So far from this passage proving that Confucius had an inadequate regard for the truth, it will perhaps strike a good many people as indicating that untruth and insincerity were abhorrent to Confucius's nature: and this was undoubtedly the impression that the disciple who remembered and recorded the incident wished to convey.
So much for two out of the three solitary occasions on which Confucius is said to have laid himself open to what Prof. Legge calls "the most serious charge that can be brought against him, the charge of insincerity." The events recorded in connection with the third occasion are much more grave and deserve closer attention. The story goes that Confucius when travelling to a place called Wei was captured by a rebel-brigand of that state, who would only release him on condition that he would take an oath to give up his proposed expedition to Wei. Confucius took the oath, and on his release forthwith continued his journey to the place he had sworn to avoid. On one of his disciples asking him whether it was a right thing to break his word, Confucius replied: "It was a forced oath. The spirits do not hear such." Now of the moral question here involved Sir Robert Douglas takes the view that it is "a nice question for casuists," but expresses the conviction that by most people Confucius "will not be held to be very blameworthy for that which, at the worst, was a mistaken notion of truthfulness."[268] On the other hand many of us will hold the equally strong conviction that if this story is true there is an ugly blot on the character of Confucius. If he deliberately and knowingly broke his word, as this story would indicate, then he was no gentleman.[269]
Le bon sang ne pent mentir, as the old French proverb says. Not his can have been what Burke in thrilling words calls "that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound." But the evidence from other sources that Confucius was a gentleman—a man to whom truth and sincerity were very precious—is overwhelming. His teachings and actions, so far as we know them—all but this one—prove conclusively that he laid almost greater emphasis on truth and honour than on any other quality. "Hold faithfulness and sincerity," he said, "as first principles."[270] One of his English commentators remarks that "the earnestness with which he insists on this, repeating the same injunction over and over again, is a point in his teaching which is well worthy of admiration."[271]
How then is this strange story of the broken oath to be explained? Probably by the simple statement that the story is not true. The incident is one which finds no place in the accepted Confucian canon: as Prof. H. A. Giles says, it "occurs in an admittedly spurious work,"[272]—namely the Chia Yü, which in its present form is believed to have been composed in the third century A.D. The only other authority for it is the great historian Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien. Confucius was born in 551 B.C., Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien no less than four hundred years later. It may, doubtless, be urged by those who believe in the story and wish at the same time to save the honour of Confucius, that the standard of truth at that time was very low and that Confucius was only acting in accordance with the practice of the age in breaking his plighted word. But we have no reason whatever to suppose that the standard was any lower than it is to-day in Christendom: and what no writer, so far as I am aware, seems to have made a note of is the important fact that the story, if true at all, is of itself a clear proof that the standard of honour was remarkably high. The rebel would not have given Confucius the option of taking an oath unless there had been an expectation on his part that Confucius would keep that oath; and if the expectation existed, it must even in those far-off days have been founded on a belief that a gentleman's word was "as good as his bond." Thus if we believe in the story we are compelled to adopt the conclusion that Confucius was not, as one would have thought, superior to his contemporaries in matters of morals, but was immeasurably their inferior: a conclusion which is patently absurd. To suppose after hearing the evidence of the canonical books that Confucius was a man who could deliberately break his word seems almost as unreasonable as to suppose that Sir Walter Scott ("true gentleman, heart, blood and bone," as Tennyson called him) could have acted dishonourably or that Sir Philip Sidney, the prince of chivalry, could have told a lie.
WEIHAIWEI VILLAGERS (see p. [315]).
