Justin Stone's Chinese Name
(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 26)
Fundamentals of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, by
Wen-Shan Huang who was Justin Stone’s teacher, contains a preface by Justin
Stone – just as Stone’s T’ai Chi Chih!,
published at about the same time (1974), not only includes a foreword by Huang
but is dedicated to him as a ‘friend and teacher.’ Huang’s book, unlike Stone’s
brief manual, is an imposing tome, 559 pages in all, more like a reference book
for a lifetime. Probably nobody ever read it at one sitting.
It
took me forty years to get around to the Appendices at the back, which are in
Chinese. (By that time I had at least a reasonable knowledge of Chinese, though
I still had to ask my wife what certain key phrases meant...)
In the third Appendix, where Huang lists
some acknowledgments, he calls Justin Stone by a Chinese name, adding the
English name in parentheses. The Chinese name is Shi Dong 石東,
the two characters meaning ‘stone’ and ‘east’ respectively. Shi is an existing
Chinese family name, and Dong is a plausible first name. If we rearrange the characters to put the
first and last names in the usual Western order (‘Dong Shi’), they mean ‘Oriental
Stone’ or ‘Eastern Stone.’ Very appropriate, given Justin’s intense study and
assimilation of Oriental meanings and values.
I have no way of knowing whether it was
Wen-Shan Huang himself who gave Justin this name, but it is a reasonable guess.
Western students of Chinese things often receive a name from their Chinese
teacher. (I did.) And there is a technical detail of ‘Shi Dong’ which adds to
my suspicion that Teacher Huang himself gave this name to Teacher Stone. In
giving names to foreigners, the Chinese like to select Chinese syllables which
are not only meaningful but more or less resemble the original sound of the
person’s name. In Southern Chinese speech, ‘Shi Dong’ would likely be
pronounced ‘Si Dong,’ or if pronounced very fast – as is usual – ‘S-dong.’ To
Chinese ears that would sound very close to ‘Stone.’ And Wen-Shan Huang was of
South Chinese origin.
I don’t know if Justin actually used this
Chinese name much. (Incidentally, in the older spelling common in those days, 'Shi Dong’ would have been ‘Shih Tung.’) But maybe there are other students out there
who, like me, have been curious as to what his Chinese name might be. If
somebody does know of another attested Chinese
name for Justin Stone, please do let me know!
Lloyd
Haft
January
2015
