Annotations on the Analects…………

2,942 characters2005.12.13

Today I picked up a strange book at the Inward Bookstore and ended up reading it until I was almost out of breath……
Peking University Department of Philosophy Class of 1970 worker-peasant-soldier students: Annotations to The Analects, Zhonghua Book Company, 1974
Below I randomly excerpt two relatively short “criticisms”:

10·22 A friend dies, with nowhere to turn, and he says: “It is for me to bury him”
[Notes] 1
Friend — refers to someone who shared Confucius’s aspirations and path; this person died and nobody took care of him, clearly a decadent aristocrat.
[Translation] (Confucius’s) friend died, and no one took responsibility for him; (Confucius) said: “Let me take charge of his burial.”
[Criticism]
When Yan Hui, Confucius’s proud disciple, died, he called to heaven and beat his breast, appearing utterly grief-stricken, but when asked to buy a set of inner and outer coffins for Yan Hui, he would not part with a single penny. Here, when his friend dies, he says he will bury him himself. He deliberately puts on this appearance of benevolence and generosity in order to win people over and collude with his clique.

13·27 The Master said: “Firm, resolute, plain, and taciturn are close to benevolence.”
[Notes] 1 Plain — unsophisticated. 2 Taciturn — slow in speech.
[Translation]
Confucius said: “Firmness, resolve, plainness, and careful speech are close to benevolence.”
[Criticism]
Here Confucius is demanding that the slave-owning aristocracy, in fighting alongside the newly emerging landlord class to restore slavery, must first of all be firm and resolute; second, they must be cautious in speech and conduct, put on an honest air, avoid showing their hand, and be adept at using hidden counterrevolutionary methods. In Confucius’s view, if one can do these things, one is close to what he calls “benevolence.”

These words are hilarious by today’s standards, but when I think that thirty-four years ago the “senior classmates” from the same Department of Philosophy at Peking University wrote this book in the same way—offering line-by-line annotations to the Analects (I have selected the shortest annotations; generally each sentence has anywhere from half a page to more than a full page of “criticism,” plus the appended “The Counterrevolutionary Life of Confucius”)—they wrote it with grandiloquent language and an imposing air, and that really could not have been easy either…… And having produced such a book, they must likewise have felt a strong sense of accomplishment; when reading it, they must have been overflowing with passion, and would certainly not have broken into suppressed laughter the way I did. We need not judge them with overly harsh eyes; that was an insane era, and people all easily became unhinged. But this era has its own madness too, only perhaps to a lesser degree than during the Cultural Revolution. Who knows—decades or centuries later, when people look back again, whether they too will laugh at the foolishness of our modern times? Reading the writings of that era, and thinking that we ourselves may also now be caught in some kind of frenzy without realizing it, even if we perhaps do not know whether our own age is still such a frenzy, it is always good to keep a humble heart