Analects 12.1 and the commentarial tradition.

• Author: Kieschnick, John

THE TWELFTH CHAPTER of the Analects opens with the disciple Yan Yuan questioning Confucius about Goodness (ren).(1) The Master responds that "to ke ji and return to propriety (li) is Goodness. If for a single day a man could ke ji, then all under heaven would consider Goodness to be his. The practice of Goodness comes from oneself alone, how could it come from others?" Yan Yuan then asks for a detailed explanation of how Goodness is achieved, to which Confucius responds, "If it is not |in accordance with~ propriety, do not look. If it is not |in accordance with~ propriety, do not listen. If it is not |in accordance with~ propriety, do not speak. If it is not |in accordance with~ propriety, do not move." Finally, Yan Yuan announces, "Though I am not quick, I would like to practice these words."

James Legge translated the phrase ke ji as "to subdue the self"; Soothill as "the denial of self"; Lyall as "to conquer the self"; Wing-Tsit Chan as "to master oneself"; and D. C. Lau as "overcoming the self."(2) But the admonition to "overcome the self and return to propriety" stands out dramatically in the context of the Analects. Does the passage imply that humans are by nature evil and that only through rigorous training and introspection can the cultivated gentleman overcome his savage, animal instincts? The English word "evil," at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, connotes absolute bad. Did ancient Chinese thinkers assume this sort of stark dualism, or is this a modern interpretation?

The only Western scholars to translate the phrase in a significantly different way are Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound. Pound translates the phrase ke ji as to "support oneself" in the first appearance and to "be adequate to" oneself when the same phrase occurs in the next line.(3) Waley, noting the classical usage of ke as "to be able to," translates the phrase: "He who can himself submit to ritual is Good"(4) (emphasis mine).

A solution to the puzzle would seem to lie in an understanding of the word "ren" which is after all the topic under discussion. At once a standard of moral behavior, and a mystical entity in itself, the concept of ren in the Analects--variously translated as "benevolence," "Goodness," "humaneness," and "altruism"--is notoriously elusive. Arthur Waley's translation of the word as "Goodness" has the merit of being sufficiently general to cover the word's various connotations. For now, suffice it to say that ren in the Analects is a desirable goal, an ideal for which the student of the text is expected to strive.

Fortunately, though the relationship between this ideal and one's natural impulses is difficult to determine from the terse language of the Analects, later commentators on the phrase make their stances on the issue quite clear. Later interpretations of the passage are by no means uniform; the difficulty Western scholars have had in interpreting the phrase is mirrored in the commentaries of Chinese scholars. Even a cursory reading of commentaries to the Analects quickly dispels facile notions of a monolithic Confucian tradition firmly founded on a set of commonly held truths. Tracing the vagaries of the phrase through the commentarial tradition reveals much, not only about the attitudes of various Chinese thinkers towards the self and towards the Analects, but also about the tenuous nature of their claims to objectivity--the foundation of classical exegesis.

HAN-TANG

The basis for the majority of the English translations cited above was established already in the Han by the scholar Ma Rong (79-166) who understood the phrase to mean "to restrain oneself" |ke ji: yue shen~.(5) That is, ke ji is a process of self-cultivation, or more accurately, of self-control. For Ma Rong, the self stands in stark opposition to Goodness; only through submission to the bounds, or rather the binds, of ritual propriety can one curb the excesses of the self and become good. In a brief passage in his Fa yan, the Han thinker Yang Xiong defines ke not as "to restrain the self," but as "to overcome one's selfishness".(6) This is a significant departure from the Ma interpretation, both because of its harsher definition of ke and for its nuanced interpretation of ji. For Yang, the self was not a uniform entity, but a composite of both good and bad elements. The task facing the practitioner, then, was to weed out these bad elements--to overcome one's selfishness, rather than the self in general. But it was to be several centuries before scholars recognized the value of Yang's interpretation; up until the Song, discussion of the passage was dominated by Ma Rong's gloss. The central reason for the popularity of Ma Rong's interpretation was, perhaps, simply its accessibility, for Ma Rong's gloss was included in what were to become the two most influential editions of the Analects in the Six Dynasties period: He Yan's (190-249) Lunyu jijie, and Huang Kan's (488-545) Lunyu yishu, a subcommentary to He Yan's text.

Interestingly, both Huang Kan and He Yan's versions of the Analects, in addition to Ma Rong's "restrain" gloss, include an opposing interpretation of the phrase attributed to another Han scholar, Kong Anguo. In the text, the reader is presented with a startling contradiction: two distinct readings of the phrase side by side. Under the phrase "to keji and return to propriety is Goodness," we read: "Ma |Rong~ states, 'keji means to restrain the self.' Kong |Anguo~ states, 'fu means to return; if one is able (neng) of oneself to return to propriety, then this is Goodness.'"(7) The authenticity of Kong's authorship of a commentary to the Analects was vigorously challenged already in the Qing.(8) But what is important for our purposes here is that the gloss to 12.1 attributed to Kong was included in He Yan's third-century edition of the Analects and accepted as authentic all the way up to the eighteenth century. "Kong's" picture of self-cultivation here is markedly different from that of Ma Rong. For Kong, the point of the passage is not that the self and Goodness are opposing forces that can only be brought together through vigilant containment of natural impulses; rather, Kong emphasizes precisely the opposite: that Goodness is within the grasp of the individual; the individual can of himself, without external assistance, become good. For Kong, rather than condemning the self, Confucius had reaffirmed it.

Included in Huang Kan's subcommentary is yet another interpretation of Analects 12.1. In the text, Huang quotes the Eastern Jin scholar Fan Ning (339-401) who writes: "ke means to hold oneself responsible (ze). To 'return to propriety' is to blame oneself (zeke ji) for losing |one's sense of~ propriety. If one is not Good, then one cannot hold oneself responsible for returning to propriety. Therefore, if one can take the responsibility on oneself to return to propriety, then this is Goodness."(9) Fan Ning's interpretation approaches that of Kong ("to be able to"), while introducing a new factor into the discussion: responsibility. If one fails to return to propriety and achieve Goodness, one has only oneself to blame. Fan's sensitivity to this aspect of the passage stems no doubt from attention to the line of the Analects that follows: "Goodness comes from oneself alone. How could it come from others?" Innovative though it was, Fan Ning's interpretation was not to play a prominent role in the history of the Analects, for in the Song, Huang Kan's subcommentary--along with Fan Ning's glosses--disappeared, surviving in Japan from which it returned to China only in the seventeenth century.(10) In sum, at the beginning of the Song, two interpretations of the phrase were commonly accepted: Kong Anguo's "of oneself" to return to propriety is Good|ness~, and Ma Rong's to "overcome the self" is Good|ness~. While commentators disagreed over the nature of the self, with the exception of Yang Xiong, the composition of the self was not--at least in relation to this passage--a topic of discussion.

SONG

If the early commentaries provide us with vital clues about the thought of early thinkers, it is with the Song that we begin to get more extensive commentaries that reveal much more about the scholars who wrote them. In the early years of the Northern Song, the scholar-official Xing Bing (932-1010) completed a new subcommentary to He Yan's text. In the subcommentary, Xing attempts to reconcile the Ma and Kong interpretations, stating, "As for the Master saying 'to keji and return to propriety is Goodness,' ke means 'to restrain'; ji means 'the self'; and fu means 'to return.' He is saying, 'if one can restrain himself (neng yue ji) and return to propriety, then he is Good.'"(11) If here Xing seems to give equal emphasis to the interpretations of Kong and Ma, further on in his commentary it becomes clear that he wishes to emphasize and even sharpen Ma Rong's reading at Kong's expense.

Liu Xuan (fl.600) says, "ke should be interpreted as 'to overcome' (ke xun sheng ye). Ji means, the 'individual' (shen). When the individual has cravings and desires (shi yu) he should order them with propriety and righteousness. When one's cravings and desires do battle with propriety and righteousness, and propriety and righteousness overcome cravings and desires, then the individual returns to propriety. This then is Goodness. 'To return' is to say that when one's emotions are hounded by cravings and desires, and one has parted from propriety, one once again returns |to propriety~. Now we have verified that...