仁 (rén) / humanity

My father participated in a work leadership retreat one week while I was in highschool. During the trip, in one of the sessions, my father mentioned he had a daughter.

The facilitator asked my father to write down one word, one wish, that my father wanted for me.

At the time, we were all living in China, so the workshop was conducted in Chinese. My father wrote down one Chinese character: “仁” (rén).

The “亻” on the left side stands for person and the “二” on the right stands for the number two. Breaking down the character, the subcomponents of “仁” could be interpreted to mean two people.

The actual translation into English for “仁” are words like “benevolence,” “humane,” and “love.” In my head, I usually simplify “仁” to the English word “kindness.”

Kindness is a virtue and the foundation of Confucian philosophy.

I find there’s always something poetic about the meaning of the sub characters that relate to the actual definition of the Chinese word.

I like to think these Chinese characters interpret kindness as the relationship between two people. After all, there is nothing more humane than being with another human. There is no better way to exhibit kindness than to show love for another person.

As a self-involved teenager at the time, I didn’t have the capacity to understand the magnitude of my father’s wish.

Now that I am older, I appreciate it so much more.

To be human is to be kind.

In fact, the word is pronounced the same as the word for “human being,” which is “人” (rén).

To be kind is to love.

Therefore, by transitive property, to be human is to love.