Metamorfosi di un sinonimo di “Natura” in Asia orientale. Da avverbio della ineffabilità cosmica a oscuro oggetto del desiderio post-moderno

A biunivocal synonymy between the word 自然 (Chinese ziran, Japanese shizen) and the English nature, or its equivalents in other languages, is today commonplace. Although the word has persistently conveyed a different meaning across two millennia throughout the Sinosphere, this interlingual synonymy, pos- sibly established in Japan during the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of the reception of Western knowledge, is not ungrounded. The word was used in ancient China to meditate on ideals of existential ataraxia and political utopia, to oppose superstitious beliefs, to translate notions that arrived from In- dia in Buddhic texts. Vague, suggestive and fascinating like the Greek physis and the Latin natura, it is versatile enough to fit the goals of eighteenth-century Japan- ese nativist thinkers in describing an unlikely golden age that existed even before the arrival of Chinese culture in the archipelago. Nowadays, the ecological aware- ness of public opinion favors the use of the expression 自然 = Nature in com- mercial advertising and political propaganda in China and Japan too.