04.16義
by Matthew
義を見てせざるは勇なきなり
ぎをみてせざるはゆうなきなり
which means:
道義を知る者が、正しいことと知りつつ、それをしないのは、ほんとうの勇気がないからだ。孔子の言葉。君子として恥ずべき事として挙げたことの一つ。語：義物事の理に叶った正しい筋道。道義。
If a person who knows moral principles, while knowing the right course of action, does not follow it, they are not truly brave. These are the words of Confucius （孔子・こうし）. As a man of virtue (君子・くんし）…. [I get stuck here...]
This bit 理に叶った is an idiom — means “be reasonable”. The rest of it stumps me, to be frank.
In short, it means:
- “To see what is right and not to do it is to lack courage.” or;
- “Knowing what is right without practicing it betrays cowardice.”
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| Filed under: Kanji, Kanji (GA), Idiom, Kanji
Thanks to the efforts of one of my students for translating the difficult bit for me!
“As a man of virtue, if you lose GI you should be ashamed of yourself”
“Losing GI is one of the things that you should be ashamed of, as man of virtue.”
April 20th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
This is just toooooooo tempting – me old china Confucius!
This is Analects 2:24.
子曰：「非其鬼而祭之, 諂也。見義不爲, 無勇也。」
The Master said, “To worship [ancestral] spirits who are not your own is mere flattery. To see what is right and fail to do it is to lack courage.”
Let’s not worry about the connection between the first and second half of the passage. Analects is a strangely structured text.
The Japanese idiom you give at the start is a direct “translation” of the Chinese, or better, a reworking of the Chinese in the grammar of classical Japanese in the manner called “kundoku” 訓読. If you put back in all the kanji, it would read:
義を見て爲ざるは勇無き也 (same pronunciation);
where 不 corresponds to the negative ざる, of course, but I think this ending would almost always have been written in kana, no matter how crazy people were for kanji.
Your Japanese definition continues:
君子として恥ずべき事として挙げたことの一つ。”One of the things give as things of which a ‘man of virtue’ (君子 junzi/kunshi: Confucius’s term for his ideal person) should be ashamed.” The redundancy (“thing . . . thing”) is awkward, but there in the Japanese (事…こと).
I think the next sentence is missing some sort of punctuation mark, and is intended as a gloss on the word gi:
語：義 — 物事の理に叶った正しい筋道。道義。
“Vocab: Gi — Correct reason, whereby things conform to principle/nature 理. Morality.”
理 is a very old concept in Chinese philosophy (though it was not important so long ago as the Analects), and it would be possible to write a book on it.
That makes me wonder – how many sayings from the Analects would be recognised (in this kundoku form, of course) by a literate Japanese person (even if they don’t know the source)?
May 12th, 2009 at 11:30 am