Confucius almost never talks about himself. Search all twenty books of The Analects and there is exactly one place where he sets out his own life.
In the fourth passage of the Weizheng book he cuts that life into six marks.
吾十有五而志于學 三十而立 四十而不惑 五十而知天命 六十而耳順 七十而從心所欲不踰矩
wu shi you wu er zhi yu xue, san shi er li, si shi er bu huo, wu shi er zhi tian ming, liu shi er er shun, qi shi er cong xin suo yu bu yu ju
At fifteen I set my heart on learning. At thirty I stood. At forty I was no longer led astray. At fifty I knew the decree of Heaven. At sixty my ear was in accord. At seventy I could follow what my heart wanted without overstepping the measure. (Analects 2.4)
The words that came out of this one passage are still used across East Asia as other names for forty, fifty and sixty.
Fifteen, the Age of Turning to Face One Way
The first mark says he set his heart on learning, not that he had learned. Zhi is the character for a mind turning to face in one direction, so what is being reported here is not ability but direction.
Which also means how much he knew at fifteen falls outside this sentence’s interest.
Confucius was born into a fallen warrior family in the state of Lu, and the Shiji records that he lost his father young and grew up poor. Who taught him is not clear either. He once said of himself that he was not someone born knowing, only a man who loved the old things and went looking for them diligently.
So the setting of the heart at fifteen was less a matter of entering a good teacher’s school than of a person with nothing in hand deciding to look that way.
What It Means to Stand at Thirty
The second mark is short. It says he stood at thirty and never says what he stood on.
Zhu Xi read the place as standing in li, the forms. On this reading, how a person is to conduct himself among others had settled into his body, so that he could stand without being shaken.
Other readings have been around just as long. That the foundation of his study had set, so that he could carry his own learning forward, is one. That a living and a position had been secured, so that he no longer leaned on anyone, is another. You do not have to pick one of the three before you can read the passage.
Confucius is said to have begun taking students around this age.
Forty, No Longer Led Astray
The third mark is buhuo. Huo names the state of a mind that will not settle on any one of several roads in front of it.
So buhuo does not say there was nothing left to learn. It says the going back and forth about what was right had stopped.
This mark later became another name for the age of forty, and in becoming one it picked up a weight it never originally had. A person still wavering at forty is likely to stand before that name and feel that he is late.
Yet the forty of Confucius was an age at which he had achieved nothing at all. He gained no office in Lu worth the name until past fifty, and even that he set down after a few years and took to the road.
The Portion He Came to Know at Fifty
The fourth mark is zhi tianming, that he knew the decree of Heaven. What that portion was never appears.
Tianming reads as a fixed destiny and also as the work given to you in particular. Read the first way, the mark is about acceptance. Read the second, it is about a calling.
Set against his life, the two senses meet in one place. He took to the road near sixty after leaving office, and nowhere did he find a position that would use him. Even so he did not turn back.
What is clear is that knowing his portion did not make things any easier for him.
The Ear at Sixty
The fifth mark is the hardest of the six. How to read an ear in accord has been argued over for a very long time.
One side holds that nothing he heard could grate on him any more, that neither praise nor slander moved him.
Another holds that he came to grasp a speaker’s meaning the moment it was said. Hearing the words together with the place they came from, he saw at once why the speaker was saying them.
The two readings are not, in fact, far apart. Understanding why someone speaks as he does usually makes it grate less.
What is worth remembering is what he was listening to at that age. For fourteen years he moved from state to state and heard doors closed and laughter behind him, and from hermits who had turned their backs on the world he heard that the whole thing was pointless.
Seventy, Following the Heart Without Overstepping
The last mark is cong xin suo yu bu yu ju. He could follow wherever his heart wanted to go and still not overstep the measure.
If the five marks before it say what he gained, this one says he stopped having to strain.
As long as the line you must keep is outside you and the thing you want is inside you, there is effort in the space between them at all times. When the two overlap, there is nothing left to endure. That is why being free and not going astray can sit in the same sentence.
This is not, of course, a story about defeating the rules. It is the story of a man into whose wants the rules had moved.
A Timeline Drawn from Behind
Set the six marks side by side and they look like a well kept schedule. Cut into decades, rising as they go, ending in completion.
The man who said them, though, was already past seventy.
Which means this is not a plan drawn up by someone looking ahead at a life to be lived. It is a set of names attached from behind by someone who had lived it. The direction is reversed. Ordering a road you have walked reveals its joints, but to the person still walking, no joint is visible.
So the six marks make a poor ruler for measuring anybody else’s age. Confucius at forty cannot have known that he was in buhuo either.
Not Noticing That Age Was Coming
There is one more place in The Analects where he describes himself. A man called the Duke of She asked Zilu what sort of person his teacher was, and Zilu had no answer. The line comes just after that.
發憤忘食 樂以忘憂 不知老之將至
fa fen wang shi, le yi wang you, bu zhi lao zhi jiang zhi
He throws himself into a thing and forgets to eat, he is glad and forgets his cares, and he does not notice old age coming on. (Analects 7.19)
A man who counted himself out in decades says elsewhere that he does not notice old age arriving.
The two lines do not cancel each other. One of them settles what the other means. The timeline of six marks is not a story about counting years. It is a story about what he was holding on to so hard that he forgot to count them.
Today, the Names Attached to Ages
Buhuo, zhiming and ershun are still in use. Names one man attached while looking back over his own life have become, two and a half thousand years later, everybody’s chart.
Hold that ruler up and most people come out late.
Pulled about at forty, unsure at fifty what portion is theirs, still finding some remarks hard to hear at sixty. That the forty and the fifty of the man who left this sentence were exactly like that is not often mentioned.
Read this passage as a schedule and all that is left is the feeling of falling behind. Read it as one man’s record of naming the places he had passed, and a different question comes up.
What am I setting my heart on now, and since when have I been able to call it that?