Page 271 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 264
following entries: Aubergine, Bean, Boat, Chrysanthemum, Maple, Monkey. Scholars,
who were almost always also officials, also came to occupy a very high place in the
hierarchy of officials.
Originally, tai bao = ‘great protector’ was the title given to one of the Emperor’s
highest officials. Later it came to refer to a gangleader’s sidekick. Today it is used to
mean a juvenile offender.

Olive

gan-lan

For climatic reasons, the olive tree grows better in South China than in the North.
The tree seems to have been introduced to China from Persia. where – as in South-
western Asia in general – it had been cultivated since the 3rd millennium BC. Being
green, the olive symbolises life; and from it is brewed a sort of wine or tea
which used to be drunk at New Year.

One

yi

One Chinese dictionary gives 67 meanings of the character yi, giving a total of 3,417
compounds. Another takes 923 folio pages to deal with this single character: confronted

with this, the publishers gave up the idea of producing a complete dictionary of numbers.
According to ancient Chinese philosophy, there was in the beginning the ‘Greatest and
Highest’ ( tai ji) whence issued the ‘Great Monad’ (tai yi); this in turn divided into
the two principles, yin and yang, which generated the five elements or
‘states of being’ (wood, fire, earth, metal, water); from these five elements the ‘ten
thousand things’ (wan wu) arise.
Confucian thinkers and Lao-zi alike stressed in their own ways that the ‘One’ is
the Undivided, the Perfect Entity. ‘Great is the original power of the Creative One, to
whom all beings owe their existence. And this power flows through the whole of Heaven’
(Elucidation to the first hexagram of the Yi-jing: ‘the Creative One’).
And in Lao-zi:

There is a thing confusedly formed,
Born before heaven and earth.
Silent and void