Original Analects Supplement
LY 14
(c0305)

Passages: 1a

Prefatory Note. This is the first of two "double" chapters, each of which is about twice as long as the standard Analects chapter. Both of them appear to reflect an extra burst of activity in the Lu school at the close of the 04th century. We have suggested that many of the passages, both the newly composed ones and those recycled from earlier text, are relevant to the specific situation at the Lu court in that period. The precise interpretation of individual passages cannot be guaranteed. There is no independent evidence for Lu politics in the late 04c, and in any case, the nuances in question, however clear they would have been to hearers at the time, are likely to be more opaque to the modern student.

14:1a. This passage and the several following may be seen as psychological preparation for the exit from official life which seems to have occurred in in LY 15 (c0305), and whose psychological consequences are visible in LY 1 (c0294). The note here struck is the shame of taking money from a state which "has not the Way." These passages give no particular hint about the sense in which Lu of the late 04c might have lacked the Way. In LY 15:1 we discover that the issue was Lu military policy. So far toward the pacifistic left had the Analects leaders come from a decade earlier, when the military needs of the state, though carefully subordinated to other matters (LY 12:7, c0326), were still fully recognized (LY 13:29, c0322).

If, as we infer, Mencius indeed left the Lu school shortly after LY 13 was completed, taking with him his theory of populist statecraft, and also a willingness to address the rulers of the major warmaking powers such as Ngwei and Chi, then what he left behind him seems to have been a disinclination to grapple with these large but brutal questions. That residue of impracticality is what we seem to have in LY 14-15. As Tswei Shu observed from other data, a steady decline in the effectiveness of Lu School leadership followed, through the remainder of the book (LY 16-10), which in our interpretation corresponds to the period of more destructive warfare which came in approximately with the 03rd century. To these challenges, the Lu Confucians proved to be unequal. It was left for the more cold-eyed Sywndz (in SZ 15, c0250) to formulate a Confucian theory of war.

 

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