The Original Meaning of the Chinese Character for »Beauty«

Abstract

A Chinese character is an ideogram that represents people's idea of a thing, rather than the pronunciation of a word for the thing. Attracted by this fact, many Chinese have been trying to trace the original meaning of the Chinese character for beauty, so as to shed light on today's research on aesthetics. In this paper, the author provides an investigation of several most influential opinions on the original meaning of beauty prevailing in China, and shows why and how these opinions are incorrect or incomplete. The first opinion the author deals with is that the character for beauty is written as »big sheep», so that the original meaning for beauty is something to do with the sense of flavor, or more precisely, the delicious. The second opinion is that the character for beauty is to »imitate a man wearing sheep horns or a sheep on his head.« Some Chinese scholars even suggested that the man was the chief or sorcerer of a primitive tribe, who was playing a ritual dance of totemism or sorcery. The third opinion is that the character looks like a man wearing feathers. After the critiques of the above three opinions, the author reaches a conclusion: the character for beauty in China was originally imitating a beautiful man. It imitated such a man simply because people thought a man was possible to be beautiful. This is the sign of the origin of their aesthetic consciousness, not for the cause of religion, nor for the cause of direct feeling of mouth or tongue.