Stories
the narratives it tells itself
Out of food between Chen and Cai.
The party was cut off, the provisions ran out, the followers were too ill to stand. Zilu came to him angry and asked whether a gentleman also has to endure this. Confucius said that a gentleman endures it — and that the difference is that the small man, in the same position, gives way completely.
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The stable burned down.
Returning from court, Confucius heard his stable had burned. Was anyone hurt? — he did not ask about the horses. The tradition keeps the story because it is the whole ethics in one reflex.
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When Yan Hui died.
Confucius cried out that Heaven was destroying him. He wept without restraint, and when the disciples said he was going beyond what the rites permitted, he said that if he did not grieve without restraint for this man, then for whom. The Analects records the breach of decorum without tidying it.
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Mencius's mother moves house.
She lived near a cemetery and the boy played at funerals; near a market and he played at trading; she moved next to a school and he played at ritual, and there she stayed. Later, when he came home from lessons early, she cut her half-finished weaving off the loom and asked him how this was different.
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The ox and the bell.
King Xuan saw an ox being led to be killed for the consecration of a bell, could not bear its trembling, and had a sheep used instead. The people said he was miserly. Mencius told him the feeling was exactly right and the reasoning was not — he had seen the ox and had not seen the sheep, and he had not seen his own starving people either.
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The Duke of Zhou hands it back.
He ruled as regent for his young nephew while the new dynasty was unstable, was accused by his own brothers of taking the throne, put down their rebellion, and then handed the government over when the king came of age. Confucius took him rather than any king as the model, and dreamt about him.
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The burning of the books.
In 213 BCE the Qin ordered the historical records of the conquered states and privately held copies of the classics destroyed, and the following year, by Sima Qian's account, scholars were executed. Whatever the exact numbers — historians argue about them — it fixed for two thousand years the Confucian view of what government without ritual looks like.
⚖ contested within
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Seven days looking at bamboo.
Taking Zhu Xi's instruction to investigate things literally, the young Wang Yangming and a friend sat in front of a stand of bamboo to find its principle. The friend collapsed after three days; Wang lasted seven and made himself ill. He concluded that principle is not out there in the bamboo, and built a philosophy on the failure.
⚖ contested within
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The Analects.
Twenty books of fragments — a question, a reply, sometimes a single remark with no context — assembled by students of students. There is no system in it and several passages have no agreed meaning. It has nevertheless been memorised entire by East Asian children for two thousand years, and its phrases are ordinary speech in four languages.
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The Mencius.
Where the Analects gives fragments, this argues — for innate goodness, for the four sprouts, and for the proposition that a ruler who ruins the people is no longer a ruler and killing him is not regicide. The first Ming emperor had that passage struck from the official edition, which is the best evidence of how the book reads.
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The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean.
Two short chapters that Zhu Xi lifted out of the Book of Rites and promoted into free-standing classics. The first gives the ladder from investigating things through making the intention sincere to bringing peace to the world; the second makes sincerity a cosmic principle. With the Analects and Mencius they became the examination curriculum for six hundred years.
held by most
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The Book of Songs.
Three hundred and five poems — courtship, harvest, complaint about being conscripted, and court hymns. Confucius said the whole collection comes down to one line: no twisty thoughts. Being able to quote it aptly was a working diplomatic skill, and he told his own son that without it he would have nothing to say.
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The Book of Rites.
Forty-nine chapters on how to sit, stand, address a superior, mourn, marry, offer and bury. It is the operating manual, and almost everything anyone actually does in Confucian practice comes from here rather than from the Analects — which is why a tradition famous for a book of sayings is in fact organised around a book of procedures.
held by most
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The Yijing.
A Zhou divination manual with a philosophical commentary attached centuries later, which converted a book about casting lots into a book about change. It is shared with Taoism and with everyone else in the Chinese world. Confucius is said to have worn out the leather cords binding his copy three times.
⚖ contested within
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The Classic of Filial Piety.
Eighteen short chapters framed as Confucius instructing Zengzi, scaling filial duty from the commoner up to the emperor and claiming it as the root from which all virtue and all teaching grow. It was among the first texts put in front of a child, and it is the source of the line about not daring to injure the body your parents gave you.
held by most
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