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Upaya: the joy of teaching Classical Chinese

Underlying Logic 2022-10-14

One of my favorite books for everyday living is Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking.  The author's cheerful approach to her craft in the kitchen is similar to my jubilant upāya उपाय ("expedient pedagogical means; skill-in-means; skillful means" > fāngbiàn 方便 ["convenient"]) in the classroom.

In my classes, especially Introduction to Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC), we don't just read through texts with the aid of vocabularies, commentaries, annotations, and grammar notes.  We live the texts, act them out, draw them on the board, debate them, chant them, analyze them, get at their profound philosophical significance, plumb their esthetic depths.

One of my guiding principles for teaching LS/CC is to let the students realize that I am keenly sensitive to the rhythm with which they read a text, be it prose or poetry.  Often, when they recite a text, I can tell right away whether they understand its basic structure.  I glean this from the way they pause and the intonation they impart.  If they do not understand the sentence, from the flow of their reading I usually know immediately in what way they misunderstand.  That saves a lot of time in getting into what's going on in their mind when they try to explicate the sentence assigned to them.

In our last class last week, we were reading a passage from the Mencius (author 372-289 BC), Liáng Huì wáng 梁惠王 II.22:

Téng Wén gōng wèn yuē:`Téng, xiǎo guó yě. Jiélì yǐ shì dàguó, zé bùdé miǎn yān. Rú zhī hé zé kě?'

滕文公問曰：「滕，小國也。竭力以事大國，則不得免焉。如之何則可？」

"Duke Wen of Teng asked [Mencius], saying, 'Teng is a small state.  We exhaust our strength to serve the large states, but [still] cannot be exempt from their exactions.  What can be done so that the result will be satisfactory?"

The question "Rú zhī hé zé kě 如之何則可?" is widely recognized to be a thorny construction.  It occurs two other times in this chapter; each time it has to be translated differently according to the context.

Literally, "like it how then can?"

I asked one of the students to read that passage.  I could tell from the way she read it that she didn't understand what it meant.  So I went around the whole room of twelve students (there were also auditors present, but I didn't call on them), asking each of them to read the sentence aloud in Mandarin (Japanese and Korean pronunciation are also allowed, as are Cantonese and other languages of the Sinosphere when they are spoken by members of the class).

The students basically read the vexed utterance in three different ways:

1. rú zhī / hé / zé kě

2. rú zhī / hé zé kě

3. rú zhī hé / zé kě

The class neatly divided into three groups of four students each.  I knew that two of the groups were wrong and that one of the groups was right, but I didn't want to tell them outright which groups were wrong and which was correct.  I wanted them to discover for themselves the importance of proper parsing.

So I asked them to divide up into their respective groups and go into three separate corners of the classroom to caucus.  I allowed them five minutes to discuss among themselves what the sentence meant, analyze the grammar, and come up with a reasonable translation.

After the allotted time, groups 1 and 2 were still deliberating and hadn't come to any consensus or conclusion, while group 3 had quickly and clearly sorted everything out and were able to announce their collective interpretation:  "how shall I / we handle / deal with it [the situation] such that it will be feasible?"

Then we reconvened the class as a whole and went over group 3's solution together, the result being that groups 1 and 2 also acceded to it as making the most sense.  Above all, the class as a whole came to the realization that, when reading a LS/CC sentence, one must be keenly sensitive to its proper parsing.  In this and other exercises throughout the year, the students become aware of the importance of rhythm, prosody, pausing, intonation, stress, emphasis and other such suprasegmental features if one is to gain a full and correct understanding of a sentence or passage.

Such experiences, which happen in every class session, are but one of the many reasons that make teaching and learning so much fun and why I and the students always leave the classroom exhilarated at the end of a session.

 

Selected readings