Tidbits From the World

At my University, there are a lot of evangelical christians studying Chinese. Some of them are active missionaries, while others prefer to keep their faith to themselves. I talked to one of my classmates, who is a University professor in Brazil, and he told me the reason why he studies Chinese. He said that many Chinese now immigrate to Brazil. The parents have a business while the children go to school. Those of age to attend college are “forced” to study some practical majors that they might not be that much interested in, for instance Medicine, Law, International Business, etc. As a result, many Chinese students are depressed and lost, some of them even have suicidal thinking. My classmate, being a professor at a Sao Paolo University and a student counselor, found a way to appease his Chinese students, to make them cope better with the pressure put onto them by their family. Of course, as a Christian, he used a religious method of appeasing. His rationale is that if these students become Christians themselves, they should cope better with pressure, having the lord behind supporting them and giving them strength to go forward in their lives. But now the question is: how do you convert a Chinese to Christianity? The Chinese being largely a “godless” people as I’ve heard many people say, pragmatic and proud atheists, it seems a little more difficult to convert them to any religion. So, the method my classmate found consists in using some Chinese characters to “prove” his Chinese students that the Chinese people believed in the same God 3000 years ago as the Christians do today. Let’s take a look at his selection of characters that, arguably, prove that the Chinese people are actually unsuspecting Christians…

I will start here with the most explicit one, the one that most captures the imagination, the traditional character for the verb “to come; to arrive”.

This ancient character was created well before Jesus’ arrival on earth, yet it seems to depict a man being crucified along with two other people (the two thieves who were crucified at the same time as Jesus). Let’s take a closer look:

There seems to be a “cross” from which two “legs” are protruding on the bottom. And here is the interesting part:

Each one of these red parts on this character means “people; person”.

Here is the character that means “person”. So, for my classmate, the traditional character which means “to come, to arrive”, is a pictogram depicting the Christ being crucified along with two other people (the two thieves). To him, this character was prophetic: it was created one or two millenia before Christ’s arrival on earth, thus the ancient Chinese, according to him, believed in Jesus as their saviour. His Chinese students back in Brazil seem to be receptive to his ideas.

Now, the character for “righteousness”. It depicts:

A lamb and

“me; I”. Thus, “I, the lamb“. In the Book of Revelation, the lamb is used as a metaphor for referring to Jesus (the Sacrificial lamb). So if you analyse this character,

who is “righteous”? “Me”, the “lamb”, Jesus Christ.

Now let’s take a look at this very rare character:

This character, made up of two trees and a woman, means “avaricious; greedy; never satisfied”. For my classmate, this is a clear reference to Eva in the Garden of Eden, who commited the original sin. “She” was “greedy” in a garden containing two “trees”…

Another example he gave me:

This character means “boat; ship; vessel”. The right part of the character is made up of two elements:

“Eight”, which according to him, was written differently inside the character “boat”, where both lines of this character are joined by a horizontal line (the upper-right part of the character).

And underneath, there is a “mouth” or “people”. Therefore, in the character for “boat”, there are “eight people”, a reference to Noah’s Ark, which saved eight people from the great Flood…

All this to me sounds a little like the “Da Vinci Code”, or the hidden code in the Torah. One can take any selection of Chinese characters and interpret them as they wish. This was the first time I heard a religious interpretation from the characters, but many times before have I read or heard interpretations (mostly false) concerning the construction and origins of the Chinese characters. But the fact is that only about 10% of the simplified characters currently in use in China are pictographic, that is they carry a meaning within their structure. The rest, roughly 90%, is made up of phono-semantic compounds, wherein one part of a character describes a very approximate idea, while another part describes an approximate sound. (This system was more accurate in older times, but today, both the pronounciations and meanings of the characters have evolved).

Here is an example of a phono-semantic compound:

This is a ideogram meaning “forest”. It is composed of two “trees” each represented by four strokes. The pronounciation of this compound, in mandarin Chinese, is “lin”.

This is a radical meaning “heart”. It is not a caracter and it can only be used as a particle inside a character. It is used to convey meanings pertaining to feelings, mood, spirit, etc.

And now, this combination of the aforementioned two particles forms a phono-semantic compound. The right part of the character describes the pronounciation (lin), while the left part gives an approximation of the meaning. (It has to do with feelings). This is the only etymology that one can take from this character. General meaning + pronounciation. The ancient Chinese used this method to conveniently invent new characters (a writing system uniquely composed of ideograms or pictograms would be impractible). This character is a synonym to the one we saw earlier:

“Avaricious; greedy; never satisfied”. Both characters are phono-semantic. In this case, the upper part gives the pronounciation (this time, “lin” is an approximation to the actual pronounciation “lan”, an example of how the Chinese writing system can be inconsistent). The lower part is a “woman”. The “woman” radical is often used in characters having a bad connotation, for instance: the characters for “slave”, “anger”, “to pout”, to only state a few. Now, that’s very far from the Garden of Eden!

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