The Analects of Confucius

The Arthur Waley Estate, Arthur Waley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415361729
• eBook ISBN: 9781135650919
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1938.

Previous translations of the Analects of Confucius are based upon a medieval interpretation which reflects the philosophy of the 12th century A.D rather than of the 5th century B.C., when Confucius lived. This book detaches the Analects from the Scholastic interpretation and lets these famous sayings speak for themselves.

Appendix I

The Interpretations

THERE are two main interpretations of the Analects, the ‘old’ and the ‘new.’ The old interpretation is that of the Lun Yü Chi Chieh, ‘Collected Explanations of the Lun Yü,’ presented to the throne by a committee of scholars about A.D. 240. The chief commentators whose explanations were here collected are Pao Hsien (6 B.C.-A.D. 65), Ma Jung, Chêng Hsüan, Wang Su, the noted literary forger (A.D. 195–256) and Chou-shêng Lieh, who is interesting to us from the fact that he was a native of Tun-huang, the scene of Sir Aurel Stein’s and Professor Pelliot’s epoch-making archaeological discoveries. A commentary falsely attributed to K’ung An-kuo (c. 130–90 B.C.) was also used. It seems likely that the editors did not originally indicate which explanations were extracted from which commentaries. Possessors of the book added the names as best they could, and there was subsequently a good deal of confusion as to which commentary any particular gloss really came from; for the commentaries themselves fell out of use and disappeared. It seemed, indeed, in the highest degree unlikely that any of them would be recovered. But as has already been mentioned, a considerable part of Chêng Hsüan’s commentary was found at Tun-huang. Many of the glosses that the current Lun Yü Chi Chieh attributes to him occur verbatim in the Tun-huang fragments; but there are also many discrepancies.

The main object of the old interpreters¹ was to make the text easily comprehensible to current readers. They do not use it as a peg either for pure philology or for moral edification. To this end they explain allusions to persons and events by reference to the annals and to the much-expanded legend of Confucius and his disciples, as it existed in their time. For the rest, they confine themselves to translating archaisms into the language of their own day, and to bringing allusions to rituals and usages into line with current ritual theories. Almost all the information they supply is such as anyone familiar with extant early literature could even to-day easily supply for himself. They are valuable in that they show the new interpretation to have had no ancient authority. But they seldom help anyone with a complete knowledge of early Chinese literature a step further towards understanding the real difficulties of the text.

The old interpretation, in all its essentials at any rate, held the field until the second half of the twelfth century. Hitherto the Analects had been a scripture among other scriptures, studied by those who were adept in ancient literature. But in the Sung dynasty it became a school-book, and finally not merely a school-book, but the school-book, basis of all education. This transformation was due almost entirely to the efforts of one very remarkable man, Chu Hsi (A.D. I 130—1200). Chu Hsi was occupied with the Analects during the greater part of his life. His labours were embodied in a series of books, culminating in the Lun Yü Chi Chu of 1177. But we possess very minute records of his conversations,¹ and we see him down till his last years still wrestling with the problems that the Chi Chu had provisionally disposed of, meeting criticisms of that work and constantly modifying his published opinions.

Chu Hsi, like Confucius, was a ‘transmitter rather than an originator.’ His main object was to popularize the new approach to the Confucian Classics taught by the brothers Ch’êng.²

Neo-Confucianism, as we call the school to which the Ch’êng brothers belonged, had its origins in the ninth century.³ If it seems to us to spring into the world unheralded upon the rise of the Sung, it is only because of the hiatus due to the disturbed state of China in the long period of anarchy between T’ang and Sung. The method of this school, as applied to the Classics, was a complete reinterpretation in terms of the syncretist philosophy (deeply influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism) which had gradually grown up since the ninth century.

Chu Hsi has been called a great scholar, but no one would call him so who had any experience of the difference between scholarship and theology. For though Chu Hsi was not a theologian in the literal sense of the term, though he is concerned with a Truth rather than with a God, his methods are at every point those of the theologian, not those of the scholar. It was not his aim to discover, as a scholar would have done, what the Classics meant when they were written. He assumed that there was one Truth, embodied equally in the teachings of the brothers Ch’êng and in the sayings of Confucius. In the teachings of the brothers this Truth lay on the surface; in the Analects it lay hidden behind the words, and was not easily accessible even to those who had fully embraced it in its more exoteric manifestations. Chu Hsi’s task was to make this hidden Truth, ensconced in the Classical books, accessible to everybody. To him every sentence vibrated with this Truth. The old interpreters allowed the reader to go his own way, only coming to his assistance occasionally where an archaism or allusion was likely to hold him up. Chu Hsi is always at our elbow, ready to save us from the ‘obfuscation’ of thinking that the text really means what it says. Again and again Confucius confesses to ignorance and imperfection. Chu Hsi is at hand to tell us that this is only ritual modesty; ‘How could a Sage really err, how could a Sage truly not know?’; or to construe the sentence differently, so that ‘You and I are not equal to him’ (V, 8) becomes ‘I grant you are not equal to him’; or to make a Sage figure as a Sage should, so that ‘sent on a mission’ becomes ‘sent on a mission by Confucius’ (VI, 3). He is there to save us from supposing that a Sage ever spoke the dialect of his native State (VII, 17); and all the time, by perpetual paraphrase and adaptation, he brings the recalcitrant text into line with Truth, so that in the end the Analects become as orthodox a Neo-Confucian treatise as any that proceeded from the class-room of the brothers Ch’êng. Chu Hsi was a great popular educator, a great evangelist; but in no sense was he a scholar.

The following discourse of Yu Tso (flourished c. A.D. 1100) on Analects, XII, 1, contained in his Lun Yü Tsa Chieh, is a good example of the mixed Taoist-Buddhist interpretation of the Analects, which prevailed in Sung times:

Goodness is the heart of man. All that the word Goodness means is ‘getting access to one’s real heart.’ In its true and original state the heart did not experience pleasure, anger, grief or delight. But once a man begins to pursue his own private ends, harassed by rage and desire, he ceases to be in any proper sense a man. If on the other hand, he can overcome the personal cravings of his human heart and return to the impersonal state that belongs to the heart of Tao, then he will regard others just as he regards himself, will regard things just as he regards men, and the true original state of this man’s nature will be manifested. Henceforward he will be seen to treat his parents as parents should be treated, to show consideration to his inferiors and affection towards all creatures, all of which will follow spontaneously from workings of his real, unspoiled heart. That is what is meant by the saying ‘Goodness is overcoming one’s personal self and returning to li.’¹ For li simply means the natural state of the heart. It is a question of getting the heart back to its original state; that one thing and no more. It is not a question of recognizing a duty as a duty, and doing it; or of recognizing a creature as a creature, and loving it. Nor is it a matter of piling day on day or month on month before one can attain to the end desired. If a man can for a single day return to the original state, go back to the always-so,² then the ten thousand things will be for him all of like form and condition, and wherever he goes there will be Goodness. That is why the Master said, ‘If for a single day a man can overcome his personal self and return to li, everything under Heaven for that man turns into Goodness.’

Chu Hsi himself is, as a rule, careful to avoid interpretations too markedly Buddhist or Taoist in character. He does not, however, refrain from using expositions wholly bound up with Sung scholasticism and having no connexion whatever with doctrines which could possibly have existed in the time of Confucius. For example, on Analects, 1, 2, he reproduces a passage from Ch’êng Hao which insists that while Goodness is inborn, family piety is not; for it is well known that ‘nature’ consists ‘solely of four constituents, Goodness, Conscience, Reverence and Knowledge.’ All this is not merely alien to but directly contradicts the teaching of the Analects. Confucius would, for example, have been surprised indeed to learn that Goodness, the quality he so persistently refused to accord even to his most favoured disciples, was common to all men; and that inborn knowledge, which he himself expressly disclaimed,¹ was to be reckoned as an inevitable part of human equipment.

The methods of critical philology were first applied to the text by scholars such as Yüan Yüan (1764–1849), Wang Nien-sun (1744–1832),² Wang Yin-chih (1766–1834), Yü Yüeh (1821–1906). The only European writer who has used these native studies to any purpose is Chavannes, in dealing with the biography of Confucius in Mêmoires Historiques, Vol. V. All existing translations of the Analects rely entirely on the ‘scriptural’ interpretation of Chu Hsi. It is the Chu Hsi interpretation which, except in small academic circles, is still accepted unquestioningly everywhere in the Far East and which, in so far as Confucius has not been replaced by Sun Yat-sen, still forms the basis of moral education. Translations such as those of Legge, Soothill, Couvreur and Richard Wilhelm have therefore by no means lost their value; at the same time, there is room for a version such as mine, which attempts to tell the European reader not what the book means to the Far East of to-day, but what it meant to those who compiled it. I have used the work of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century native scholars, and appreciated it. But in many ways, especially as regards phonology, it is completely out of date; and my chief guide throughout has been a knowledge of the rest of early Chinese literature.

The references to Chou Li are to the Chou Li Chêng I of Sun I-jang. The transliteration used throughout is that of Wade, save for the omission of the short mark over u following ss and tz, and the occasional use of Yi for I where confusion with the English first person singular was likely. The substitution of an apostrophe for the ‘rough breathing,’ to mark aspirated consonants, is a concession to the preferences of the printer.

¹ What follows, refers in the main to the Chi Chieh; Huang K’an (died A.D. 545) is already considerably more expatiatory; his sub-commentary on the Chi Chieh was lost in China, but rediscovered in Japan in 1720 by Nemoto Hakushu, who published it at Yedo in 1750, with a preface by the well-known scholar Fukube Genkyo. It was reprinted in China in the nineteenth century. Fragments have also been recovered at Tun-huang, and these show that the current text is a contamination of the Huang K’an commentary with later commentaries.

¹ Those referring to the Analects are conveniently collected in chapters 10 to 19 of the Chu Tzu Ch’üan Shu.

² Ch’êng Hao (A.D. 1032–1085), Ch’êng I (1033–1107).

³ The mental furniture of the average chün-tzu in the ninth century was derived impartially from Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.

¹ Literally ‘ritual’; but in the language of the Sung philosophers it had come to mean ‘the natural.’

² The vocabulary belongs to Taoism; the conception, to the Sudden Illumination branch of Zen Buddhism.

¹ VII, 19.

² Valuable commentaries on passages in the Analects will be found scattered about his Tu Shu Tsa Chih, and in the Ching I Shu Wen of his son Wang Yin-chih. Much of the best work of the eighteenth and nineteenth century scholars is collected in the Huang Ch’ing Ching Chieh (‘Classical Commentaries of the Ch’ing Dynasty’) and its continuation Huang Ch’ing Ching Chieh Hsü Pien, referred to henceforward as H.C.C.C. and H.P.

Appendix II

Biographical Dates

INTEREST tends to centre upon certain kinds of biographical data to the exclusion of others. Western scholars think it extremely important to discover exactly when people were born and exactly when they died. About various other kinds of biographical data we have no curiosity at all. Chinese legend finds it consequent to record the exact height of its heroes,¹ and the American writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, reflecting presumably a fairly general interest in the subject, records² that one of her characters ‘did not weigh over 110 pounds at most.’ A European biographer is not expected to give exact data about height or weight; but he is prepared to spend months in discovering whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Appendix 1: The Interpretations
• Appendix 2: Biographical Dates
• Translation
• Additional Notes
• Textual Notes
• Index