Admiring the worthy — longing for men of worth慕賢

The ancients said, "A sage in a thousand years is as close as morning to evening, and a worthy man in five hundred years is as close as shoulder to shoulder." This says how hard sages and worthy men are to come by, and how thinly they are spread. If a man should meet a bright and thorough gentleman such as the age seldom brings, how can he not cling to him and look up to him? I was born in a broken age and grew up among war horses, drifting and driven about, and I have seen and heard much already. Never once did I meet a man of known worth without my heart growing drunk and my spirit dazed with longing toward him. While a man is young his spirit is not yet settled, and he is steeped and dyed by those he keeps close company with. His speech, his laughter and his bearing shift without his knowing and grow like theirs, though he had no mind to learn them. How much more with conduct and principle, with skill and ability, which are plain to compare and easy to take up? So living with a good man is like entering a room of iris and orchid, where in time one grows fragrant of oneself, and living with a bad man is like entering a shop of salted fish, where in time one grows rank of oneself. When Mozi grieved over the dyeing of silk, this is what he meant. A gentleman must be careful in whom he goes about with. Confucius said, "Do not befriend one who is not your equal." Yet how is the world to furnish men like Yan Hui and Min Ziqian? It is enough that a man be better than oneself, and then he is worth prizing.

Men of the world are mostly blinkered. They prize the ear and hold the eye cheap, and they weigh the far heavy and the near light. Among those they have gone about with since youth there may be a worthy man, yet they slight him in their familiarity and pay him no respect. A man of another district or another county, with only a borrowed scrap of report, has them craning their necks and rising on their toes, worse than in hunger or thirst. Measure the long and short of the two and sift the fine from the coarse, and sometimes the far one is not the equal of the near. This is why the men of Lu called Confucius Qiu (丘) of the house to the east. Long ago Gong Zhiqi of Yu had grown up with his ruler from boyhood, and the ruler took him lightly and would not accept his remonstrance, until the state was lost. One cannot fail to keep this in mind.

To use a man's words and cast the man aside was a shame to the ancients. Whatever word or deed is taken from another must be openly named as his. One must not steal another's good and make it one's own strength. Though the man be slight and low, the credit must be given back to him. To steal another's goods is a thing punishment deals with. To steal another's good is a thing the spirits call to account.

When Emperor Xiaoyuan of Liang was formerly in Jingzhou there was a man named Ding Chan, only a commoner of Hongting, who wrote rather well and was uncommonly fine in the cursive and the clerical hand. Emperor Xiaoyuan had him do all the secretarial writing. The army office held him cheap and low and mostly made little of him, and was ashamed to let its sons take his hand as a model. The saying at the time was, "Ten sheets from Master Ding are not worth a few words from Wang Bao." I have loved his brushwork from the first and have always kept it as a treasure. Emperor Xiaoyuan once sent the clerk Hui Bian to show some writings to Libationer Xiao, and the Libationer asked, "The letters His Majesty has lately bestowed, and the poems copied out, are the work of an uncommonly fine hand. What is his name? How is it that nothing at all is heard of him?" Hui Bian answered with the truth, and Xiao Ziyun sighed and said, "This man has no equal among the rising generation, and yet in the end the world does not speak of him. That too is a strange thing." At this those who heard began little by little to look at him with new eyes. He rose in office as far as Gentleman of the Ceremonial Section in the Department of State, and at the last he was Reader to the Prince of Jin'an and went east in the prince's train. When the Western Terrace fell, the documents were scattered and lost, and Ding too died soon after in Yangzhou. Those who had held him cheap before longed later for a single sheet, and could not get one.

When Hou Jing first entered Jianye, the terrace gates were shut, yet public and private alike were in confusion and no one could keep himself safe. Yang Kan, Commander of the Left Guard of the Crown Prince, sat at the Eastern Side Gate, divided the posts and laid out the plan, and settled it all in a single night, so that in the end they could hold out against the rebel for more than a hundred days. At that time there were some forty thousand people inside the walls, and no fewer than a hundred were princes, dukes and court officers, yet it was on this one man Yang Kan that their safety rested. So wide is the distance between men. The ancients said, "Chaofu and Xu You yielded the realm, while the petty men of the market street fight over the profit of a single coin." That distance too is already a far one.

Within a few years of ascending the throne, Emperor Wenxuan of Qi sank into drink and gave himself free rein, and there was hardly any order left. Still he knew enough to hand the government to Yang Zunyan, Director of the Department of State, so that within and without were clear and quiet, court and country at ease, each man in his own place, with no one raising a contrary word, and so the Tianbao years ran to their end. Yang Zunyan was later put to death by Emperor Xiaozhao, and from then law and government declined. Hulü Mingyue was a minister who turned back the enemy for the court of Qi. When he was killed without guilt, officers and men fell apart, and the men of Zhou first conceived the purpose of swallowing Qi. In Guanzhong they praise him to this day. Was this man's handling of troops no more than something ten thousand men looked up to? The life of the state hung on his living or dying.

When Zhang Yanjun was Left Assistant of the Branch Department at Jinzhou, he set the commanding general straight and upheld him, calmed and held the frontier, laid up arms and supplies, and cherished the common people and kept them alive, standing so firm that he was a match for a rival state. The crowd of petty men could not have their way, and joined their strength to have him moved. After his replacement came, public and private fell into disorder, and when the army of Zhou rose once, this garrison was the first to be brought down. The traces of the fall of Qi were opened here.