"Ship" in Chinese = We're Saved?

[n3bulous]

so today at work i get to talking to a chinese coworker (older, FOB from Taiwan, married w/ kids, repressed engineer dorky looking type, but really smart and pretty cool to talk to sometimes) of mine, and we end up on the topic of chinese pictograms after i notice some chinese characters he wrote on one of his notepads.

so he ends up penning down some example pictograms for me, and after the first few words he shows me, i notice a trend that they are all spriritual/religious related: righteousness, sacrifice. so i ask him if he's christian, and he confirms. then he shows me the pictogram for "ship." he breaks it down for me and shows me how it's composed of the sub-pictures (? sorry, don't know the correct linguistic term) for "boat," "eight," and "mouth," or "a boat that holds eight mouths," or further, a "boat that holds eight people"-->"a big boat"-->"a ship," and he explains that since there were eight people on noah's ark, the existence of this chinese character is strong evidence that noah's ark existed. talking to him further, i discovered that he's likely a biblical literalist, or close to it, which surprised me. i thought he'd be buddhist or agnostic or even catholic, or something, but not fundamentalist. i made a mental note of it and got the hell out of there for fear of being thumped on the head with a bible.

anybody heard of this supposed evidence for the existence of noah's ark?

[zarathustra]

One can find a very feudal character to Chinese characters. Looking thru tradition, it's easy enough to look at one of the classics, the Great Learning. It begins..


The Way of the great learning involves manifesting virtue,
renovating the people, and abiding by the highest good. (...)

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the
kingdom, first ordered well their own States.


Ethical values, personal and familial customs started are all influenced by the state. It was the government who laid down the law for the Chinese. Filial piety and ancestor worships are forms of worshiping sovereignty. Intellectuals were also in service of the state and limited their philosophical inquiry to issues of rule. They were chosen by how well they memorized the classics. Variation of philosophical inquiry also came to virtual halt after the warring states period. When there were many states fighting for power, debates gave birth to a wide range of beliefs like taoism, legalism, mohism, … After China unified, the Hundred Schools of thought died. So did the progress of Chinese philosophy.

So when you look at Chinese beliefs and it's language, it's easy to see its feudal character. Like there is no word for old in Chinese. The word, lao necessarily contains an idea of filial piety and respect for elders--like laoban (boss), laoshi (teacher), laoye (master), laoshi (honest as a way of being well behaved).

As for what your friend things, I'd recommend to him to read up on Chinese philology. :) It still has the character of reverance and unconditional respect for the ancestry of China but it's at least it's a start.

[SunWuKong]

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/chinese/bible.shtml

personally i think it's dumb.

[kimpossible]

so today at work i get to talking to a chinese coworker (older, FOB from Taiwan, married w/ kids, repressed engineer dorky looking type, but really smart and pretty cool to talk to sometimes)


sheesh. you guys are harsh on the fobby engineers lately.

[CBC guy]

Hmmm... I'm Christian so yes I've heard of theories where the Chinese word "yi" (righteosness) composes of the characters "lamb" and "Me". Signifying Jesus Christ as the lamb. There were a few other ones as well, but I don't really remember. My dad's very interested in this kind of thing. , connecting ancient china to Judeo-Christianity.

There was this documentary by the Chinese Christian dissident Yuan Zhiming called "Shenzhou" (literally "land of God", an ancient term for China) which tried to portray how Ancient China followed a form of pseudo-Judaism until Qin Shihuangdi called himself Emperor. After that Yuan argues that China goes into a spiral of war and death. Well, ok, no wonder Chinese patriots everywhere were incensed at this.

As a Christian AND a bit of a Chinese patriot, (Don't worry, I love Canada too...) I'm kind of on the fence for this one. I would like to know more, but it just seems a little far-fetched right now.

[snailpoo]

I'm Christian, and I think that this might be coincidence... though, there must be some things in Chinese culture that lends itself towards Judeo-Christian beliefs. There are Chinese Jews, who, supposedly, first arrived when Babylon conquered Israel. There is a historical record of their existence in China for several centuries, even if they can't be traced back to Biblical times. The second, and far more convincing evidence is the speed in which the TaiPing were able to rapidly convert millions into their misinterpreted form of "Christianity" during the late Qing Dynasty.

[zarathustra]

If you believe some people like Meister Eckhart, who's still in debate whether he should be added to the canon, that Christianity's highest virtue and value is suffering (many other philosophers have said this too)... Would you say there are some Chinese which would have faced a life like Jews, of intense persecution and slavery, who invented a love of suffering and deliverance?

The Chinese are closer to other cultures of classical Europe, peoeple who conquered. Their invented myths and Gods are closer as well.

As a note, people have compared Eckhart's understanding of Christianity to Buddhism. maybe you'll like that. :)

[SunWuKong]

There was this documentary by the Chinese Christian dissident Yuan Zhiming called "Shenzhou" (literally "land of God", an ancient term for China) which tried to portray how Ancient China followed a form of pseudo-Judaism until Qin Shihuangdi called himself Emperor. After that Yuan argues that China goes into a spiral of war and death. Well, ok, no wonder Chinese patriots everywhere were incensed at this.

that's a little problematic because some of the major Chinese philosophies had taken root by the time the Qin dynasty came around, like Confucianism, Legalism, and Daoism.

[zarathustra]

It's possible there were Chinese farmers or other commoners harshly persecuted like the Jews. I'm kind of skeptical any of these people could have had an influence on the language.

Much is lost in Chinese history. With one empire and it's love for tradition, any differing thought could have easily been buried and burned. Surely, there had to be some of philosophical and religious invention outside of the emperor's court--all of it has been lost.

About possible Chinese slaves, I'm not sure if any of them would have lasted enough in number to create their own lasting religion to develop it to any similarity with Christianity.

Remember, Christianity could only have been invented by slaves, by people who valued above all else, freedom from persecution, people who even turned their suffering into a virtue and believed it made them better people.

People who have never seen slavery wouldn't invent a religion that describes their escape from it.

[didu]

There was this documentary by the Chinese Christian dissident Yuan Zhiming called "Shenzhou" (literally "land of God", an ancient term for China) which tried to portray how Ancient China followed a form of pseudo-Judaism until Qin Shihuangdi called himself Emperor. After that Yuan argues that China goes into a spiral of war and death. Well, ok, no wonder Chinese patriots everywhere were incensed at this.

He forgot to mention that before Qin united China as an empire, China was divided into hundreds of small kingdoms which had been warring with each other for more than 400 years ...



As a Christian AND a bit of a Chinese patriot, (Don't worry, I love Canada too...) I'm kind of on the fence for this one. I would like to know more, but it just seems a little far-fetched right now.

It's purely garbage, I could've eaten a box of Chinese characters and crapped a better story than the one they are selling.

In terms of the pictogram, I'm not sure how recent the character 船 is, you see, in most classical text, the character 舟 is used to refer to "boat" or "ship", as you can see from 舟, it's basically a tiny boat with 2 people in it and an oar in the middle -- which pretty much depicts what the little boats the ancient Chinese used for fishing and leisure looked like. You can actually trace 舟 pretty much to the earliest Chinese character which were recorded on animal bones and turtle shells.

[Napoleon Chynamite]

Everybody knows Jesus was Chinese. I want to make a bumper sticker that says "Jesus approves pirated dvds."