The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue.

• Author: GEANEY, JANE M.
• Position: Review

The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue. By SARAH ALLAN. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1997. Pp. xiv + 181 + illus. $53.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Sarah Allan, in The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue, explores the premise that linguistic concepts are rooted in culturally specific imagery. Allan argues that in the process of translation the target language inevitably grafts its own imagery onto the concepts of the original language. Therefore the translation process fails to capture the range of meaning and the structural relations between terms in the original language. Allan's work elaborates this point via an analysis of the metaphors related to water and plants in early Chinese philosophical thought.

Allen's thesis is that "in the absence of a transcendental concept, the ancient Chinese turned directly to the natural world" to explicate their ideas (p. xii). The frame of the book mimics her thesis that water and plants are the formative metaphors of early Chinese thought. Allan argues first that water images, in various forms, predominantly serve to describe the cosmos. Next, she explores how plants serve to illustrate the specifically human aspect of the cosmos. Within this framework Allan proceeds "from the concrete to the abstract"--first presenting the range of meaning of the metaphors, then offering an interpretation of their use by individual thinkers, focusing on the Mencius and the Laozi.

Allan's work on imagery sheds light on obscure passages in early Chinese texts. For example, pointing out that the xin (heart/mind) resembles a pool of water (p. 82), Allan illuminates Mencius' analogy in 7A.24 between the way of water and the way a gentleman's mind does not "penetrate." Similarly, noting that qi (energy/matter) is vaporized water, Allan uses terms from descriptions of how Yu controlled the great flood to explain Xunzi's treatment of qi in "Yue Lun" (p. 92). With regard to plant imagery, Allan makes the interesting general point that in early China people belonged to a category that included both plants and animals (wanwu), rather than a category including animals but distinct from plants.

Because her book is a structural analysis of shared features of early Chinese thought, Allan's approach tends to highlight similarities. However, she also distinguishes distinctive uses of imagery in the work of different thinkers. For example, she notes that the Laozi and the...