運命無し unmei nashi No Fate
This is a philological study of the Japanese sentence 運命無し (unmei nashi), no fate. It spans the record from a rhetorical question a fifth-century Chinese emperor asked to assert that fate exists, through Kenkō's fourteenth-century sentence about impermanence and the Meiji dictionaries that first gave 運命 its modern sense of destiny, to a 1991 film's slogan, and it examines why no Japanese source ever wrote this sentence to mean what the film means by it.
Abstract
運命無し, unmei nashi, is a grammatical classical Japanese sentence, no fate, that no Japanese source ever wrote to mean what an English speaker means by it. The Chinese source of the word 運命 asks the negation only as a rhetorical question that expects fate to exist, and the nearest Japanese sentence of the same grammar, Kenkō's nothing is fixed, is about impermanence rather than free will; 運命 itself did not carry the modern sense of destiny until late Meiji. The English No Fate is the slogan of the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the Japanese is a rendering of it.
Overview
The sense. Classical grammar; no Japanese tradition of the sentence that the sources can see; plain prose says 運命はない. One: there is no fate. 運命 is the power beyond a person's will that hands out good and ill fortune, and the fortune so handed out [1]. English fate is the inescapable and usually unhappy allotment, destiny the appointed and grander one [2]; 運命 covers both, and No Fate is the plain rendering of the four graphs.
The words. Its kin each carry a history of their own: 天命, the decree of Heaven, which Confucius said he knew at fifty [3]; 宿命, which was a Buddhist word about past lives until Meiji scholars re-read its characters as predestined fate in 1881 [1]; and the native 定め, whose one sense is fate and whose other is being fixed [1]. 無し is the classical there is none.
The text in English. Legge gave the Analects' line as determined appointment in 1861 [3]; Hepburn in 1888 has fate decreed by heaven under 運命 itself, and fate, destiny determined by Heaven under 天運 [4].
The historical record
The Analects, Warring States. The Analects say it without a question: death and life have their determined appointment; riches and honors depend upon Heaven [3].
About 500, the 文心雕龍. The oldest fate-sense of the word in Chinese is the title of a third-century essay, On Fate, named beside the Balanced Discourses in a treatise on literature around 500 [5].
The 560s, Xu Ling's circular. At the source of the word the negation exists, and it is a question that expects the answer no. In a circular letter of the 560s the Chen minister Xu Ling quotes a Song emperor of the previous century: how could the world of men be without fate? Whenever a good post falls vacant, I think of Yang Xuanbao. That anecdote is the one the Japanese dictionaries cite for the word, and its point is that there is fate [6].
1093, and the Tale of the Heike. It is a Chinese word, in Japanese since 1093, but the sense an English speaker means is young: the national dictionary's own note says that in its first Japanese use the word meant lifespan, that in the Tale of the Heike it meant luck, which opens and declines, and that the modern sense, destiny, came when the word was joined to the Western doctrine of fate [1].
About 1330, Kenkō. Japanese has a classical sentence with exactly this grammar and it means something else. Kenkō wrote if the dew of Adashino never vanished and the smoke of Toribeyama never cleared, and people lived on forever, where would the pathos of things be? It is precisely because nothing in this world is fixed that it moves us. The sentence a modern reader might take for there is no fate, 定めなし, is the medieval word for impermanence, and it is the one such sentence that the prewar archive returns in numbers, one hundred and eighty-five books, from Chikamatsu's lovers whose meetings in this world are not fixed to a Meiji dictionary that glosses fleeting with it [7].
1888, Hepburn, and Brinkley in 1896. The Meiji dictionaries date the change. Hepburn's dictionary of 1888 already has it, at p. 709: UMMEI ウンメイ 運命 n. Fortune, luck; fate decreed by heaven, destiny: — ga tsukita, has lost one's good luck, the old sense first and the new one behind it; the English side of the same dictionary still renders fate with four other words, ten-un, tem-mei, un and yakusoku, and Brinkley in 1896 admits 運命 only as a synonym [4].
1895, and the sentence in kana, in five prewar books. An 1895 translation of an American manual for young men says that beasts are not moral, so they lack character, so they also have no fate; they only eat, only sleep, only breed, only die [8].
Before 1902, printed 1912, Takayama Chogyū. The critic Takayama Chogyū, in an essay on fate and tragedy, wrote that fate is the marrow of tragedy, its life; no fate is no tragedy [9].
1907 to 1944, plain prose, and 1922, Maeterlinck. Plain prose of the same decades says 運命はない, with the topic particle, as in a 1922 translation of Maeterlinck: there is no fate of joy, there is no lucky star [10].
1936, a careers book. A 1936 careers book says that no fate can match effort and patience [11].
1991, the film. The sentence has one famous English carrier: the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which its encyclopedia article says emphasizes the concept of free will and the value of human life, quoting the film's line "no fate but what we make" [12].
Today. The Japanese article on the film has no sentence with 運命 in it, and a subtitle corpus renders a filmed There is no fate as 運命じゃなく [13]. The house's No Fate is Timothy L. Jackowski's rendering for Takase Studios, and the Japanese under it is exact for the English. A rendering must keep the statement form, there is no fate; the Japanese is a rendering of the English, not a saying the Japanese have.
What is not a source. In the exact form 運命無し, with the kanji and the kana し, the archive returns nothing, and no dictionary carries the sentence as a headword.
A reading
This sentence is a rendering of English, not a saying Japan has, and that is a fact to state rather than a fault to hide. Its grammar is classical and correct; its idea is the film's; and between them no source here shows a Japanese writer saying there is no fate except to argue with fate, as the critic and the careers book do. The two classical neighbors say the opposite: Kenkō's nothing is fixed is about impermanence, and the Chinese emperor asks whether there could be no fate in order to say there is. When Japanese did argue with fate it said that effort beats it, or that a person carves their own, which is the sentence 運命を制す.
References
- 「運命」・「宿命」・「定め」, 大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/運命-35734
- "fate", 研究社新英和中辞典, at Weblio 英和・和英辞典. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/fate
- 論語, 顏淵 5, at Chinese Text Project (Legge translation). https://ctext.org/analects/yan-yuan
- James Curtis Hepburn, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, fourth edition, Z. P. Maruya, Tokyo, 1888, p. 709. Internet Archive japaneseenglishe00hepbuoft. https://archive.org/details/japaneseenglishe00hepbuoft
- 文心雕龍, 論說, c. 500, at Chinese Text Project, post-Han search on 運命. https://ctext.org/post-han?searchu=運命
- 陳書, 卷二十六, 徐陵傳, at Chinese Wikisource. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/陳書/卷26
- 兼好, 徒然草, 第七段, c. 1330. https://tsurezuregusa.com/007dan/
- モキソム著・鹿州生訳, 青年規箴, 1895, scan 6. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/757513/1/6
- 高山樗牛, 「運命と悲劇」, 樗牛全集, 1912, scan 86. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/930959/1/86
- 鷲尾浩 (訳), マーテルリンク全集, 1922, scan 165. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/962811/1/165
- 加藤直士, 就職より立身へ, 1936, scan 15. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1255440/1/15
- "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day
- "no fate", at Weblio 英和・和英辞典 (subtitle corpus). https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/no+fate