溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Am I Living Up to My Name?
Does the place my name points to fall out of step with who I actually am?
What is necessary is to rectify names. Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son.
Asked what he would do first if given rule, Confucius answered: "rectify names" (zhengming). When a ruler fails to live up to the name "ruler," or a father to "father," the world falls into disorder. A name is not a mere label but a promise calling for the substance (shi) that ought to fill that place. The question branched. Mozi and the later School of Names probed the relation of name and substance as a matter of logic; Laozi, by contrast, questioned the limits of naming — "the name that can be named is not the eternal name." The names that call me — parent, profession, role — am I living up to them?
In an age when we call one another by titles and profiles, the question of whether we live up to them aches all the more quietly.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
I live bearing many names — someone's child, someone's parent, some title. Confucius's question halts me before them: am I living up to the name "child," to the name "parent"? The wider the gap between name and reality, the more a corner of my heart grows uneasy — because I too know that gap. Rectifying names, before it is politics that corrects others, is my own work of narrowing the gap between my name and my life. Today, calling to mind one name I bear, I quietly ask whether I am living up to it.
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