Go to Jordan's main page,
China Resources main page.

Content created: 2022-05-31
File last modified:
Go to English only version.

decorative header

A Child’s Discourse

Procursus

This page deals with Confucius’ encounter with a very self-confident seven-year old boy named Xiàng Tuó 项橐, who is blocking the road. The story is old, but in this version it comes from an XVIIIth-century children’s reader. Here is the background.

Children’s Readers. In late dynastic times an increasing variety of elementary reading books emerged in China, of varying pedagogical effectiveness, but ostensibly aimed at children and incorporating very general knowledge and repetitive injunctions to obey their superiors. In many cases they were made more appealing by the inclusion of illustrative woodcuts like the one shown below.

Easily the most famous one still in print today is the “Three Character Classic,” available on this web site (link), but there were many others, often including in their titles the self-effacing expression “miscellaneous characters” or Zázì 杂字.

bildo
Confucius’s way is blocked by a stubborn little boy named Xiàng Tuó
Internet Reproduction of Almanac Woodcut

The “miscellaneous characters” text on this page comes from an anonymous work called the “Miscellaneous Characters from an Eastern Garden” (Dōngyuán Zázì 东园杂字) apparently published in Guǎngzhōu 广州 in 1743.

The story itself, however, is an old and famous one. It is off-handedly referred to in the “Strategies of the Warring States” (Zhànguó Cè (Qín cè wǔ 战国策) as revised in the early Hàn period (period 6). (Not surprisingly, knowledge of it is assumed in the “Three Character Classic” (chapter 8, line 112).

The 1743 version used here is therefore a retelling. It seems to be the version often included with other “pedagogical” material in traditional almanacs (tōngshū 通书) throughout the last dynasty and subsequently to the present.

No doubt it was its very ubiquity that led to its inclusion in S. Wells Williams 1842 textbook, Easy Lessons in Chinese, where it is accompanied by Cantonese romanization, English word glosses, and an English translation.

Interpretation of the Selection

The plot is simple. Briefly, Confucius goes out in his carriage, with some of his followers walking alongside. His way is blocked by a seven-year-old small urchin named Xiàng Tuó 项橐, who is ignoring his playmates and is using broken roof tiles to built a structure across the path. Confucius is forced to stop. He gets out and has a discussion with the child, who bests him in discoursing on Confucian orthodoxy, among other things. Confucius declares him a prodigy and proceeds on his way.

The traditional interpretation makes this an edifying event. Confucius, China’s most venerable ancient sage, was never known to be especially fond of children, although it is reasonable to suspect that his own troubled youth may have left him sympathetic to kids out of step with their playmates, as here. (For a brief biography of Confucius, click here.) The famous man’s encounter with little Xiàng Tuó is said to demonstrate

  1. that the sage honored wisdom from any source, however humble, which you (the intended reader) ought to do too, and
  2. that even a little child like you, if he studies hard enough, can become a paragon of learning.

(Which of these lessons is highlighted depends on the storyteller. The ode at the end of the present version, probably a later addition, stresses the second.) The two-pronged traditional interpretation is no doubt the reason why this text has survived with other popular hortatory texts, and is even celebrated in some popular art like the following lintel decoration in a Taiwan temple.

bildo
Confucius descends to talk with a small boy
Lintel painting,Jìn’ān Fǔ Temple 進安府, Táixī台西, Taiwan

Another interpretation is that the story is simple satire. Although I know of no Chinese commentator who sees it as such, the encounter lends itself to being read as a satire more persuasively than as adulation, rather like Zhuāngzǐ’s 庄子 famous account of Confucius’ humiliating meeting with Lǎozǐ 老子 (link). Seen as satire, the clearly prodigious child may be an asocial and sanctimonious brat, but Confucius is a self-important booby in need of having his chain pulled.

(Confucius’ initial attempt to befriend the kid smacks, for a modern reader, of a failed attempt at child abduction, but this would not have been part of a traditional satire.)

To argue for and against the two interpretations, I have inserted interpretative comments between sections of the narrative. Such ambiguity, in the face of a staid traditional interpretation of the child as a moral exemplar able to humble even Confucius, only increases the interest and charm of the text.

Web Translation

For the presentation here, I began with an on-line version of the Chinese text in traditional characters, made a few small corrections to agree with Williams’ version, repunctuated the text, and provided a new translation, guided in part both by Williams and by a rendering of much of it that occurs in Martin Palmer’s fascinating T’ung Shu: The Ancient Chinese Almanac. (Full references are at the end of the page.) The short sections have been numbered for easy reference in classes.

The Chinese text and my English translation may be reused for educational purposes with no further permission. The romanization and simplified characters were produced using BabelPad and have not been proofed except to correct the tone change in when it is a verb.


Go to English only version.

A Child’s Discourse



Return to top.



Return to top.



Return to top.



Return to top.



Return to top.



Return to top.



Return to top.



Return to top.

Go to English only version.


Sources Cited:

Anonymous
1743 “小兒論” (A Child’s Discourse). (link). Táinán 台南鴻鑫風水教育學園 (Prosperous Swan Geomancy Academy). Consulted 2022-05-20.
PALMER, Martin
1986 T’ung Shu: The Ancient Chinese Almanac. Boston: Shambala. (Pp. 135-138)
WILLIAMS, S. Wells
1842 in Easy lessons in Chinese or Progressive Exercises to Facilitate the Study of That Language Especially Adapted to the Canton Dialect. (Chapter VI part V “Confucius and the Boy” from the “Miscellanies of the Eastern Garden” 東園雜字) Macao: The Chinese Repository. (Pp. 102-111). (Available from Google Books.)

Return to top.