To Learn, and to Practise

Reading it step by step

This is the first of thirty pages on the Analects. Let's begin by stepping back.

Between about 800 and 200 BCE, great teachers appeared in several parts of the world at almost the same time: the Buddha in India, Confucius in China, Socrates in Greece, and later, from the Jewish tradition, Jesus. Philosophers call this the Axial Age. Each faced different problems, but each turned in the same direction: away from myth, ritual and rank, and toward the human being. Every human being. When Confucius heard that his stables had burned, he asked, “Was anyone hurt?” He did not ask about the horses.

Confucius was born poor, with no famous teacher and no position waiting for him. What changed his life was learning. So the Analects opens with one word: 学, to learn.

Third: learning is for growing, not for being seen. “Unrecognised and not resentful” is the hardest line. Late in life Confucius sighed that no one understood him, yet he did not grow bitter. If you learn for applause, silence deflates you. If you learn to grow, whether anyone notices changes nothing about its worth. Confucius put it this way: people of old learned “for themselves”; people now learn “for others.” For yourself does not mean for your own promotion. It means to remake yourself into a fuller person. For others means learning to be seen. Someone who learns for themselves and feels no resentment at being unknown is a junzi. In Confucius' hands the word stopped meaning “a lord's son” and became a kind of person anyone could become.