Use of Metaphor in Language

Throughout this reading, as well as past ones, I have been surprised at the amount of metaphors that these ancient philosophers used. All of their teachings seem to be up for interpretation by the reader. This was interesting to me, because in some other more convoluted speculative texts I have had to read for other classes, while the meaning may be hard to distinguish at first, once read through a couple times the point is nearly plain as day. However, with these ancient Chinese philosophers, most everything seems to be set up in a metaphor or set up through parables. In this article I found (https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/06-Su-Lichang.pdf) it talks about how many of these metaphors eventually worked their way into everyday Chinese vernacular, with some even influencing the language. The article also talks about how the common use of the metaphor is culture bound, which probably explains why I had never seen anything like it before. The article concludes that this integration of these metaphors of the ancient philosophers into the Chinese language shows that language is culture-driven and a social phenomenon, since many of the more common metaphors have a specific set of characters in the language that people then come to understand and equate to that specific story or parable.