Page:Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms (Faxian, Giles).djvu/16

iv passage in Chinese, accompanied by Sir Thomas Wade's version and what is unquestionably the correct one; so as to shew the slippery nature of the Chinese language even in the hands of an acknowledged master of it, at that date of fifteen years' standing among the ranks of sinologues.

Sir Thomas Wade's Translation:—"And again a proverb says with equal truth, It may be well to kill another; it is perdition to kill oneself."

又設說 [sic]得好好殺了是他人懷殺了事自巳己 [sic]

The correct translation:—"And again a proverb well says, Good as those may be, they are strangers; bad as these may be, they are (part of) oneself."

The allusion is to quarrelling brothers who seem disposed to make friends among outsiders rather than of each other, and the proverb signifies in plain English that "A bad brother is better than a good stranger." The catch lies in the word 殺 which besides meaning "to slay" is often used as an intensive of a preceding adjective, e.g., 好殺—good beyond all expression. But there is yet further consolation in store for the timorous. Dr. Williams in his new dictionary, published after forty years' study of Chinese, quotes the above proverb under the character 殺 with the following eccentric mistranslation:—"If you love the child greatly, yet he is another's: if you feel that he is a ruined child, still he is my own." Dr. Williams further makes the mistake of reading 好 in the 去聲, whereby he quite destroys the very clear antithesis between 好 and 壞.

We need only add that Fa Hsien's Record contains