Death and life have their determined appointments - Riches and honors depend upon heaven

生死有命富貴在天, read in Japanese shisei mei ari, fūki ten ni ari: life and death have their allotted span; wealth and rank rest with Heaven. Eight characters in two clauses of four. 命 is the decree of Heaven, the lot one is given, and so one's span of life; 富貴 is wealth and rank together; 在天, they rest with Heaven. The line is in the Analects, book 12, and it is not Confucius's: the disciple Sima Niu grieves that he alone has no brothers, and Zixia answers him with a saying he has heard, death and life have their allotted span, wealth and rank rest with Heaven, and then with his own consolation, that a gentleman who is reverent and courteous has brothers within the four seas. The canon writes 死生; the scroll's order 生死 is old too: the Tang commentator Li Shan quoted the line that way, and both Edo printings of the Wen xuan print his note beneath the essay that cites it. In Japan the line became a way of facing death, from a soldier in the fourteenth-century Taiheiki arguing to attack now, since no one knows who dies first, to an 1829 wanderer refusing to beg for his life. The English title is James Legge's sentence of 1861. David Beckham's tattoo of the line has 由 for the seventh character where the text has 在; every design here carries 在.