258 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
When Zizhang asked what “these five” were, Confucius said, “Cour-
tesy, tolerance, trustworthiness, diligence, and kindness. Be courteous, and
you avoid disrespect. Be tolerant, and you win over the multitude. Be trust-
worthy, and you are trusted by others. Be diligent, and your work will go
well. Be kind, and you will be able to employ others.” (Watson 2007:121)
The commonsense decency in this explanation of ren might mistakenly
portray Confucius’s thought as little more than platitudes, which indeed is how
he often comes across in older translations. But his thought is far more subtle,
and far more Chinese, than merely an exotic version of the Golden Rule.
If ren is a state of moral awareness and cultivation, one achieves ren
through li. Li is the distinctly Chinese concept giving Confucian thought the
tremendous impact it had in Chinese civilization. The following passage from
the Analects shows Confucius trying to explain the behavioral aspect of ren:
12:1 Yan Yuan asked about humaneness. The Master [Confucius] said,
“To master the self and return to ritual (li) is to be humane (ren). For one
day master the self and return to ritual (li), and the whole world will
become humane (ren). Being humane (ren) proceeds from you yourself.
How could it proceed from others?
Yan Yuan said: “May I ask how to go about this?”
The Master said, “If it is contrary to ritual (li), don’t look at it. If it is
contrary to ritual, don’t listen to it. If it is contrary to ritual, don’t utter it. If
it is contrary to ritual, don’t do it.” (Watson 2007:80)
What could li mean in the above passage? Translators attempt to make
Confucius (or anyone being translated) speak English, but there are different
“deep habits” of the two languages that make translation more difficult than
just finding the right English word. So Confucius may sound pompous or the-
atrical when a translation is too close to the original. In the case of li, the deep
habits of English have changed in the last two centuries. The nineteenth-cen-
tury translator, James Legge, translated li as “righteousness,” which gives the
above passage a piety that sounds more Victorian than Chinese. (Try reading
the passage again, inserting “righteousness” for li.) Still, righteousness is a valid
sense of the meaning of Confucius.
More recent scholarship has focused on li as “ritual.” Western culture hardly
knows what to make of a worldview in which “righteousness” and “ritual” could
be squeezed into a single word, but that is exactly what makes the Confucian
worldview so distinctive. Li, ceremonious conduct, is the behavioral expression of
the inner moral quality of ren. “It regulates one’s daily life and interactions with
others, channels emotions properly, distinguishes civilized patterns of behavior,
and maintains the political order” (Chow 1994:10). When Confucius said in the
passage quoted above, “to subdue oneself and return to li is ren,” he was suggest-
ing that through self-governing by ritual, one transforms one’s own nature. Thus,
ritual and righteous action are the same thing: a remedy for moral crisis.
The thing that a Westerner might object to in ritual—that its form is pre-
scribed by society and the past—is what makes li so very Confucian. Westerners