Original Analects Supplement
LY 10
(c0465)

Passages: 1a

Prefatory Note. A translator embarking on a long project is likely to worry about some part of the task ahead: an especially difficult or uncongenial section. We had doubts of that kind about LY 10, which is not only different from other chapters, but different in a way that does not engage our sympathies: it is a list of rules of behavior. But when we did finally take up LY 10, we found that we rather enjoyed it. Part of the fun, here as in the rest of the text, was in trying to infer the society in back of the rules from the rules themselves.

10:1a. The "country association" was presumably a ceremony of the non-elite level of society. Our impression is that the elite of the 05c and early 04c were only nominally in contact with the lower populace, and then only on ceremonial occasions, where an official presence might be thought appropriate. Very soon, however, there came the incorporation of the lower populace into the state as a militarily eligible class, not replacing, but vastly supplementing, the elite chariot warriors who had previously furnished the whole of the military power of the state, but who became, in the 04c military reforms, its officer corps. For an earlier sort of contact between the diplomatic elite and the populace (and folksongs) of other states, see LY 6:13.

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