A teacher asking a student to measure himself against another student is not a common scene.
The Analects has one such scene. The one asking is Confucius and the one who takes the question is Zigong.
From this chapter the students are taken one at a time. The first is the one his teacher held dearest and lost earliest.
The Teacher Asked First
This is the eighth passage of the Gongye Chang book. Confucius calls Zigong over and asks him which is the better, he or Hui.
By the standards of today it is an awkward question. It stands two men side by side and tells one of them to answer.
Zigong answered by stepping back.
回也聞一以知十 賜也聞一以知二
hui ye wen yi yi zhi shi, si ye wen yi yi zhi er
Hui hears one thing and knows ten of them, Ci hears one thing and knows two. (Analects 5.8)
Ci (賜) is the given name of Zigong. In front of a teacher a student pointed at himself with the given name rather than the courtesy name.
Ten and Two
The numbers catch the eye. He did not say a little short of him. He split it into ten and two.
Five would have been modesty. Two makes it a different kind of statement, because it settles for him that the distance is not one he can close.
Zigong was quick in speech and quick in judgement. That a man like that gave this answer is what gives the scene its weight.
The Last Six Characters
The difficulty lies in what Confucius said back.
Wu yu ru fu ru ye (吾與女弗如也), six characters. This is where the readings part.
Read yu (與) as and, and it becomes neither you nor I come up to him. The teacher has set himself alongside his student and said that both of them fall short.
Zhu Xi read it otherwise. Taking yu (與) to mean to grant, to allow as true, he had the line say that I grant you what you have said about falling short of him.
The first reading makes it consolation and the second makes it confirmation. How you take one character changes the whole face of the teacher.
This series leaves the two readings standing side by side and writes down that they part.
What Loving to Learn Meant
What sort of man Yan Hui was comes out more plainly in another place. It is where Duke Ai of Lu asked which of the students loved to learn.
Confucius named Yan Hui. And the reason he gave for it is not what you would expect.
不遷怒 不貳過
bu qian nu, bu er guo
He did not pass his anger on, and he did not make the same mistake twice. (Analects 6.2)
He did not say that the man read a great deal. He did not say that his memory was good, or that he was good at asking.
What stands as the content of loving to learn is not the amount a man knows but these two things.
Not Passing Anger On
The first three characters are the harder side. To pass anger on means to pour the anger over someone who had nothing to do with the place it came from.
A heart bruised outside and emptied out at home, a weight taken from someone above and let down onto someone below, all of that belongs here. It is not that anger is never felt. It is that anger is kept in its own place.
Why this should be tied to learning is worth a moment. Probably because a man who passes his anger on is a man who has not looked accurately at what he was angry about.
Not Making the Same Mistake Twice
The second three characters look simpler and are in fact harder.
It is not that no mistake is made. It is that the same mistake is not made again. Which requires that a man know for himself what it was that he got wrong.
One line from the earlier part hangs on this. That taking what you know as known and what you do not know as not known is knowing. Only a man who knows the outline of his own fault can keep from committing it twice.
There Is No Such Man Now
The answer given to Duke Ai has a tail on it. Yan Hui was short lived and died, and now there is none.
And then he said that he had not yet heard of anyone who loves to learn.
These are the words of a man said to have had three thousand students. Among all of them one loved to learn, and that one had gone on ahead.
The last part of this series treats that death on its own. Here it is enough to note that the line was said about a man already dead.
Today, After the Measuring
Measuring yourself against other people is something we are mostly taught to think badly of. And yet it is also true that without measuring it is hard to know how far you have come.
What is worth watching in this scene is what Zigong did after he measured. He did not stop where he stood.
Several of the answers in the earlier part came out of his questions. The one word to carry for a lifetime, and the answer about the size of ren, came out because he asked.
Perhaps the fork is not the measuring itself but what a person does once the measuring is done.
I measured myself against somebody recently, and what did I do after that.