3 ¤½¦Ï¶Ç, «s¤½¤Q¥|¦~. According to Kung-yang, however, the lin was
found by some wood-gatherers.
4 Mencius III. Pt. II. ix. 8.
5 Mencius III. Pt. II. ix. 11.


of Ch'i had been murdered by one of his officers. Confucius was
moved with indignation. Such an outrage he felt, called for his
solemn interference. He bathed, went to court, and represented
the matter to the duke, saying, 'Ch'an Hang has slain his
sovereign, I beg that you will undertake to punish him.' The duke
pleaded his incapacity, urging that Lu was weak compared with
Ch'i, but Confucius replied, 'One half the people of Ch'i are not
consenting to the deed. If you add to the people of Lu one half the
people of Ch'i, you are sure to overcome.' But he could not infuse
his spirit into the duke, who told him to go and lay the matter
before the chiefs of the three Families. Sorely against his sense
of propriety, he did so, but they would not act, and he withdrew
with the remark, 'Following in the rear of the great officers, I did
not dare not to represent such a matter [1].'
In the year B.C. 479, Confucius had to mourn the death of
another of his disciples, one of those who had been longest with
him, the well-known Tsze-lu. He stands out a sort of Peter in the
Confucian school, a man of impulse, prompt to speak and prompt
to act. He gets many a check from the master, but there is
evidently a strong sympathy between them. Tsze-lu uses a
freedom with him on which none of the other disciples dares to
venture, and there is not one among them all, for whom, if I may
speak from my own feeling, the foreign student comes to form
such a liking. A pleasant picture is presented to us in one passage