Confucius' Analects: transmit rather than reinvent
A new board almost always starts by redoing things. Some of what it is redoing worked — nobody just said so out loud.
In September a new board rebuilds the registration form, because last year's is 'not our style'. Confucius calls himself a transmitter; to that he adds character, which governs better than an order, form, which carries content across generations, and names, which have to fit things.
Find one thing the previous board did well and deliberately leave it alone. Say it in the meeting: we are not changing this, because it works.
The full biography is on the public version →
Yuan-period album portrait — a traditional depiction, not from life. National Palace Museum, Taipei. PD-Art / PD-old-100-expired — anonymous, National Palace Museum, Taipei
These screens carry out this specific work. Every published work in the library also has at least an exercise — it is at the foot of this page.
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These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Continuity, Self-command
shared competencies: Self-command, Rhetoric
shared competencies: Self-command, Rhetoric
shared competencies: Self-command, Rhetoric
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The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.
This text is freely available, so the links go straight to it rather than to a summary of it.
- James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. I (1861) — the translation this page cites
- Stanford Encyclopedia on Confucius
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