The lexicology of ran 然
Then bulls will be offered on thy altar. (Psalm 50:21)
We still have, in English and other modern languages, a large number of holdover phrases of ancient use—many of them, but not all of them, idiomatic. If we want to express, for example, something that happens suddenly, we might say ‘in the blink of an eye’. Another sense might be the swift movement of the hands: ‘in a trice’ is still sometimes used, and in its original sense a ‘trice’ was a sharp tug or a pull. In German, a pulley, particularly in a nautical setting, is still sometimes called a Trieze. Another sense might be a natural phenomenon. A ‘jiffy’, which has been proposed as deriving via working-class slang or cant from Middle English glif (related to dialect German glipfen, ‘glance’) would be a bolt of lightning, for example. And then there are the terms to do with fire: ‘in a flash’, ‘in a spurt’.
In Chinese, there may have been a parallel way to express something happening suddenly. The word ran 然 ‘so, like, as if, thus, then, suddenly, naturally’ is written with a fire (huo 火) radical, and it originally carried the function of something lighting on fire. The character which today means ‘to ignite, to spark, to set alight’ in Mandarin is ran 燃, as in ranshao 燃烧 ‘to burn’: we can see that in its present usage it was given a redundant fire-radical on the left-hand side for added semantic clarity! (It’s the same development that caused yun 云 ‘cloud, to quote’ to become yun 雲 ‘cloud’ to differentiate the nominal usage from the verbal one; or qi 气 to later become qi 氣 ‘air, vapour’ and xi 餼 ‘a sacrificial or gift-offering of cereal’.) In modern Chinese, ran 然 retains primarily the former use, though when used by itself as a conjunction it functions as ‘thus’ or ‘so’. It’s used in compounds like ranhou 然后 ‘then, (directly) after’; dangran 当然 ‘of course, naturally’; suiran 虽然 ‘although’; ran’er 然而 ‘however’; turan 突然 ‘sudden, suddenly’; ziran 自然 ‘nature’; rengran 仍然 ‘still’; or jingran 竟然 or juran 居然 ‘all of a sudden, unexpectedly’.
Xu Shen, in the Shuowen jiezi, defined ran 然 as ‘to roast’ 燒也, and classified it as a phono-semantic glyph, with huo 火 ‘fire’ providing the semantic direction and ran肰 ‘dog meat’ as a phonic marker. Earlier paleoglyphs show a much more ornate and hieratic usage, though, suggesting that the meat may have also carried some semantic weight, and thus perhaps that the ceremonial fire thus employed brought about a change in state. However, another early authority—the thesauric Erya—links ran 然 to yu 俞 ‘to answer, to reply, yes, to approve, to grant sanction’ and da 答 ‘to reply, to answer’: thus establishing that as early as the Warring States period this character already had a functionality answering to the immediate effect, of something suddenly happening.
The bifurcation in usage therefore probably occurred quite early, prior to the emergence of Classical literature. On the one hand, there is the physical usage—the fire striking, burning, changing something rapidly from a solid into vapour—from which the sense of ‘suddenly’ can be seen to have emerged. And on the other hand, there is the more abstract usage: the immediate answer, the logical conclusion, leading to the use of ran 然 as a conjunction: ‘thus, so’.
We can see in the Classics that both usages readily appear. For something occurring or appearing suddenly, and startlingly, we find: 玉之瑱也、象之揥也、揚且之皙也。胡然而天也、胡然而帝也。 ‘There are her ear-plugs of jade, her comb-pin of ivory, and her high forehead, so white. She appears like a visitant from heaven! She appears like a goddess!’ (Book of Odes 《詩經》, Odes of Yong 鄘風, ‘The Husband’s to Old Age’ 君子偕老 2) And: 初九：履錯然，敬之无咎。 ‘The first NINE, undivided, shows one ready to move with confused steps. But he treads at the same time reverently, and there will be no mistake.’ (Book of Changes 《易經》, ‘Li’ ䷝離 2) And in the sense of ‘logically, thus, so’: 曰予不戕、禮則然矣。 ‘He says, “I am not injuring you; the laws require that thus it should be?”’ (Odes, Decade of Qi Fu 祈父之什, ‘Conjunction in the Tenth Month’ 十月之交 5) Also: 予念我先神后之勞爾先，予丕克羞爾，用懷爾，然。 ‘I think of my ancestors, (now) the spiritual sovereigns; when they made your forefathers toil… and I would be enabled in the same way greatly to nourish you and cherish you.’ (Book of Documents 《尚書》, Book of Shang 商書, ‘Pan Geng II’ 盤庚中 10) There are occasions where ran 然 is connected with ‘fire, to burn, to set alight’ also—but usually in a poetic sense, by juxtaposition.
心之憂矣、如或結之。
今茲之正、胡然厲矣。
燎之方揚、寧或滅之。
赫赫宗周、褒姒滅之。My heart with its sorrow,
Feels as if it were tied and bound by something.
This government of the present time,—
How oppressive it is!
The flames, when they are blazing,
May still perhaps be extinguished;
But the majestic honoured capital of Zhou,
Is being destroyed by Si of Bao.(Odes, Decade of Qi Fu, ‘First Month’ 正月 8)
Sudden epiphanies and logical consequence—both are attested in the Classics which make up the early corpus of Chinese literature by the Warring States period (475-221 BC). The Documents in particular are already using it in its conjunctive function. In addition, we see that the Odes and the Changes both make use of ran 然 in its fiery connotations for dramatic or poetic effect.
A quick further note, for clarity’s sake. The oldest known appearance of ran 然 in the compound ziran 自然 is found in the Nanhuajing:
是非吾所謂情也。吾所謂無情者，言人之不以好惡内傷其身，常因自然而不益生也。
‘You are misunderstanding what I mean by passions and desires. What I mean when I say that he is without these is, that this man does not by his likings and dislikings do any inward harm to his body – he always pursues his course without effort, and does not (try to) increase his (store of) life.’
(Zhuangzi 《莊子》 5.6)
In such a case it is important to note that the functionality of this word is not the same in an ancient context as it is in a modern one. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese language did quite a bit of ‘back-borrowing’ from Japanese—which was considered a more modernised society and thus more advanced in technical, scientific, and even philosophical and ideological terminology. One of these back-borrowings was the term daishizen 大自然, which had been adapted in Japanese to the state religion of Shintō. From there, through contact with German Romanticism, it acquired the connotation of Natur as a realm apart from that of man. Early modern Chinese thought readapted ziran 自然, and particularly daziran 大自然, to mean ‘nature’.
That is not what Zhuangzi is saying at all! And actually, Legge does us all a solid here by not translating it as ‘nature’, and adding a layer of interpretive confusion! In the seminal works of Matrical School thought, ziran 自然 is literally ‘self-so’, or ‘that which comes about of itself’. The term connotes spontaneity, action without deliberation. Ziran 自然 isn’t Ferngully. Interpreting it as such would be to import a European philosophical dualism, both anachronistic and foreign to this term’s context. Rather it indicates a course, a direction that is immediately available to all living beings. The use of ziran 自然 in early Matrical School thought mirrors ran 然 in its Classical connotations of imminence and sequential logic.
It is tempting, though in this case the evidence is far more tenuous and fragmentary, to make a parallel case for the Hebrew conjunction ’az אז ‘then, so, at that time’ with regard to ’azā’ אזא ‘to kindle, hot, to heat up’. This derivation is problematised on account of the second consonant (the same in Hebrew) being differently derived in Arabic and Syriac. In Arabic, the derivation from the triliteral root ’-z-’ א-ז-א is ’azz أز ‘to kindle, to be hot’; whereas the correlate of the Hebrew conjunction ’az אז is ’iḏa(n) إذا ‘thereupon, and then, when behold, lo’, with a voiced dental fricative /ð/ instead of a geminated voiced alveolar /zz/. In Classical Aramaic and Syriac, the connexion is shown to be even more tenuous! The cognate conjunction is deyn ܕܝܢ ‘yet, but, thus’, while the function of ‘to kindle’ belongs to a completely different root ’aḥed ܐܚܕ! The roots look similar in Biblical Hebrew, but in fact they come from very different Semitic sources.
Yet the connexion exists in literary terms, similar to how ran 然 remains connected by connotation in poetic imagery to fire in the Odes. In Isaiah, for example: ’āz yibāqa‘ kaššaḥar ’ôrekā אז יבּקע כּשּׁחר אורך ‘Then shall your light break forth like the dawn…’ (Isa 58:8) Or in Psalm 50: אז תּחפּץ זבחי־צדק עולה וכליל אז יעלוּ על־מזבּחך פרים ‘Then shalt thou be pleased with a sacrifice of righteousness, offering, and whole-burnt-sacrifices: then shall they offer calves upon thine altar!’ (Psa 50:21) In each of these cases, the suddenness of the event is likened to a spontaneous spurt of flame. The hopeful prophetic voice of Isaiah and the penitent voice of the Psalmist use this imagery to different effect, but they both play with the homophony between ’az אז and ’azā’ אזא to paronomastically evoke a singular God Who is unpredictable, sudden, consuming, enlightening in an instant.
