Katō Jōken about 仁

Monday 30 June 2025

The Chinese character 仁 is really straightforward in its composition. It consists of the graph “human, person” 人 (in its left side form 亻) and the graph 二, in modern Chinese used for the word “two”, but in ancient times also as a “duplication symbol”.

The pronunciation of 人 is identical to 仁, and that has been the case at least as long as the record goes back. But 人 is also relevant for the meaning of 仁. 人 is used for the word rén, for which the earliest meanings are “human being, person, man” (or “other persons, someone”).

Ancient meanings for the word rén 仁 are “be kind, good; to love; gentle, humane”—all meanings that relate to humans.

Exactly how the ancients interpreted 二 in 仁 is impossible to know. But there’s no reason to doubt that it would have amounted to something like having to do with human beings, or another human being, etc.

And yet, at the end of 20th century, a few Japanese scholars, notably Katō Jōken 加藤常賢 rejected this straightforward analysis and suggested a complicated one in which 二 was actually a so called “phonetic with associated sense”.

I was curious how Katō Jōken made that work, so I wrote an article about it: Analysis of 仁 and Katō Jōken’s methodology.