Page 51 - EALC C306/505

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Notice, that by using 所 the writer can refer to the persons who are being taught even
though he cannot name them. This is a perfectly ordinary feature of languages, and 所 is
a perfectly ordinary syntactical device.

What makes 所 sometimes difficult is that it may occur in complex sentences. Let’s
consider the sentence in our text:

夫孝德之本也教之所由生也

which, for the sake of clarity, may be simplified to:

孝，教之所由生也

This is an equational sentence. Xìao 孝 is the subject, and the remainder of the sentence
forms the predicate – that which is said about (predicated about) the subject. Since this is
an equational sentence, its structure is basically:

孝 X 也 xìao [is] X

X is a noun. We know, of course, that 所 creates a noun-phrase, therefore it makes sense
that 教之所由生should be a noun unit. Literally, the phrase 所由生 means: “that out of
which [something] is born.” Therefore the entire X-phrase is “the teaching’s that-out-of-
which- [something]-is-born.” But we can simplify this. The 之 is superfluous here: 之too
creates noun phrases, like 所. There is no need for both, and if we disregard the 之, our
X-phrase would translate “that out of which the teaching is born.” This is clearly a noun,
but what is the identity of this noun, or, in WYW:

教所由生者，何也？
The answer:
教所由生者，孝也！

This sentence first refers to 孝 without naming it by using 所 to create an equivalent
noun-phrase out of a verbal aspect of 孝 – then it reveals the identify of 孝 by name.
“That which gives birth to the teaching is . . . filiality!” (Ta-daa!) But, really, this is
hardly a surprise, since the sentence we began with was simply the inversion, “Filiaility is
that which gives birth to the teaching.”

(N.B. We will see that it is common to include both 之 and 所 is phrases such as this one;
although it is logically redundant, it helps the rhetoric flow.)