, whatever you consider unacceptable, Ju also says it is unacceptable. <\/span>This is like complementing water with more water: <\/span>who will be able to drink it? <\/span>If the zithers and dulcimers were to hold a single tone, who could listen to it? <\/span>This is how conformity (tong<\/em>) is unacceptable.”<\/p>\n

<\/span>Zuo <\/em>Zhao 20, cited in Pines 160-161<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

  1. Well, not the only point anyway ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  2. via Pines, Yuri. Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722-453 B.C.E. University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
    \n     ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Students often come to classes on China looking for the Timeless Wisdom of the Easttm As a historian I tend to dislike giving it to them, since the point of history is not to take wisdom out of historical context and apply it to your life.1 Still, I do like providing timeless wisdom when I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,108,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-classics","category-english"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-gI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4724,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions\/4724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}