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What does 全伽（ぜんが） mean?

Thursday, January 6th, 2005

For the public benefit I’m going to explain what 全伽（ぜんが） means. You won’t find it in any dictionary, I know, because I looked in a lot of them.

It came up in the text for “The Second Night,” in “Ten Nights and Dreams” by Natsume Soseki. I was only able to find out what it meant by pulling the Natsume Soseki Zenshu at the Portland State Library. The Soseki Zenshu published by Iwanami from Showa 41, volume 8, page 541, note for page 37 line 3 defines it as:

全伽（ぜんが）　普通「伽」は「跏」と書く。結跏趺坐のことで、略して結跏とも言う。坐禅の際の坐り方で、足の裏表を組み合わせて安坐すること。半跏に対する称。

So apparently what happened was that a similar kanji was substituted for another, make a weird abbreviation and causing a lot of problems for me. And what does it mean? Sitting in the Lotus position.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under General, Japan, Translation, Natsume Soseki’s “Ten Nights and Dreams”. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “What does 全伽（ぜんが） mean?”

  1. rus Says:
    January 7th, 2005 at 5:16 am

    Karai.com, where only eagles dare to soar.

  2. moira Says:
    January 15th, 2005 at 1:49 pm

    Let me pre-empt this by telling you that saying this comment makes me feel like a stupid ignorant jackass american that should be murdered and cut up into a thousand pieces and then those pieces should be divided up equally and mailed via the US Postal Service Priority Mail to the various members of my family. But unfortunately I must be truthful and say that when I first saw the headline, I thought the Japanese characters were shorthand for cuss words, you know like %@%?!#. And I thought, that seems uncharacteristic of CP to censor cussing.
    Then I realized that I am moronic sometimes.

  3. rus Says:
    January 15th, 2005 at 7:38 pm

    Ha ha, I didn’t have Extended Chinese support installed either on my system, so that’s what I saw too. ;) I just wrote my thing because it was the first thing to come into my mind.