Page 331 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 324
Sex

se

An appendix to the celebrated Yi-jing (‘Book of Changes’) contains the sentence: ‘Male
and female mix their essential forces (jing = seminal fluids) and the ten thousand
beings arise’: a surprisingly unadorned way for Chinese to convey information. True,
Confucius, a thinker who is of unsurpassed authority for the whole spectrum of Chinese
family and sex life, is supposed to have said: ‘Eating and sex (se) are given by nature.’
He was, of course, referring to matrimony only. Later Confucianism went so far as to
recommend husbands not to hand things directly to their wives: they should lay things
down so that the wife could then pick them up. That is to say, all bodily contact should be
avoided in formal encounter.
The enormously rich sexual imagery conceived by the Chinese and expressed in their
language goes to show that their sexuality and erotic impulses have certainly not been
suppressed – rather, they have been expressed obliquely in more or less refined form.
(See Beauty, Marriage, Married Bliss, Nakedness, Open.)
Post-Confucian thinkers distinguished between se (which normally means no more
than ‘colour’) and yin, which implies an excess, an overflowing, and which may be
translated as fornication or lewdness: that is to say, the word implies both sexual
freedom and sexual excess. A 19th-century writer who was also a pious Buddhist wrote:
‘Of the three forbidden things in human life, sex takes first place; it generates sin and
blame in ten thousand ways. Worst of all these ways is fornication (yin). The gods see it
even when it takes place in a dark house.’
The Utopian socialist Kang Youwei (1858–1927) saw these matters in a
different light. He made a strong plea for ‘love-contracts’ valid for a given
period (jiao-hao zhi yue). This period should be not more than a year, not

less than a month; the anti-quated terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ were to be
discarded, and ‘love-contracts’ for life were not to be allowed (‘Da Tong
Shu’ = ‘The Book of the Great Equality’, 1902). This Utopia came to
nothing, however; and today men and women who have sexual relations
outside of the marriage bond are quite likely to land in a re-education
camp.
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