Chinese fa in Altaic: a further note.

• Author: Miller, Roy Andrew
• Position: Word meaning 'law, etc.'

Twice in this decade G. Kara has published short notes touching upon, and generally dismissing, the possibility of Chin. fa 'law, etc.' being etymologically connected with a somewhat eclectic selection of Manchu, Mongolian, and Turkic forms meaning 'magic, spells, etc.'. Since both these notes appeared not as separate publications but only as passing remarks embedded in reviews, they might easily be overlooked by anyone interested in this etymological problem; and so it may be useful to consider them together as a connected etymological enquiry, at the same time adding a few remarks of our own that may help further to clarify the issues to which our Hungarian colleague has already directed attention.

The first of those two notes appeared in AOH 44 (1990): 423 in a review of G. Doerfer, Mongolo-Tungusica [= Tungusica, Bd. 3] (Wiesbaden, 1985). Commenting upon Doerfer's attempt (p. 155) to involve Chin. fa in the etymology of Manchu fada- 'to bewitch, enchant', Kara wrote, "the proposed Chin. etymon, fa means 'law, method' etc., but not 'magic' (cf. Manchu fa, fafun, Daur pabun and pa/pas, the latter two: 'law' and 'method'), but see Xibo fa = Chin. fashu 'black art' and moshu 'magic', Li Shulan et al., Xibo yu kouyu yanjiu (Beijing, 1984), p. 140."

Evidently something went awry in the printing of this note, which as it stands is, to put it bluntly, self-contradictory. The Xibo citation with which it concludes pretty well refutes the etymological allegation with which it begins; and there is also the unanswered question of why the well-attested meanings of Ma. fa 'magic; dharma'(1) are not mentioned even in passing.

Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that this 1990 note by Kara was the point of departure for remarks that another Hungarian colleague, C. U. Kohalmi, writing in the inaugural issue of the journal Shaman 1 (1993): 59-61, directed against the central theses of a 1991 monograph(2) that attempted to set forth in considerable detail linguistic evidence that appears to relate an earlier form of this same Chin. fa to early borrowings into Altaic, and also to other early forms in Old Korean and Old Japanese, notably OJ FaFuri.(3) Her remarks, entirely based upon a simplistic one-word English gloss 'law' for fa,4 at least have the merit of avoiding the internal contradictions of Kara's 1990 contribution; otherwise they in no whit diverge from his firm a priori negative conclusions concerning the etymological possibilities inherent in this word.

Most recently, Kara returned to this topic once more, and at somewhat greater length, in a note appended to his review of K. H. Menges' Drei Schamanengesange der Ewenki... (1993), in JAOS 116 (1996): 758. There he briefly recapitulated his 1990 argument, glossing the Chinese form as 'method, law', but now going on to add that, "beside semantical difficulties, a serious obstacle for this idea is qab, another Middle Mong. form of the same word... Middle Mong. arba- in arbatqun 'pronounce spells' ... and its Turkic/Uygur cognate arva- cannot derive from ab/hab/qab.... Old Japanese fafuri 'sacrificer (shaman)' also seems to be too far from Mong. ab/hab/qab and Turk. arva-."

Each of these two notes by Kara, especially the more recent one published in the present journal, makes important points that deserve further comment. The problems they raise are many-sided, so it may be well to begin with a survey of their semantic aspects, then go on to the question of their phonetic, resp. phonological adumbrations.

The obvious starting-point for this survey is to try, once more, to answer the question of whether or not Chin. fa has ever meant 'magic'. Kara has in effect already provided an answer to this, and a positive one at that, in the somewhat garbled documentation to his 1990 note cited above. But it would be well to go a little beyond the information that he cited there, and to trace, if only in broad outlines, the semantic permutations of this word throughout its long history.

The standard dictionaries already provide abundant materials for a future full-scale study of the semantic history of this word; for the moment it is sufficient to note that from the beginning of its pre-Buddhist documentation in China it has meant both 'law, regulation' and 'means, method'. It was this second sense (if we may so term it) that provided the necessary semantic link facilitating its later employment as a calque for Buddhist Sanskrit dharma. And once the fa = dharma equation had been established, it was, relatively speaking, a short journey of semantic extension from the fa = dharma of the Buddhists in China to the description of their frequently esoteric ritual practices and observances as fa = 'magic, esoteric arts'. The end product of this course of semantic adumbration survives particularly vividly in certain of the terms registered in Chinese-English dictionaries from the turn of the century, i.e., fashu 'the black arts', fali 'the magic arts of the Buddhists', and fufa 'exorcist charms or spells', 'to exorcise'.(5) These and similar terms incorporating fa are of course much older than the sources in which we find them attested; for a complete history of the word it would be necessary (but here impossible) to undertake a detailed philological account and documentation of each term. But even without such study, desirable though it be, we may easily grasp the main thrust of these semantic shifts, if merely by confronting the Giles gloss for fali 'the magic arts of the Buddhists' with the canonical Soothill-Hodous gloss for the same, 'the power of the Buddha-truth to do away with calamity and subdue evil'.(6)

In Buddhism, as probably in every major religious system, the path reaching down from unsullied and purely spiritual ritual observances to mumbo-jumbo and magic carryings-on of the most blatant variety is too often a dangerously short and direct one. It has been observed that by the time of Calvin, he and many other reformers could see nothing in the Latin Mass but idolatry and magic;(7) Calvin would very easily have understood the semantic permutations of Chin. fa. In short, our former Soviet colleagues who edited the great Cincius comparative dictionary knew very well what they were doing when in documenting a number of their Tungus etymological citations involving Chin. fa they there glossed the word as 'law, regulation, means; magic means, methods (magiceskie sposoby)' (TMS 2.297a). It is safe to let the matter rest with this, their succinct but completely accurate and satisfactory gloss.

All words in all languages not only have...