The prince

I first met Margaret Pearson at a talk she was giving in Clare Hall, Cambridge, about the Yijing and her upcoming translation. She handed out excerpts from her first drafts, including Hexagram 11, and I started reading with great interest. Simple, fluent translation… a couple of ‘why did I never realise that?’ moments… A gently lucid commentary that I can see myself quoting in readings in future.

Then I looked at the Image – and there, instead of the usual ‘ruler’ or ‘prince’, was the queen, ‘guid[ing] the natural forces of both sky and earth’. Oh dear, I thought. She’s just arbitrarily converting the male to the female, I thought. After all, this character means a male ruler, right?

Um. It ain’t necessarily so.

On the one hand, it does seem to be used to mean male rulers in the Shijing, the Book of Songs – at least, unless the translations I have are based on false assumptions. There’s Hou Ji, Lord Millet, Wen and his son Wu, and so on.

On the other hand, Margaret pointed us to the earliest forms of the Chinese word itself:

(This image copyright Wenlin software)

In the older form, on the left, you can see the hou giving birth to a child.

Ah.
So – nothing so arbitrary about Margaret’s ‘queen’, then. The same character, interestingly enough, comes up in the Image of Hexagram 44. A controversial hexagram, of course, but unarguably about women – and its name, gou, is this same word with another female figure added.

(Much more information on this will be available in the recording of last Saturday’s webinar with Margaret. It’s almost ready, I just have to save it in the right format for download, and type up a transcript.)