by Confucius
11.3 Virtuous in conduct: Yan Yuan [Yan Hui], Min Ziqian, Ran Boniu [Boniu], Zhonggong.
Skillful in speech: Zai Wo, Zigong.
Skillful in administrative affairs: Ran You [Ran Qiu], Jilu [Zilu].
Accomplished in cultural pursuits: Ziyou and Zixia.
Here is a summary of what Confucius thought were his disciples’ strengths, which, on the whole, can be corroborated with the records of these disciples’ speech and conduct in the Analects. Since the disciples were referred to by their courtesy names, some scholars feel that this was not a direct quote from Confucius, who always called his disciples by their personal names. They further point out that the entry does not begin with “The Master said.”
11.4 The Master said, “Hui [Yan Hui] is of no help to me. He is pleased with everything I say.”
Confucius’ remark here about Yan Hui should be read together with 2.9, 9.11, and 9.20, and also with my commentary on 2.9.
11.5 The Master said, “How filial is Min Ziqian! No one would disagree with what his parents and brothers said about him.”
According to several Han dynasty sources, the story of Min Ziqian involved the familiar narrative of a nasty stepmother who thought only of the welfare of his half brothers and showed no love for him. Yet, unlike the father in many other stories of the kind, his father was quick to notice the inequity and quick to act. But when the father tried to drive his wife out, Min Ziquan stopped him. He told his father, “With our mother home, only one child is neglected. With her gone, all four children will suffer.” These words, as the story goes, managed to move his stepmother and his half brothers so deeply that they changed their ways, and thereafter had only love and affection for him. Some scholars consider this an example of a son who disobeys the command of his father and yet fulfills a larger sense of filiality.
11.6 Nan Rong repeated often the poem about the white jade tablet. Confucius gave him the daughter of his older brother for a wife.
The white jade tablet to which this refers is found in Ode 256: “A blemish in a white jade tablet / Can be polished away; / A mistake in these words / Can never be mended.” Nan Rong chanted this poem to remind himself of the troubles that misspoken words could bring. And as I explain in my comments on 5.2, maybe because Nan Rong was vigilant in speech, he managed “to avoid punishment and execution” even when the moral way did not exist in the state. For these reasons, Confucius considered him a suitable husband for his niece.
11.7 Ji Kangzi asked, “Who among your disciples love learning?”
Confucius responded, “There was Yan Hui who loved learning. But unfortunately he had a short life and is dead now.”
This is a slightly truncated version of the conversation between Confucius and Duke Ai in 6.3. This record could have come from a different line of transmission, but it also makes sense from an editorial point of view to have Confucius’ remark repeated here as a preamble to the next four entries, which are about Yan Hui’s death.
11.8 When Yan Yuan [Yan Hui] died, his father, Yan Lu, asked the Master if he would sell his carriage so that he, the father, could use the money to buy his son an outer coffin.
The Master replied, “Whether a son is talented or not, he is still a son to his parents. When my son Li [Boyu] died, he had an inner coffin but no outer coffin. I did not go on foot in order to provide him with an outer coffin. Since once I held the rank just below that of a counselor, it would not be right for me to go on foot.”
11.9 When Yan Yuan [Yan Hui] died, the Master cried out, “Oh, Heaven is destroying me! Heaven is destroying me!”
11.10 When Yan Hui died, the Master wept with uncontrollable emotion. His followers said, “Master, you have gone too far.”
The Master said, “Have I? If not for this man, for whom should I show so much sorrow?”
11.11 After Yan Yuan [Yan Hui] died, the disciples wanted to give him a lavish burial. The Master said, “That would not be appropriate.” The disciples gave him a lavish burial anyway.
The Master said, “Hui looked upon me as a father. But in this matter I could not treat him like a son. This was not my doing—it was on account of you, my young friends.”
We learn in 11.9 and 11.10 that Confucius was feeling so bereft after Yan Hui’s death that even his disciples asked him to show some restraint. Yet when Yan Hui’s father asked him to sell his carriage so that he could buy his son an outer coffin, Confucius refused. And when his disciples acted against his objection and gave Yan Hui a grand sendoff, he was upset. Did he love Yan Hui or not? Many scholars over the years have brooded about this question and offered their explanations, yet it is Confucius himself who can best clear the air. We learn in 9.12 that years before Yan Hui’s death, when Confucius looked as if he were on the point of dying, Zilu asked the rest of the disciples to act as Confucius’ retainers so that their teacher could go to his grave with the formalities of a minister. As it happened, Confucius’ condition improved, and when he realized what Zilu had been prepared to do, he scolded him for “practicing chicanery” because he at the time had no official position. “By pretending I had retainers when I had none, whom were we trying to deceive?” he said. “Besides, would I not rather die in the arms of a few good friends than in the arms of retainers?” This, I believe, was Confucius’ point about Yan Hui’s burial. Did Yan Hui, who had been poor, need an outer coffin or a lavish burial when he had a few good friends to bid him farewell? Besides, such things bear no relationship to feelings. They simply cannot express the depth of one’s loss, which for Confucius was like having lost a son.
11.12 Jilu [Zilu] asked about how to serve the spirits of the dead and the gods. The Master said, “You can’t even serve men properly, how can you serve the spirits?”
“May I then ask about death?”
“You can’t even understand life, how can you understand death?”
Confucius’ response may be a disparagement of Zilu, suggesting that Zilu was not ready to serve the spirits or understand death, or it may suggest his own reluctance to let his mind travel beyond the human world. Scholars such as Liu Baonan, however, offer another way of looking at this conversation. They argue that there was nothing facetious about the questions Zilu asked: serving the spirits was an “all-consuming business” in early China, and everyone was mindful of death, since no one knew when it might come to call. But “only a person who did his best to serve his parents while they were alive is able to let them enjoy his offerings after they are dead,” and this, Liu Baonan explains, was what Confucius was trying to say to Zilu. And as for death, “if one reveres life, one has respect for death,” Liu writes. Mencius expresses the idea best when he says, “Though destiny determines everything, one accepts willingly only what is proper destiny. That is why he who understands destiny does not stand under a wall on the verge of collapse. He who dies after having done his best in realizing the moral way dies according to proper destiny.”
11.13 When Min Ziqian was attending the Master, he looked upright; Zilu looked tough and unbending; Ran You [Ran Qiu] and Zigong looked affable. The Master was pleased. He said, “A man like You [Zilu] will not die a natural death.”
Confucius was pleased, the commentaries say, because each disciple seemed distinctly himself, but watching Zilu, he had the foreboding that Zilu would not live out his years because he was “tough and unbending.” His hunch, of course, turned out to be correct. The history in the Zuo Commentary tells us that Zilu was caught in a succession dispute between a father and a son in the state of Wei, and he died a violent death in the final confrontation of the two sides.
11.14 The people of Lu wanted to rebuild the treasury. Min Ziqian said, “Why can’t we just restore it? Why must we rebuild it?”
The Master said, “This man rarely speaks, but when he does, he always gets it right.”
Most commentators feel that Min Ziqian was not just talking about a building—whether to pull it down and erect a new one in its place or to renovate the old one. The remark had a p
olitical background, they say. Ever since the Three Families drove Duke Zhao out of Lu in his twenty-fifth year of rule, they had wanted to rebuild the treasury, because the structure, being a storehouse of wealth and weapons, stood as a symbol of the ducal authority in their state. (Thus “the people of Lu,” here, refers to the Three Families.) Min Ziqian, however, was against the idea. He wanted restoration—not just a restoration of the old building, but a restoration of the old political structure.
The question of whether to have the existing political structure dismantled and to start anew or simply to fix it and reinforce the foundation received a lot of attention in the eleventh-century debate on reform. The historian Sima Guang, who opted for repair and renewal, used a metaphor similar to what we find here.
11.15 The Master said, “Why do I hear You [Zilu] playing the zither inside my door?” The disciples began to treat Zilu with disrespect.
The Master said, “You [Zilu] may not have entered the inner room, but he has ascended the hall.”
A long explanation of Confucius’ remark about Zilu playing the zither is found in the Han dynasty source Shuoyuan (World of Stories). The music is described there as “the rustic sound of the north.” Confucius characterized such music as “violent and abandoned,” and he contrasted it with the “gentle and measured” sound of the south, which added “a liveliness to the air” but “no pangs of pain and sorrow to the heart.” But he then pointed out that such ideas were not fixed: the sound of the south had, in fact, originated in the north but was kept alive in the south, he said; it was Shun, a rustic man, who was most closely associated with “gentle and measured” music, and it was the last king of Shang, a royal, who was the maker of “violent and abandoned” music. Several commentaries cite this source in trying to explain why Confucius was displeased with hearing Zilu playing the zither in his home. He did not like the stubborn and unbridled sound, they say, and he was also worried that Zilu’s intemperate music, like his “tough and unbending” appearance, could signal that his life might not end well. Yet when other disciples began to shun Zilu because of his remark, Confucius offered a correction, saying that Zilu might not have entered the inner recess of his teaching but he had already stepped inside the gate.
11.16 Zigong asked, “Of Shi [Zizhang] and Shang [Zixia], which one is worthier?”
The Master said, “Shi overshoots the mark, while Shang falls short.”
“Does this mean, then, that Shi is the better of the two?”
The Master said, “Overshooting the mark is about as imperfect as falling short.”
Liu Baonan cites separate chapters of the Book of Rites to point out the two possible ways of understanding “overshooting the mark” and “falling short”—whether Confucius was referring to a lack of ritual propriety or to his disciples’ natural propensities. A passage in “Confucius Relaxing at Home” (Zhongni yanju) suggests the first scenario, while the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong) implies the second. Yet we know that the person who is smart and impatient and the person who is slow and methodical are both prone to ritual blunders. This was true with Shi (Zizhang) and Shang (Zixia), as the Analects can bear out, especially in 19.12, 19.15, and 19.16.
11.17 The wealth of the Jisun family exceeded that of the Duke of Zhou, yet Ran Qiu had been collecting taxes for them to add further to their wealth. The Master said, “He is no disciple of mine. My young friends, you may beat the drums and attack him.”
The history in the Zuo Commentary offers a detailed account of the events that led up to the scene here, where Confucius is clearly enraged with Ran Qiu, the disciple he should have felt most indebted to because Ran Qiu had orchestrated his return to Lu and helped him to secure the honorific title of guolao, our “elder statesman.” Toward the end of 484 BC, right after Confucius came home, the Zuo Commentary states, the head of the Jisun family sent Ran Qiu, who was their chief steward, to Confucius, to sound out their plan to collect land taxes from their tenants. When Ran Qiu put the question to him, Confucius said, “I don’t understand a thing about it.” Privately, however, he told Ran Qiu, “The gentleman gauges his action according to the spirit of the rites—when conferring a benefit, he tries to be generous; when performing a service, he aims for what is most appropriate; when imposing a tax, he is sparing.” Confucius also said this: “If the Jisuns really want to do the right thing, there is always the standard set by the Duke of Zhou. Now if they want to act as they please, why come to me?” The standard set by the Duke of Zhou is discussed in 12.9. It was called che, where “people were taxed one part in ten” and where the tax in kind came only from the public land they worked on. The early commentaries referred to the che as the “universal standard”—a standard that made the most sense because “people will have sufficiency” in bountiful or lean years, which meant that the ruler, too, will increase his wealth. (Ran Qiu’s role here was further complicated by the fact that Jisuns were not in a position to collect taxes because they were hereditary counselors, not rulers. Thus whatever authority they had wrested from their ruler could not have been legitimate.)
What Confucius said privately to Ran Qiu proved to be useless. By the spring of the next year, “the land tax was administered,” according to the chronicle of the Lu; by winter, a locust plague was recorded. Now Confucius was furious with Ran Qiu. And so when he tells the other disciples that they “may beat the drums and attack him,” he means that it is all right for them to criticize Ran Qiu publicly for his offense.
11.18 Chai [Zigao] is simpleminded; Can [Zeng Can, or Zengzi] is slow; Shi [Zizhang] is given to excess; You [Zilu] tends to be unruly.
Zigao was a disciple of Confucius, and, according to the history in the Zuo Commentary, he was with Zilu shortly before Zilu was killed in an act of bravura in the final chapter of the succession crisis in Wei. And it was Zigao who asked Zilu not to get involved in a conflict whose outcome had already been decided. This Zigao appears in the Analects twice: here, where he is described as stupid or simpleminded (yu), and in 11.25, where the conversation implies that he lacks learning. Scholars over the years have come to Zigao’s defense, pointing to a few stories about this man from the Han dynasty, which suggest that, rather than being simpleminded, Zigao possessed an innocent, an uncomplicated, mind. But why does Confucius say Zeng Can (Zengzi) is “slow”? This, as I indicate in my comments on 1.4, could be because Zeng Can spent too much time reflecting on his own conduct. And as for Zizhang and Zilu, Confucius’ characterization of these two disciples here resonates with what we find in the records of the Analects about them. Liu Baonan feels that the evaluation of these four men was consistent with what Confucius had always said about his disciples—that some were overly cautious while others were wildly spirited, and none, with the exception of Yan Hui, could hold on to a position of equanimity.
11.19 The Master said, “Hui [Yan Hui] is almost there, yet he frequently lives in poverty. Si [Zigong] does not accept his lot, and so he is good at making money. And [because of it] he is given to assessing a situation and weighing the favorable against the unfavorable, and is often right in his speculation.”
Yan Hui had nearly perfected his character—he was “almost there”—even though, for the better part of his life, he lived in deprivation. This means that circumstances made no difference to him because he loved learning and he was on a quest for self-understanding. Zigong was different, their teacher observed: he would not accept his lot, and so he learned to make money; in so doing he acquired the skills of “assessing a situation” and “reading people,” and so he was “often right in his speculation.” Although Confucius preferred Yan Hui, he also appreciated Zigong, for not bowing to his circumstances and for being able to let the skills he learned as a tradesman sharpen his wit and judgment.
11.20 Zizhang asked about the way of a truly good man [shanren].
The Master said, “He does not tread in the footsteps of those before him, but, then, he is unable to reach the inner recesses [of moral knowledge].”
> A shanren is a person born with a strong moral impulse. Such a person may have success in “curtailing violence and killing,” but he will not be able to reach “the inner recesses”—and possess the moral insight and presence of a sage—if he does not follow the cultural vestiges and learn from the rites and music left behind by the former kings. This is the reading of the traditional commentaries.
11.21 The Master said, “You show approval of him because he seems sincere in what he says. But is he truly a gentleman, or does he simply put on a dignified appearance?”
The Han scholars believe that this is the second part of 11.20—that being “sincere in speech,” being “gentlemanly in conduct,” and being “dignified in appearance” are the attributes of a “truly good man.” The Song scholar Zhu Xi disagrees. He feels that the point Confucius is trying to make here is the difficulty of distinguishing a true gentleman from a fake—that even a person whose words seem genuine could turn out to be an imposter. My reading follows Zhu Xi’s because his reading reflects a central concern in Confucius’ teachings, not just about what is true but also about the gap between speech and conduct.
11.22 Zilu asked, “When I hear something [that needs to be addressed], should I take action right away?”
The Master said, “When your father and elder brother are still alive, how can you take action as soon as you hear something?”
Ran You [Qiu] asked, “When I hear something [that needs to be addressed], should I take action right away?”
The Master said, “Upon hearing such a thing, you should take action right away.”
Gongxi Hua said, “When You [Zilu] asked you whether he should take action as soon as he heard something [that needed to be addressed], you said, as long as his father and elder are still alive [he should not]. But when Qiu [Ran You] asked you the same question, you said, he should take action right away. Now I am confused. May I beseech you for an explanation?”
