1.7: Zǐ Xià yuē:
Xián xián yì sì, shì fù mǔ néng jié qí lì, shì jūn néng zhì qí shēn, yǔ péng yǒu
jiāo yán ér yǒu xìn. Suī yuē wèi xué, wú bì wèi zhī xué yǐ.
1.7: Zi Xia
says: "Exchanging beautiful appearance for virtue; serving the parents and able to exert/exhaust
all one's strength; serving the ruler (and) able to present (give/surrender) one's life; going
with friends, mingling and speaking true: even though called without education, I
must call it learning!"
2 comments:
The phrase 賢賢易色 is a little confusing and I see several ways to translate in the context of the passage as a whole.
James Legge manages to unpack the phrase into: "If a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty, and applies it as sincerely to the love of the virtuous..."
While Ames and Rosement provide a slightly more condensed version with: "As for persons who care for character much more than beauty..."
Both of these share the same basic approach and translate 色 as "beauty" which is fairly straightforward. The difficult part (it seems) is translating 易. Based on this approach the best translation I could find was "exchange." This leads to:
"Exchanging beauty/appearances for virtue..."
This could be condensed to "Exchanging beautiful appearances for virtue..."
I ultimately decided to change "Good virtue appearing easy" to "Exchanging beautiful appearances for virtue" and made the change above.
The reason 易 (yi) can mean either "easy" or "exchange" is much more apparent when we think in terms of Daoist process. Forgetting for a moment whether we can even know Dao (we probably can't) we should think for a moment about the nature of process itself. If we imagine a situation like homeostasis, where there is constant regulation and balance, but also transition from one state to another, we can see how "easy" and "exchange" become conceptually linked. We are looking at a situation where an easy exchange of material helps facilitate the process of change: the root metaphor is actually the process of change or regulation and "easy" is simply a characterization of that process.
This helps demonstrate once again the importance of finding root metaphors.
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