Benoît Vermander (Fudan University), "Confucius and the Hen-Pheasant: The Enigma at the Center of the Analects"
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 2023
At the very middle of the Analects of Confucius, lies a riddle:
Startled, [the bird] rose up. It circled around, and then settled. [Confucius] said: “Over the hill dike, the hen-pheasant! The time has come! The time has come!” Zilu presented the offering. Three times [the bird] smelled it, then it took off.
(Analects 10.27)
Basically, all the characters of this short passage are problematic and have been debated by commentators for the last two millennia. My translation is only tentative. It relies on a number of intertextual clues. For instance, in the “Great Vow” chapter of the Classic of Documents, King Wu of Zhou exclaims:
What the people longs for, Heaven means to give. So, come now, help me, a simple man, to rejuvenate the world. The time has come, let us not waste it [let us seize the moment]!
Or yet, we read in the Xunzi:
The reason for which the officiant does not drain the sacrificial cup, why the impersonator of the dead does not taste the dishes on the sacrificial stand when the service is complete, and why the three officiants do not eat during the three offerings [literally: the three smelling] are unified by a single principle.
(Translation Donald Hutton)
These clues and others hint at the fact that the bird is spontaneously perceived by Confucius as a ritual envoy with a [quasi] divine status. The way Confucius wishes to see it, this ritual envoy has come to fulfill a heavenly mission. The dancing it performs awakens in Confucius the idea that the Heavenly Mandate is somehow going to be bestowed upon him. And yet, no external manifestation takes place.
Still, why a hen-pheasant? The behavioral characteristics of these animals were exalted and put into motion in tales that centered upon mythical birds whose appearance did not excessively depart from the one of the ordinary pheasant. These mythical birds were strongly associated with the figure of Yu the Great, the archetypal rescuer from calamities, the hero who, in the “Great Plan” chapter of the Classic of Documents, is introduced into the mystery of the cosmic patterns. That the birth of Yu the Great—the quintessential civilizing hero—is heralded by a pheasant-like mythical bird acts here as a reminder of the extent to which Confucius, for a good part of his existence, was looking for a shining sign of the mission entrusted to him. Analects 9.9 provides us with the clearest testimony of this pursuit:
The Master said: “The phoenix does not appear; the [Yellow] River does not bring forth the Chart. For me, it’s all over!”
And yet, Confucius, in his later years, is seeking the Mandate of Heaven through the motions of one’s inner core: “At fifty I knew the Mandate of Heaven; at sixty, my ears were attuned. [Now that I am] seventy, I can follow my heart’s wishes without overstepping boundaries” (Analects 2.4). The episode of the hen-pheasant may signal an in-between, a moment in the journey that goes from the outer to the inner: through its dance, the bird enacts a ritual that reawakens Confucius’ quest for the Heavenly Mandate.
The hen-pheasant paragraph constitutes a riddle in the sense that it remains open-ended and does not constitute a well-defined teaching. The discovery of the central role played by a riddle, an enigma, in the composition of a text generally organized as a ring has played a crucial role in the unearthing of the laws governing compositions originating form a number of cultural contexts. The hen-pheasant anecdote wraps up the tenth chapter of the Analects, whose received version comprises twenty chapters. This is equivalent to saying that the hen-pheasant paragraph concludes the first of the two halves that compose the book. It closely resonates with the beginning and the end of the book as it works as a parable of the journey through which Confucius needs to go beyond external omens so as to fully recognize and accept his destiny and become the archetype of a gentleman, an exemplary person (junzi). Located at the “geographical” center of the work, the enigma also provides us with the tipping point between “outer” and “inner” knowledge. Speaking of accomplishment in the innermost (fulfilling the original spirit of the Rites) and of failure in the outermost (the absence of any clear omen), the enigma at the center links together the beginning and the end: the mixture of accomplishment in the inner and of failure in the outer is akin to “being ignored by men” (Analects 1.1) while progressively “knowing one’s fate” (20.3).
These clues and others suggest the editing of the book underwent a process of composition based on rhetorical patterning. The hen-pheasant episode, located at the end of Chapter 10 and thus at the geographical center of the Analects, corresponds to what studies on ring composition label the enigma at the center. This amounts to hypothesizing that the Analects are organized as a ring.