Sitting Shiva with Confucius

The Passages

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7.9

7.10

Two short descriptions of Confucius among the bereaved: he would not eat his fill beside mourners, and he would not sing on a day he had wept. Neither is a saying — both are records of conduct, kept because his students thought the conduct was the teaching.

Philosophical Discussion

These are not quotations

Both passages open with 子 and neither continues with 子曰. That absence is the first thing to notice. There is no "the Master said" here, because nobody is quoting him. Book 7 (述而, Transmitting) stands with Book 10 as a record of what Confucius did — his habits, his bearing, the things he would and would not do in a given room.

So the question these passages raise is not what Confucius believed about grief. It is why anyone bothered to write down that he did not finish his dinner.

Two rules that are one rule

Read alone, 7.9 is almost too obvious to need saying. You are invited into a mourning household to help; you sit down to eat with the family; you do not tuck in. Anyone who has lost someone can tell you why. Appetite is among the first things grief takes, and eating heartily in front of people who cannot is a way of announcing that their loss has not touched you.

7.10 is the harder one, and the interesting one, because on its face it says nothing about funerals at all — only that weeping and singing did not happen on the same day. Two things supply the missing context. The first is position: passage numbering and most modern punctuation were not settled until the 1950s, through the work of the philologist 楊伯峻, so for most of the text's life readers took 7.9 and 7.10 in a single breath and carried the funeral over from one to the other. The second is the vocabulary. Weeping at a funeral needs no explanation. Singing does — and in the Analects, music belongs to celebration and to company.

That is not a matter of association but of the writing system. The character 歌 is singing; music and joy are the same graph, read yuè in the one sense and lè in the other — two readings, one idea underneath. 荀子 states it without hedging in his Treatise on Music: 夫樂者、樂也 — as for the musical, it is joy. Singing on the day you wept is not disrespectful in some abstract way. It is bringing joy into a room that has none.

Why grief needed a schedule

The most revealing detail in the later ritual literature is the one that sounds most absurd. According to the 禮記, mourning men were expected to leap — three hops to a leap, at prescribed moments in the ceremony, with an equivalent chest-beating for women. Weeping was scheduled the same way, which is also how hired professional mourners could wail on cue without anyone thinking it fraudulent.

The reasoning is stated plainly, and it is not what a modern reader expects. These actions were held to be natural expressions of grief, and therefore had to be performed. But grief without a bound on how long and how loudly it runs turns to chaos, and the chaos falls hardest on the bereaved. The rites are not there to manufacture feeling. They are there to give feeling a shape and an end.

Which is the same logic as the rule about socks in my father's house, and the same logic by which the 禮記 says that on a day you go to mourn with others, you do not sing.

Context and Connections

Why these were written down

Book 7 opens with Confucius calling himself a transmitter and not an innovator, one with faith in and love for the ancient ways. Its first eight passages stay close to the transmitting half of that claim — learning, teaching, whether to hoard knowledge. 7.9 and 7.10 begin on the other half.

Confucius did not invent this conduct; he learned it, most likely in training as a 儒 — the ritual specialists whose practices predate him by at least five centuries and who were the professionals families hired to run a funeral. That he behaved correctly at one would be unremarkable if everyone had. The fact that his students recorded it suggests most people no longer did. The Song commentator 馮椅, a contemporary of 朱熹, says as much: in his own day these practices were not being observed, but the Master observed them, so his disciples took his conduct as their measure.

The 禮記 and its 檀弓 chapters

The 禮記 (Book of Rites) was compiled from the decades after Confucius's death through the Warring States period and finished several hundred years later in the early 漢. Its two 檀弓 chapters concentrate on mourning, quote both of these passages with small modifications, and generalize them into rules — where to weep for each kind of relation (inside the ancestral temple for family, opposite its door for a father's friend, outside the house for a personal friend, in open country for an acquaintance), when wailing should be most intense, what a lower official owes a higher one who comes to mourn.

It reads as a book of lists, and much of it is. Its value is not that the rules still apply but that it is one of the better records we have of the period, and that it argues with itself. One 檀弓 anecdote sets two protests side by side: 蟜固, visiting the dying 季武子, refuses to remove his mourning dress — officials remove it only before the Duke, and 季武子 is not the Duke, however much his clan behaves as if he were. 季武子 concedes the point gracefully. Then, when he dies, 曾點 leans on the gate and sings. The chapter approves the first and does not approve the second: there is such a thing as making your point too far.

Who's who

• 楊伯峻 — 20th-century philologist whose work settled the passage numbering and punctuation now standard in the Analects
• 馮椅 — 12th-century commentator, contemporary of 朱熹
• 荀子 — the Confucian philosopher most associated with ritual; his Treatise on Music supplies 夫樂者、樂也
• 季武子 — head of the 季 clan, one of the three families that had taken power from the ducal house of 魯
• 蟜固, 曾點 — the two officials of the 檀弓 anecdote

Related passages

• 7.1 — "A transmitter and not an innovator, faithful to and loving the ancient ways" — the claim these two passages illustrate
• 10.25 — Confucius bowing to mourners he passes, even from his carriage: the same instinct outside a professional setting
• 1.7 — 子夏 on family, work and friends, and studying: character shows in conduct, not in study hours

Language Notes

7.9 — 子食於有喪者之側，未嘗飽也

The Master — eating — at — the side — of — those having — a funeral, never once — ate his fill.

• 食 — the 食 of modern 食堂, dining hall. Positioned right after the subject it has to be a verb, so "to eat" rather than "food."
• 於 — the all-purpose preposition. Render it "with" and you can leave 側 untranslated; render it "at" and you owe the reader the "side."
• 有喪者 — three parts: 有 to have, 喪 a funeral or mourning rites, 者 the nominalizer. Literally "those having a funeral."
• 之側 — beside, at the side of; the same 側 as modern 側邊.
• 未嘗 — not the general negative 不 but the experiential one, matching modern 沒…過: 未 is "not yet" like 沒, 嘗 is "ever, once" like 過. Together: something that has never once happened.
• 飽 — full, sated. What never once happened is eating to fullness.
• 也 — marks the sentence as a statement of fact; usually goes unrendered.

The compressed English costs something. "When the Master dined in the company of one who was in mourning" keeps every unit and reads like a deposition.

7.10 — 子於是日哭，則不歌

The Master — on — that day — wept, then — not — sing.

• 於 — the same preposition as 7.9, but the object is a day, so it becomes "on."
• 是日 — 是 normally means "this" or "that," but with the day defined by the weeping, the demonstrative folds into the English "a day of weeping."
• 哭 — to weep, as in modern Mandarin, with the caveat that this weeping was often scheduled.
• 則 — a grammatical particle doing the work of "then."
• 歌 — like 食 in 7.9, ordinarily a noun (a song) pressed into service as a verb by where it sits.

Rendering the two in parallel means holding "the Master" back to the second clause and folding 於, 是 and 則 into a single opening word: On.