The Duality Code

[Angelina]

It looks like a fun thing to do when you retired from banking, at least more meaningful than banking. Don't get carried away!

[lips]

OK, I confess. My dad was one of the 士s and he passed the secret on to me. Just to give the unenlightened a glimpse of the power of the code, I will decipher the first part of Lu Xun's famous dead bed confession "汉字不灭，中国必亡" here.

1. You have to start with the last character of 汉字不灭. This is called 倒帘式。Since 天，or sky, is composed of 一 and 大, the coded meaning of 一 at the top of a character is the sky itself, as the sky is the big thing overhead. With this, it's easy to see that 灭 signifies the big bang—fire in the sky—or the beginning of the universe.

2. We then skip to the first character. Going from the last to the first is not uncommon, as a certain great religious leader said two thousand years ago, "So the last shall be first, and the first last". Anyone who understands even rudimentary Chinese knows that 又 means "also", so 汉 here means "and then there was also water". We know that after the earth was formed and cooled down, water appeared. This is also the order mentioned in Genesis.

3. The next character in the sequence is 不. As mentioned above, the 一 at the top means sky, or the heavens. The bottom part is actually part of the character 木, or plants. It is not complete, because with water, plants were just starting to appear under the heavens.

4. It's obvious now. 宀 is part of 穴, which signifies "home", as every student of Chinese knows. Again, the character is incomplete to give the meaning a dynamic sense of time. 子, of course, means humans. The last character 字 therefore signifies the last stage—the appearance of human beings who live in dwellings.

So we see that 汉字不灭 really tells the history of the universe. The second part, 中国必亡, foretells the future. But, 天机不可泄漏。

Whoever has ears, let them hear.

[eddyf]

WKC, you are claiming that a large cabal of intellectuals spread across multiple countries is working hard to keep a big secret, a secret which they have been passing down from generation to generation but they desperately don't want the world to know. In fact, they're so intent on keeping the secret that they are going to try to silence or discredit you and your big revelation.

 

Sorry but regardless of what you call it in your book, that's like the textbook example of a conspiracy theory.

 

I suggest you go promote your book on some conspiracy theory forums like AboveTopSecret. You'll probably find much more sympathetic people there than you will find here.

[coolnicholas]

当代大文豪鲁迅在《病中答救亡情报访员》提出："汉字不灭，中国必亡！这八个字到底代表鲁迅的什么意思呢?“他认为鲁迅是说汉字掌握起来太难（因为当年还没有拼音），清朝末年民国初年，汉字教授起来很困难，接受汉语教育对普通百姓来说不容易，所以造成文化普及太率非常的低，4万万人只有少部分能掌握。说这样话的各大门派的大人物都有个共同的时代背景--近代中国正处于水与火的交融中，多年的战乱贫困，外强入侵。让这些人都有种强烈的危机感。这些人里面就有鲁迅，所以鲁迅的 “汉字不灭,中国必亡”！便家喻户晓，鲁迅是提倡白话文的，也便是汉字改革。因而，鲁迅所说的“汉字”，不是广泛意义上的汉字，而是指“古文”，也便是“文言文”。 我们知道，文言文写起来的确是有点麻烦，而且表达的意思也不简洁，甚至还有点繁琐（不是说诗词之类的，而是说日常通讯交流）。所以，那时才会有文人提出“汉字改革”，而鲁迅，恰好就是这些文人之中的一个。他所说的“汉字不灭，中国必亡”，虽说是夸张了点，但也是说明了他坚持“汉字改革”的立场。 再说，便是当时的时代原因了。

[roddy]

"I think there will be one or two who will wonder why Qian Xuntong, Lu Xun and Mao all wanted to get away from Chinese characters"

Because, as writing systems go, they're really kind of daft. Never seen anyone claim to find hidden meaning in the letter f. Although that would make a fine episode of Sesame Street. "Today we're going to learn about the letter f, the number 9, and a global conspiracy."

[Shelley]

Thanks for sharing your qualifications and something about yourself.

 

I see you have not listed one chinese qualification, but call yourself a student of chinese, have you any chinese qualifications?

[WKC]

Shelly,

 

I do not have a degree in Chinese.  Very true.  I never claimed that I have.  I do maintain that I have decrypted the Duality Code.

[WKC]

eddyf,

 

Thanks for your advice.

[WKC]

Angelina,

 

It is fun solving puzzles.  I'll try not to get to carried away.

 

The battery on my laptop is almost dead and I won't be able to recharge it for some time.  I'll probably check back in tomorrow.

[Gharial]

Wow, this stuff is amazing, and has helped explain an apocryphal tale I once heard:

 

One follower of what we can now see was in fact the Duality Code wrote to somebody with the following cryptic message: 大犬(一人大, 丶大犬), which in English comes out as the Kanzi (太)-like "big dog (one person big, master big dog)".

 

The reply was just 什么?, which would've made sense even without the Duality Code, but which the Duality Code (iff added) would confer a spectacular bracketed twist to: "(person one down cross, slant personal tum ti tum tra lalah)".

 

And that was as far as the mystical correspondence got. Theories abound as to why it petered out, but they will be explored in the next thrilling episode of...BULLBUSTERS. Don't miss it!!

 

Edit: Oops I somehow missed Lips' post above, which makes my rather feeble one here a tad redundant.

[stapler]

I don't think there is any need to mock WKC. This is a bit cruel. Even more so considering - and I mean this quite sincerely - he shows the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, a serious illness that ruins lives.

[Angelina]

reminds me of  The Garden of Forking Paths

 

Andrew Gelman references "The Garden of Forking Paths" to describe how scientists can make false discoveries when they do not pre-specify a data analysis plan and instead choose "one analysis for the particular data they saw."^[6] The "Garden of Forking Paths" refers to the near infinite number of choices facing researchers in cleaning and analyzing data, and emphasizes the need for pre-analysis planning and independent replication, an especially relevant consideration in social psychology's recent replication crisis.

 

[Gharial]

Perhaps WKC really is schizophrenic like you say, Stapler, but you're the one who said it first. Either way, my particular brand of "mockery" (though I'd prefer to call it just an attempt at humour) was not directed at the person but rather at the ideas, which do seem hard to take seriously. If I were talking to him face to face I would probably have phrased it along the lines of 'All that you seem to be doing is decomposing select characters into component parts and/or assigning meanings, with some of those meanings quite arguable, and thus creating some sort of "secret" code, the significance or indeed reality of which (as in, provably used by others in actual and reasonably clear communication and to an undeniable ends, rather than being a made-up individual parlour game or whatever) I'm unfortunately finding hard to follow or credit'.

 

Kudos to the people who teased (but not literally) enough out of him for me to delay putting my own apparent boot in until now (and again, I somehow missed Lips' post above, which is far superior to mine), but this isn't ultimately a "serious" discussion, is it? Or should we put kid gloves on for every apparently serious poster who might care to post who knows what "lunacy"?

 

For what it's worth, I have a relative who has some very delusional beliefs, but I've only definitively worked that out over the course of several years of personal contact, and on the basis of quite telling episodes and effects. I certainly use humour with him as a means of "addressing" or "acknowledging" his "points" and indeed the underlying issue but in an indirect way (that is, without really arguing or needing to argue the "truth" of those "points").

[WKC]

Thankfully I found a charger and can communicate with you again.

 

I asked why Quan Xuantong would propose to abandon Chinese in favour of Esperanto, why Lu Xun said what he did on his death bed, why Mao said Chinese characters are not good.  The best person to give an answer is Quan Xuntong who said,

 

"If we don’t want China to perish, and if we want it to be a civilized nation in the twentieth century, the best thing to do would be to abandon Confucianism and Daoism, and the simplest way toward this end would be to abandon written Chinese, in which the Confucian doctrines and Daoist fallacies were recorded.  After written Chinese is abandoned ... we should adopt Esperanto, an artificial language that is concise in grammar, uniform in pronunciation, and elegant in its word roots." [Ping Chen, ‘China’, in Andrew Simpson (ed.), Language and National Identity in Asia, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 151.]

 

Confucian doctrines and Daoist fallacies were recorded (encrypted) into Chinese characters.  In the New Culture Movement, there was discussion to move away from Confucianism and Daoism.  In Quan Xuantong's view, this would require not just replacement of the Chinese writing script but also the entire Chinese language.

 

I am quite happy for people to doubt what I say.  I hope that one or two would have a sufficiently open mind to read my book.

 

Cheers

[Gharial]

Daoism is admittedly a bit mysterious and all that, but surely even Daoists, given they were bothering to write at least some things down rather than have secret oral transmissions or whatever, wouldn't want their writings to be too cryptic. That is, encryption and now to some extent even encoding LOL are strange words to use for writing. Surely its main purpose is to record and communicate, and relatively unambiguously at that, over distance or for posterity. And did Confucius say anything about the value of clear and truthful expression? I'm assuming so.

[WKC]

Gharial,

 

Something very strange was causing Quan Xuantong, a professor of Chinese at Peking University, to propose abandoning the Chinese language.  That same strange thing caused Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature,  to say "汉字不灭，中国必亡" on his death bed.

 

I will frankly admit that I do not have all the answers.  Why create a writing script containing encryptions in the first instance?  I do not know.  All I know is that in my retirement, i had lots of free time and I took an interest in the etymology of Chinese character.  I also started taking Chinese characters apart to see what the sub-components said, so as to see how Chinese characters generate meaning.

 

My contention is that Chinese characters are encrypted with the Duality Code.  i explain how to decrypt the code in my book.

 

There will be people here whom I can never convince to give my book a chance.  That is OK with me.  I hope that there will be just one or two who are sufficiently open minded to give my book a chance.

 

Thank you everyone for taking time to read this thread.  There is really nothing much more for me to say.  

 

Cheers

[Gharial]

The way I'd look at that is this: although the call for the adoption of Esperanto as a new national language was even more doomed to failure than the calls for just the adoption of alphabetical writing for Chinese, at least there wouldn't (according to the apparent thinking behind such a proposal) be as much grumbling about writing Esperanto in an alphabetical script, right? That is, simply writing the Chinese language in an alphabetical script would likely not get rid of the arguments for or the indeed the adherents of continuing to write in Chinese characters.

 

Qian Xuantong's logic would thus appear to have been that of wanting to effect as complete a break with the character-based writing system as possible, which meant the adoption and promulgation of a completely foreign language instead (even though such an unrelated foreign language would obviously be hard for a whole nation to pick up, despite the optimistic claims for its conciseness, elegance and simplicity).

 

Actually, forget foreign, it's not even that, it's purely an invented language, and thus not really with a community proper of speakers helping it develop. (Some people I knew, who apparently had tried learning some Esperanto, said it was all right up to a certain point, but then became limiting, as it couldn't easily express certain concepts that are taken for granted in natural languages).

 

The main point however (as I'm sure others have mentioned) is that if there were such a thing as the Duality Code in the characters, and that was the main reason that language reformers wanted to get rid of them, why didn't they state that reason in their arguments? Could it be that there was in fact no such code, and that you are reading waaay too much into things?

[abcdefg]

The Amazon product description:

 

The Duality Code reaches out to different audiences. For fans of mystery novels and code breaking, it deciphers the Duality Code – the world’s most ancient and extensive cipher. For fans of crossword puzzles, it locates and solves the world’s oldest crossword puzzle. For philosophers, it explores the birth of political philosophy. For linguists, it explores the etymology of Chinese characters and the conception of the written word. For men of letters, it explores Chinese literature. For sociologists, it explores the structure of Chinese society. For anthropologists, it explores Chinese culture. For theologians, it explores Confucianism. For archaeologists, it explores China’s Neolithic archaeology. For historians, it explores the New Culture Movement and the Cultural Revolution. For human rights activists, it tells the story of the Chinese people's struggle against oppression. For general readers, it tells the story of man’s emergence from the Stone Age. For everyone, it is narrative non-fiction that tells an astounding story that changes our understanding of China and the Sino sphere. The Duality Code brings about a paradigm shift in the world of sinology.

[Lu]

Daoism is admittedly a bit mysterious and all that, but surely even Daoists, if they were bothering to write things down rather than have secret oral transmissions or whatever, would want their writings to not be too cryptic.

Having read bits of the 道德经, I'm not so sure of that.

 

(This is partly in jest, of course.)

 

OP, surely your research could only gain if you decided to actually learn Chinese. For all you know, there's an extensive body of work on the 'duality code'. Or perhaps there isn't, but you have no idea either way. That in itself makes any claims you make more than shaky. Much as I pretty much dismissed Gavin Menzies from the instance I read that he didn't know Chinese. (The rest of his book is nonsense too, but that fact alone foreshadowed that.) Chinese language and Chinese culture is not so simple that you can understand all it and make extensive claims from just a few books and articles.

 

You already mentioned that you don't wish to share too much of your conclusions here (fair enough), but perhaps you could share your book's bibliography? That might be interesting.

[Shelley]

an artificial language devised in 1887 as an international medium of communication, based on roots from the chief European languages. It retains the structure of these languages and has the advantage of grammatical regularity and ease of pronunciation.

 

This is the definition of Esperanto, as it is based on European languages, I am not sure it would have been that easy for chinese people to learn. The only reason its grammar is simple is because Europeans are already familiar with it as with the pronunciation and structure.

 

Personally I think that would have have been a disaster to change.

 

I am glad characters have survived.