关键词: “勇”, 勇气, 中国传统文化, 古籍, 内容分析

Abstract: “Yong” (courage) is an old moral quality in Chinese traditional culture. Together with benevolence and intelligence, courage makes up the Chinese perfect personality. This personality construct has abundant explanations and most of the meanings remain to the present day. The purpose of this study is to explore the connotations, classifications and functions of courage in ancient Chinese books from a psychological perspective and find out the developmental characteristics of courage in Chinese culture. Through the retrieval of 830 ancient Chinese books from two famous Chinese classical works databases, 427 ancient books in the proportion of 51.4% about courage were found. These books consisted of 20 on Confucian classics, 132 on historical records, 217 on philosophical writings and 58 on miscellaneous works. The retrieval rates of them were 86.9%, 61.6%, 50.6% and 35.3% respectively. Based on three clear criteria, these linguistic data were simplified. By means of simplification, 836 sentences and paragraphs describing courage had been collected so as to construct a corpus of courage. In the corpus, there were 160 on Confucian classics, 220 on historical records, 252 on philosophical writings and 204 on miscellaneous works. The method of content analysis was applied to analyze the linguistic data. Every sentence and paragraph was classified by three experienced sorters in three respects. After that, the indexes of category agreement among three sorters were assessed, and all the indexes were more than 0.95. The results showed that (1) “Yong” could be found firstly in inscriptions on ancient bronze objects. From the lexicology sense, its original nominal meaning was “a container”, and then evolved into verbal meaning “execute” or “use” and adjective meaning “courageous” or “resolute”. The connotation of courage mainly contained six dimensions: being bold and powerful, feeling fearless when confronting danger, persevering with ambitions, making decisions resolutely, devoting himself to moral responsibility, being ashamed of behaviors and endeavoring to break through. The proportion of each dimension was 43.3%, 12.4%, 4.4%, 8%, 13% and 3% in sequence. (2) Chinese courage could be generally divided into two kinds. One kind was called brute courage, and people who had brute courage seemed to be always reckless or impulsive. The other kind was moral courage, with which people’s courageous behaviors were out of kindness or rationality. The former accounted for 29.5% and the latter was 54.6%. (3) The functions of courage in ancient Chinese books could be viewed from both social and individual perspectives. In the social aspect, courage had a positive effect on defending state security, but it would do harm to social stabilization if it was improper or unnecessary. In the individual aspect, courage would be helpful to promote the psychological harmony and enhance the ability to innovate, however it might cause a fatal disaster for ordinary people. The social functions of courage accounted for 41.1% and the individual ones were 43%. Finally, this paper discussed the heritage and modernity of courage, and analyzed the cross-cultural similarities and differences of this concept. These results indicated that (1) courage had complex connotations, two types as well as social and individual functions in ancient Chinese books. (2) Courage was a psychological trait which inherited the Chinese cultural tradition and adapted to the needs of the development in modern society. It had distinct features of Chinese culture and some consistency with western cultures as well.

Key words: “Yong”, courage, Chinese traditional culture, ancient books, content analysis