The Analects

by Confucius

  A young boy from Que took on the task of being a messenger [for the people] of this district. Someone asked Confucius, “Do you see him as someone who is eager to make progress in his learning?”

  The Master replied, “I have seen this boy sitting down [in a gathering of adults] and walking abreast of his elders. He is not someone who seeks to make progress [yi]. He simply wants to grow up fast [cheng].”

  The two words yi and cheng are critical to our understanding of Confucius’ assessment of the young boy. But before he pronounces the boy to be cheng and not yi, Confucius says that he has seen this child “sitting down with” his elders and “walking abreast of” them, which, according to the mores at the time, was a violation of ritual propriety. Thus the boy, in Confucius’ view, could not have been someone who was “eager to make progress in learning [yi]”: “He simply wants to grow up fast [cheng].” Evidence is crucial to judgment. Confucius applied this principle to the judgment of character, and scholars later on extended it to the reading of a text. But the idea is the same, and this is how we get the moral thinker and the exegete. There is one other thing the record shows, and that is just how closely Confucius observes a person’s—even a mere boy’s—conduct. And the fact that the boy was from Que, which was Confucius’ home district, suggests that the knowledge was firsthand.

  A more difficult kind of exegetical work involves searching for a thread among the records in the Analects to tell a bigger story about Confucius’ thinking on a broader subject. And if the subject is politics, one could start with Book Thirteen. There, Confucius comments on how to govern and who is fit to govern; how politics works and what it should serve; when to be flexible and when to get tough; what is an ordered society and whether capital punishment has a part in it. His view on the principles of government appears in 13.3, where he says that rectifying names is what he would attend to first if he were to take charge of a government, because, “If names are not rectified, what is said will not seem reasonable. When what is said does not seem reasonable, nothing will get accomplished.” What this means is that if a government does not restore the integrity of names and words before everything else, then no one will trust what is being said, and consequently nothing can get done. Punishments, too, will become arbitrary, Confucius observes, and so “people will not know where to put their hands and feet.” And once a government has ceased to function, the state will come to ruin.

  Confucius always held on to this belief, that a government runs on trust and on all of its moral capital, but he did not clench it too tightly. In practice he allowed flexibility, and he urged those in office to act with common sense. In 13.2, he tells one disciple, after this disciple has received an appointment as a district steward, to assemble his staff first and “assign them to the right positions.” “Try to overlook their minor shortcomings,” Confucius says. “Promote those of outstanding talent.” The disciple asks, “How can I recognize those of outstanding talent in order to promote them?” And Confucius responds, “Promote those you recognize to be outstanding. . . . As for those that you missed, will other people let them slip by you?” And when asked in 13.9 what a ruler should do first when he has already attracted a multitude of people to his state, Confucius says, “Make them rich,” and then “instruct them.”

  Examples like these may give the impression that pragmatism is the driving force in Confucius’ political thought, but a closer look at the records—just those in Book Thirteen, for instance—shows that even when Confucius lets moral issues take a backseat, he never loses sight of where he is going—that his aim has always been to achieve greater benefits for a greater number of people. And if he seems inconsistent at times, it may be that he is thinking aloud about the pull and counter-pull of an argument while searching for that precise point of balance. Thus he stands firm against killing people for their transgressions, no matter how serious the offense, because he believes that self-reform can come about only through the influence of moral instruction and exemplary virtue. But he also points out that “only after good men have been in office for a hundred years is there the possibility of winning the war against cruelty and doing away with capital punishment.” In this example the pragmatist in him takes a long view of how to reach a goal, and so even when he is in a hurry to get there, he refrains from taking extreme measures, which, he knows, may introduce other kinds of cruelty.

  This is how Confucius works out most of life’s questions. Thus you, as the reader, have to feel the tug going both ways before you are able to hear what Confucius says about trust (xin) and humaneness (ren), learning (xue) and knowledge (zhi), rightness (yi) and petty loyalty (liang). And it is the search for his distinct voice that promises the most satisfaction. This is the reason why, in my task as translator and commentator, I concentrate on Confucius—on gathering evidence about his life and on placing him in his own world. I want us to be able to imagine him thinking or speaking or mulling over a question. And so I do not treat his ideas as a set of concepts and categories that could find their counterparts in the Western philosophical tradition. The latter approach, in a book like this one, could have spoiled the pleasure and the surprise of discovery.

  Besides, Confucius himself stays away from “putting forth theories” and making conjectures. He does not speculate about man’s inborn propensities or debate the nature of knowledge. But he is happy to talk about poetry and the rites, for they are inseparable from the speech and conduct of everyday life. An education in both, he proclaims, can give a man discerning eyes and ears, moral acuity and a sense of propriety. In 16.13, Confucius tells his son, “Unless you learn the Odes, you won’t be able to speak.” What he means is that you may be able to string together a few words, but this is not the same as speaking because it will have neither the measured voice of a fine poem nor the poem’s transforming power. Of the earliest anthology of poetry, Confucius says, “The Odes can give the spirit an exhortation and the mind keener eyes. They can make us better adjusted in a group and more articulate when voicing a complaint.” He compares the kinetics in these poems to driving a team of horses in the wild: “They never swerve from the path.” The balance in the act of spurring on and reining in is the point of the lesson. That it should become the gauge of one’s conduct and judgment was what Confucius hoped, but he was also eager for this knowledge to be put to use. He says in 13.5, “A person may be able to recite the three hundred poems, but if he is unable to put [this knowledge] to full use when he is given a political assignment, or if he is unable to hold his own in a diplomatic exchange when he is sent abroad on a mission, no matter how many poems he has learned, what good will it do?” In early China, a man acting as the representative of his ruler on a foreign mission was expected to understand the aesthetic elements and the political implications of the poems his host had selected for their entertainment. And in response, the emissary would ask the court musician of his host to recite, on his behalf, poems of his choice. The test in these functions was whether the emissary could “hold his own.” If his selections were equally forceful and fitting, then he would not have brought “disgrace to the mission his ruler had entrusted to him.” This form of diplomatic exchange, where one’s knowledge of poetry was a means of assessing each party’s strengths, had been around long before Confucius was born, but it was Confucius who noticed a moral dimension in these performances, and he wanted to amplify it in his teachings.

  The same could be said about his teachings of the rites. According to his earliest biographer, the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, Confucius, in his childhood games, liked “to set up ritual vessels and orchestrate a ritual performance around them.” Even though there is no record to support this claim, we can well imagine the scene. For how could a precocious child, destined for great things, not be awed by the weight of bronze implements and the sound of bronze bells and stone chimes? The ritual wares Confucius played with were wooden ones and modest, but he must have witnessed ancestral rites being performed. He would have been drawn to
the solemnity of the occasion, and he must have found satisfaction in the fluidity and the balance of a given movement or act. Thus he also told his son in 16.13, “Unless you learn the rites, you won’t be able to find your balance.” “Balance” here refers to a person’s deportment and conduct, but if the person were to try to achieve it for the sake of a good name, he would be missing the point. Confucius says in 17.12, “To assume a dignified exterior with only a soft pith for an interior—that kind of person, to take an analogy from the riffraff [of the world], is like a thief who makes his way into a house by boring a hole through the wall.” If a person were the genuine article, he would want the rites to effect an inward change: “Being human and yet lacking in humaneness—what can such a man do with the rites?” The fulfillment of humaneness (ren) is the beginning and the end of one’s journey through life, Confucius teaches, and to “restrain the self and return to the rites” is “the way to be humane.” This idea is easier to visualize when Confucius construes it as a guide to proper political behavior. He says, “When abroad, conduct yourself as if you were receiving an honored guest. When employing the service of the people in your state, deport yourself as if you have been put in charge of a grand sacrifice.” The acting principle in these instructions is “Do not impose on others what you do not desire for yourself.” That is a heavy burden, and no one who has “only a soft pith for an interior” can hope to carry it off.

  • • •

  Confucius—Latinized from Kong fuzi, or Master Kong—was born in 551 BC, toward the end of an era in Chinese history called “the Spring and Autumn” (770–481 BC). His home was in Lu, a regional state in eastern China in an area now known as the Shandong peninsula.

  The Kongs of Lu were common gentlemen (shi) with no hereditary entitlements and privileges. The common gentlemen—in the social hierarchy of the Zhou dynasty (1045–221 BC), just a notch higher than the common folk—could boast of their employability in the army or in any administrative position because they were educated in the six arts of ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and numbers. Confucius’ father had been a military officer and later served as a district steward in Lu, but he was already an old man when he fathered Confucius. A previous marriage had given him nine daughters and a clubfooted son, and so it was with Confucius that he was granted a healthy heir. But he died soon after Confucius was born, leaving his young widow to fend for herself.

  Confucius was candid about his family background. He said that because he was “poor and from a humble station” he could not enter government service as easily as young men from prominent families and so had to become “skilled in many menial tasks.” He found employment first with the Jisun clan, a hereditary family, whose principal members had, for many decades, served as chief counselors to the rulers of Lu. A series of modest positions with the Jisuns—as keeper of granaries and livestock, and as a district officer in the family’s feudal domain—led to more important appointments in the Lu government, first as minister of works and then as minister of crime.

  Records of the time suggest that, as minister of crime, Confucius was effective in handling problems of law and order but was even more impressive in managing diplomatic missions: he knew when to flex his muscles and when to yield, and how to bring a tough negotiation to a successful conclusion. But his involvement in the internal politics of Lu cut his tenure short. In 498 BC, in an effort to restore the authority of the ruler, he came under suspicion of being the mastermind of a plot to steer the hereditary families to self-ruin, and when the case was unraveled, even the ruler was unwilling to offer his support. Thus Confucius had no choice but to leave his position and his home.

  His self-exile took Confucius on a fourteen-year journey, first to Wei, the state just west of Lu, then south to the state of Song, and finally to the states of Chen and Cai before he circled back to Wei. Confucius spent much of that time looking for rulers who might be willing to come under his influence and be guided by his vision of a virtuous government. His search was in vain but he never gave up, because he was anxious “to be put to use.” He said to those who found his ambitions suspect: “How can I be like a bitter gourd that hangs from the end of a string and not be eaten?” How could he let his knowledge and ingenuity and all his inborn potential go to waste just because the going had been rough?—this, I believe, is what he meant.

  Confucius was emboldened to think he could set things right for the world because he was born at a time when such aspirations were within the reach of men living in circumstances similar to his. The Zhou dynasty by the mid-sixth century BC was approaching its five-hundredth year. The political framework the dynastic founders had put in place, an enfeoffment system held together by family ties, was still standing, but the joints had been giving out since the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period, and so the structure could collapse if not shored up. The regional rulers, who were relatives of the Zhou king, should have been the king’s strongest supporters, but they preferred pursuing their own ambitions. By Confucius’ time, none of the regional rulers was interested in the security of the empire or the idea of the greater good. The same could be said of the members of the aristocratic class, who had once aided their ruler in government—now they were openly competing with him for wealth and women. Their apathy and ineptitude allowed the common gentlemen—men like Confucius who had once been in their service—to step in and take charge of the administrative functions of the government.

  The common gentlemen still could not displace the aristocrats as the society’s elite, yet if they worked hard enough and were smart, they could be influential in most political contests. But the more discerning ones set their goals higher: They saw an opportunity to introduce a few new ideas about worth (xian) and nobleness (shang)—which, they felt, could challenge the set of assumptions that had been supporting the existing social hierarchy. They asked whether proof of ability and strength of character should be the measures of a person’s worth, and whether men of noble rank should be stripped of their titles and privileges for their incompetence and moral indiscretion. Men who posed such questions were not just seeking a chance to compete in the political world; they wanted to rewrite the rules so that the outcome would benefit the virtuous and the competent. This, in part, explains what Confucius was trying to teach. He believed that the moral resolve of a few could favorably affect the fate of many. But integrity alone, in his view, was not enough. Good men had to be tested in politics.

  The man whom Confucius looked back to for inspiration and guidance was the Duke of Zhou, brother of the founder of the Zhou dynasty and regent to the king’s young son. Despite the temporal distance between them, Confucius believed that he and the Duke of Zhou wanted the same thing for the dynasty—social harmony and political stability grounded in trust and mutual obligations, with minimal use of legal rules. But the Duke of Zhou was royalty, and Confucius was a professional bureaucrat, which meant that if Confucius did not have a government job he could not have any influence in society and would have few resources to live on. Men who knew him on his travels wondered whether his eagerness for a political position might have led him to overplay his hand and whether he had compromised his principles by letting disreputable men and women act as intermediaries. Confucius’ critics included his own disciples—the three or four who accompanied him in his exile.

  Confucius’ disciples were considerably younger than he was. Young men from a wide range of backgrounds—sons of aristocrats, children of common gentlemen, merchants, farmers, artisans, criminals, and sons of criminals—chose to attach themselves to him in order to learn skills that might get them started on the track to an official career. In the process, they acquired a lot more—a gentleman’s refinement and moral acuity, which, in Confucius’ mind, were essential to a political career. Confucius was the “master” (zi) to these followers, who called themselves his “disciples” or “apprentices” (tu). Among his earliest disciples, three stand out in the Analects: Zigong, Zilu, and Yan Hui. And it
was these three, Zigong, Zilu, and Yan Hui, who accompanied Confucius on his long journey into the unknown.

  Confucius was invited to come home to Lu in 484, when he was nearly seventy. It was probably two of his disciples, who had gotten plum jobs in the Lu government the year before, who orchestrated the move. To get Confucius to agree, they thought, the ruler should offer him a nice sum to retire on. The plan worked. Once back, Confucius found himself in a comfortable position. He no longer had financial worries, and the people of Lu treated him with the kind of respect he had not known before. The ruler and his counselors addressed him as the “elder statesman,” and they would approach him for advice when natural disasters struck or when they were thinking of raising taxes or raising an army against a state they perceived to be a threat. The number of Confucius’ disciples also grew. And even though Confucius says in 2.4, “At seventy, I followed what my heart desired without overstepping the line,” he was not free of care. From the dialogues in his later life, it seems he weighed the opposing views of history and of human character with greater precision. He also spoke more frankly about his defeats and about feeling tired. Yet his voice was unstrained. It was the voice of someone who had lived and traveled, who had done all he could to guide the world away from a violent and arbitrary course while knowing that his efforts would have no effect on those who held the reins. Toward the end of his life, he told his disciple Zigong that he intended to remain silent, and when Zigong protested, Confucius replied, “What does Heaven ever say? Yet the four seasons move in order, and the hundred things come to life. What does Heaven ever say?”