The Analects

by Confucius

  This is what Confucius says in 9.18, but here he adds that he “should give up hope” of finding such a man. See my comments on 9.18.

  15.14 The Master said, “Zang Wenzhong betrayed the integrity of his office. He knew Liuxia Hui to be worthy, yet he did not recommend him for a position equal to his.”

  Confucius says in 5.18 that the chief counselor Zang Wenzhong, who lived a hundred years before him, lacked wisdom because of his transgressions against ritual practices. Here, he accuses him of having betrayed the integrity of his office because he deliberately held Liuxia Hui back when it was his responsibility to help someone as talented as Liuxia Hui to advance in his career. Qian Mu is right to say that Zang Wenzhong made a sharp contrast to Kongshu Wenzi, who, as we read in 14.18, “had his family retainer, Zhuan, promoted along with him to positions within the court.”

  15.15 The Master said, “Be hard on yourself and be sparing when criticizing others—this way you will keep resentment at bay.”

  The Han scholar Dong Zhongshu writes, “One should govern others by way of humaneness [ren] and govern oneself by way of what is right [yi], which is what is meant by ‘Be hard on yourself and be sparing when criticizing others.’” “This statement,” he says, “is found in the Analects, but, so far, it seems, people have not given it much thought. . . . To point out the mistakes in yourself is to be good and honest. To point out the mistakes in other people is to be hurtful. To be hard on yourself means that you are generous. To be hard on others means that you are unkind. . . . A person in the ruling position would be regarded as intolerant if he were to govern the people by imposing on them the measures he set for himself in his own cultivation.” Mr. Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals makes a similar point about the difference between making demands on oneself and making demands on others. It says, “A gentleman would make demands on others based on their abilities, but he would make demands upon himself by the standard of what is right. If you make demands on others based on their abilities, this means that your demands are easily satisfied, and when this is true, you will win their hearts. Moreover, if you make demands on yourself by the standard of what is right, this means that it will be difficult for you to make mistakes, and when this is true, your conduct will likely to be correct.”

  15.16 The Master said, “I can never do anything for a man who has not been asking himself, ‘What should I do? What should I do?’”

  Confucius’ comment here reinforces what he says 15.12. Both statements emphasize preparedness before trouble descends, but here Confucius seems to say that if a person does not constantly ask himself what is the best thing to do, then when he finds himself in a jam, there is no one—not even Confucius—who can help him. This reading follows the interpretation of the Han scholar Dong Zhongshu and the Song scholar Zhu Xi.

  15.17 The Master said, “There is something hopeless about a group of men spending time together all day, not touching on the question of what is right in their conversations and wanting only to show off their cleverness.”

  To ask oneself constantly the question of what is right is to put heavy demands on the self, because, given the many variables of the human condition, it is difficult to know just what is right. But in the view of Confucius and his followers, this is how a person will learn to make fewer mistakes and perfect his character. Thus Confucius could not understand why a group of men would spend a whole day together without ever mentioning the one subject they should be most concerned with. Discussion of this topic could help them to see more clearly, he thought, but men preferred talking about things that could let them “show off their cleverness.”

  15.18 The Master said, “The gentleman makes rightness the substance. He works at it through ritual propriety; he expresses it with modesty; he brings it to completion by being trustworthy. Now that is a gentleman!”

  Rightness is again the topic. Here Confucius refers to rightness simply as zhi, the substance of a gentleman, and to ritual propriety, modesty, and trustworthiness as the virtues the gentleman pursues and the proof of his distinction.

  15.19 The Master said, “The gentleman is worried about his own lack of ability and not about the fact that others do not appreciate him.”

  This is almost exactly what Confucius says in 14.30. One can also refer to 1.1 and 14.24.

  15.20 The Master said, “The gentleman is troubled to think that after he is gone from this world, his name will vanish unnoticed.”

  Passages 15.19 and 15.20, when read together, tell us clearly where Confucius stood on the question of whether a person should have a reputation, a name (ming). No, Confucius would say, while the person is alive, and yes, after he is dead. Contemporaries’ views of you—even favorable ones—need not mean much (perhaps Confucius is speaking from experience), since many factors are at play while you are alive; but to have no trace of you remain after you are gone would be a tragedy, since this would mean that you did not do anything to make people of later generations acknowledge your existence. On the question of name, therefore, Confucius takes a long view of things, placing his trust in the judgment of history and in reputations that have endured the test of time. Historians in China liked what he said; Sima Qian from the Han was the first to pick this up, and he carried it further, suggesting that it was the historian’s responsibility to rescue men of worth from oblivion. He writes, “[Otherwise,] how can folk of the villages who wish to perfect their behavior and establish their names be known to later generations, unless through some gentleman who rises high in the world?” Confucius, in Sima Qian’s mind, was such a gentleman.

  15.21 The Master said, “The gentleman makes demands on himself. The petty man makes demands on others.”

  My translation, which is identical to Burton Watson’s, is based on He Yan’s commentary. The alternative translation, “The gentleman seeks it in himself; the petty man seeks it in others,” is literal but not precise, because one cannot be sure just what the “it” is that the gentleman or the petty man seeks. The phrase “making demands,” on the other hand, is clearer, and the sense is corroborated by 14.24 and 15.15. A person who makes demands on himself takes his cultivation and his self-reform as the point of his life’s pursuit, and he will not blame anyone else for his mistakes; a person who makes demands on others, however, is not interested in self-reform, and so even when he engages in learning, he does it for a name or for social elevation, and such a person never takes the blame for his own mistakes. The Song thinker Yang Shi feels that it is important to put 15.21 together with 15.19 and 15.20 because, in the end, Confucius believed that as long as a person tried to find it in himself, nothing would be lost even if his name disappeared altogether in posterity.

  15.22 The Master said, “The gentleman is self-assured but not competitive. He likes to be in a group but does not form any clique.”

  “A person who is self-assured,” Liu Baonan observes, “will tend to be competitive. A person who likes to be in a group will tend to form cliques. But the gentleman is neither competitive nor cliquish.” The Ming thinker Liu Zongzhou says, “A person who is self-assured is aware of the fact that he stands apart from others, but because he is not competitive he does not reject things outside [what he holds dear]. A person who likes to be in a group is easily at one with others, but because he is not cliquish, he will not go along with things [he does not believe in]. This is the measure the gentleman observes in his relationship with the world.”

  15.23 The Master said, “The gentleman does not recommend a person based on what that person said, and he does not disregard what a person said because of what he knows about the person.”

  When recommending someone for office in ancient times, the Book of Rites says, one could point to the person’s virtuous character, his accomplishments, or his words; and according to Liu Baonan’s understanding, “if the recommendation was based on a person’s fine words, then it was also necessary to look into his character and his accomplishments.”

  The weight of the first half of 15.23 is b
alanced by that of the second half, where Confucius shows that he is willing to give words their fair share, and so he says that they cannot be dismissed just because the speaker’s character is in question.

  15.24 Zigong asked, “Is there a single word that can serve as the guide to conduct throughout one’s life?”

  The Master said, “It is perhaps the word shu. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not want [others to impose on you].”

  The word shu appears in 4.15. There, I translate shu as “treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity,” which agrees in spirit with Confucius’ explanation of shu here. Scholars also suggest reading 15.24 with what Confucius describes in 6.30 as “the method and the way of realizing humaneness.”

  15.25 The Master said, “In my judgment of others, whom have I condemned, and whom have I praised? If there is someone I have praised, you can be sure that he has been put to the test. The common people today are like those [in the past] who kept the Three Dynasties on a straight path.”

  Confucius goes beyond what he states in 15.20 with regard to the question of human character. Here, he places his trust in the judgment of history and of the common people, for it was the common people who kept the Three Dynasties—of Xia, Shang, and Zhou—on a straight path. And that straight path, Qian Mu says, has “its foundation in a public sense of fairness [dagong] that all humans possess. And because all humans possess this sense of fairness, there is no need for me [or you or anyone] to fix blame or praise.” In the history of the Three Dynasties, “everyone praised Emperor Yu, King Tang, Wen, Wu, and the Duke of Zhou without exception. Everyone condemned King Jie, Zhou, You, and Li without exception.” This, in Qian Mu’s view, was what Confucius mean by “whom have I condemned, and whom have I praised?”

  15.26 The Master said, “I am old enough to have seen scribes [shi] leave a gap when they are unsure about a word and horse owners leave the driving to those with the right skills. Nowadays there are no such cases.”

  What Confucius says here about scribes and owners of horses reflects his overall attitude toward those who are presumptuous—men who make false claims to knowledge or skills they do not possess. This was how Zilu behaved in 13.3, and Confucius berated him, saying, “With things he does not understand, a gentleman would know to keep quiet.” The Han historian Ban Gu in the bibliography section of the History of the Former Han gives this explanation: “According to the mode of working in ancient times, scribes wrote down exactly what was in the documents, and when they were not familiar with a word, they would leave a blank or they would ask senior scholars [who might have such knowledge]. But in periods of moral decline, right and wrong could no longer be verified, and so people relied on their own speculations.”

  15.27 The Master said, “Clever words will upset [the idea of] virtue [de]. Impatience with small things will upset big plans.”

  Clever words and a glib tongue could confuse the distinction between right and wrong, and so what they upset is the idea of virtue. In this, I follow the explanations of Kong Anguo and Zhu Xi. The concept of buren, “being impatient with something,” is also discussed in the commentaries. The Qing scholar Wu Jiabin notes that the rule of the former kings could be characterized as buren, “being impatient with,” but, he says, what they were impatient with were not small things. Since “only a truly humane person is able to like and dislike others,” what the former kings were impatient with—what they could not bear to witness—must have been the suffering of humanity. And what might be an example of impatience with lesser things? The blunt courage of a common man is Zhu Xi’s suggestion.

  15.28 The Master said, “When a crowd of people dislikes a person, you must look into the matter closely yourself. When a crowd of people likes a person, you must look into the matter closely yourself.”

  This is essentially a restatement of 13.24, where Confucius asked Zigong to be cautious about the opinions of the crowd when judging a person’s character. There, he said it would be better to trust the views of men of integrity, but here he suggests that each person look into the matter himself.

  15.29 The Master said, “It is humans who can enlarge the Way [dao]. The Way cannot enlarge humans.”

  Dao here refers to the moral way, and, like nature’s life-giving way, it is constant—it never fails to do its best and never fails to be trustworthy. And the Way belongs to us, Confucius says: it waits for us to give it integrity and greatness. The Doctrine of the Mean says, “The Way would not have come into shape if there was no one to fulfill it.” The Han historian Ban Gu writes, “The Way of the Zhou declined during the reign of King You and King Li, but this did not mean that the Way came to an end, only that these two rulers had cast it aside. When King Xuan came to the throne, he reflected on the virtues of the former kings; he let light break in upon the stagnant and he mended the smashed and broken; he explained the accomplishments of King Wen and King Wu; and the Way of the Zhou was revived in its original splendor.”

  15.30 The Master said, “To make a mistake and not to correct it—now that is called making a mistake.”

  Confucius understood that it was natural for humans, including himself, to make mistakes. This did not trouble him. A genuine mistake, he thought, is not to correct a mistake you have made. In Han Ying’s Commentary to the Book of Poetry, he is quoted as saying, “To make a mistake and to correct it, this is the same as not having made a mistake.” Of all his disciples, he felt, there was only one, Yan Hui, who “did not repeat a mistake.”

  15.31 The Master said, “Once I spent a whole day thinking, not bothering to eat, and a whole night thinking, not bothering to sleep, but I gained nothing from it. It would have been better if I’d spent the time learning something.”

  This is about thinking in isolation and thinking without the context and the support of learning. This could be either a futile effort, which is what Confucius says here, or a dangerous exercise, which is what he says in 2.15.

  15.32 The Master said, “The gentleman makes plans to realize the Way; he does not make plans to secure food. If you decide to till the field [and plant crops], there still will be times when you will go hungry. If you decide to devote yourself to learning, there will be times when you may receive an official stipend [for putting your knowledge to work]. The gentleman worries about the Way. He does not worry about being poor.”

  Confucius puts two choices before the young men of his time: devote yourself to learning or be a farmer. The object of learning is realizing the Way and the object of farming is putting food on the table. And even if you opt for farming, he says, there will still be times when you will not have enough to eat; yet if you concentrate just on learning, there will be times when you will find yourself being given a stipend—and therefore a livelihood—for applying what you have learned to affairs of the government. Confucius is prodding others to choose learning, most scholars say. Even so, Liu Baonan points out, most of the educated men during the Spring and Autumn period would have had a hard time earning a living from a government job: nearly all of them had to worry about going hungry, and farming, they thought, would allow them self-sufficiency. Thus Fan Chi asked Confucius in 13.4 about how to grow vegetables and grain crops, and even recluses who ran away from the world to keep themselves immaculate—men such as Chang Ju and Jie Ni in 18.6—had to work in the field and plant crops in order to stay alive.

  15.33 The Master said, “Your knowledge is sufficient [to govern the people], but if it is beyond the strength of your humaneness to guard it, you will lose it even though you have gotten it. Your knowledge is sufficient to govern the people and it is within the strength of your humaneness to guard it, but if you lack the dignity to rule over your subjects, then they will not respect you. Your knowledge is sufficient to govern the people and it is within the strength of your humaneness to guard it and you possess the dignity to rule over your subjects, but if you do not rally them into action in accordance the rites, it is still not good enough.”

&nb
sp; This statement, in Qian Mu’s words, is about “the way of governing the people,” and since it is Confucius who speaks here, “the way” must refer to the way of a moral government, which he describes in four steps: “Knowledge comes first; humaneness is the agent that puts it into play, and there must be a sufficient amount of it to fulfill what knowledge demands, or otherwise that knowledge will be lost; the man who has the requisite knowledge and humaneness as a ruler must also possess the dignity that will gain the respect of his subjects; and finally, to rally his people into action, this man must follow the measures of ritual propriety.

  15.34 The Master said, “The gentleman is not able to absorb trivial knowledge but is able to take on large responsibilities. The petty man is able to absorb trivial knowledge but is not able to take on large responsibilities.”

  An alternative translation is: “You cannot appreciate a gentleman from what he does in trivial matters, but he is someone who is able to take on large responsibilities. A petty man is not able to take on large responsibilities, but you may be able to appreciate what he does in trivial matters.” This follows Zhu Xi’s commentary, which says that the point of Confucius’ statement is about how to know a person, “what to look for when assessing his character.” My translation reflects the earlier reading, from the Han and Wei dynasties. This is the reading Liu Baonan prefers. It is more straightforward (and less forced) than Zhu Xi’s, he says, because the focus does not shift from the person who is trying to gauge the character of another person to the person being observed.

  15.35 The Master said, “The common people rely more on humaneness for living than on water and fire. I have known people who died from treading on water and fire. But I have never known anyone who died from treading on the path of humaneness.”