恕 (shù) — Reciprocity · Forgiveness · Your Own Heart as the Measure

The second form 许慎 recorded for this character holds a surprise. Beside the standard graph he lists a 古文 form, 㣽, written with 女 and 心, and in the bronze and Warring States examples cited by the Chinese University of Hong Kong's character database, that graph writes a different word: 怒, anger. One example is a line on the bamboo slips excavated at 郭店, 凡有血气者，皆有喜有怒, every creature with blood and breath has joy and has anger. The database explains the overlap through sound. The phonetic parts of 恕 and 怒 both go back to 女, so a single shape could serve as a variant of either, as the scholar 张富海 notes there.

The standard form sets 如 over 心, and 许慎 gives 如 only as the sound: 恕，仁也。从心，如声. Later readers wanted the upper half to mean something too. 贾公彦, writing a Tang subcommentary on the 《周礼》, explained 忠 and 恕 as a pair from their shapes, 如心曰恕 and 中心曰忠: a heart that is like another's is 恕, a heart at the centre is 忠. 朱熹 recorded that reading in his commentary on the 《论语》 as one that also makes sense, beside 程颐's working definition, 推己之谓恕, carrying oneself outward is 恕. Earlier still, the Han writer 贾谊 had put it in his list of virtues and their opposites as 以己量人, taking oneself as the measure of others.

The sense of pardon grew out of that measuring, and one scene in the 《战国策》 holds both. The old minister 触龙 goes to see the Empress Dowager of 赵, who has just said she will spit in the face of the next man to raise a certain request, and he opens with his feet. They are bad, he says, he cannot walk quickly and has not come for a long time, 窃自恕, he has privately excused himself; but he feared her own health might be troubling her, so he came. The Song commentator 鲍彪 glossed it: from his own bad feet he feared she too might find walking hard, 亦自恕以及人也, this too is 恕 carried from oneself to another. The excuse he made for himself and the guess he made about her are one act.

The 《宋史》 says that the chancellor 范纯仁, son of 范仲淹, put everything he had learned into two characters: 吾平生所学，得之忠恕二字，一生用不尽, all my learning came to 忠 and 恕, and a whole life did not use them up, at court, with colleagues and among kin. His advice to the young men of the family was copied into Song books of maxims: 以责人之心责己，恕己之心恕人, blame yourself as clearly as you blame others, and excuse others as readily as you excuse yourself. 朱熹 is recorded objecting to the second half. 恕, he said, is a thing pushed outward, and drawn back in to excuse oneself it turns into carelessness. His student 陈淳 put it more sharply in the 《北溪字义》: read that way, the word only means letting people off.

Modern Chinese has kept both halves, in different registers. 宽恕 is forgiveness and 饶恕 is sparing someone. 恕罪, forgive the offence, is said by the person apologising, and 恕我直言, forgive my bluntness, comes just before a hard sentence. 恕道, the old principle of putting yourself in another's place, is still the dictionary word for it. When 王安石 answered a letter from 司马光, a friend of many years on the other side of the reform quarrel, he set out his reasons and ended the opening with the hope that 司马光 might 见恕, understand and excuse him, a request that can be read in the old sense and the new at once. The 汉典 dictionary's short entry gives to forgive first, so a lone 恕 on a wall can read as a pardon offered or a pardon asked for, and a gift of it goes best with a word from the giver about which they mean.