The Side Quest Trap

The Passage

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Informal interpretation:

Eight characters, three of them contested. Depending on how you read 攻, 異端, and 已, passage 2.16 is either a warning that detours cost you your goal, or an instruction to attack heretical doctrines until they stop. The reading I argue for — that it's about distraction — is a minority one; the orthodox reading for most of the last thousand years was the other, and it was written into imperial policy.

Philosophical Discussion

Three Ambiguous Characters, Three Different Passages

攻乎異端，斯害也已 is short enough that every word carries structural weight, and three of them are genuinely undetermined. 攻 appears only twice more in the Analects, and in neither case does it mean warfare: at 11.17 Confucius tells his students to "sound the drums and 攻 him" — denounce Ran Qiu for enriching the Ji family — and at 12.21 he says to 攻 your own faults and not other people's. Both are moral censure, not battle. It is also a plausible loan for 功, to work at. 異端 is literally "different endpoints": 異 is other or divergent, 端 is a terminus or extreme, and crucially 端 need not be a final point (modern 開端 means a beginning). 已 is normally a sentence-final particle of emphasis, but can be read as the verb to stop.

Those three choices multiply out. Take 攻 as labor and 異端 as alternative endpoints, and you get a caution about wasted effort: working toward the wrong destination costs you. Take 攻 as attack and 異端 as heterodoxy, and you get polemic. Add the reading of 已 as "stop," and the passage stops describing anything at all — it becomes an imperative: strike at deviant doctrines and their harm will cease.

The Cost of the Byway

The reading I argue for — a minority one — is the undramatic one. A long goal — the kind measured in decades — is rarely approached in a straight line. You are on an unmarked road, unsure how far the destination is or whether you would recognise it. Forks appear with no signage; a branch may be better paved and more inviting than the main route. On this reading the harm in 斯害也已 is not that the byway is wicked. It is that the road is long, the traveller has one life, and a detour discovered late may never be recovered from.

The implied goal is not generic. Confucius was not telling people to follow their dreams; he wanted rulers and disciples to become 君子 — exemplary people whose conduct made a flourishing society possible. There is one road to that, and everything else is a byway.

Small Ways and Other Skills

Commentators supply two labels — 小道 ("small ways") and 他技 ("other skills") — along with a long, unsorted list of what might belong to each: farming, medicine, astronomy, alchemy, divination, music, archery, board games, gambling, and, memorably, the extraction of walnut oil. Sorting that list into rival vocations (小道) and rival pastimes (他技) is my division, not the tradition's.

Neither is condemned. The world needs farmers and doctors; Confucius was himself an accomplished musician and archer. The objection is arithmetic, not moral: excellence in any of these is all-consuming, so pursuing one forecloses the other. And the reason the small ways are small is a claim about reach. 君子, 賢人 (the worthy), and 聖人 (the sage) form a ladder I find in my reading of the Analects rather than one Confucius sets out as such: the rungs are how many lives your conduct improves — a household, then thousands of strangers, then generations unborn. Government service was the reliable amplifier, which is why it counts as the Great Way rather than the only good one.

How a Warning Became a Weapon

The hardening begins in the Six Dynasties — though not yet in the commentaries. 皇侃 (Huang Kan, 488–545), the major Six Dynasties commentator on the Analects, still glosses 攻 as 治: to work at, to apply oneself to. What is circulating around 500 is the hardened sense of 異端 as "heterodoxy" in literary writers such as 任昉 and 劉勰 — a fact about the word before it becomes a fact about this passage. The doctrinal reading of 2.16 consolidates considerably later. By the twelfth century 朱熹 had made it standard — though, tellingly, even he kept 攻 as "devote effort to," and identified the doctrines as Mohism and Yangzhuism. That is almost certainly an anachronism: only the seeds of those schools existed in Confucius's lifetime, and it would be strange for him to denounce them exactly once in the entire text.

As Buddhism and Daoism grew, the heterodoxy reading became politically useful, and the Ming completed the transformation by taking 已 as "stop." The passage now licensed officials to suppress not only Buddhists and Daoists but any unapproved reading of the classics. The irony sits two passages earlier: 2.14 says the exemplary person is inclusive and not partisan, and it is the petty who are partisan and not inclusive.

The Tomb Manuscript

There is manuscript evidence against the attack reading. In 1973, excavators opened Han tomb no. 40 at Bajiaolang, in Dingzhou — the burial of 劉脩, King Huai of Zhongshan, who died in 55 BCE. Among the bamboo slips was a copy of the Analects, now called the 定州論語. At 2.16 it does not read 攻. It reads 功: to work, to achieve.

It does not settle what the "different endpoints" were — but it is a first-century-BCE reader who evidently was not being told to attack anything.

Context and Connections

19.4 — the passage that names the small ways

The vocabulary of 小道 is not invented by commentators; it comes from the Analects itself. In 19.4 子夏 says: 雖小道，必有可觀者焉；致遠恐泥，是以君子不為也 — "Even in the small ways there is surely something worth seeing; but pursued far they bog you down, and so the exemplary person does not take them up." That is 2.16's argument stated plainly, by a disciple, with the concession built in: the byways are worth something. The objection is to distance, not to value.

Why not a career in music

Confucius held music in the highest regard — a reflection of a state's health and one of the surest means of cultivating virtue. So the discouragement is not aesthetic but occupational: under the Zhou, professional court musicianship was an occupation reserved for the blind. For his sighted students, it simply was not an available road.

The neighbours in Book 2

2.16 sits between two of the most quoted lines on learning, and the compilers clearly grouped them: 2.15, "learning without thinking leads to confusion; thinking without learning leads to peril," and 2.17, knowing what you know and what you do not. Whatever 2.16 means, its editors filed it under how to learn.

Key Terms

• 小道 — "small ways," rival vocations (farming, medicine, astronomy, alchemy)
• 他技 — "other skills," rival pastimes (divination, music, archery, board games, gambling)
• 賢人 — the worthy; impact measured in thousands
• 聖人 — the sage; impact echoing across generations
• 定州論語 — the Dingzhou Analects, sealed in the 1st c. BCE, unearthed 1973; reads 功 for 攻
• 朱熹 — made the heterodoxy reading standard, glossing it as Mohism and Yangzhuism

A Note on This Page

Recording this, I try to mark what belongs to whom — my translation, how I read it, "I rendered these characters as 'the byways,' and I wouldn't fault anyone for taking issue with that," and the admission that the standard reading for at least the last 800 years was nothing like the one I present.

Boiling that down into a reference page strips those markers off almost by itself. The argued reading ends up sitting in the slot where a standard translation goes, and the hedges quietly disappear — which is, in miniature, exactly what the commentarial tradition did to 2.16. Nobody decides to do it; it happens in the summarising. So where this page states a reading as fact, read it as a preference.

Related Passages

• 19.4 — 子夏 on the small ways: worth something, but they bog you down
• 2.14 — the exemplary person is inclusive, not partisan — two passages before 2.16 was made a tool of partisanship
• 2.15 — learning and thinking, the passage immediately before
• 2.17 — knowing what you know, the passage immediately after

Language Notes

攻 — attack, or work at

Every other appearance of 攻 in the Analects means to attack. Read that way, this is a passage about assault. But scribal substitution between homophones was routine, the Dingzhou manuscript has 功 ("to work, to achieve"), and 功 fits the surrounding passages on learning far better. Rendered here as "laboring."

乎

A classical preposition, functionally close to 於/于 — "on," "at," "toward," "from." (Sentence-finally it does other work entirely, marking a question.) Translating it as "along" is a choice that leans into the road metaphor rather than a neutral rendering.

異端

異 is other, different, divergent — still live in 異性 (opposite sex) and 變異 (to mutate). 端 is an endpoint or extreme, as in 極端 (extreme) — but note 開端, "a beginning," which shows 端 marks a terminus, not necessarily the final one. Hence Slingerland's alternative: not divergent destinations but a wrong starting point. "The byways" is a frankly interpretive rendering, defensible on the grounds that working toward a different endpoint puts you on a different road.

斯

A demonstrative pronoun — "this." It is worth not filing it with 其, which is a possessive/third-person determiner ("his," "its," "that one's") and does different grammatical work. 斯 stands in for something already said; here that is the whole first clause, which is how we know the second half is a comment on the first.

害也

害 is to harm, unchanged in modern Mandarin. 也 is the standard classical marker that a clause is a statement, definition, or judgement rather than a narration.

已 — and 也已

The contested character. Taken as a verb it means "to stop," which is what converts the passage into a command. But throughout the Analects it pairs with a preceding 也 as 也已, a fixed combination adding emphasis and finality — "indeed," "truly," "and that is all." That usage is common enough that the imperative reading has to argue against the grain.