The Sayings of Confucius

Overview

The Analects is about a hundred pages and roughly five hundred entries, most of them two or three lines. Confucius died in 479 BCE; the book was compiled by his students and their students over the following two or three centuries, and the later books differ in style and vocabulary from the earlier ones. Some entries are almost certainly not his.

The Chinese title, Lunyu, means something like selected sayings or edited conversations. There is no organisation. Book II is not about a subject; the twenty books are collections, and consecutive entries may have nothing to do with one another. A reader looking for development will not find it.

The form matters philosophically. Confucius is asked the same question by different students and gives different answers, because the answer depends on who is asking and what they need. Asked about filial duty four times in a row, he tells one student not to disobey, another that the difficulty is in the facial expression, and a third that parents should have to worry only about the child’s health. This is deliberate: he says he does not open the door for someone who is not already struggling, and that if he raises one corner and the student cannot come back with the other three, he does not repeat the lesson.

The historical setting is a period of disintegration. The Zhou royal house had lost real authority, the states were fighting, and Confucius believed the older ritual order had worked and could be recovered. He says he transmits rather than creates, which is both modesty and a claim.

The argument

Ren. The central term, and the one every translator struggles with. It has been rendered as benevolence, humaneness, goodness, human-heartedness and authoritative conduct, and the character is written as a person plus the number two, which suggests something that only exists between people. Confucius never defines it. Asked directly, he gives different answers: to love others; to be able to practise five things in the world; to overcome oneself and return to ritual propriety. He also says he has never seen a man who truly loved it, and declines to attribute it to almost anyone, including himself.

Li. Usually translated ritual or propriety, and it covers far more than ceremony: how you greet someone, how you conduct a funeral, how you behave at a meal, how a minister addresses a ruler. The claim is not that these forms are pleasant but that they are how human relationships are made workable and how character is shaped. A person becomes decent by practising decent forms long enough that they stop being a performance. Confucius is scathing about ritual performed emptily, asking what someone who has no ren has to do with ritual at all.

The junzi. Literally the son of a lord, and Confucius redefines it to mean a person of cultivated character regardless of birth. This is one of his most consequential moves: nobility becomes an achievement rather than an inheritance. The junzi is contrasted throughout with the petty person, and the contrasts are practical, that one understands what is right and the other what is profitable, that one is composed without being arrogant and the other the reverse.

Filial duty. Treated as the root. The argument is developmental: someone formed by honouring parents and elders is unlikely to become the kind of person who overthrows superiors or starts disorder. It also produces the passage most often used against Confucianism, in which a governor boasts of a man who testified against his father for stealing a sheep, and Confucius replies that in his part of the country the upright conceal the conduct of their fathers, and that uprightness is found in that.

Government. Rule by example rather than coercion. If a ruler is himself correct, things will go well without orders; if he is not, he may give orders and will not be obeyed. Hence the contrast between governing by law and punishment, which produces evasion without shame, and governing by virtue and ritual, which produces shame and self-correction. Asked what he would do first if given a state, Confucius answers, to the exasperation of his student, that he would rectify names, so that words match realities and a ruler is actually a ruler and a father actually a father.

Learning. The book opens with it and returns constantly. Learning without thought is labour lost and thought without learning is dangerous. He describes himself as not born with knowledge but as fond of antiquity and diligent in seeking it, and as someone so absorbed in study that he forgets to eat and does not notice old age coming on.

What is absent. Confucius does not discuss the gods, and when asked about serving the spirits replies that if you cannot yet serve people, how can you serve spirits, and when asked about death, that if you do not understand life, how can you understand death. He is silent, the text says, on strange occurrences, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings.

How to read it

Read it in small doses over weeks rather than straight through. It is a book of fragments and it flattens in bulk.

Start with Books I to IX, which are generally taken to be the oldest layer and contain most of the memorable material. Books X, which is about Confucius’ personal habits down to how he sat and what he wore, is strange and worth reading for the portrait it gives.

Read two translations side by side if you can. The key terms have no English equivalents and every translator is making an interpretive decision on every page. Lau gives you the sense; Ames and Rosemont deliberately refuse the comfortable renderings so that you notice how much the comfortable ones assume.

Do not look for arguments. There are none. There are claims, examples, refusals and jokes, and the teaching happens by accumulation and by the modelling of a character.

Watch for the man in it. Confucius is funny, irritable, disappointed and self-deprecating. He fails to get the office he wants, wanders from state to state with his students, is mocked by a gatekeeper as the one who knows it cannot be done and keeps trying, and says he has never met anyone who loves virtue as much as they love sex.

Then read the Tao Te Ching, which is close to a direct rejection of everything here, and Mencius, who systematised Confucius into an argument that human nature is good.

Questions it raises

• Ren is never defined. Is that a refusal, an admission that it cannot be defined, or a pedagogy?
• Ritual is supposed to form character. Can going through motions produce something genuine, and when does it produce hypocrisy instead?
• Confucius says the upright conceal their fathers’ offences. Is that a defence of loyalty over law, or the corruption that critics have always called it?
• Government by example rather than law: does that scale past a small state, and what happens when the ruler is not good?
• He claims to transmit rather than create, and he redefined nobility as achievement rather than birth. Which is it?
• The ethics assumes a person formed by relationships rather than an individual choosing. How much of Western moral philosophy would have to change to start there?