和睦 (hé mù) — Concord · The Peace That Takes More Than One

In 575 BCE, with the armies of Chu and Jin about to meet at Yanling, a commander rode out to the retired statesman Shen Shushi and asked him a plain question: how will we do? The answer recorded in the Zuo Commentary never counts a single chariot. It works through virtue, punishment, ritual and trust, and arrives at a condition of the state itself — 上下和睦，周旋不逆, those above and those below in concord, so that when the ranks wheel they do not wheel against each other. Then he turns the list around: 今楚内弃其民，而外绝其好 — Chu has thrown away its own people and cut off its friends abroad. He is not describing Chu. He is naming what Chu does not have, and he ends by telling the commander he will not see him again. (Chu lost at Yanling; the commander took his own life.) Note what the sentence cannot do even in the negative. It cannot name one man. 和睦 arrives already carrying two parties, and everything it says is about the space between them.

The two halves divide the work. 和 supplies the fit — different elements held in proportion, the sense that runs from a chord to a bowl of soup — and 和 is perfectly willing to describe one person's manner: 和气, an easy way of being. 睦 supplies the closeness and the face. China's first dictionary (Shuowen Jiezi, c. 100 CE) defines it in three words, 目顺, the eyes at ease, and the Rites of Zhou lists it among the 六行 as a conduct a person is taught to perform toward their kin. Each half, alone, can belong to somebody: 和 still does, and 睦 did for as long as the six conducts were being taught. Joined, they lose that: the compound describes a state, and a state needs more than one party to be in.

What happened afterward was a slow widening. The 六行 filed 睦 with one's own line — Zheng Xuan's gloss is 亲于九族, closeness with the nine branches — and kept a separate item, 姻, for the ties that arrive with a marriage. The Erya (尔雅), the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary of terms, sorted kin along parallel lines and put 夫之父 and 夫之母 under 婚姻 rather than under 宗族: from where a wife stands, her husband's mother is someone the wedding delivered. Living Chinese does not sort them at all. 婆媳和睦 is said in exactly the register of 家庭和睦, and nobody hears a category change. The compound governs proximity, not kinship — whoever you cannot get away from is inside it.

• 上下和睦，周旋不逆，求无不具，各知其极。

  《左传·成公十六年》(Zuo Commentary, entry for 575 BCE)
  Those above and those below in concord, wheeling without turning against one another; nothing sought that is not supplied, and every man knowing his limit. — Shen Shushi, asked on the eve of a campaign whether the army would hold, answers by describing the country an army needs behind it, and then telling the commander that Chu is not that country. The oldest use of 和睦 in this shape already has the grammar the word never lost: two parties named together, 上 and 下, and a peace that belongs to neither of them alone.

• 兄及弟矣，式相好矣，无相犹矣。

  《诗经·小雅·斯干》(Book of Songs, c. 800 BCE)
  Brothers here: be good to one another, and do not scheme against one another. — 斯干 is the poem for a newly completed house, and this is the line it spends on the people who will live in it. Not a wish that they love each other — 犹 is read as 猷, to plot — but an instruction that they not work against each other. The oldest housewarming poem in Chinese assumes the risk is indoors.

• 兄弟不睦，则子侄不爱；子侄不爱，则群从疏薄；群从疏薄，则僮仆为雠敌矣。

  《颜氏家训·兄弟》(Yan Family Instructions, c. 590 CE)
  When brothers are not in concord, their sons and nephews will not be fond of one another; when the sons and nephews are not fond of one another, the wider cousins grow distant; and when the cousins grow distant, even the household servants become enemies. — Yan Zhitui wrote for his own descendants after living through the collapse of three dynasties, and he traces the failure outward one ring at a time. That widening ring is the reason the compound cannot take a singular subject: the failure is never located in one person either, and nothing in a household breaks on its own.

和睦 is the only word in this part of the vocabulary that also works on a map. 睦邻友好 — good-neighbourliness — is the standing name of China's policy toward the countries on its borders, and 敦睦, to deepen concord, is the verb on diplomatic communiqués; the 2001 China–Russia treaty is a 睦邻友好合作条约, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation signed a long-term one of its own in 2007. Meanwhile 和顺, 家和 and 美满 never once leave the house. The reason is in the word rather than in the diplomacy: what 和睦 requires is not affection or kinship but proximity nobody can exit. A state cannot move away from the state next to it any more than a daughter-in-law can move away from her husband's mother, and that is precisely the condition the compound was built for.

At home it comes with a warmer form. Chinese doubles both halves — 和和睦睦 — and that is the shape it takes in a New Year toast: 一家人和和睦睦, the whole family in concord, said across a table where several of the people present are related by somebody else's marriage. Note what the grammar quietly refuses to do. Because the subject has to be plural, no version of the sentence assigns the credit or the blame to one side. 婆媳关系 may be the most discussed relationship in Chinese family life, and 婆媳和睦 is the polite thing to say about one that works — polite in a very specific way, because it declines to say which of the two women made it work.