Yetgeul › China

Yanshi Jiaxun (The Family Instructions of Master Yan)顏氏家訓

Yan Zhitui · Late 6th century · China · 20 pieces · 33,031 Chinese characters

Twenty chapters of family instruction left to his descendants by Yan Zhitui, a scholar of the end of the Northern and Southern dynasties. He was born under Liang and survived as a wanderer through four states — Western Wei, Northern Qi, Northern Zhou and Sui — and he wrote, in his own words, "to set the household in order and to wake the sons and grandsons." It runs from teaching children, brothers, a second wife, the ordering of a house, bearing and speech, learning, writing, name and reality, and knowing when one has enough, on to the examination of characters and books, the sounds of speech, the many arts of calligraphy and painting and archery and divining and the zither and go, and at last to his last charge on how his own burial was to be conducted. The passage where he sees the sons of the noble houses of Liang, of whom the proverb ran, "If he can climb into a carriage without falling out, he can be a court compiler," left after the troubles to plough the fields and tend horses, and says that "a thousand myriad piled up in goods is not so good as a small skill about the person"; and the passage that "he who learns while young is like the light of the rising sun, and he who learns when old is like a man walking at night with a candle in his hand," both come from here. Every book of family instruction after it takes this one for its ancestor.

20 chapters, 255 paragraphs and 33,031 graphs have all been translated. Volumes 3, 4 and 7 on Wikisource are posted in simplified graphs (a {{正體化}} template on the page makes them look traditional on screen only), so they were turned back by the method settled upon for the Hou Han Shu, the Caigentan and the Hanfeizi — a converter was used to draw out the pairs at each position, only graphs that never once appear in the traditional volumes (1, 2, 5, 6) were accepted as simplified counterparts, and graphs that can go either way, such as 于, 后, 云, 余, 几, 谷 and 并, were decided position by position (3,381 graphs; 되돌림기록.txt). At the thirty places where Wikisource writes a graph that is not in Unicode by its components, as in (水百) and (介鳥), they are left as □〔components〕. The graph counts of the original against the source text, and of the source text against the translation, are all the same. Yan Zhitui's 「I (吾)」 is left as it is, and personal names are read by the sound of their Chinese graphs.

Listen to this bookPlay Store
Complete in one volume