1In the land of the Yellow River, in the years when the states were tearing at one another, a teacher was travelling the roads with his students. His family name was Kong. His students called him the Master. The world would later call him Confucius.
2He was past sixty. He had held office once in his own state of Lu, and had left it when its lord would not govern rightly. For years now he had gone from court to court in a creaking cart, looking for one ruler who would govern by rightness and not by fear. He had not found one. In one state a great lord had sent men to kill him. He went on to the next.
3With him went a handful of students who would not leave him. There was Zilu, a big, blunt man who still wore a sword. There was Zigong, who had been a merchant and could talk a toll-keeper out of his toll. There was Yan Hui, thin and poor and quiet, whom the Master loved best. And there was a cart boy named Geng.
4Geng was sixteen. He was no student. He had been hired to drive the second cart, the one with the bamboo books, and to mind the ox that drew it. He had taken the work because he was told the old man would soon be a minister somewhere, and a minister's cart boy eats meat. That had been two years ago. He had not yet eaten meat.
5Now hear what befell them in the wild country between the states of Chen and Cai.
6The great southern kingdom of Chu had sent to invite the Master. The lords of Chen and Cai heard of it and were afraid: this man knows every fault of ours. They did not dare to kill a teacher so well known. So they sent armed men to ring him in, out on the empty plain. Hunger could do the rest, and no one's hands would be bloody.
7The travellers woke one morning to find spearmen standing in the distance on every side. They could not go forward or back. They had food for two days.
8On the third day the rice was gone. By the fifth, half the students were too weak to stand. They lay under the carts in the shade, with their lips cracked. The spearmen stood in the distance and did nothing at all.
9And through all of it, the old man taught. That was what Geng could not forgive. He sat under a dead tree with those who could still sit up, and went over the old songs with them, line by line. In the evening he took out his zither and played, and sang in a cracked voice. Geng, lying by his ox with his belly clenched like a fist, thought it the most hateful sound he had ever heard.
10On the fifth evening Zilu got to his feet, grey in the face, and angry. He stood over the Master and said what all of them were thinking. His words, and the answer, were kept by those who heard:
11"Has the superior man likewise to endure in this way?"
12The Master did not stop tuning the string. He said: "The superior man may indeed have to endure want, but the mean man, when he is in want, gives way to unbridled license."
13Zilu stood there, breathing hard. Then he sat down again. Geng did not sit down in his heart. Fine words, he thought. You can eat fine words. I am a mean man, and glad of it, and I mean to live.
14For Geng knew something the others did not. That day, grazing the ox, he had found a dry stream bed. It ran deep between banks, with thorn growing over it, out through the ring of spearmen to the south. A man could not be seen in it. An ox could not be seen in it, if it was led quietly, at the dark of the moon.
15The ox was the last thing of value they had. A fat ox would buy a boy his passage through the line, and a bag of millet besides. Without the ox, the cart of books would stand where it was until it rotted, and the students who could not walk would have nothing to carry them. Geng knew this. He had not been hired, he told himself, to die for bamboo.
16On the sixth night the moon would set before midnight. He made his fire small, apart from the others, beside the cart. He tied the ox with a knot that one pull would free. Then he sat down to wait for the dark.
17Someone came out of the night and stood at the edge of his firelight.
18It was a child, a girl of about ten, in a patched jacket too large for her, with a gathering basket on her back. He could not think how she had come through the spearmen, and then he thought: who looks at a child picking herbs?
19"May I sit at your fire?" she said. "It is cold on the plain."
20He should have sent her away. He had a thing to do that wanted no witness. But it is hard to refuse a fire to a child. He moved over.
21She sat. She took from her basket four wild yams, small and crooked, and pushed them into the embers with a stick. He watched them as a dog watches.
22When they were done she raked them out and broke each one, and gave him the larger half. He had a little salt left, in a twist of cloth; he had been keeping it for his road. He held it out to her, and she took a pinch and thanked him. They ate without talking. It was the first food he had had in three days, and he felt his own mind come back to him, like a man returning to a house.
23She looked round, while she ate. She looked at the ox, and at the knot on its tether. She looked at the cart with its load of bamboo. She looked across at the other fire, where the sick lay in a row. And she looked a good while at Geng's bundle, tied and ready beside him.
24Then she turned to him. Her eyes were quite calm. She asked him one thing.
25"What have you left open?"
26He did not understand her. "Open? Nothing is open. Look about you. We are shut in like pigs in a pen. That is the whole trouble."
27She did not answer, and she did not ask again. She finished her yam. After a while she lay down on the far side of the fire with her basket for a pillow and seemed to sleep.
28The moon went down. It was the hour. Geng did not get up.
29The question would not leave him. It was like a burr in his sleeve. He was angry at it. He had left nothing open; nothing was his to open or shut; he was a cart boy.
30But he had eaten, and his mind went on without his leave. There is the stream bed, it said. That is open. It is the only open thing on this whole plain, and you are the only one who knows it. You were going to go through it and pull it shut after you, like a man who finds a gate and takes it away with him.
31He looked across at the sick. He had only ever looked at his own hunger, which was large and near and blocked the view. One of those men had given him a padded coat last winter. The thin one, Yan Hui, had taught him to write the characters for ox and cart in the dust, laughing, on a dull afternoon.
32He thought: if the ox goes, they stay. If I say where the stream bed is, someone may get out who can fetch help. Both of those things are in my hand tonight, and in no one else's.
33It surprised him very much to find that anything was in his hand.
34He sat until the grey came. When he looked across the ashes, the child was gone. She had left the last yam on a stone beside his bundle.
35He got up, with stiff legs, and went to the other fire, and found Zigong. "There is a way out," he said. "South. A dry stream. I found it yesterday." He made himself say the rest. "I was going to take the ox through it last night and sell it to the soldiers. I did not. I am telling you now."
36Zigong looked at him a long moment. He was a merchant, and knew what a thing costs. "Show me," he said.
37Zigong went out by the stream bed that same night, alone, to carry word to the king of Chu. But before he left, he bargained with a farmer beyond the line for a small bag of rice, and passed it back up the stream bed to Yan Hui.
38So on the seventh day there was rice. Not much. One pot, for all of them.
39Yan Hui cooked it. Geng lay by his cart, forty paces off, and watched the steam. And he saw a thing which made him go cold, and then hot.
40Yan Hui lifted the lid. He looked quickly into the pot. Then he reached in with his fingers, took out a lump of rice, and put it in his own mouth.
41Geng could have laughed aloud. The best of them! The gentle one, the Master's darling. He was stealing from the common pot before the sick had tasted it. Then they were all the same underneath, the fine ones and the mean ones, and Geng need not have sat up all night being ashamed.
42He turned his head. The Master was sitting under the dead tree, and he had seen it too. The old man's face did not grow angry. It grew grieved, and very tired.
43The Master said, quietly, "This is the first clean food we have had in seven days. Let us set some aside for the ancestors, before anyone eats. It should be offered untouched."
44"Master, it cannot be offered," said Yan Hui. "It has been touched. When I lifted the lid, a clot of soot fell from the tree into the rice. I could not serve that to you, and it is wrong to throw food away when men are starving. So I picked out the spoiled part and ate it myself." He bowed his head. "I am sorry. I should have told you at once."
45The old man did not speak for a while. Then he called the students who could walk to come near, and Geng crept near too, behind them.
46"I saw him eat from the pot," the Master said. "With my own eyes. And I was sure, in my own mind, of what I saw. I have known this man fifteen years, and in the space of a breath I believed him a thief." He looked at his hands. "We trust the eye, and the eye is not to be trusted. We rely on the mind, and the mind too may deceive us. Remember this, all of you. It is not an easy thing to know a person."
47Geng sat back on his heels. He had been just as sure. He had been glad to be sure. He had seen a hand go into a pot, and all the rest he had supplied out of himself. He thought: I did not see Yan Hui at all. I saw Geng, and put Yan Hui's face on him.
48They ate the rice. It was the best food he ever tasted in his life.
49Four days later there was dust in the south, and then banners. The king of Chu had sent soldiers to bring the Master through. The spearmen of Chen and Cai went home. The ox drew the cart of books out of that field, with two sick men lying on the bamboo, and Geng walked at its head.
50He did not leave at the next town, though he could have gone. One evening on the road, he went and stood at the edge of the circle where the Master sat with his students. He stood there a long time with his heart knocking.
51"Well?" said the Master.
52"I cannot pay," said Geng. "And I am not of good family. And I nearly sold your ox."
53"I know about the ox. Zigong told me. He also told me who came and said so, when he need not have." The old man moved over on his mat. "I have never refused to teach anyone who came wishing to learn, though he brought no more than a bundle of dried meat. Sit down. We are speaking of what knowledge is, and Zilu here is about to be corrected."
54Zilu growled. The Master turned to him and said the thing which Geng remembered longest:
55"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge."
56Geng followed him for the five years that were left of his wandering, and afterward home to Lu. He learned his characters. He was never one of the great students; his name is in no book. But he was there on the day Zigong asked the Master whether there was one word a man could carry all his life as a rule. And he heard the answer:
57"What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."
58Geng thought of a dry stream bed, and a knot that one pull would free. Yes, he thought. I would not have wanted it done to me. I knew that the whole time. It only needed someone to make me look.
59The Master went home to Lu in the end, an old man, and no ruler ever gave him a state to set right. He spent his last years teaching, and putting the old songs and records in order. It is told that near the end he believed he had failed. His students mourned him three years, as sons mourn a father. Then they went out through all the states, and taught others, and wrote his sayings down.
60No king of that age is remembered as he is. But Geng, when he was old, and had students of his own in a village school, would tell them first of a cold night on the plain, and four crooked yams, and a child whose name he never learned.
61"She asked me one question," he would say, "and I told her it was a foolish one. I have been answering it ever since."