Abstract:

As a significant issue in human’s language, cognition, thinking and even “existence”, metaphor deserves serious academic attention. With the unique ideographic system of Chinese characters, early Confucianism took benevolence and righteousness as the foundation, “the fulfillment of a human” as the goal, and thus developed various metaphors based on stances of internal initiation and external molding respectively. In doing so, the possibility and necessity of educating people to “act toward goodness” are presented. These four typical images, i.e., jade, water, trees and seedlings, are commonly used in Confucian educational metaphors, which all have distinct natural attributes and agricultural characteristics for discussing the objects and ideal expectations of education. At the process level, with metaphors such as dyeing, incense, taste, archery, carpenter’s ink maker, ruler, shadow, echo, etc., the gradual, subtle, interactive and normative characteristics of education are revealed. At the same time, this also symbolizes the characteristics of Confucian education that attaches importance to embodied experience and reflective sincerity. In addition, through education and learning, the attainment of the wonderful realm, the completion of the ideal personality, and the achievement of a good order, are all holistically associated, revealing the possibility of “internal transcendence” contained in the secular activity of education. Metaphorical languages have their shortcomings, but they are omnipresent. Scholars of education should abandon treating metaphors with a mysterious or loathed attitude and try to transcend the binary opposition between objectivism and subjectivism, and then examine the referential connotation, origination mechanism and application effect of educational metaphors from the perspective of empiricism, while paying due attention to the limits from within.

Key words: Confucian philosophy, educational metaphors, language, meaning, cognition, thinking