爲仁由己 jin o nasu wa onore ni yoru The Practice of Humaneness Rests on Oneself

仁 (read jin) is humaneness. A Japanese dictionary gives it as consideration, affection and kindness, and especially as the highest virtue of Confucianism. 爲 (read nasu) is to do, to practice. 由 (read yoru) is to come from, to rest on. 己 (read onore) is oneself. In a copy of the Analects printed in Japan in 1533, a reader's brush wrote yoreri beside 由 and onore beside 己.

In the Analects, the line comes with the sentences before it: to restrain oneself and return to the rites is humaneness; if for one day one restrains oneself and returns to the rites, the world will turn to humaneness; the practice of humaneness rests on oneself, and how could it rest on others? The question expects the answer no. In our history's reading, the practice cannot be borrowed, delegated or waited for.

Whose self is meant has two answers in one commentary. Huang Kan, in the sixth century, reads the sentence before the line as said of a ruler. The line then gives the reason the people turn to him: he practices humaneness for one day and the people turn to him; that is why it rests on himself and not on others. Huang Kan quotes the older scholar Fan Ning, who speaks it of himself: the practice of humaneness lies in me; how should I wait for another to practice it? Zhu Xi read the line of anyone: the spring of it is in oneself.

James Legge's English of 1861 asks: Is the practice of perfect virtue from a man himself, or is it from others? His note says the line is designed to teach that every man may attain to this virtue for himself. Arthur Waley, in 1938, gave it to the ruler, with no note on it: For Goodness is something that must have its source in the ruler himself; it cannot be got from others. Wing-tsit Chan, in 1963, put the ruler in brackets in the sentence before and read this one of oneself.

Zhu Xi read the 己 of 克己, to restrain oneself, as the body's selfish desires. Mao Qiling in China, and Ogyū Sorai and his pupil Dazai Shundai in Japan, pointed to this line. Here 己 is the self, they argued, so the 己 of 克己 cannot be selfish desire. Dazai asked: could one say the practice of humaneness rests on the body's selfish desires? Ruan Yuan printed the same argument in 1823.

Kaibara Ekken, in his Record of Great Doubts, whose preface he signed in 1713, turned the line on the sentence before it. If the world will turn to humaneness meant the world grants a man humaneness, he wrote, humaneness would rest on others' praise. He read it as the world coming home to humaneness.

The line has long been used on its own. Pan Yue's elegy for his friend Xiahou Zhan was written by the year 300. In it the poet recalls warning his friend that the age hates the outstanding, and Xiahou answers: our ways are not the same; the practice of humaneness rests on oneself. The general Wen Jiao set the line in a proclamation, and Fu Xian built it into a poem made of lines of the Analects. Zhu Xi put it in an inscription for a studio named relying on humaneness. A Japanese handbook of phrases for the brush prints the inscription among his studio inscriptions.

In 1681, at twenty-four by the Japanese count, the Japanese Confucian Muro Kyūsō wrote a vow to the spirit of Sugawara no Michizane. In its last paragraph he turned to the line: though the practice of humaneness rests on oneself and cannot be sought from others, yet to make a man stand in awe and in faith, so that he dares not deceive himself, who could do it but a god, keen of ear and eye and upright?

Our history reads the line, standing alone as it is sold, of anyone: a sentence about where the work of humaneness begins, in oneself. It gives the ruler reading its place as Huang Kan's.

The third sentence of Confucius's answer to his disciple Yan Hui, who asked him about humaneness, in the Analects, chapter 顏淵, two sentences after 克己復禮; it opens the question 爲仁由己、而由人乎哉, the practice of humaneness rests on oneself; how could it rest on others?