Monday, September 12

Reading:    "The Confucian School," pp. 1-11;
                    The Analects of Confucius, all of Books I & IV (use the Bookmarks tab), plus these additional passages: XI.1, XI.2

At last, with Monday's class we begin to read Chinese philosophy.  Our starting point is Confucianism and its first philosopher, Confucius (551-479).  The first reading, from the Coursepack, will give you an introduction to Confucius and his circle, and a brief overview of the concepts that are pivotal to the earliest stages of Confucian thought.  The "Introduction" to the Analects will give you an overview of our first "text" -- the collected sayings ascribed to Confucius and his personal students.  It will be good if you move rapidly through these introductory readings before embarking on the text of the Analects itself.

As you will learn, the Analects is a text composed of twenty "books," each book consisting of a series of short entries -- generally between about 15 and 50 passages -- sometimes linked to one another thematically, sometimes not.  The Analects is in many ways the hardest of all Chinese books to read, although you can go through it in an hour and feel that there have been no sentences you haven't understood (unlikely, though, that you'd understand why anyone would think the book was particularly interesting).

"Analects" means something like "pithy saying," and it's not a bad title for the text.  The Chinese name of the text (Lunyu) means something more like "sequenced sayings," meant to reflect the fact that originally, each passage was probably recorded on an individual slender strip of pierced bamboo, with a string tying each "book" of strips together.  Although Confucius wrote none of the text, there may be portions that record conversations recalled by his own disciples.  Other portions were added gradually by later generations of disciples, the text probably building throughout the period c. 475-200.  The "Introduction" sketches a quick model of how the various "books" of the text can be sorted in these terms.

The Analects is unsystematic, but it is rarely random. As you read each book, you are likely to feel at first that you are just hearing one platitude after another. If you were to read each book many times in the conviction that the book as a whole must make sense, you would find that many groups of passages actually form coherent discussions: the editors of the text arranged them with considerable care (although this is not consistently true, and in certain books of the Analects, it's hard to avoid a sense that you've stumbled on a sections that were originally part of "The Post-its of Confucius"). What we are missing is the crucial thing given to every disciple along with the text: a Confucian Master to link the passages together for us, and explain thematic continuities.

I am asking you to begin by reading two "books" in their entirety.  We begin with Book I, because it introduces a wide range of themes in a type of overview manner, and because the notes to Book I (in the register on the right side of each page) are designed to help guide you initially into the text.  But the philosophical "beginnings" of the Analects are more easily seen in Book IV, and in class, I will focus principally on that book, and on two additional passages selected from a later book, XI.1 and XI.2.

I  begin class discussion with Book IV because it is the most coherent of the books, both stylistically and thematically, and so the easiest point of entry. In style and placement in the text, it also appears to be among the earliest of the books. Two terms central to Confucius' teachings dominate Book IV.  We will use the Chinese words for these terms, which will initially be "blank" for you.  The terms are ren (pronounced "ren"; sometimes translated as "goodness" or "humanity") and junzi (pronounced "joon-dz"; sometimes translated as "gentleman").   You can read more about these two terms in the Glossary and in the notes to the text. 

These two terms seem central to certain strings of passages within Book IV, and you can spot these as you read.  Among the groupings of passages in Book IV which seem thematically linked are these: 1-7 all deal with ren, and generally speak of ren in terms of matters of choice or of attitude. For example, 1, 5 and 6 all discuss crucial choices which reveal whether a person is or is not ren, and 7 relates to this. 2, 3, and 4 discuss attitudes. All the passages suggest that the issue of being ren is cast in terms of simple alternatives: to do what is right, or not to.  Somewhat further, the discussion begins to focus more on the junzi, but again, dual options seems to be the mode of thought (9-11, 16-17). The junzi is repeatedly contrasted to people called, in the Chinese, "small men." A great deal of Book IV seems to involve defining these two types by contrast.

Ren and the junzi are not the only terms of interest to the book.  Another linked group appears at 18-21, all on "filiality": a simpleminded Confucian virtue repellant to many Westerners, which is, in fact, subtle, and relates to the Chinese portrait of human beings as innately social. Some passages which do not appear side by side are, nevertheless, thematically linked (5 and 23; 22 and 24; 18 and 26). Passage 15 is interesting as a profound intrusion in this book -- it probably was incorporated after the rest of the book was complete.