Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Five Confucian Virtues



Reader Samantha emails in a photo of her fellow student from college. It is a tattoo of five Confucian virtues which represent "benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom, and sincerity".

From the look of this tattoo, he needs a little more work on "justice".


7 comments:

  1. i actually feel that if that tattoo was done correctly, it would be cool. it's not someone's name bogusly translated or anything.. in fact, i can think of a million more horrible things you could get tattooed :)

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  2. I agree with the first comment on here - this tat would actually be pretty cool looking if done correctly - and as far as stuff on this site goes, it's not too terrible. Even if "justice" is missing a few strokes it's still recognizable. And a gifted tatoo artist might be able to somewhat alieviate the error.

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  3. Why do I remember six Confucian virtues?

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  4. I thought there were EIGHT virtues:
    忠孝仁愛信義和平

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  5. I'm a native speaker of Japanese and the 義 looks perfectly fine to me. Some characters look different when written in "brush writing", similar to how English writing becomes different when written in script/cursive.

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  6. kay is correct, the character is technically missing a stroke, but it is also clearly calligraphy - and skilled calligraphy at that. Indeed, a quick look through my handy Japanese calligrapher's reference, 五體字類 attributes a version to 六朝諸碑 (りくちょうしょひ) which bears an exceedingly close resemblance to the one shown here.

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  7. i thought it was propriety (li) 禮 instead of courtesy

    they can have the same meaning but different characters

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