ABSTRACT
The Analects, or Lun-Yü (論語 lit. ‘ordered sayings’), purports to be a record of the teachings of Kong Zi (孔子) and his disciples. Kong Zi is more commonly known in the West by the latinization ‘Confucius’, bestowed upon him by Jesuit missionaries in the eighteenth century. His traditional dates are 551-479 BCE, but little is known for sure about his life.1 Most of the traditional details of his biography are derived from an account in the Record of the Historian, compiled around 100 BCE by the Grand Historian Sima Qian, and which consists largely of legend and literary invention. Some Western scholars have attempted to construct coherent chronologies of Confucius’ life from a variety of early sources and to separate potential facts from clear fiction,2 but so little can be known for sure that it seems best to stick to whatever facts we might glean from the Analects itself. Confucius was clearly a native of Lu (18.2), of humble economic background (9.6), and seems to have been a member of the scholar-official (shi 6) class, the lowest of the three classes of public office holders. Originally referring to an aristocratic warrior, shi had, by the time of Confucius, come to refer to a class of people who filled the middle and lower ranks of state governments, in primarily civil posts. Like Confucius, it seems that a subset of these scholar-officials were also ru (儒). This term, which later came to mean ‘Confucian’, and appears only once in the Analects (6.13), referred in Confucius’ time to a class of specialists concerned with transmitting and preserving the traditional rituals and texts of the Zhou dynasty. The fact that mastery of the Zhou classics and traditional ritual etiquette was a valued skill in public officials led many aspiring scholar-officials to seek out ru-like training for the sake of acquiring public office and – most importantly – the salary and public prestige that went along with it. This was only one of many contemporary phenomena that troubled Confucius, who felt that training in traditional cultural forms should be pursued as an end in itself. Confucius himself probably never held anything more than minor posts in his lifetime,
failing to realize his ambition of being employed at a high level, under a virtuous ruler, so that he could put his vision into practice. He did, however, gather around himself a fairly sizeable group of disciples, some of whom managed to obtain high governmental posts after the Master’s death. His vision was picked up by two prominent Warring States followers, Mencius and Xun Zi, the latter of whom was an extremely influential intellectual and teacher of Han Fei and Li Si, the two legalist thinkers who helped the first emperor of Qin unify China in 221 BCE. It was not until well into the Han dynasty, however, that Confucius was finally officially recognized as a great sage by the rulers of China, at which time the book that purports to be the record of his teachings, the Analects, became required reading for any educated Chinese person. Although Confucianism was eclipsed, during the Sui and Tang dynasties, by Buddhism, it continued even during this period to exert a powerful influence on the Chinese mind, and it was officially revived in the Song dynasty by the so-called ‘Neo-Confucian’ school. During the Ming dynasty the so-called ‘Four Books’ assembled by Zhu Xi (1130-1200) as the core of Confucian teachings – the Analects and the Mencius, along with two chapters from the Record of Ritual called the ‘Great Learning’ and the ‘Doctrine of the Mean’, all accompanied by Zhu Xi’s commentary – became the basis of China’s civil service examination, and were therefore memorized by every single educated Chinese person from 1313 until the last nationwide exam in 1910. Similar national exams in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam assured the hold of the Analects on the minds of the educated classes in those nations as well. Therefore, although the Master had little influence during his own lifetime, the cultural legacy he left to East Asia is difficult to overestimate. As Simon Leys has observed, ‘no book in the entire history of the world has exerted, over a longer period of time, a greater influence on a larger number of people than this slim little volume’ (1997: xvi).
