The lexicology of zai 在
Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. (Isa 40:24)
So… the Chinese civilisation is an agricultural civilisation. Okay, that’s a tautology. All civilisations are agricultural—with the possible exception of the Mongolian civilisation, but the extent to which they can be counted a civilisation is debatable. But the Chinese take agriculture to extreme lengths. China produces fully 25% of the world’s food, ranking first in production of grains, fruits, vegetables, meat and fish—but only 10% of China’s total land area is arable. As a result, they have specialised in high-density, high-labour input farming for most of their history. Such is their dedication to agriculture that they have even grown vegetables in space. But China’s population is so high that even this insane rate of domestic production is insufficient to feed everyone—and so China is also the largest net importer of food products.
So it is unsurprising that many of their most common words, and indeed many of their most important words, have their roots in agriculture. Such is indeed the case with the common preposition zai 在: ‘on’, ‘at’, ‘in’, ‘present’, ‘during’, ‘steady’, ‘to be’, ‘due to’, ‘to exist’, ‘to be alive’. By itself, zai is the word that a student uses to announce himself ‘present’ in class, much as English schoolchildren would say ‘here’ when their name is called.
Zai 在 is the 6th most common character in written Chinese, and it is necessary first-year vocabulary for any learner of Mandarin. It is used in such indispensable and commonplace compounds as xianzai 现在 ‘now’; shizai 实在 ‘really’; cunzai 存在 ‘to exist’; zaijia 在家 ‘at home’; zainei 在内 ‘inside, among’; zhengzai 正在 ‘just then, while, in the process of’; zaiyu 在于 ‘to be at (a place)’; zaihu 在乎 ‘to care about’; bu zaihu 不在乎 ‘to not care’; zaixian 在线 ‘online’; and zizai 自在 ‘(spiritually) free’.
Back in July this year, there was an online geng 哏 (meme) that started circulating on Douyin (TikTok), which featured a clip from a running Chinese TV melodrama The Tale of Rose 《玫瑰的故事》, where the titular female lead is being confronted by her jealous ex-husband (played by a scenery-chewing Lin Gengxin 林更新) about her choice to go back to Beijing, and he exclaims: ‘Beijing daodi you shei zai a?’ “北京到底有谁在啊？” (Translating roughly to: ‘Who’s actually in Beijing, anyway?’) Obviously, the humour derives from the fact that Beijing is one of the world’s largest cities… but Douyin influencers and even local government tourism bureaus quickly got in on making funny splices of this quote with advertisements for places like Xinjiang, Hebei, Ningxia, Harbin, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Inner Mongolia and even Serbia (all of which you could get to from Beijing by plane or by HSR).
The character zai 在 in its original form shows the stalk and root system of a plant (he 禾) rooted in the ground (土). Xu Shen, in the Shuowen jiezi 《説文解字》, links this character to cai 才, which he erroneously assumes to represent a sprouting plant. Despite his etymological instincts being slightly off, Xu Shen does correctly link the origin of this character to agriculture. According to the Erya 《爾雅》, zai 在 is interestingly enough linked to sheng 省 ‘to save’, ‘to inspect’, ‘to examine’ which in its earliest forms clearly shows an eye watching a seedling plant grow. And the structure, appearance and pronunciation all link this zai 在 to another zai 栽 which is the Chinese verb ‘to cultivate’, ‘to plant crops’.
But what is clear is that it was primarily being used as a preposition even in the Chinese Classics—its function is to show that something is ‘in’ or ‘at’ a certain place. See, for example, the Odes:
殷其靁、在南山之陽。
何斯違斯、莫敢或遑。
振振君子、歸哉歸哉。Grandly rolls the thunder, on the south of the southern hill!
How was it he went away from this, not daring to take a little rest?
My noble lord! May he return! May he return!Book of Odes 《詩經》, Odes of Shao and the South 召南, ‘Grand Thunder’ 殷其靁
But the use of zai 在 as a preposition also has a figurative dimension, such that it functions as ‘due to’, ‘owing to’ or ‘that’. See the Mencius (again, in one of Mencius’s rare but brilliant moments of self-awareness where he is directly criticising the philosophers who ended up following him):
孟子曰：「人之患在好為人師。」
Mencius said, ‘The evil of men is that they like to be teachers of others.’
Mencius 《孟子》 7.23
And zai 在 is also used as a verb in classical Chinese: ‘to exist’ (as a synonym of cun 存) or ‘to be alive’ (as a synonym of huo 活). See the Rites:
父母在，朝夕恒食，子婦佐餕，既食恒餕。
While the parents are both alive, at their regular meals, morning and evening, the (eldest) son and his wife will encourage them to eat everything, and what is left after all, they will themselves eat.
Book of Rites 《禮記》 12.11
The Biblical Hebrew verb nāṭa‘ נטע ‘to plant, to fix, to establish’, has a similar locative value to zai 在—as evidenced by its cognate value to the Qur’ānic Arabic waḍa‘ وضع ‘place, to put in place, to give birth’… which puts it in the same family of Semitic roots as the aforementioned n-ṣ-b נ-צ-ב ‘to erect, pillar, sign’! (Note for reference that the Sinitic characters shi 事 and zai 在 both, in their archaic forms, show something being stuck into the ground!)
This should not be surprising. The authors of the Tanakh were descendants of the same Syrian and Mesopotamian Semitic peoples that had birthed the Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires—all of which were located along the Fertile Crescent between the Two Rivers. Their civilisations had been, like the Chinese civilisation, agricultural. But the Tanakh is a text that is highly critical of civilisation as a whole—to the point of valorising the shepherd lifestyle of Abel and denigrating the settlements and monuments of Cain!
Fr Paul Tarazi makes a strong scholarly case in The Rise of Scripture that the Tanakh was written by the West Asians of Late Antiquity, after the invasion of Alexander the Great and his subjugation and Hellenisation campaign in Babylon. It was composed in a Tolkien-esque constructed language (Hebrew), imagined for a historical-fictionalised nomadic shepherding people of Canaan, but drawn from the components of the Semitic languages (Assyrian, Aramaic, Babylonian, Ugaritic, Canaanite) spoken by the agrarian peoples then living in the Fertile Crescent. By thus attacking the roots of Hellenic civilisation, they proceeded to write themselves and their ancestors into their own literature as anti-heroes, even as the villains: the sons of Cain, the builders of the Tower of Babel, the kings and potentates of the peoples that opposed the Hebrews and their God.
Thus, when we encounter nāṭa‘ נטע in the Tanakh, it has a very double-edged connotation. On the one hand, God is described as planting (wayyiṭṭa‘ ויּטּע) a garden in Eden, where He places (wayyāśśem ויּשׂם) the man (Gen 2:8). This usage is reflected in Psalm 80, in which God removes (tassiya‘ תּסּיע) a vine from Egypt—a reference to the sons of Jacob—and plants it (wattiṭṭā‘ê ותּטּעה) with His right hand. God can both plant men or tribes of men this way, and drive them out (Psalm 44). God can plant nations as a planter plants vineyards (Isa 5:2; Jer 2:21), and just as easily He can unstake them, remove their fences, trample them down, wither them up and cast them into the fire (Isa 5:5-6; Jer 45:4).
But it is not for the human being to become a planter—and bad things happen when he does! The first vigneron who plants is Noah (Gen 9:20), whose punishment comes upon him in the form of drunkenness (9:21), such that he is exposed naked and senseless, like a corpse before his sons (9:22-23). And afterwards he curses his own grandson (9:25). The ideal is for God to be the planter and for the human being to enjoy that which God plants, sharing them freely with his fellow animals (Gen 1:29-30, 2:9). This is reflected in the blessings which God occasionally grants to the nomadic shepherding people who follow His ways—He blesses them by saying that they shall eat from trees that they did not plant (Deu 6:10-11; Jos 24:13), and He curses them when they turn away from Him (by planting trees to Asherah!—Deu 16:21) by saying that others shall eat from the trees that they plant (Deu 28:30)!
The authors of the Tanakh therefore have a kind of double-mindedness about agriculture. On the one hand, God is perfectly justified in plucking up entire peoples and planting them like vines wherever He chooses. But human beings are not. The authors of the Tanakh are thus making a criticism of the assumed power over nature that comes with agriculture.
The five-book canon of the Chinese Classics comes out of a similar matrix of political and cultural discontent, in a period of systemic societal collapse. (The ‘lost sixth book’ of the Classics, the Classic of Music, may later have been used as a rhetorical device against the régime of Qin Shi Huang.) The Zhou Kingdom had held itself aloft as a shining exemplar of humane rule to all its neighbours. As the Classics were being written (or compiled, depending on your view), the Zhou’s authority had utterly collapsed and given way to the Warring States. This failure had to be explained somehow.
The authors of the Chinese Classics were clearly aware that the Zhou kings had justified their rule by pointing to their religious-moral and ritual superiority over the Yin-Shang whom they had defeated. But the Zhou Kingdom had fragmented into a large number of power-hungry states ruled by bloodthirsty tyrants and oppressive landlords. And so the authors of the Classics planted in the text a descendant of the defeated former Yin-Shang kings, namely Confucius, as their alter ego, their authorial voice in criticising the religious-moral and ritual decline of the Zhou. This is a parallel literary device to how Moses, a descendant of one of the wicked and murderous older sons of Jacob (Levi), was elected as the authorial voice of the Tōrah—or to how Paul, a repentant persecutor of Christ, was elected as the authorial voice of the ‘Tōrah to the Gentiles’.
And the substance of this critique, in fact, is that the problem is planted in—zaiyu 在於—the human ego. The Odes 《詩經》 showcase both the primordial closeness of man to nature, and lament the quickness with which man seeks to conquer and oppress nature and other men. The Book of Documents 《尚書》 is the source of the myth of cyclical dynastic rise and fall: just as the Zhou had overthrown the Shang for their crimes—so state the Documents—so too the Shang had once had their shining moral exemplars (King Tang of Shang 湯商王) who overthrew tyrants (King Jie桀 the descendant of Great Yu 大禹), established new rituals, and proclaimed themselves the religious-moral-ritual centre of the universe. Yet just as the Xia fell, the Shang fell. And just as the Shang fell, so the Zhou would fall.
The Rites 《禮記》 showcase one possible arrangement by which human beings can treat each other in a decent and caring fashion, but the Changes 《易經》 which follow the Rites assert that all such arrangements are temporary and dependent on the will of Heaven—not on human will. The finishing touches on this canon are provided by Confucius himself, the suwang 素王 ‘uncrowned king’ and heir of Yin-Shang, who writes the Spring and Autumn Annals 《春秋》: a heavily critical chronicle of his declining State of Lu, as a microcosm of the cultural and political problems that are afflicting the Zhou Dynasty as a whole, and also as a mythical microcosm of the problem of the human being!
But we should bear in mind the historical context in which the Classics were written. Similarly to ancient Mesopotamia, the peoples ruled by the Zhou Dynasty were not a monoculture, nor were they ‘ethnically’ homogeneous. They were, much like the patchwork of Warring States that took the Zhou’s place, a hodgepodge of different ethnic groups with different customs. Even the ancestral Zhou themselves before they replaced the Shang, being from the outlying western Guanzhong district, may have been a non-Shang Sinitic people. But apart from the people of Zhou and Shang, there were other non-Shang Sinitic-speaking peoples such as the Qiang or Rong; there were Austroasiatic Yue (ancestral Vietnamese); there were Miao (Hmong); there were Kra-Dai speaking peoples of various tribes; there were proto-Mongolic peoples like the Xianbei; proto-Tungusic peoples like the Donghu; and there were Yeniseian peoples like the Xiongnu—all of whom drifted in and out of the Zhou Dynasty’s hegemonic-cultural sphere of influence.
The official Zhou propaganda was that it was the magnetism of its charismatic leaders, the humane beneficence of its government, the splendour of its rituals, that kept all of these other peoples obediently in line and at peace. The Classics, despite basing themselves at least somewhat on this propaganda, expressly set out to undermine these claims. Even though they do not go as far as the Tanakh in inventing a language and telling a self-undermining saga of a shepherding people with it, there is a similar current of self-criticism in the Chinese Classics that places it as a kind of cousin-literature to the West Asian work.
