A Page Wiser
When and Where
These books were written on a small patch of land. From Confucius's Qufu to Zhuangzi's Meng is under 200 kilometres; from Mencius's Zou to Qufu is less than a day's walk. Yet they did not all meet.
Where they walked
- ConfuciusBorn in Lu. In his fifties he left and spent fourteen years between Wei, Song, Zheng, Chen and Cai, reaching She on the edge of Chu, and came home to Lu at sixty-eight.
- MenciusBorn in Zou, close to Qufu. In middle age he went from court to court: Qi, Song, Teng, then King Hui of Liang, then Qi again, and wrote with his students at home in old age.
- LaoziThe Records of the Historian makes him a man of Ku in Chu, keeper of the Zhou archives at Luoyi, who went west through the pass and was not seen again. All of this is tradition.
- ZhuangziA man of Meng in Song, once a minor official at a lacquer garden. There is almost no record of him travelling; invited to office by the king of Chu, he preferred to drag his tail in the mud.
When they lived
All years are BCE and most are approximate. A dashed bar means tradition only, with no firm record.
Who met whom, and who did not
Confucius and Laozi: said to have met
The Records of the Historian has Confucius travel to Luoyi to ask Laozi about ritual, and Laozi tell him to drop his pride and his many desires. The story is famous, but no record from the time supports it, and most scholars think the Laozi we read took shape after Confucius. The oldest bamboo copy, from Guodian, dates to about 300 BCE.
Confucius and Mencius: a century apart
When Mencius was born, Confucius had been dead for about a hundred years. Their home towns are less than thirty kilometres apart. Mencius says he never had the chance to be Confucius's student; he learned of him privately, from others (Mencius 4B22).
Mencius and Zhuangzi: same years, not a word
They were born and died within a few years of each other, under 200 kilometres apart. Mencius had audiences with King Hui of Liang; Zhuangzi's friend Hui Shi was that king's chief minister. Yet the Mencius never mentions Zhuangzi and the Zhuangzi never mentions Mencius. Nobody knows why.
Confucius and Laozi, as written by Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi was born about 180 years after Confucius; they cannot have met. Yet Confucius appears in the Zhuangzi dozens of times, and Laozi often: sometimes to be teased, sometimes to speak Zhuangzi's own thoughts for him. These are parables, not records.
The I Ching: older than all of them
The line texts of the I Ching come from the Western Zhou, centuries before Confucius. In the Analects (7.17) he says that with a few more years, studying the Changes at fifty, he might avoid great faults; how to read that sentence has long been argued. The commentaries were traditionally credited to Confucius and are now usually dated to the Warring States. That is where Confucian and Daoist vocabulary meet.
Based on the Records of the Historian (the biographies of Confucius, of Laozi and Han Fei, and of Mencius and Xunzi) and on the Analects, the Mencius and the Zhuangzi themselves. Dates and routes are disputed; this page follows the common account.