Etymological Tapestry – Why 經 might be my new favorite Chinese character

Up until a couple of weeks ago, if you had asked me what my favorite Chinese character was, I would have probably said 忍 which represents the idea of endurance.

The character 忍 is both an associative and a picto-phonetic character, and it consists of two parts. On the bottom we have the heart (心) which gives us an indication this character relates to feelings and emotions. And on the top, there is a blade (刃) which by itself is pronounced rèn in the fourth tone, and therefore gives us an approximation of the sound.

But now there is a new contender for the title, and that is the character 經 which I recently had the pleasure of researching extensively for another language project I am working on. The character 經 is a fairly basic character which can be found in many beginners’ words such as 經常 (often) and 已經 (already), but their meaning is so abstract, you really cannot tell what it is even doing there, or how it all relates to the silk radical (糹) on its left side.

However, a deep dive into the character did not only help me make sense of all the unexpected words it appears in, but it also revealed the amazing journey the character 經 went through – from a simple depiction of a loom all the way to serve as reference to holy scriptures, as well as many other interesting uses. On top of all that, it has also demonstrated a couple surprising similarities between Hebrew and Chinese, and even made me appreciate Star Trek on a whole other level. Let’s take a look.

The Looming Background of the Character 經

At first glance, the core of the character 經 might seem to be the silk radical 糹 on its left side, as the right side 巠 is a common phonetic component in many other similarly sounding characters such as 徑 (jīng – path), 頸 (jǐng – neck), 勁 (jìn / jìng – energy and strength), 莖 (jīng – stem), 輕 (qīng – lightweight), 氫 (qīng – hydrogen), and others.

But it turns out to be quite the opposite, and it is actually the right 巠 that does most of the heavy lifting. In fact, the earliest versions of the character were written only 巠 and the 糹 (silk) was added later to reinforce its meaning and make it clearer.

So what is this 巠 and how does it relate to the meaning of 經 as a whole? Well, it turns out it is a drawing of a loom ready for weaving with the warp threads properly set on it. The term ‘warp’ refers to the vertical threads though which you alternately pass the shuttle with the horizontal threads which are called weft. The character 經 originally referred to the warp threads on the loom and that is why it started as 巠 – a pictograph of these threads.

Naturally, nowadays it is very rare to see the character 經 in its original capacity of expressing the meaning of warp or threads. However, we can see traces of this meaning in some words it appears in, most notably the word 神經 (shén jīng) which means nerves. By the way, the other character in that word 神 means both ‘mind’ and ‘god’, so technically in Chinese the nerves are “threads of the mind” or the “threads of the gods”, and I find this absolutely fascinating.

Why Warp Drive is called Warp Drive

Prior to doing this research I only knew the word ‘warp’ from Star Trek and the warp-drive the Enterprise used to travel through space at hyper-speed. I always thought it had something to do with how the engine folded and tightened the space-time continuum to eliminate the distance between two points thus making the travel between them instantaneous, but it turns out that’s not exactly how warp-drives work.

Instead, the engine wraps the spaceship in an artificial bubble of normal time-space continuum, while the space before the vessel is being tightened and the space behind it expands, creating a tension that propels the ship forward. Considering how when you weave you also have to pull and stretch the warp threads to let the device that that carries the weft thread go through, and then releasing and untightening them after the device went through, I think the name ‘warp drive’ is absolutely brilliant. Especially because the device that carries the weft threads is called a shuttle.

It is interesting to see how many iconic phrases from a futuristic show like Star Trek have their roots in the primitive world of manual labor. Apart from ‘warp drive’, there is also the log in “Captain’s log” and the beam from “beam me up Scotty”.

The Alternating Nature of Knitting

Hebrew also have a cool word that grew out from the domain of textile. The Hebrew word לְסֵירוּגִין (leserugin) is an adverb that means alternately or on and off. It is based on the shoresh ס-ר-ג (Samekh-Resh-Gimel) from which we also get the verb סָרַג (sarag) – to knit. Another word we get from the same shoresh is סוֹרָגִים (soragim) meaning bars, as in what you find in a prison cell or over a window.

And before we move on to the next part, let me quickly tell you about a couple of other interesting textile-related similarity between English, Hebrew and Chinese that I noticed during my research of the character 經 and its meanings. The Hebrew word for cloth or fabric is בַּד (bad) and apparently it is related to the verb בָּדָה (bada) which mean to create from one’s imagination or make stuff up. This is same relation we find between the English words fabric and fabricate. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Also, in English there’s the phrase “weave a tale” and in Chinese there 編故事 (biān gù shi) which means the exact same thing both literally and figuratively. The word 故事 means ‘story’ or ‘tale’, and one of the core meanings of the verb 編 is ‘weave’ (note the silk radical on the left just like in 經) though now it also commonly used in the sense of writing, composing and editing.

Tables Cloths and Maps

Did you know that in Hebrew the word for map and the word for tablecloth is the same word? They are both מפה (mapa) though technically for tablecloth the full term is the smikhut מפת שולחן (mapat shulchan) which literally means table map. Speaking of tables, in English the word ‘table’ also has two meanings. The first is a flat piece of furniture as in dining table, and the second one is an arrangement of values into rows and columns as in data table. Why am I telling you all this? Because maps, tables and cloths are all grid-based and that leads us to the modern usage of the character 經.

The modern and much more common meaning of the character 經 is longitude. Its counterpart in that sense the character 緯 (wěi) which also means weft and as you can see is also based on the silk radical 糹on its left side. The right side 韋 is phonetic (alone pronounced wéi), though it is worth noting that it depicts guards tracing their steps around a city wall, a movement which bears some resemblance to how the weft threads run back and forth and from side to side of the fabric during the weaving process.

Here is a real-world example of the characters 經 and 緯 expressing the longitude and latitude values of the city of Shanghai. Since the photo was taken in China, they are written in their simplified forms 经 and 纬 respectively.

The character 北 before纬/緯 means North and the character 东 before 经/經 means East. This of course corresponds to Shanghai’s location in relation to The Equator and to the Greenwich Prime Meridian.

Tapestries of Past Experiences

Now that we are acquainted with the character 經 and understand its origin, we can start talking about its modern meanings and common uses today – most of which derive directly from the act of passing the shuttle through the warp threads.

The most basic meaning of 經 today is that of passing or going through something. Note that in that sense it is not used as an independent verb and can only be found in compound words and phrases. A classic example of such compound is the word 經過 which mostly serves as the verb to pass by or go through, both in the physical sense of movement and in the figurative sense of ‘undergo’ or achieving something through certain means.

Some words with 經 are strictly reserved for going through something figuratively in the sense of experience. Two commons examples of such words are 經歷 (jīng lì) and 經驗 (jīng yàn) – both basically mean experience, but 經歷 usually refers to life in general, while 經驗 refers to more concrete experience in a specific field, or maybe the type that is acquired by trials.

The character 經 is also found in two adverbs most commonly used in the past tense. The first one is 曾經 (céng jīng) which means ‘ever’ or ‘once’, and the second is 已經 (yǐ jīng) which means ‘already’. Speaking of the word ‘already’, did you know that the Hebrew word for already כְּבָר (kvar) is based on the same shoresh as the word כְּבָרָה (kvara) which is an archaic name for a sieve or a strainer.

So both Hebrew and Chinese associate the meaning of ‘already’ with a device which is mainly designed to pass something through a dense alignment of threads. In English I guess, the association is with readiness and idea of already having gone through all the necessary procedures and preparations in order to reach that state.

Over and עוֹבֵר

Since passing the weft shuttle through warp threads is something you do over and over, the character 經 has gradually started to express the idea of repetition, and subsequently was also attached to concepts such as becoming a norm and turning into a classic.

Under this category of meaning, we will find words such as 經常 (jīng cháng) which means ‘often’ or ‘regularly’, the word 月經 (yuè jīng) which is the Chinese term for menstruation, the word 經典 which is one of the ways to describe something as classic in Chinse, and the word 正經 (zhèng jīng) which literally means ‘go through straight’ but in practice can mean proper, decent, standard, canonical and many other things along that line.

Speaking of passing through and doing things over and over, it’s funny how the English preposition ‘over’ sounds like the Hebrew verb עוֹבֵר which means ‘passing’. I remember the first time I noticed this phonetical crossover between the two languages. It was a long time ago when I was still in high school, and someone labeled the cable crossover machine as קרוס עובר and it totally made sense to us because the arms do go over each other or in Hebrew – עוברות אחת מעל השנייה.

The Texture of Tradition

One of the most unexpected turns of the evolution of character 經 is how at some point it was also assigned the meaning of classic writings and holy scriptures.

For instance, the Five Classics of Confucianism are called 五經 (wǔ jīng) and as you probably have guessed by now 五 means five. The most famous of all the Five Classic is the Book of Changes which is called 易經 (yì jīng or Y Ching in older transliterations) in Chinese, and right next to it as part of the canon we will also find the Book of Rites 禮經 (lǐ jīng) and the Book of Odes 詩經 (shī jīng), both of which also employ the character 經 in their titles.

This use of the character 經is not limited to Chinese writing. Case and point – the sacred texts of Buddha are called 佛經 (fó jīng) in Chinese. The Bible is called 聖經 (shèng jīng), and since the character 聖 means ‘holy’ it literally means Holy Scripture. The Quran is referred to as 古蘭經 (gǔ lán jīng) and here even though the character 古 means ‘ancient’ it is only a transliteration of Quran from Arabic, as the second character 蘭 simply means orchid.

The act of reading these texts is called 讀經 (dú jīng) and reciting them is 唸經 (niàn jīng). Speaking of recitation, the fact that ancient Chinese was written vertically from top to bottom, and the fact that these texts were being read through over and over again may have very well had something to do with why the character 經 was chosen to represent them. In that sense, it is much like the Mishnah, or מִשְׁנָה in Hebrew, which got its name from the shoresh ש-נ-ה (Shin-Nun-Heh) – a root which (among other things) represent repetition.

Writing about how a pictograph of a loom evolved into representing sacred texts of metaphysical nature, I cannot help but think about the movie Wanted (2008) and the Loom of Fate.

I am pretty sure the writers of Wanted didn’t get their inspiration for the Loom of Fate from the Chinese character 經 however interesting it maybe. The association between the craft of weaving, fate, and storytelling in general has very deep roots in Western thought and European mythology. In fact, the English word ‘text’ itself derives from the Latin verb ‘texere’ meaning to weave, which also gave us the words ‘textile’ and ‘texture’.

Unlike the character 經 which only refers to classical texts, the English word ‘text’ refers to any kind of writing. Though it is worth noting that in ancient times, since writing was a scarce resource both in qualified manpower and materials, more often than not the word ‘text’ did refer to scripture and sacred texts, as there was hardly anything else that was deemed worthy of parchment and ink.

Strong Suits and String Pulling

Essentially speaking, weaving is leading a horizontal string back and forth through a strictly defined course laid out by a set of vertical strings which are tightly tied to the top and bottom parts of the loom. This didn’t only lead the character 經 to be associated with guiding texts that set out rules of conduct, but has also made it part of words which describe people or jobs of managerial and administrative nature.

The most obvious example for that is the word 經理 (jīng lǐ) which means manager, but there is also 經濟 (jīng jì) which means ‘economy’, the verb 經營 (jīng yíng) which means to run a business, the verb 經銷 (jīng xiāo) which refers to sales and distributions, and other words from the world business and trade.

Considering nowadays many businesspeople wear silk in order to project pristine and authority, it is definitely safe to say that the character 經 along with its silk radical 糹 came full circle.