The Analects

by Confucius

  When everyone else acts out of private motives, and one person makes a show that he does not, is this then truly a case where private motives do not exist? If even the sages find it difficult to realize what is called “public spirit,” and one person finds it easy, does it mean that this person has made simple what everyone else considers difficult? Has he gotten what he claims to have?

  But Cheng also rejects the reading the Song scholars suggest. If they were right, he says, then the tussle between the two opposing loyalties could never be conceived of as a moral problem, because the person faced with this question would always stand on the side of his family. Cheng prefers to understand Confucius in light of the latter’s strength as a moral thinker. Thus, he argues, in saying that “uprightness lies therein [zhi zai qizhong],” Confucius meant that in being human a person has to “use the fullness of his private affections to realize what is good for the public.”

  13.19 Fan Chi asked about humaneness. The Master said, “Remain reverent in your private life; be respectful in handling affairs; do your best in your relationship with others. Do not leave them behind even when you go and live among the Di and Yi [border] tribes.”

  One can refer to 12.1 and 12.2 for a more precise, a more tactile description of being reverent in private life and being respectful in handling affairs. But in Qian Mu’s view, what Confucius wanted to emphasize here was that a person should not let go of these rules even when he had settled among the Di and Yi, among people who lived beyond the reach of culture and refinement, because, though their conduct might have lacked ritual propriety, the Di and Yi were still part of the human race.

  13.20 Zigong asked, “What sort of men could be considered good enough to be in government [shi]?”

  The Master said, “Men who have a sense of shame in the way they conduct themselves and, when sent abroad, will not bring disgrace to the mission their ruler has entrusted to them.”

  “What would be the next best?”

  “Those who are good sons in the eyes of their kin and fine young men in the eyes of their neighbors and villagers.’

  “And the level below that?”

  “Men who insist on keeping their word and seeing their actions through to the end. They have little pebbles for brains and are inferior indeed. But I suppose you can say that they come next.”

  “And what about those who are in public life right now?”

  “Unh? They are puny vessels, men with hardly any capacity. They don’t even count!”

  There were shi before Confucius’ time—men who received an education in order to have a career in government—but it was Confucius who spelled out the requirements for the job. The most qualified, in his view, were those who had a sense of shame in the way they conducted themselves and were deft players in the political world so that they would not “bring disgrace to their ruler” when sent on a mission abroad. And the next best were those who possessed stellar characters in the eyes of family and neighbors, but whose administrative and diplomatic skills were not necessarily well honed. And on the level below that were men who would keep their word and see their actions through to the end: they were truthful but inflexible; they made kengkeng sounds as if they had “little pebbles for brains.” And as for the men in office in his own time, Confucius said they were “puny vessels” that could hold only ten pecks of grain or less.

  13.21 The Master said, “Not being able to be in the company of those who do not swerve from the right path, I must turn to the wildly spirited [kuang] and the overly cautious [juan]. The wildly spirited forge ahead [without reservation]. The overly cautious refrain from doing certain things.”

  Confucius’ remark here about the company he sought reflects what he says in 2.2 about “the three hundred poems in the Book of Poetry”: “They never swerve from the path.” But while he was able to find that sudden rightness in a poem, he did not have such luck with people. There was no one, it seemed, who could give him the pleasure that a good poem had in store for him—a pleasure he describes in 2.2 and in 3.20 as the moral and aesthetic idea of balance, a balance in advancing and retreating, spurring on and reining in, letting go and holding back.

  To understand how Confucius felt about men who were wildly spirited (kuang), one could refer to 5.22 and the commentary there. He had less to say about men who were overly cautious (juan). But from his description here, one could infer that he had in mind men who were watchful about not going too far, not overstepping the line of ritual propriety. Mencius, however, is more critical of the overly cautious. He says that such men will always try “to steer clear of the squalid and unclean,” thus suggesting that they are overly scrupulous and priggish. And Mencius thinks that the overly cautious were Confucius’ last choice for association: he would turn to them only after he had failed to find “the wildly spirited.” It is difficult to know if Mencius is right, but from the affinity Confucius had with Zeng Xi in 11.26, it does seem that he was drawn to the wildly spirited.

  13.22 The Master said, “People from the south have a saying, ‘A man lacking constancy will not make a shaman or a doctor.’ Well put, is it not? [The Book of Changes says,] ‘The person who lacks constancy in upholding his virtue will be met with disgrace.’” [Commenting on this,] the Master said, “It means that there is simply no point for him to have his fortune told.”

  This passage poses many questions, the most difficult of which is how to integrate the two statements attributed to Confucius. A large number of scholars, beginning with the Han, seem to think that the gap can be narrowed if we understand the first sentence to read: “The people from the south have a saying, ‘A shaman or a doctor cannot do a thing for a man who lacks constancy.’” There would then be continuity in what Confucius said, they argue, since both of his statements would have a single target, the fickle man who wanted to have his fortune told. And to support their reading, these scholars refer to a longer but similar passage in the Ziyi (“Black Robe”) chapter of the Book of Rites, which is also ascribed to Confucius. There, Confucius says:

  People from the south have a saying, “A man lacking constancy cannot have his fortune told.” These must be words passed down from the ancient time. If tortoise shells and yarrow stalks cannot know your fortune, how much less so [a shaman,] a human being! The Book of Poetry [Ode 195] said, “The tortoise shells are tired, / They have no fortunes to divulge. . . .” The Changes said, “The person who lacks constancy in upholding his virtue will be met with disgrace.”

  The problem with the above interpretation is that it was too neatly worked out. Why, one might ask, could Confucius not be talking about the shaman and the person who sought his advice? Why could he not be saying that both the soothsayer and the seeker need to have constancy? With the recent discovery of a large number of bamboo texts in central China, we now have a much earlier—a 300 BC—version of the Ziyi text, and compared with the passage cited above from the received version, there are two principal differences. The bamboo text begins with “The Master said, ‘The people from Song [not the people from the south] had a saying,’” and it ends much earlier, with the two lines from the Book of Poetry, which means that the quote from the Book of Changes is not in this version, which predates the received text by about 150 years. One possible explanation for the discrepancies is that the early Han editors used the record in the Analects to expand the Ziyi chapter and so they included the quote from the Book of Changes; they also modified the attribution of the saying in the Ziyi from “the people from Song” to “the people from the south” to make the passages in these two separate texts more uniform. And then, in later Han, scholars like Zheng Xuan returned to the Ziyi chapter to explain Confucius, but by that point, the Ziyi, in its amplified version, already had an unmistakable connection to the Analects.

  13.23 The Master said, “The gentleman harmonizes [he] without being an echo. The petty man echoes [tong] and does not harmonize.”

  To illustrate Confucius’ point here, most commentaries refer to an analogy the
Qi counselor Master Yan used in a conversation with his ruler on the same topic. The account is found in the Zuo Commentary, and in it, Master Yan tells his ruler that finding harmony in government is like making soup. “Water, fire, vinegar, meat paste, salt, and plums—these are the ingredients to prepare fish and meat in a soup,” he says, “and it is up to the cook to harmonize them and balance the flavors, to add a bit more of this or that when the flavors are too bland and to dilute it a bit more when the flavors are too strong.” “The same can be said about the relationship between the ruler and his counselors,” Master Yan continues. “In what the ruler considered acceptable, there must be something that is unacceptable. And so it is up to the counselors to put forth to him what is not unacceptable in order to [refine and] improve his idea of what is acceptable. In what the ruler considered unacceptable, there must be something that is acceptable. And so it is up to the counselors to put forth to him what is acceptable in order to [refine and] improve his idea of what is not acceptable. In this way, the ruler will be able to realize a fair government and not commit any transgressions, and the people will no longer have contentious thoughts.” Master Yan contrasts this approach toward government, where ruler and counselors work together to adjust the extremes and to find a balance and harmony (he) in administrative styles and policies, to another type of approach, where the counselors simply echo (tong) whatever the ruler says. “This is like trying to improve the taste of water with more water. Who would want that?”

  13.24 Zigong asked, “What would you think of a person if everyone in the village liked him?”

  The Master said, “I still would not be able to tell [one way or another about him].”

  “What would you think of a person if everyone in the village disliked him?”

  “I still would not be able to tell [one way or another about him]. Better if the good people in his village liked him and the bad ones disliked him.”

  Confucius tends to reserve judgment about those who are known by their reputation. Reputations, good or bad, are built on perception: they are mercurial, and they are hard to support. For this reason, he despises men who take manufacturing perception and manipulating public sentiment as their calling. Only men of integrity can offer a correction. He says in 4.3, “Only a humane person is able to like and dislike others.”

  13.25 The Master said, “The gentleman is easy to serve but difficult to please. He will not be happy if, in trying to please him, you veer from the proper way; but when he employs others, he does so with respect to their capacity. The petty man is difficult to serve but easy to please. He will be happy even though, in trying to please him, you veer from the proper way; but when he employs others, he expects them to be able to handle everything.”

  In his remark here and in 13.26, Confucius tries to persuade us of his idea of the gentleman. He first gives him a palpable description, and then he sharpens the idea by contrasting this man against the petty man.

  13.26 The Master said, “The gentleman has breadth of character [tai] but is not arrogant. The petty man is arrogant but has no breadth of character.”

  Confucius comes back to this idea in 20.2 and gives a precise explanation of what he means when he states that “the gentleman has breadth of character but is not arrogant”; such a man, he says, “dares not to be disrespectful whether he is dealing with a few or with many, with people big or small.” Zhuangzi, from the fourth century BC, takes the idea to another level. Though he has often been thought of as an adversary of Confucius and a competitor in China’s early intellectual wars, the two have more in common than Confucius’ later defenders care to admit. An example can be found in what Zhuangzi says about the kind of man he admires. Zhuangzi calls him “the great man [daren].” He writes in the “Autumn Flood” (Qiushui): “[The great man] will not act for the sake of profit, but he does not despise the porter at the gate. He will not wrangle for goods and possessions, but he makes no exaggerated show of yielding these things to others. . . . He does not despise the greedy and base, . . . the glib and sycophantic.” The Qing dynasty scholar Jiao Xun equates “breadth of character” (tai) with “adroitness” (tong). Zhuangzi, in his description of the “great man,” magnifies the idea of adroitness: this man, though principled himself, is at home with the greedy and the base, the glib and the sycophantic.

  13.27 The Master said, “Unwavering [in integrity] [gang], resolute [in one’s moral conviction] [yi], simple as [a piece of unadorned] wood [mu] and hesitant [as if too clumsy] to speak [ne]—these qualities come close to being humane [ren].”

  It was the third-century scholar Wang Su who first suggested the reading of gang, yi, mu, and ne. Liu Baonan follows Wang Su in his commentary and gives a clearer explanation of these four concepts, using Confucius’ own words in the Analects. My translation reflects their interpretation, and it also draws from other records in the Analects.

  13.28 Zilu asked, “How should a person conduct himself in order to be considered good enough to serve in government [shi]?”

  The Master said, “He must be critical, encouraging, and affable to be considered good enough to serve in government: critical and encouraging to his friends; affable to his brothers.”

  Confucius already has discussed with Zigong the qualifications of a shi, a man who possesses the knowledge, the skills, and the character to be in government service. When Zilu asks him the same question here, Confucius again turns to the subject of character, but now he wants to consider this man’s relationship to his friends and family, to those who are closest to him. Confucius makes a distinction, however, between friends and family: Be critical and encouraging to one, he says, and be affable to the other. A distinction must exist, Liu Baonan says in his commentary, because these two sets of relationships are different in nature. “Friends are drawn together by their sense of rightness; brothers stay together because of the love and affection they have for each other.” Mencius also stresses this point in his teaching. He says, “Father and son would be at odds if they were to tax each other over a moral issue. It is for friends to demand goodness from each other. For father and son to do so would seriously undermine the love between them.”

  13.29 The Master said, “A good man will give his people seven years of instruction before he is ready to arm them for military action.”

  One should consider Confucius’ remark here together with what he says in the next entry. Both are about sending troops to war, which, he feels, is a matter of deadly seriousness. Here he says that a good man, a good ruler, “will give his people seven years of instruction” before he is willing to dispatch them to the battlefield. And just what sort of instruction does Confucius have in mind? Most scholars believe that it is a combination of moral education and military training. Just military training alone would not be enough, they argue: a person would need to learn about rightness, propriety, and trust before he felt that he was ready to die for his duties. And seven years, Zheng Xuan says, would be ample time for the ruler to cultivate the love and loyalty he would need from his troops in order to carry out a successful undertaking.

  13.30 The Master said, “If you send your troops to war without first instructing them, this is the same as throwing them away.”

  Here Confucius adds more urgency to what he states above about the importance of giving the people proper instruction before sending them to war. Not to do so, he stresses, would be the same as treating their lives callously. This point can be found in several Warring States and early Han texts, most notably the Mencius. On one occasion, Mencius tells a military commander of Lu, “To send the people to war before they are trained is to bring disaster to them.” On another occasion, he decries the ruler of Liang for dispatching his people, even his young men, to war, “making pulp of them,” because of his own blind ambition.

  BOOK FOURTEEN

  14.1 Xian [Yuan Si] asked what conduct could be considered shameful.

  The Master said, “When the state is governed according to the moral way, one would accep
t a salary. When the state is not governed according to the moral way, it would be shameful to accept a salary.”

  “[If a person] does not insist on winning and is not boastful, begrudging, or covetous, can such conduct be called humane?”

  The Master said, “One can call that difficult, but I don’t know whether it measures up to being humane.”

  Xian is Yuan Si’s given name, and so, scholars say, he must have been the person who recorded the above conversation. If someone else were responsible for it, that person would have used the courtesy name Yuan Si.

  Most scholars like to consider this conversation together with 6.5 and 8.13. In 6.5, we learn that Yuan Si was a district steward in Lu, and when he declined an offer of nine hundred measures of grain for his service, Confucius chided him for being uptight and priggish. He said, “Can you not share it with the people in your village and in your neighboring communities?” But here he seems to think that it would be shameful to accept a salary, any amount of salary, from a dysfunctional government, which, in fact, is how one would describe the political practice in Lu around this time. If this was how Confucius felt, why did he scold Yuan Si for not accepting a salary in 6.5? Was his response there—about how to put Yuan Si’s salary to use—not more imaginative? Confucius also shows more flexibility in 8.13, where his thoughts about what would be a cause for shame cover more ground than what he says here, and where he surprises us by saying, “When the moral way prevails in a state, being poor and lowly is a cause for shame.”

  The second half of the present conversation has also received a lot of attention across the centuries. The discussion tends to focus on the difference between difficult feats (nan) and humane action (ren). And most scholars agree that what Yuan Si describes is difficult to realize but that it pertains only to personal cultivation, to the effort of “making oneself immaculate.” “If a man is able to conduct himself in this way,” the Qing scholar Ruan Yuan says, “then he cannot bring harm to anyone. But he also cannot benefit others—he cannot help others ‘to steady themselves’ or ‘to reach their goal.’ For this reason, Confucius did not consider such conduct as humane.” What Ruan Yuan refers to in his comment is what Confucius says in 6.30 about “the method and the way of realizing humaneness.” The humane person, Confucius explains there, draws his analogies from what he likes and dislikes, and so because he wishes to steady himself and reach his goal, he helps others to steady themselves and reach their goal.