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Ren ... is the heart of Confucianism. Its importance to ancient Chinese thought and culture cannot be overstated. But the etymological origins of ren have long been clouded by ambiguities and complexities. In his illuminating account of the evolution of ren, Wing-tsit Chan summarized a range of its English translations: "benevolence, love, altruism, kindness, charity, compassion, magnanimity, perfect virtue, goodness, true manhood, manhood at its best, human-heartedness, humanness, humanity, 'hominity,' man-to-manness."1 This list did not include the translation "authoritative humanity" that was proposed later by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames.
In a sense, these translations may all be correct to the extent that each of them articulates some distinctive aspect of ren. Despite the lack of agreement about the root meaning of ren in classical scholarship, there has been some exciting progress in the study of variant forms of ren found in ancient inscriptions on bronze vessels and the newly discovered bamboo slips of the Chu state. These discoveries and investigations were consequential for revealing the origins of this enigmatic word. Unfortunately, the inferences from these new researches were often at variance with one another. They have not been conclusive and convincing enough to dissolve the puzzles concerning ren. It remains a deep irony that for this Confucian word that is so essential for the harmony of the human community, the investigations into its linguistic sources have admitted of little concord and consensus.
The ambition of this essay is to take the long neglected connection between ren and gantong ... as a vital clue so as to work out a line of interpretation that may bring the complex meanings of ren and its various written forms into a coherent unity. The long and short of my hypothesis is this: one of the oldest and most crucial meanings of ren is gantong, which can be translated as "to open oneself to and be affected by the spiritual, human, and natural beings in the surrounding world." The word ren can be traced to the word shi ..., which referred to the spiritual surrogates and sorcerers in ancient ritual ceremonies who served as intermediaries for the correspondence (gantong) between dead ancestors and their living descendents - between heavenly spirits and...