Yesterday I was reading the old story クモの糸. If you aren’t familiar with this, here is wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider%27s_Thread, but I think a lot of people here know this story.
Here is the page I read:
And I was wondering, why is the narrator using 致す? I thought that is for saying that *you* did something to someone who is more important than you. The author here is describing what the thief 犍陀多 did, not what (s)he did, so I was confused why there was the humble form being used.
I got some answers which I thought all made sense to me at the time:
1. The listener is being elevated
2. The word 致す is also 丁寧語 sometimes rather than 謙譲語, and in this case is functioning as 丁寧語.
3. Narrator is implying his relationship with the characters (this is sort of similar to my teacher’s explanation)
After getting these answers, I decided this is an interesting question to ask my Japanese teacher (iTalki).
His answer was, that it has to do with the story itself and our relationship to the characters and Buddha. If you are even a little familiar with keigo you probably know about うち and そと. In this story, we are all in the same circle as the thief, when compared to the Buddha who is both そと to us and also would be higher rank of course. I thought this was an interesting answer.
Disclaimer: I am posting this because I found all of this interesting, the intent is not to say some peoples’ answers are not good, in fact I am grateful to interact with everyone and get all these answers.
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Something else that is also interesting is the AutoModerator posting to this thread because you have “daily thread” in the title. That aside, this is actually very interesting information too, thanks for sharing!