The lexicology of xi 息
The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life. (Job 33:4)
Mostly in the Asian languages, the word for rest has something to do with the breath, or is otherwise connected to the breath. This is true in Russian, for example, though not in most other Slavic languages. ‘Breath’ in Russian is дых or дыхание, which is also the anatomical term for the ‘diaphragm’; ‘to breathe’ is дышать; and ‘to rest’ is отдыхать. These come as doublets from the same proto-Slavic root as душа, the famous Russian ‘soul’.
It’s possible that, in contrast to all the other Slavs who use the term почить (same root as the Latin quiēs, ‘quiet’) in various forms to mean ‘rest’, the easternmost Rus’ adopted this word via loan-translation from their Caucasian and Semitic neighbours to the southeast. In Armenian, hangist հանգիստ ‘to rest’, ‘pause’, ‘break’ comes from Old Armenian hang հանգ ‘breath’, ‘soul’. This is also the case in Arabic. ‘He rests’ in Arabic is yartāḥu يرتاح, and ‘a break’ or ‘a quick rest’ is istirāḥa إستراحة, which are derived from the Semitic triliteral r-w-ḥ ر و ح (Hebrew ר-ו-ח) pertaining to ‘wind’, ‘air’, ‘breath’, ‘respiration’.
In Biblical Hebrew, the ‘breath’ (rûaḥ רוח) is connected by consonantal substitution to the name Noah (Noaḥ נח ‘repose’, from nûaḥ נוח ‘to rest’, originally connoting respiration). This is particularly apt when one considers that Noah and his family were the only humans that God allowed to continue breathing—a connexion that is made explicit in Genesis 7:15! Actually, even in modern Hebrew, the term rewaḥ רוח refers to a ‘space’, a ‘gap’ or (in musical notation) a ‘rest’.
Hey: even in English, we colloquially say ‘take a breather’ if you want someone to rest for a little while! Among the other Indo-European languages, the sundry folk of the Mediterranean’s leeward coastline would tell us to ‘leave off’ or ‘cease’, that is to ‘pause’ (Gk. [ἀνα]παύω => L. repausāre => Alb. pushoj; Fr. reposer; Sp. reposar; Ita. riposare; Port. repousar; Rom. repauza). The Celts, quite practically, ‘lie’ down (OIr. laigid => Ir. lig do scíth; Sc. laigh). Being in the north must make you dull, because my people the Scandinavians simply ‘while’ away the time (Got. 𐍈𐌴𐌹𐌻𐌰𐌽; ON. = Is. hvílast => Dan. / No. hvile; Sw. vila). Sadly, my other people—continental Germans with their usual blasted sense of joyless workaholic sadism—insist that you take your rest ‘rowing’ (G. ruhen) or ‘hauling’ (G. erholen)!
Thanks be to the Holy Spirit, the ar-Rūḥ al-Qudus الروح القدس, that the Chinese are—like the Russians, the Armenians and the classical Semites—Asians, and therefore sensible. You relax by catching your breath, by breathing. The Sinitic lexeme of the day is xi 息.
This lexeme, the 428th most common in written Chinese, is most commonly seen in modern Mandarin as the compound xiuxi 休息 ‘to take a break’, ‘to rest’; and also in the compound xiaoxi 消息 ‘news’ (also xinxi 信息 in Mandarin or sìn-sit / seon-sik 讯息 in Hokkien and Cantonese, respectively—the general idea being that where a particular message stops en route is where it becomes ‘news’). Its original sense of being the ‘breath’ can be seen in other compounds, like: qixi 气息 ‘breath, smell, odour’; bixi 鼻息 ‘to respire through the nose, to snore’; zhixi 窒息 ‘to asphyxiate, to suffocate’; and maixi 脉息 ‘heartbeat’, being the ‘breath’ of the veins.
The ideogram for xi 息, in its earliest form, very clearly depicts a human nose (zi 自 ‘self’; it is still the semantic element in the modern Chinese bi 鼻 ‘nose’), breathing in a ‘stream’ (shun巛 or chuan 川) of air. The lower graphical element later got stylised to xin 心 ‘heart’, but it doesn’t seem to have any direct relation to the ‘heart’ ideogram. It clearly connoted breathing in its original ideographic form. However, the double semantics of this word as ‘to breathe’ and ‘to rest’ clearly have Classical-era roots. The Shuowen jiezi defines xi 息 etymologically as a synonym of chuan 喘 ‘to breathe, to gasp’. But the older, Classic-era Erya links xi 息 to a different xi 栖 ‘to perch, to roost’; and also to chi 迟 ‘to delay, to tarry’; qi 憩 ‘to take a rest’; xiu 休 ‘to repose, to relax’; and kui 㕟 ‘to stop, to pause’—as well as xie 齂 ‘to snore’. The sense of the term as ‘to rest’ appears to be the dominant one in the Chinese Classics, as in the Odes:
有菀者柳、不尚息焉。
上帝甚蹈、無自昵焉。
俾予靖之、后予极焉。There is a luxuriant willow tree;—
Who would not wish to rest [under it]?
[But] God is very changeable;—
Do not approach Him.
If I were to [try and] order His affairs,
His demands afterwards would be extreme.Book of Odes 《詩經》, Decade of Sang Hu 桑弧之什, ‘Luxuriant Willow’ 菀柳 1
And also the Documents:
惟荒腆于酒，不惟自息乃逸。
The people were all sorely grieved and wounded in heart; but he gave himself wildly up to drink, not thinking of restraining himself.
Book of Documents 《尚書》, Zhou Writings 周書, ‘Jiu Gao’ 酒誥
And the Changes:
泽中有雷，随；君子以向晦入宴息。
(The trigram for the waters of) a marsh and (that for) thunder (hidden) in the midst of it form Sui. The superior man in accordance with this, when it is getting towards dark, enters (his house) and rests.
Book of Changes 《易經》, Sui ䷐随 1
And, among the Matrical School canon, in the Zhuangzi:
鹏之徙于南冥也，水击三千里，抟扶摇而上者九万里，去以六月息者也。
‘When the peng is removing to the Southern Ocean it flaps (its wings) on the water for 3000 li. Then it ascends on a whirlwind 90,000 li, and it rests only at the end of six months.’
Zhuangzi 《莊子》, Enjoyment in Untroubled Ease 逍遥游 1
In the Martial School, Sunzi’s Art of War:
來委謝者，欲休息也。
When envoys are sent with compliments in their mouths, it is a sign that the enemy wishes for a truce.
Art of War 《孫子兵法》, The Army on the March 行軍 3
This is only a small sampling of its usage, but one easily gets the picture. The function of ‘to rest’ for xi 息 is in fact very early and well-attested to the point of dominance in the Classics, despite the Shuowen jiezi’s insistence on the archaic primary function ‘to breathe’.
In the Hebrew Scriptures as well, not only in Genesis is there this etymological and lexical connexion seen between nûaḥ נוח ‘rest, repose’ and rûaḥ רוח ‘breath, spirit, respiration’. One sees this wordplay repeated in the Tōrah, in the Book of Numbers:
ויּרד יהוה בּענן וידבּר אליו ויּאצל מן־הרוּח אשׁר עליו ויּתּן על־שׁבעים אישׁ הזּקנים ויהי כּנוח עליהם הרוּח ויּתנבּאוּ ולא יספוּ׃
ויּשּׁארוּ שׁני־אנשׁים בּמּחנה שׁם האחד אלדּד ושׁם השּׁני מידד ותּנח עליהם הרוּח והמּה בּכּתבים ולא יצאוּ האהלה ויּתנבּאוּ בּמּחנה׃
Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was upon him and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did so no more. Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested upon them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. (Num 11:25-26)
And also in the wisdom literature, the Kǝtubim, in Ecclesiastes (though the wordplay gets absolutely butchered by the RSV’s baffling English word choices):
אל־תּבהל בּרוּחך לכעוס כּי כעס בּחיק כּסילים ינוּח׃
Be not quick to anger, for anger lodges (rests, nûaḥ) in the bosom (breath, rûaḥ) of fools. (Ecc 7:9)
And a bit more comprehensibly to the English reader in the second Book of Kings:
ויּראהוּ בני־הנּביאים אשׁר־ בּיריחו מנּגד ויּאמרוּ נחה רוּח אליּהוּ על־אלישׁע ויּבאוּ לקראתו ויּשׁתּחווּ־לו ארצה׃
Now when the sons of the prophets who were at Jericho saw him over against them, they said, ‘The spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha.’ And they came to meet him, and bowed to the ground before him. (2 Ki 2:15)
And, of course, also in the Nǝbī’im, in Isaiah:
ונחה עליו רוּח יהוה רוּח חכמה וּבינה רוּח עצה וּגבוּרה רוּח דּעת ויראת יהוה׃
And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Isa 11:2)
Note that even in the Gospels, it is only when the Son of God rests, declaring that ‘it is finished’ (referencing Gen 2:2), that He allows His breath to go out from Him (John 19:30)! Further evidence that the Gospel of John is very much so a Semitic text, even though Saint John is writing in Greek. And not only him: Saint Luke recalls in the Book of Acts (2:2-4) how the Holy Spirit (Rûaḥ) rested (ἐκάθισεν, corresponding directly to nûaḥ via cross-reference to the story of Noah and the flood in Gen 8:4) on the heads of the apostles at Pentecost!
Ancient Chinese ascetics and hermits, like the Indian ascetics to their west, or (further afield) the Afro-Asiatic Egyptian monastics in the Thebaïd community of Saint Anthony, were not wrong to focus on the control of the breath as being necessary for calming or resting the mind. In our day and age, the reclamation of rest is in fact an act of radical resistance against a neoliberal anti-culture that satanically still wants us to ‘row’ or ‘haul’ during the hours we take to ourselves. True rest, stopping to catch our breath, and stopping to allow our neighbour to catch his, is not only needed for life but is indeed a Tōrah command, so important that it had to be listed and explained among the Ten (Exo 20:8-11). Glory be to the Father Whose command it is!
