my friend was reading an article about motherhood in Qing era China and came across the following sentence, "...the Confucian distinction between righteousness (zheng) and propriety (yi)", and couldn't really understand what it meant. i am also unsure which characters are the relevant ones, and would appreciate help with this little mystery. thank you!
#question about characters mentioned in an article
dim cargo
ocean shadow
My guess is 正and义
sterile sphinx
my friend was reading an article about motherhood in Qing era China and came acr...
"...the Confucian distinction between righteousness (zheng) and propriety (yi)"
I think the author is a bit confused. Kim seokjin has given you the correct guesses as to what zheng and yi are, but 正 is usually used as an adjective, not a noun. What is usually translated as righteousness is called 义 (yi): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_(philosophy). Propriety is usually the translation for 礼 (li): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(Confucianism).
A possible source for this confusion is that 正义 (zhengyi) is also translated as "righteousness" or "justice" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/正義#Chinese). Maybe the author was trying to make a point by separating the two characters from the compound word in this sentence. It doesn't make sense, though, because 义 (yi) most definitely does not mean "propriety".