A Transmitter and Not a Maker

The seventh book of the Analects opens with its teacher declining the title of originator. The word he refuses — 作, zuo — is not create in the loose modern sense. It is the verb for what a sage-king does when he institutes: founds rites, originates forms. So the disclaimer is not modesty about creativity. It is a refusal of the founder's prerogative, made by the one figure in the tradition entitled to claim it.

II.11 then makes transmission the qualification for teaching rather than an ornament of it. Keep cherishing the old so as to continually acquire the new — only then may one be a teacher of others. Not a virtue that adorns a teacher. The condition of being one.

There is a detail here worth the whole page, and it is a translator's reading rather than a settled fact. Arthur Waley's 1938 version prints the first clause inside quotation marks and footnotes it as a quotation from the Mozi. If Waley is right, the most famous sentence in this tradition about handing things on is itself a handed-on sentence. Later translators do not all follow him, so it belongs on the page as his judgment, not as established.

Two further cautions for anyone reading across translations. Legge and Watson turn 述 into an identity noun — a transmitter — so the line reads as a definition of role; Slingerland keeps it a verb, I transmit rather than innovate; Waley converts it to a completed act with an object. And the last clause, 竊比於我老彭, divides the translators outright: Legge and Slingerland hear modesty, I venture to compare myself, while Waley reverses the valence entirely, so that not even old P'eng can have excelled him. Same clause, opposite tone. Old P'ang's identity is itself uncertain in the commentaries.

A tradition that would be named after its teacher by foreigners begins by recording that he declined to be its author.