Confucius from the Heart

Confucius attached a great deal of importance to the effect of friends on a person’s development. He taught his own students to make good friends, and to avoid bad ones.

The first are straight friends. Straight here means upright, honest, and fair-minded.

A straight friend is sincere and great-hearted, he or she has a kind of bright, transparent openness about them, without a trace of flattery. Their character will have a good influence on your own. They will give you courage when you are timid, and decisiveness and resolution when you are wavering.

This friend is honest and sincere in his or her dealings with others, and is never fake. Associating with this kind of friend makes us feel calm, composed and safe, they purify and elevate our spirits.

The third is the well-informed friend. This kind of friend is possessed of a great deal of knowledge about a great many things and has seen a lot of the world.

The pre-Qin period (before 221 BC) when Confucius lived was quite different from today, with our computers, Internet, sophisticated information resources and all our different kinds of media. In those days, what did people do when they wanted to widen their outlook? The easiest way was to make a well-informed friend, absorbing the books he or she had read and all their experience into your own direct experience.

When you find yourself dithering over a problem, unable to come to a decision, you would be well advised to go to see a well-informed friend. That friend’s wide-ranging knowledge and experience will help you with your choice.

The three kinds of beneficial friends are true friends, loyal friends and well-informed friends.

Confucius also said that there are three sorts of bad friends: ‘He stands to lose who make friends with three other kinds of people.’ So what sort of people are these?

Having a well-informed friend is like owning a huge encyclopedia; we can learn many useful lessons from their experiences.

Confucius said that there are three kinds of bad friends, ‘the ingratiating in action, the pleasant in appearance and the plausible in speech’, and that to have these three types as friends is ‘to lose’. So how can we tell what kind of people they are?

By the ‘ingratiating in action’, Confucius meant flatterers and fawners – shameless toadies.

We often encounter this sort of person in our lives. No matter what you say, they will always say: ‘That’s just so brilliant’; whatever you do, they will always say: ‘That’s amazing.’ They will never say ‘No’ to you. On the contrary they will slavishly follow you and take their tone from yours, praising you and paying you compliments.

This kind of friend has a talent for weighing your words and watching your expressions. They trim their sails to suit the wind, making sure they never do anything that they sense might displease you.

They are the absolute opposite to the good straight friend. The hearts of these people are neither straightforward nor honest, and they have no sense of right and wrong. Their aim is to make you happy, but only so that they can get something out of it.

Most Chinese people have heard of the treacherous minister He Shen, a character in the TV series Iron Teeth, Copper Teeth. This man fawns on the Qianlong Emperor in every possible way. He is the worst kind of sycophant and there’s almost nothing he won’t stoop to. He is a classic example of this type of bad friend.

A friend like this will make you feel unusually comfortable and happy, just like the Qianlong Emperor in the TV series: he knew very well that He Shen was taking bribes and perverting the law, but even so he could not bear to be without him. As Confucius says, making friends with this kind of person is extremely dangerous!

After being told all the things you want to hear, and flattered into a state of contentment, it will start to go to your head; your ego will swell uncontrollably and you will become blindly self-important, caring for nobody but yourself. You will lose the most basic capacity for self-knowledge, and it will not be long before you bring down disaster on your own head.

The second harmful friend is the person that Confucius called ‘the pleasant in appearance’, or two-faced.

They will be all smiles and sweetness to your face, positively beaming as they dish out their compliments and flattery; they are precisely what Confucius meant by ‘a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face’. But behind your back they will spread rumours and malicious slander.

We often hear people complain: ‘That friend of mine seemed so kind and loving, his speech was so gentle, his behaviour so thoughtful, I believed he was my closest, most intimate friend, I was genuinely committed to helping him, I poured out my heart to him too, told him my innermost secrets. But he betrayed me, abusing my trust for his own ends; he started rumours about me, spread my secrets, destroyed my character. And then when I confronted him, he had the gall to deny it to my face, and put on a show of injured innocence.’

This kind of person is false and hypocritical, the exact opposite of the frankness and honesty of the loyal and trustworthy friend.

People like this are the true ‘petty people’ – petty, and with a dark shadow in their hearts.

However, such people often wear a mask of goodness. Because they have an ulterior motive, they will be very friendly towards you; they might be ten times nicer to you than somebody with no hidden agenda. So if you aren’t careful and let yourself get used by this person, you will find that you have fitted shackles to your own wrists: this friend will not let you go unless you pay a heavy price. This is a test of our judgement, and of our understanding of people and the ways of the world.

The third kind Confucius called ‘the plausible in speech’, referring to people who brag and exaggerate. Ordinary people might call them ‘fast talkers’.

There is nothing this kind of person doesn’t know, and no argument they don’t understand. They talk in an endless stream, carrying you along with their momentum until you can’t help believing them. But in actual fact, apart from the gift of the gab, they have nothing else at all.

There is a clear difference between the kind of person described above and ‘the well-informed’, which is that this kind of person has no real talent or knowledge. A person who is plausible in speech has a glib tongue, but nothing inside to back it up.

Confucius was always suspicious of glib people and their sweet words. A junzi should speak less and do more. Confucius believed that it is not what a person says that matters, but what they do.

Of course, in modern society there has been a change in attitudes and values: if people with real talent and true scholarship cannot communicate effectively and do not get their meaning across, it will obstruct their careers – and their lives.

However, if someone can only talk, and has no real skill, it is something far more harmful.

The three harmful friends found in The Analects of Confucius are flattering friends, two-faced friends and big-talking friends. On no account make friends with this sort of person, or else you will end up paying a painful price.

But, whether a person is good or bad is not written on their face. How can we make good friends and steer well clear of bad friends?

If you want to make good friends, and avoid making bad, you need two things: the first is the desire to make good friends, the second is the ability to do so. We have already seen how important ‘benevolence’ and ‘wisdom’ are, and they are key if we wish to make good friends. The desire to make good friends comes from benevolence and the ability to make them from wisdom. As you will remember, when Fan Chi asked his teacher what he meant by benevolence, his teacher answered with only two words: ‘Loving people.’

The teacher replied, again with just two words: ‘Knowing people.’ To understand others is to be wise.

Plainly, if we want to make good friends, we must first have a kind, benevolent heart, be willing to get close to people, and have the desire to make friends; second, we must have the ability to discriminate. Only in this way can one make friends of real value. Once you have this basic standard, you will be well on your way to making friends of the very best kind.

In a sense, making a good friend is the beginning of a beautiful new chapter in our lives. Our friends are like a mirror: by watching them, we can see where we ourselves fall short.

However, there are some thoughtless people who spend almost all their time with their friends, but never seem able to make these comparisons.

I’ll give you a perfect example of someone who couldn’t. The sixty-second volume of China’s great history, Records of the Grand Historian, tells the story of Yanzi, the famous prime minister of the Kingdom of Qi.

As everyone in China knows, Yanzi was short and stumpy-limbed, with a plain, unremarkable face and rather coarse features. But he had a very handsome, tall, dashing charioteer.

Confucius said: ‘He stands to benefit who makes friends with three kinds of people. Equally, he stands to lose who makes friends with three other kinds of people.

To make friends with the straight, the trustworthy and the well-informed is to benefit. To make friends with the ingratiating, the pleasant in appearance and the plausible in speech is to lose.’

This charioteer, funnily enough, thought that it was a very splendid thing to drive the chariot of the prime minister of the Kingdom of Qi. He was very proud of his position: every day sitting at the front of the chariot, whipping on the tall horses, while Yanzi had to sit behind in the covered part. He thought that his job as a charioteer was just the best thing ever!

One day, the charioteer came home to find his wife packing her bags, weeping bitterly. He asked in surprise: ‘What are you doing?’ His wife replied: ‘I can’t take any more, I’m leaving you. I’m ashamed to live with you.’

The charioteer was astonished: ‘But don’t you think I’m splendid?’ His wife retorted: ‘What do you think splendid is? Look at Yan Ying, a talented man who’s in charge of the whole country, yet he’s so modest, sitting in the chariot without the least fuss or show. You’re just a driver, but you think there’s no end to your own splendour, strutting about with a high and mighty expression written all over your face! You spend all day with a man like Yan Ying, but you don’t have the wit to learn anything at all from him to reflect on yourself – that’s what has made me despair of you. Living with you is the most shameful thing in my life.’

Eventually, Yan Ying heard about what had happened and said to his driver: ‘Since you have such a good wife, I should give you a better position.’ And he promoted the charioteer.

This story tells us that all the people around us, their ways of living and their attitudes in dealing with the world, can become a mirror for us. The key is to keep our wits about us.

The beneficial friends of whom Confucius approved are those who are useful to us. But by useful we do not mean to say that this friend will be able to help you get on in the world, on the contrary, Confucius never advocated taking up with rich or powerful people. Instead, he favoured making friends with people who can perfect your moral character, increase your self-cultivation and enrich your inner self.

In classical Chinese there is a school of pastoral poetry. Poets of this school were notable for their desire to retreat from society, live in seclusion and commune with the natural world, and their work praises the joys of nature and a simple, rural life.

So where can we find this communion with nature? It is not deep in the wild mountains and forests, but in real life. It has been said that ‘it is easier to find solitude in the market place than in the wilderness’. Only a recluse who had not yet perfected their ability to cultivate themselves would hide away up a mountain, and affectedly build themselves a country retreat there; a true hermit has no need to retreat from the mundane world, but can live in the heart of a noisy, bustling city, doing things that are not the slightest bit different from everybody else, and differing from other people only in a certain inner calm and steadiness.

Everyone in China knows Tao Yuanming, one of the first recluses who, as we saw in Part One, would never compromise his ideals, and who became the founder of the pastoral school of poetry. Tao Yuanming lived in rather straitened circumstances, but he had a very happy life. The Southern Histories tell us that Tao Yuanming had no knowledge of music, but he owned a zither. This zither was just a big length of wood, it did not even have any strings. Every time he invited his friends to his house, he would stroke the piece of wood, saying that he was playing the zither, and he would pour all his heart into his playing, sometimes playing for hours until he was weeping audibly. And every time he did this, those friends who really understood music were also visibly moved. Tao Yuanming would play out the music of his soul on his stringless zither, while his friends drank wine and talked happily among themselves. Afterwards, he would say: ‘I am drunk and I want to sleep, you may go.’ The friends left without making a fuss, and continued to meet on similar occasions in the future. Friends like this are true friends, because your souls share an unspoken understanding. And this kind of life is truly happy.

Make friends who are happy, and can take pleasure in their lives the way they are right now.

I once read an essay by the famous Taiwanese writer Lin Qingxuan, about a friend who asked him for a piece of calligraphy to hang in his study. The friend said to him: ‘Write me something that is extremely simple, but which will be helpful to me when I see it every day.’ He thought for a long time, and then wrote just four Chinese characters: ‘Think Often of One and Two.’ That friend did not understand, and asked what it meant. Lin Qingxuan said: ‘We all know the saying that “Out of every ten things in this world eight or nine will not go as I wish; and there is a mere handful of people I can communicate with.” Supposing we accept this, there will still be at least one or two things out of every ten that do go as we wish. I can’t help you too much, all I can do is to tell you to think of those “one or two” things, to turn your mind to happy things, to magnify the light of happiness, to keep the sadness in your heart at bay. As a friend, this is the best thing I can do for you.’

There is a Western fable about a king who led a life of luxury and splendour, full of wine, women, music and adventure; all the most beautiful and precious things in the world were his to command, but still he was not happy. Neither did he know what would make him happy, so he had his attendants summon his personal physician.

The doctor examined him for a long time, and then prescribed a cure: ‘Have your people search the kingdom for the happiest person in it. Wear his shirt, and it will make you happy.’

So the king sent his ministers off to search for that person, and finally they found a genuinely happy man, incurably happy, in fact. But the ministers reported that they had been unable to bring back the man’s shirt for the king to wear.

The ministers said: ‘That man is a pauper and always goes about bare-chested – he doesn’t even own a shirt.’

This reminds us that in life true happiness is happiness of the soul, and does not necessarily have a very strong connection with external, material living conditions. Confucius lived in a time of considerable material poverty, and in his time the strength of true happiness came from a rich inner life, from behaving in the right way and from ambitions and desires, but also from good friends who learned from each other.

Having once come to understand what a good friend is, we also need to know how to get on well with them. Does having a good friend imply that we must be permanently joined together at the hip? In China, we often say of two people that they are so close that they wear just one pair of trousers between them. But is this an appropriate closeness for friends?

Everything that lacks proportion or proper limits in this world will end up going too far, which, as we know, is as bad as not going far enough. Equally, when dealing with friends, we have to pay attention to boundaries. For example when you make friends with a junzi, you need to know when to speak and when not to speak and to know how far you can reasonably go.

Confucius said: ‘When one is in attendance on a junzi, one is liable to three errors. To speak before being spoken to by the junzi is rash; not to speak when being spoken to by him is to be evasive; to speak without observing the expression on his face is to be blind.’ (Analects XVI)

Jumping up and stating your views before a conversation has had a chance to get anywhere is rash and insensitive, which is not a good thing. We all have our own particular interests, but you should wait until the time is ripe, when your chosen subject has become the focus of general attention and everyone is waiting to hear about it, and only then, and without undue haste, say your piece.

Many people now have their own blogs, or use websites in which they eagerly display their innermost hearts for all to see. But in the past there were no such blogs, and everybody depended on the spoken word to understand one another and to communicate. When we get together with friends, there will always a few people who go on and on about their own affairs: I was out playing golf the other day, I’ve just been promoted, and so on and so forth. Or when some women get together, there may be one who pushes herself forward to regale us with endless details of her husband and children. Of course, these are all things that she wants very much to say, but does everybody care about these things? That is to say, while she is the only one doing the talking, she strips away the rights of other people to choose a topic. To jump in with both feet and insist on saying your piece before the right time has come is certainly not good.

But there is another extreme: ‘not speaking when being spoken to’. Confucius called this fault ‘being evasive’.

In other words, the conversation has naturally reached a point where you should be the one to take the conversation further, but you drag your feet, and refuse to speak your mind. This kind of friend leaves everyone feeling excluded. Since the topic has already come this far, why don’t you say anything? Is it self-protection? Are you deliberately holding yourself aloof? Or are you trying to whet our appetite? In short, keeping silent when you should speak is not good either.

The third kind of situation is characterized by Confucius as ‘to speak without observing the expression on his face is to be blind’, which is what we would today call an inability to read people.

‘Blind’ in this context is a great criticism. A person who gets up to speak without watching other people’s expressions is a social illiterate. You must be careful to understand the person you are talking to, you should look to see what words can be said, and what is better left unsaid. This is the tactful respect that should always exist between friends.

And not just friends. There should be tactful avoidance of certain painful issues even between husband and wife, father and son. The life of every adult contains both private triumphs and private miseries, a true friend must not lightly touch on another’s private pains, and for that, you need to be able to read people. Of course, this is not a kind of slavish pandering to other people’s tastes. Rather, it creates a peaceful, friendly atmosphere for you and your friends, so that you can communicate freely.

The actress Vivien Leigh shot to fame with the Hollywood film Gone with the Wind, which won ten Oscars. This film was an immediate hit, and at the height of its fame she went on tour to Europe for the first time. Everywhere she went, thousands of journalists clustered eagerly around as Leigh’s private plane touched down on the runway.

But one journalist, who lacked this ability to read people, pushed his way to the front and eagerly addressed a question to Leigh, who had just alighted: ‘Tell me, miss, what part did you play in this film?’ At this question, Leigh turned on her heel, went back inside the plane and refused to come out again.

Is asking a question like this in a situation you know nothing about so very different from being blind?

Apart from that, when offering friends advice, or giving them warnings, even if your intentions are good, you must be able to understand how far you can go.

Confucius said to Zigong that when giving advice, you must ‘Advise them to the best of your ability and guide them properly, but stop when there is no hope of success. Do not ask to be snubbed.’ (Analects XII) That is, you don’t necessarily have to be like a dose of bitter medicine, you don’t have to smack them round the head and shout in their ear. It is perfectly possible for you to say what you have to in a pleasant but persuasive manner. This is ‘guiding them properly’. If you can’t get through to them, let it go at that. Don’t wait until they lose patience with you, and don’t go courting embarrassment.

Whatever you do, you can’t just order people to do as you say. Today, not even mothers can expect that of their own children. Every individual is worthy of respect, and friends particularly must maintain mutual respect. Give them the right advice, or a proper warning, do your duty and no more; this is what good friends are for.

People make different friends in different stages of life. How do we make the friends that are best suited to us at each stage?

Confucius said that seventy or eighty years of human life seem to be a long time, but it can be divided into three distinct stages: youth, maturity and old age. In every stage there are things that we need to be particularly careful about, which we sometimes call pitfalls. If you can manage to get past all three of these pitfalls, then you will encounter no other serious obstacles in your life. And to overcome these three sets of pitfalls, we can’t do without the help of our friends.

Confucius said: ‘In youth when the blood and qi, or life force, are still unsettled he should guard against the attraction of feminine beauty.’ Young people are very prone to impulsive behaviour, and they should make sure to avoid romantic difficulties. We often see high school and university students troubled by emotional problems. At this time of life, a good friend acts as an onlooker, who sees things more objectively and clearly, so they can offer solutions to the knotty problems we cannot untie ourselves.

When this pitfall is past, we arrive at middle age. Confucius said of this stage: ‘When the blood and qi have become unyielding, he should guard against bellicosity.’

When people reach middle age, their family life is stable and they are established in their profession, so what is most on their mind at this time? The desire to make space for themselves, to expand their domain. However, this is all too liable to cause contradictions and conflicts with others, and both sides may very well come off worse as a result. So Confucius warns us that the most important thing for people in mid-life is to caution against getting involved in conflicts. Rather than fighting with other people, it is better to struggle with oneself, and try to find ways to improve. If, in the end, you miss out on that promotion, you should ask yourself whether it might not be because you could have done better in some way.

In this period, therefore, you should make friends with people who are calm and matter-of-fact. They will help you take the long view of temporary victories and defeats, overcome the temptations of material things, obtain spiritual comfort, and find a place of repose and respite for the soul.

But what should we beware of when we arrive in our later years? According to Confucius, ‘When the blood and qi have declined, he should guard against acquisitiveness.’

In old age, people’s minds show a tendency to slow down and become more tranquil. The philosopher Bertrand Russell compared this stage to a rapidly flowing river that rushes headlong through the mountains, but by the time it finally merges with the sea has become slow, broad and placid. At this stage of life, people should have learned how to deal with possessions and achievements in a sensible way.

When young, we all live a life of addition, but after reaching a certain point, we have to learn to live by subtraction.

Society has given you friendship, money, human ties and achievements, and by the time you reach old age you will have acquired a great many things, just like a house that gradually fills up with accumulated objects. If your heart becomes cluttered up with the things you have acquired, then they will end up holding you back.

What do our elderly friends discuss when they get together? A lot of the time, it involves grumbling. They complain that their sons and daughters have no time for them, saying: ‘I worked so hard to raise you – I did everything for you – wiped your bottom, changed your nappies! – but now you’re busy, no time even for a quick visit.’ They grumble at the unfairness of society: ‘In my day we were busy making revolution, and all we got was a few dozen yuan a month – now look at my granddaughter, she went to a foreign company and was earning three or four thousand yuan straight away. Is this fair to people like us who’ve worked our hearts out?’

Rather than fighting with others, it is better to struggle with yourself, and try to find ways to improve yourself.

If you keep saying things like this, then things that you should find pleasure in will become painful, a hidden burden dragging you down. At this time you need friends to help you come to terms with life, and learn how to let go of things, so that you can leave these annoyances and frustrations far behind you.

One thing we notice from a close reading of the Analects is that there are not actually many examples concerned with friendship alone, but that choosing friends is choosing a way of life. The kind of friends we make will first depend on our inner wisdom and self-cultivation; then on our particular circle of friends, and whether these friends are harmful or beneficial to our lives.

In short, once we have focused on our own heart and soul and on those who surround us, we must concern ourselves with what goals we should set ourselves as we move through life.