Abstract
At the end of “Zihan,” Book Nine of the Analects, is a passage whose first part is a saying of Confucius noting that people can all act alike according to prescribed norms but may not react alike under unforeseen circumstances. The second part is his comment on a man’s lament over not being able to see his beloved. In between there are these lyrics: “Tangdi zhi hua, pian qi fan er.” Some scholars maintain that they should be attached to the first part of the passages which ends with the phrase wei ke yu quan (unable to share the same unauthorized reaction as an expedience). This paper studies the Book of Poetry together with other Classics and finds that the term pianfan (偏反) that is made to mean “to deviate from the norm (and therefore to be expedient)” actually should be binfen (繽紛) (colourful and fluttering, a description of the Tangdi flowers). With this discovery it is clear that the lyrics should be attached to the second part of the passage and the two parts should be two separate chapters of Book Nine.
Keywords
The Analects, pian qi fan er, norm (jing), expedience (quan), “Jiaogong” in the Book of Poetry, “Shi mu” in Er ya
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