The Analects has a number of sentences that stay with you, but one of them lands harder than the rest.
It is the eighth passage of the Li Ren book. Eight characters long, and you stop for a moment after reading it.
朝聞道 夕死可矣
zhao wen dao, xi si ke yi
Hear the Way in the morning and it is all right to die that evening. (Analects 4.8)
The sentence does not tell you to do anything. It sets out a scale.
The Character for Hearing
The verb is the first thing to notice. Not to learn, not to obtain, not to accomplish. To hear, wen.
Learning carries a movement in which I go and fetch something. Hearing is different. Something arrives at me from outside, and I do not get to choose the moment it comes.
So what this sentence puts a price on is not an achievement built up over years. It is the single moment in which something reaches your ear.
One touch is enough, it says, and that evening you may die.
The Word Dao
Dao is the character for a road. It is the path a person ought to walk, and it is also the pattern by which the world runs, and also the something you learn your way toward.
This book never once defines it. That is the same treatment ren gets, the word this series refuses to settle into one English term.
Because no definition is handed over, every reader supplies something different, and that is part of why the line has been quoted for two and a half thousand years. Nothing has been fixed about what you must hear, so each person uses the scale where they stand.
All Right to Die That Evening
The ke yi at the end means all right, acceptable.
Not you must die and not I would like to. It names a state in which dying would not matter. A description, then, rather than a command.
Which is why the sentence makes a reader uncomfortable without demanding anything. There is no demand, and yet the scale is sitting right there.
Where the Readings Part
These eight characters have been read in more than one direction.
Zhu Xi took the Way as the proper pattern of things. Truly hear it and you live at ease and die at peace, with nothing left unfinished. He read it as a place where something happens inside a person.
Others have long read it differently, as news that the Way is being practised in the world. If only he could hear that things had been set right, he could die that day.
Read the second way, the sentence changes character. It is no longer about something happening within, but about a world he never got to see.
That the man who said it travelled from state to state and was never used hangs on this point. He did not live to hear the news he named.
What Remains Either Way
You do not have to choose one of the two readings before you can read this passage.
Either way the scale stays where it is. A life sits on one pan, and the question of what you could put on the other stays open.
The line is heavy not because it demands that you know something enormous. It asks you to name something that stands comparison with a life, and most people, trying to name it, find nothing to say.
Why This Passage Comes First
In this series the part that treats ren opens with this chapter, even though the passage is about the Way and not about ren at all.
Before asking what ren is, it has to be settled whether asking such a question is worth that much. A question with no price on it does not hold anyone for long.
From the next chapter on we look at how near ren is said to be, and why, being that near, nobody was ever granted the name.
Today, What to Put on the Scale
Asked whether anything is worth trading a life for, most of us simply move past the question. It is too large.
Shrink it and it becomes answerable. Was there something you wanted to know enough to hand over the whole of last year for it. What about a month.
The weight we feel here may not come from the size of the demand. It may come from how long it has been since we put anything on that scale.
What is it, for me, that I would give up an evening for if only I could hear it in the morning?