E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
The Many Lives of Yen Hwei: Unpacking Analects 12:1
Monday 18 Feb 2008
1:25 PM, Room 218, Jefferson Academic Center, Clark University
Sponsored by the Department of History and the Asian Studies Program

Summary

Those who read the Analects of Confucius looking for ethical guidance in their for their own lives may not, at first glance, get a lot out of Analects 12:1, in which the disciple Yen Hwei asks about the classical virtue "rvn" (roughly, "otherness") and is told that it means overcoming the self and returning to "li" (roughly, ritual propriety). When Yen Hwei asks what this means, he is told that he should not look at what is not proper, or listen to what is proper, and so on. This is neither unexpected (most people have been hearing it from their mom since they were three), nor edifying (the deep meaning of life somehow eludes these maxims). At this point, a historical reading, which asks not what we can get out of the passage, but what the people who wrote it were putting into it, can come to our aid.

The lecture traces the history of Yen Hwei in the Analects, from its early chapters where he is the outstandingly intelligent disciple, to 12:1, where he is about as stupid as they come, to the last five chapters of the book, Analects 16-20, where he is altogether absent. Why these differences? A second tour through the book shows that when he was in favor, Hen Hwei represented a meditative ideal, eating and sleeping little, and concentrating on the same idea for months at a time, in order to achieve a special mental state and a deeper understanding. When the Analects proprietors themselves turned from the values of Confucius himself to the more ritual focus of later Confucianism, this intuitive mode of knowledge fell out of favor, and it was officially banished, along with its chief example, Yen Hwei. Ironically but suitable, Yen Hwei then turned up in the Jwangdz, an aggressively Dauist text, where he openly learns meditative techniques from Confucius, and ends by being so successful at getting rid of his ordinary self through concentration and breath control that Confucius acknowledges that Yen Hwei is his superior, and asks to become his disciple. It thus emerges that Analects 12:1 is not a wisdom passage, it is a moment in a Confucian argument with the Dauist group, about the validity of meditation as a mode of knowledge. It is a battle rather than a sermon.

If, armed with this understanding about the boundary disputes between the Confucians and the Dauists, we go back to the book looking for the places in which the Analects is teaching wisdom, we find that one thread running consistently through both its early and its late layers is that of an empirical ethics based on learning from observing one's own reactions to other people's behavior -

The Master said, When I am walking along in a group of three, I will always find my teacher among them. I pick out the good parts and follow them; the bad parts, and change them (7:22)

and on treating others with the knowledge gained from observing one's own reactions:

Dz-gung asked, Is there one saying that one can put in practice in all circumstances? The Master said, That would be reciprocity, would it not? What he himself does not want, let him not do it to others (15:24)

This is not a supernatural ethic, and it is not defined by any one culture. It is based on the elementary lateral relations between one human being and another. It is not confined to any of the warring Chinese philosophical schools. Besides these Confucian echoes, it also turns up in the Dauist and Mician texts. Even outside of China, it travels well, and some will recognize that certain of its maxims turn up, some verbatim and all recognizable, in the West Asian religious texts of a later century. Its wide acceptance recommends it to our consideration also. It reminds us that we are not going to learn about life by considering only our own desires; we also need to take other people into account. Ethics is the one thing you cannot do in isolation. As the Analects puts it at one point:

The Master said, Virtue is not solitary; it has to have neighbors (4:25)

And in this spirit, it is perhaps when one is attending most carefully to what the Analects is up to, and forgetting one's own agenda, that one learn the most about what one's own agenda should be.

A major implication of the talk is that the Analects is not one consistent book. Instead, it is an accumulation of different statements made by the School of Confucius over an extended period. Most of the contents relate not to Confucius, but to the interschool squabbles and political crises of its later leaders. The talk host, Professor Paul Ropp, asked one of the speakers afterward, What percentage of the Analects do you think reflects the historical Confucius, and what percent of the Gospels reflects the historical Jesus? The answers were 5% and 15%, respectively. But we here add a postscript for the Internet audience: the Analects had a much longer time to diverge from the original stance of its founding figure than did the Gospels: 230 years versus maybe 70 years. So the rate of divergence is more or less the same

All traditions diverge; that is how they stay alive. We can personally like the early doctrines or the late doctrines of some philosophical school, but the first thing to understand is that there are early and late doctrines. One should not wear oneself out philosophically in trying to detect some deep harmony in the various positions a school may take over time. The real harmony is simply in keeping going.

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