正 (zhèng) — True to the Mark · The Main and the Exact

Shang diviners already used this graph in more than one way. In one inscription it is a verb, 今者王正土方, the king now marches on the 土方, and there it writes the word later spelled 征. In others it opens a date, 在正月, in the first month. The picture under both is a foot, 止, headed toward a mark at the top, drawn as a small square or a filled dot. The Chinese University of Hong Kong's character database reads that mark as the destination, a town or a goal, and notes the proposal that it also gave the sound. The step sign 彳 was added later to split off 征 for the marching sense. 许慎, working without the oracle bones, had a line where the mark had been, and he defined the whole in one word: 正，是也, being so. He read the graph as 从止，一以止, a foot brought to a stop at the line.

On the Zhou archery range the word had a second concrete home. At a guest archery meeting the target was a stretched cloth with a square painted in its middle. On the king's target the square had five rings, vermilion at the centre, then white, blue-green and yellow, with black outside, as 郑玄 describes it in his note on the 《周礼》. That square was the 正. The Mao commentary to 《猗嗟》 gives its size as two 尺. 陆德明's sound gloss marks it 音征, the level tone, and the modern dictionary still reads 正鹄, the bull's-eye, as zhēng gǔ. 郑玄 gives a reason for the name, 正之言正也，射者内志正，则能中焉: it is called 正 because an archer who is set right within can hit it. A second note of his, quoted in the Tang subcommentary, adds another explanation beside the first: 正 was also the name of a quick bird in 齐 and 鲁, hard to hit, so hitting it proved skill. Even the Han commentator kept both.

The step from the cloth to the person is made in the 《礼记》 chapter on archery and again by 孟子, in almost the same words. 射求正诸己，己正而后发, says the one; 射者正己而后发, says the other. The archer looks for 正 in himself first and releases only after. 孔子 made the same move about government. Asked about 政 by 季康子, the senior minister of 鲁, he answered 政者，正也, and the pun is in the graphs: 许慎 builds 政 from 攴 beside 正, which also gives the sound. 攴 is 许慎's sign for a light blow. The character keeps two things together from the oracle bones on, a mark fixed outside the person and the adjustment the person makes to meet it.

The 《旧唐书》 keeps a sentence about brushwork that turns on this character, and it was a reproach. The history says that the 穆宗 emperor, whose rule it calls 僻, wayward, once asked 柳公权 how a brush could be used to perfection. 柳公权 answered 用笔在心，心正则笔正: the brush is used from the heart, and when the heart is right the brush is upright. The emperor's expression changed, the history continues, because he understood it as 笔谏, admonition delivered as advice about writing. The same word is a plain physical verb as well. 《论语》 gives 君子正其衣冠, robe and cap set straight, as part of how a gentleman commands respect without being fierce. After 魏徵 died, 唐太宗 told his ministers that a bronze mirror is good for exactly that, 以铜为镜，可以正衣冠, while a person used as a mirror shows what one has got right and wrong.

In ordinary speech it marks the main and the exact. 正门 is the front gate, 正午 is noon, 正好 is just right. In a Beijing courtyard house the 正房 sits on the north side facing south, so the winter sun reaches into it. It was the head of the household's quarters, and in the full three-courtyard plan the old of the family lived there, with the eldest son in the east wing. The first month keeps the level-tone reading, 正月 (zhēng yuè), as the bull's-eye does. Hung alone, 正 can also be read first as the tally mark, five votes on a blackboard, so a gift of it works best when the giver says which mark they mean.