Image
the elephant — and the shape of what nobody has seen
象 is a drawing of an elephant, an animal that once ranged far further north in China than it does now and withdrew south as the climate cooled. The character kept the animal and acquired a second life meaning image, likeness, figure — and the classical explanation of how, given in the Han Feizi, is worth more than most etymologies are worth: people who had never seen a living elephant reconstructed the creature from its bones, and so 象 came to mean inferring the form of a thing from what it left behind. Whether or not that is how the sense actually shifted, no language has a better account of what an image is — a shape assembled from remains. The Yijing uses 象 for its own figures, each hexagram an image of a situation rather than a picture of a thing.
Sources · 3
- documented Han Feizi, 解老 — the passage reconstructing the elephant from its bones.
- documented The Yijing’s use of 象 for the hexagram figures.
- folk That the Han Feizi passage records the real derivation of the sense “image”. It is an explanation offered some centuries after the fact by a writer making a philosophical point — which makes it a folk etymology roughly twenty-three hundred years old, and a folk etymology still.