Xu Shen of the Eastern Han once explained "law" this way in the Shuowen Jiezi:
"Fa: punishment. Its fairness is like water. It follows water; zhi is used to gore the crooked and drive them away; it follows 'go,' forming an ideogram."
From the character's form, law sought to be "level as water," hence the water radical. Beside it stood a magical animal called zhi, also known as Xiezhi, a divine beast resembling a qilin with a single horn.
Legend said it could distinguish right from wrong and recognize good and evil, loyalty and treachery. If it discovered someone dishonest or disloyal, it would knock that person down with its horn and then eat them.
Beneath zhi was the character "go." In ancient writing, it meant "abandon" or "drive away," and was composed of an arrow and a bow.
In other words, the ancient character fa was an ideogram. Compared with Western "justice," Eastern jurisprudence placed greater emphasis on "fairness."
The Tang Code recorded, "Shang Yang's reforms changed law into statutes." This referred to Shang Yang using the Book of Laws as a blueprint to carry out social reforms in Qin territory.
What Shang Yang promulgated was the Qin Legal Code, not Qin law. "Statute" originally referred to musical rhythm and beat, with stability as its primary meaning. At the time, Qin State lay on the frontier, where the people were fierce and private feuds ran rampant. A large-scale private feud could mobilize more than ten thousand people, essentially amounting to a localized war between Italian city-states.
Such private feuds generally yielded nothing. Land merely passed from one Qin man's hands into another's, while causing massive casualties. It was pure internal depletion, a problem even more urgent than the well-field system.
Simply declaring "private fighting is forbidden" could not solve