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| Why is 干Interpreted as甲(the First)? —Also on the Shift of Views on War from “Punishing the Evil on Behalf of Heaven” to “Stopping War with War” |
| Center of Chinese Thinkers, Nanjing University |
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Abstract Originally, 干 is an aggressive weapon. The ten characters under the category of天干 are but a list of weapons. The key to solve this riddle is: first, the original form of 甲, , may be an ideograph of a weapon, even though it later meant armor, and the characters following 甲, 丙、丁are also related to weapons, further proving the view of Guo Moruo etc. that the Chinese ordinal numbers are ideographs of weapons; second, the intellectual history shows that in an era when prowess worship replaced genital worship, the ancients used the names of weapons as the ordinal numbers to express their understanding that weapons were made by saints to punish the wrongdoers. The religious idea of “punishing the evil on behalf of Heaven” was formulated by the Yan and Huang tribes, the ancestors of Chinese, in their struggle against ransacking and bullying. It developed into an ideology of “Heaven Disposes” in the Xia and Shang Dynasties. It was imbued with humanistic color in the Zhou Dynasty and evolved into the view of “stopping war with war”, the important premise of The Art of War, in the Spring and War period.
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| ［1］商务印书馆编辑部.辞源\[M\].合订本.北京：商务印书馆，1988.［2］徐中舒.甲骨文字典\[M\].成都：四川辞书出版社，1992.［3］郭沫若.甲骨文研究\[M\].北京：科学出版社，1962.［4］郭锡良.汉字古音手册\[M\].北京：商务印书馆，2010：8-9.［5］王国维.观堂学林：第2册\[M\].北京：中华书局，1999.［6］汉语大字典编辑委员会.汉语大字典\[M\].成都：四川辞书出版社,2010.［7］郭沫若.中国古代社会研究\[M\].北京：科学出版社，1960：50.［8］崔恒升.简明甲骨文词典\[M\].合肥：安徽教育出版社，2001：195.［9］杨泓.中国古兵器论丛［M］.增订本.北京：中国社会科学出版社，2007：8-13. |
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2011, Vol. 13 
