The Origins of Wen in The Chinese Tradition: Proceeding from The analogy between The ‘Pattern of Heaven’ and The ‘Pattern of Humans’

Translator’s Preface:

The character wen [文] forms nothing less than the very basis of Chinese thought and culture. With the connotations of ‘marking,’ ‘pattern,’ and ‘embellishment,’ wen is at the root of the key terms renwen [人文], wenmin [文明], and wenxue [文學], respectively, the ‘humanities,’ ‘culture’ or ‘civilization,’ and ‘literature.’ Yu-yu Cheng offers in this essay a genealogy of wen starting from the first known occurrence in the Chinese tradition of renwen [the contemporary term for the ‘humanities’] in the Zhouyi [周易], the ancient book of divination dating back to 1000 B.C.E. perhaps better known to general Western readers as the Yijing [易經: Book of Change] which is a foundational text for the various branches and divisions of Chinese thought. Literally the ‘pattern of humans,’ renwen derives its significance in analogy to tianwen [天文: literally ‘the pattern of heaven,’ and the contemporary term for ‘astronomy’ as well as ‘astrology’]. What Cheng performs is not a simple source history of the derivation of renwen and wenming [‘culture’ or ‘civilization,’ literally ‘brilliant pattern’] from wen but an analysis of the fundamental operations of analogy and categorical association that are ceaselessly in play in the dynamic correlation of humans and natural things that yields the manifestation of wen In a pre-medieval textual tradition ranging between the Zhouyi the Shijing [詩經: Book of Songs], ci and fu poetry, the Shiji [史記: Records of the Grand Historian], the tradition of commentary and exegesis related to these classic texts, and the first text of Chinese aesthetics and literary criticism, the sixth-century Wenxin diaolong [文心雕龍: The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons], Cheng shows how analogy and categorical association are operative in the correlation, expansion, configuration, and reconfiguration of human and natural phenomena into parts and wholes—as well as how the same logic of analogy and categorical association govern the very correlation, expansion, configuration, and reconfiguration of such discourses as religion, physiology, politics, poetry, and aesthetics. Cheng’s genealogical—and philologically subtle—analysis has the capacity to shed light on a logic of the ‘humanities’ and ‘culture’ alive and persistent in the Chinese (or Sinophone) tradition even today, on unexamined assumptions underlying what might be termed a specifically Chinese approach to the humanities and a Chinese comparative literature.