儒家一直就有「觀水」的傳統。理學以復興孔孟之學為職志，在水喻的運用上，也繼承先秦儒家對水的特殊情感。不過，作為儒學的開新，理學在義理確有多異於前輩處。是以當理學家欲採先秦儒家慣用之喻，建構其思想的同時，也在原喻的基礎上，進行了相當程度的轉化。
在這篇文章裡，筆者將藉助「認知語言學」的「隱喻」視角，以程明道（顥，1032-1085）與程伊川（頤，1033-1107）這兩位北宋理學奠基者為對象，考察其水喻現象、模式，及當中所蘊含的隱喻思維。通過這樣的觀察，我們當可看到在北宋，這個理學發展的初期，「隱喻」對於抽象概念的具體化，起了不可忽視的作用。

The Confucianists always have a tradition for “water-seeing”. Neo-Confucianists take the revival of Confucius and Mencius’s thought as their ideal, they also succeeded that tradition and have special feelings of water. But there were some differences between Neo-Confucianists and Confucianists, thus when Neo-Confucianists want to adopt the metaphor of water to construct their thinking system, they will have some transformation which based on original metaphor of water in Confucianists.
In this paper, the writer will take the founders of Neo-Confucianism in Northern Song Dynasty: Cheng Ming-Dao (Cheng Hao, 1032-1085) and Cheng I-Chuan (Cheng I, 1033-1107) as research subject, use the viewpoint of “metaphor” in “Cognitive Linguistics”, to examine the phenomena in metaphor of water, the model of metaphor and thinking hide in metaphor. We can find in this paper is in the Northern Song Dynasty, the beginning of Neo-Confucianism, the metaphor has an important effect to make concretion of abstract concepts.