The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (review)

REVIEWS Sarah Allan. The Way ofWater and Sprouts ofVirtue. AJbany: State University ofNewYork Press, 1997. xiv, 181 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-7914-33854 . Paperback $17.95, isbn 0-7914-3386-2. The Way ofWater and Sprouts ofVirtueis a simple yet provocative attempt to get beyond the ideology-laden sort ofWestern thinking about the classical Chinese tradition that has (often unintentionally) polluted a great deal ofour received scholarship. Of course, in some sense this is an impossible task—we cannot transcend entirely our own linguistic and conceptual frameworks. Nonetheless, to the extent that this is possible, Sarah Allan conscientiously grapples with classical Chinese language and philosophy on their own terms, tracing the etymology of certain core characters back to the proto-characters found on Shang dynasty oracle bones and the like, and then highlighting the manner in which these characters developed a richer field ofmeaning over time. Her aim is to argue that "in the absence ofa transcendental concept, the ancient Chinese turned directly to the natural world—to water and the plant life that it nourishes—for the root metaphors of their philosophical concepts" (p. xii). Allan focuses on just a few of the more prominent Chinese classics (the Mencius, Analects, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi), and, where helpful, refers to the scholarship ofA. C. Graham, D. C. Lau, Roger Ames, Herbert Fingarette, and so on. The book is beautifully presented, and the text is interspersed with ten Chinese prints dating from the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. These prints complement the text so nicely that one almost forgets that they postdate the material under discussion by some fifteen hundred years. Allan identifies what she calls the "root metaphor" as the primary operative principle in classical Chinese, where characters develop a range ofmetaphorical meanings that stem from a core concept. Drawing from the ideas of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson as presented in their Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Allan writes that "the 'root metaphor' is a concrete model that is inherent in the conceptualization of the 'abstract' idea. The abstract idea derives from the process ofanalogy, rather than the analogy illustrating the idea" (p. 13). The root metaphors ofa given language community play© 1999 by University& ^ J'v & & & ' r ' ,„ .,.„a vital role in the development of their conceptual schemes, and Allan provides several persuasive examples (time, nature, water, etc.) to suggest how our root metaphors in many respects differ from those underlying the classical Chinese language. 48 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 Despite her best efforts to avoid the importation ofWestern concepts, however, Allan occasionally uses language that betrays her noble intentions. For example, in her exegesis ofthe connection between the perceived attributes ofwater and moral notions, she writes: [Philosophers from Confucius onwards] were not simply interested in the fact that water flows downward spontaneously, clarifies itselfwhen still, yields to the hard, but wears down the stone, and so forth as [in] physical science. These were manifestations of universalprinciples. ... In such a system, the right way for a person to behave is that which accords with the way of nature. Moral principles are not based on the commands of a transcendental being, that is, there are no moral imperatives, (p. 61, emphasis added) This passage contains thoughts both to cheer and to challenge. To my mind it has never been shown definitively that writers of the classical Chinese tradition employed anything resembling our universal principles. In fact, one frequently comes across a quite different notion: that there are at once a number of different and complementary ways and perspectives in simultaneous operation. In addition, Allan advances the analogy between perceived natural phenomena and prescribed moral behavior a bit too strongly. Whereas Daoist texts might be thought to rely more heavily on analogies with nature, many texts hearken back with nostalgia to the examples set by Yao and Shun—who were accomplished persons, not natural phenomena. Nonetheless, she is certainly right to point out the absence of moral imperatives—the available examples of Confucius' contextsensitive approach to moral issues are almost too numerous to count. One also encounters some confusing incongruity in Allan's account. In her brief exegesis of dao, she concurs with Fingarette that...