An oft-cited tale in the Zhuangzi is the following passage from the “Tian Dao” [天道], “Way of Heaven”, section of the Outer Chapters:
桓公讀書於堂上，輪扁斲輪於堂下，釋椎鑿而上，問桓公曰：“敢問公之所讀者何言邪？”公曰：“聖人之言也。”曰：“聖人在乎？”公曰：“已死矣。”曰：“然則君之所讀者，古人之糟魄已夫！”桓公曰：“寡人讀書，輪人安得議乎！有說則可，無說則死。”輪扁曰：“臣也，以臣之事觀之。斲輪，徐則甘而不固，疾則苦而不入。不徐不疾，得之於手而應於心，口不能言，有數存焉於其間。臣不能以喻臣之子，臣之子亦不能受之於臣，是以行年七十而老斲輪。古之人與其不可傳也死矣，然則君之所讀者，古人之糟魄已矣。
Lord Huan was reading in the upper hall. Wheelwright Flat was cutting a wheel in the lower hall. Dropping his hammer and chisel and walking to the upper hall, [Flat] asked the Lord: “May I ask whose words my lord is reading?” Lord Huan responded, “The words of the sages”. [Flat] asked, “Are they alive?” Lord Huan said, “They are dead.”[Flat] said, “If that is the case, then what my lord is reading is nothing more than the dregs of the ancients!” Lord Huan said, “How dare you, a wheelman, dispute what I, the Rarified One*, read!? If you have a persuasive explanation, you live. If you don’t, you die.” Wheelwright Flat responded, “I look at it from the perspective of my craft. In cutting a wheel, if one does it too slowly, the strokes are smooth but do not run deep, whereas if one does it too hurriedly, one applies excessive force and it will not fit. Cutting neither too slowly nor too hurriedly: I can perform it with my hands and can feel it in my mind, but I am unable to express it in words. There is a trick to it. I am unable to impart it by [explanation] to my son, and my son is also unable to learn if from me [in that way]. This is why, going on seventy years, I am still cutting wheels in my old age. The ancients, and what they were unable to transmit [by their person / physically], are dead and gone. Thus, what my lord is reading is nothing more than the dregs of the ancients.”
As philologists and etymologists, we are of course utterly uninterested in the philosophical content in the passage. (That was a joke …. mostly.) What concerns us is the characters used to write “dregs” (zao1po4). The most common term, and the one still used in modern Chinese, is 糟粕, where both characters have the rice radical directly reflecting the original sense of leftover particles from the making of rice wine. A less commonly occurring formulation although the term that appears in early versions of the Zhuangzi is 糟魄, which shares the first character with the other binome but uses for the second character the po 魄 of hunpo 魂魄, meaning something like soul or spirit. This is, of course, a straightforward phonetic borrowing (假借 jiajie) using the phonetic content of “po” to express the meaning of the bisyllabic word “zaopo”, and is not a combination of the semantic content of “zao” ([dregs]) and “po” (soul)**. While zaopo is not a true binome in that the two sounds need not appear together in order to constitute a single meaning ( 糟 appears twice by itself in the Zhouli 周禮 with the meaning of unfiltered wine), yet po (in the sense of “dregs” whether written 魄 or 粕) as a stand-alone word appears relatively late and usually is defined with direct reference to 糟, indicating that it had no other stand-alone semantic value.
The Shuowen and early glosses treat these characters as follows:
糟 is defined as 酒滓 jiuzi “leftover wine” or “lees”. Zheng Xuan’s gloss to the Liji and Zhouli are informative describing 糟 as “unfiltered wine”. Other glosses offer somewhat circular definitions either expanding糟 as meaning 糟粕 or simply referring back to 粕.
粕 does not appear in the original Shuowen, but was added in the addendum 說文新附 by Xu Xuan 徐鉉 in the Song dynasty, so its definition, unsurprisingly, revolves around the underlying binome itself without any non-self-referential definition: 糟粕, 酒滓.
魄 is defined in its core meaning of “dark, or cloudy, spirit” 陰神。It is only in its appearance in the Zhuangzi passage that it takes the meaning of part of the “dregs” binome. Commentators such as Lu Deming gloss it as “rotten rice” 食爛曰魄, which sound very much like ad hoc definitions to fit the context. The term魄 also appears in the early medical texts 素問 and 靈樞 where it is glossed as “that which, together with the essence, exits and enters” 並精而出入者。
The early commentators do not provide us with clarity as to which term was original: Lu Deming's glosses indicate it was written 糟魄 , although he noted that "originally it was also written 粕" （魄，本又作粕 ）It is unclear which term was used in the version seem by 司馬彪, writing several centuries earlier than Lu Deming. Wang Shumin 王叔岷 analyzes the textual recensions and is unable to conclude in favor of one term or the other （莊子校詮，p. 499). If we look at other texts that contain the same story of Lord Huan and the Wheelwright, both the Huainanzi 淮南子and the Hanshi waizhuan 韓詩外傳, use 糟粕 although these could be later recensions and do not necessarily reflect the earliest version as these texts both frequently borrow parables from Zhuangzi.
So, which formulation is correct, 糟魄 or 糟粕? Familiarity with modern Chinese draws us to 糟粕 as the seemingly more appropriate pair: both characters use the rice radical indicating a clear connection with the meaning of the word and its connection with brewing. This is something of a false friend, however. 糟魄 is the earliest attested usage. More important for purposes of this investigation, 糟魄 is a reminder that written Chinese in its early stages was, like all written languages, a tool for transcribing the spoken language: the character 魄 was used for its phonetic value and provided more than adequate information for a reader to understand the meaning, which was conveyed by its sound value. As with many characters, the later use of a different character with the rice radical was a post hoc revision, an attempt to provide mnemonics, but viewing 粕 as the “correct” character is an anachronistic and post hoc rationalization that attempts to justify the notion of the Chinese written language as “ideographic”. It cannot be impressed enough upon the student of Chinese that the Chinese script is not ideographic and was, from its earliest use, a phonetic script. Let us take the 糟魄 case as a reminder and symbol of this important principle of Chinese philology even if we cannot conclude which was the earliest term to appear in written form.
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Notes:
* The origin and exact meaning of the term gua ren 寡人 is still disputed. My rendering of the “Rarified One” tries to capture the sense of lofty, elevated, grand, noble-minded without sacrificing the sense of “few” or “scarce” in 寡, and follows the interpretation of Lu Yi 鲁毅 who argues against the more common (but still conjectural) interpretations of it as a deferential, self-deprecating term meaning something like “the orphaned one” or “the one without merit” (寡德之人). Lu argues that the context of the earliest uses of the term in the Shangshu and Zuozhuan is hardly one of deference or politeness but on the contrary involves aloofness, augustness and even intimidation. The context of its use here supports Lu’s case. See 左传考释, entries on “寡人” and “且寡人出”.
** In Foundations of Confucian Thought, Yuri Pines (somewhat toungue-in-cheek, I imagine) translates the last line of the Zhuangzi story by giving semantic value to each individual character rather than viewing zaopo as a binome: "What my lord is reading is nothing but the dregs of the souls of the ancients!” This interesting approach is perhaps too literal, and may not work grammatically: taking each character for its semantic content would yield something like “the dregs-like souls of the ancients”, whereas for Pines’ translation to work the word order of 糟 and 魄 would have to be reversed. Anyway, this is getting a bit too bogged down in the weeds…
