A student asks his teacher a question. If the ruler of a certain state were waiting for you to take charge of his government, what would you do first?
The answer ran to five characters. It would certainly be to set names right.
The student comes straight back at him. My master goes a very long way around. How would a thing like that be set right?
What Would You Do First
The third passage of the Zi Lu book opens on a supposition. If the ruler of Wei were waiting for his teacher to take charge of the government, it says, and the condition sits out in front.
The one asking is Zilu. The passage opens with Zilu said rather than the Master said, so the lead in this exchange belongs to the student from the start.
What he asks is not what is right but what comes first. Zi jiang xi xian (子將奚先), what would my master do first?
A question about order corners the man answering. He cannot list several things. He has to pick one.
It Would Certainly Be to Set Names Right
The answer is short.
必也正名乎
bi ye zheng ming hu
It would certainly be to set names right. (Analects 13.3)
Five characters. Bi (必) at the front fixes the character of the answer, because it makes this not one option chosen among several but the thing that must come first.
Zheng ming (正名) does not mean tidying definitions the way a dictionary does. It reads as making name and reality line up, so that a ruler is ruler and a father is father.
The work is not changing what things are called. It is removing the gap between what they are called and what they are.
My Master Is Off the Point
Here is where the passage becomes uncommon. The student takes his teacher’s answer and hands it back.
You shi zai (有是哉), is that so. Zi zhi yu ye (子之迂也), my master is off the point. Yu (迂) is a character for going the long way around, and in today’s terms it comes close to saying somebody is not in touch with the ground.
Then he adds xi qi zheng (奚其正), how would that be set right?
There are not many places in The Analects where a student comes at his teacher this directly. The man who was delighted, in an earlier part, at the thought of going out to sea on a raft is standing on the opposite side here.
Crude, Yóu
The first response is not a counterargument but a rebuke. Ye zai You ye (野哉由也), how crude you are, Yóu.
One more line follows immediately. A junzi, he says, generally leaves blank whatever he does not know.
That line is aimed at a manner rather than at a claim. It picks out the fact that Zilu, instead of letting an unknown stay unknown, moved straight to a verdict of impractical.
Only after that does the explanation begin.
A Sentence of Six Links
The explanation is shaped less like an argument than like a chain.
名不正則言不順 言不順則事不成
ming bu zheng ze yan bu shun, yan bu shun ze shi bu cheng
If names are not right, speech does not follow. If speech does not follow, affairs are not completed. (Analects 13.3)
It does not stop there. The same shape runs four more times. If affairs are not completed, li and music do not flourish. If li and music do not flourish, punishments miss their mark. If punishments miss their mark, the people have nowhere to put hand or foot.
Li and music here are not manners and concerts but the whole apparatus of state ritual. It is the public framework in which what gets done and how is already settled, which is why its place is between speech and punishment.
Taken one box at a time, no single link is much of a stretch. What happens to chains like this, though, is that the distance between the first box and the last grows with every step, and readers differ over that distance.
Nowhere to Put Hand or Foot
The last box holds wu suo cuo shou zu (無所措手足).
Five characters, nowhere to put hand or foot. What stands out is that this sentence draws the crisis of a state not as an empty granary or a broken army but as a posture of the body.
When a person cannot tell what will bring punishment and what is safe, he loses the knack of moving. Even standing still becomes awkward.
The five boxes before it are written in the language of institutions, and only the last one is written in a human body. The chain ends with an individual standing at the far end of it.
What Was Actually Happening in Wei
Read as pure figure of speech, half of this exchange goes missing, because the name of a country is sitting inside the question.
The Zuo Zhuan records that around this time Wei had a father and a son facing each other over the throne. The father had earlier gone into exile abroad, and while he was away the son took the throne. When the father tried to return, the son kept him out.
So what was that son to be called? Call him the ruler and shutting his father out becomes legitimate. Call him the son and the seat he occupies begins to shake.
Ruler and subject, father and son, were colliding on one man.
The original does not write down that this exchange points at that quarrel. Tying the two records together is an old reading that rests on when Confucius stayed in Wei, and this chapter has followed it. On that reading, the answer Zilu called far off the point was pointing at the middle of that state.
Today, Where the Names Do Not Fit
A proposal to fix the wording first usually sounds like a luxury. It gives the impression of fiddling with expressions while something urgent waits.
What this passage offers against that is order rather than content. If what a thing is called has not been settled, the things that come after it come apart one by one.
Most people have sat in a meeting where everyone used the same word for different things. The decisions from that meeting split apart in execution, and the rules built on them land on the wrong people.
There is one question, though, that always follows the work of setting names right. Who decides which name is the correct one?
This passage does not go that far. What it sets down reaches as far as the order, that nothing after names holds up while the names do not.
In the work I am doing now, what has not yet been settled on a name?