Name and reality名實

Name and reality are as the form and the shadow. Where virtue and skill are full and thick, the name is sure to be good; where the face and its color are fair and lovely, the shadow is sure to be beautiful. To seek a fine name in the world today without cultivating oneself is like having a very ugly face and demanding a lovely shadow from the mirror. The highest sort of man forgets his name, the middling sort establishes his name, and the lowest sort steals a name. He who forgets his name embodies the way and accords with virtue and enjoys the blessing and the help of the spirits, so he has no cause to seek a name. He who establishes his name cultivates himself and is careful in his conduct and fears that his honor will not be seen, so he has no cause to decline a name. He who steals a name makes his outside thick and is deeply crooked within and dresses up a floating fiction, so he has no cause to gain a name.

What a man's foot treads on is no more than a few inches. Yet on a path of a foot or so he is sure to fall at the edge of a cliff, and on a bridge no thicker than his two hands he is always drowned in the valley stream. Why is this? It is because there is no ground left over beside him. So it is also when a gentleman establishes himself. That words of the utmost sincerity are not believed, and that conduct of the utmost purity is doubted by others, comes altogether from there being no room to spare in his words, his conduct and his repute. Whenever I am disparaged by others I always blame myself with this. If a man could open a road where two carriages run abreast and widen a crossing of joined boats, then the word of Zhongyou would be heavier to trust than an oath sworn on the altar, and the city that Zhao Xi brought to surrender would be better than a general who breaks the enemy's charge.

I have seen men of the world whose pure name rose and then gold and cowries came in, whose good faith showed and then their promises fell away; they do not know that the spear behind breaks down the shield in front. Fu Zijian said, "What is sincere here takes shape there." A man's empty and full, true and false, lie in the heart, yet there is nothing that does not show in the traces. Only our looking is not practiced enough. Once a thing is caught in that looking, deft falsehood is worse than clumsy sincerity, and what follows upon it is a great shame. When Bo Shi declined the office of minister (卿) and Wang Mang declined the government, at the time they thought themselves deft and close; but later men wrote it down and handed it on for ten thousand generations, enough to chill the bones and set the hair on end. Lately a man of high rank made his name by filial duty. In the mourning he kept, one time and another, his grief wasted his body beyond what the rule allows, and this was enough to set him above others. Yet once, on the straw mat and the clod of earth, he smeared croton oil on his face so that sores would come out, to show the marks of his weeping. The boys about him could not keep it hidden, and so those outside came to say that his lodging and his food were all not to be believed. He lost a hundred sincerities by one falsehood, and the cause was that he would not stop coveting a name.

There was a man of a gentry house who had read no more than two or three hundred volumes and whose inborn talent was dull, but whose family had been rich for generations. He held himself in and made much of himself, and with wine and calves and rare playthings he made friends of many noted men, and those who found the bait sweet took turns in puffing him up. The court took him for a man of letters (文華) and even sent him beyond the border as an envoy. Han Jinming, the prince of Donglai, was earnest in his love of letters and suspected that what the man composed was mostly not from his own loom, so he set out a banquet and sat face to face with him to test him. They made merry all day with the seats full of writers, and they set the tones and gave out the rhymes and had him take the brush and make a poem. He made one at once, but it was not in the rhyme that had been given at all. The guests were each chanting to themselves, and in the end not one of them noticed. Han Jinming withdrew and sighed, "It is just as I reckoned." Han Jinming once asked him besides, "The zhushang zhongkui shou (杼上終葵首) of the jade tablet (玉珽), what shape should it have?" And he answered, "The head of the tablet is bent and round, shaped like a mallow leaf, that is all." Han Jinming was a man of learning, and he held back his laughter and told me of it.

To touch up the writing of your sons and the young of your house so that they gain repute is a greatly harmful thing. For one, it cannot be kept up forever, and the truth of it comes out in the end. For another, the learner has something to lean on, and so grinds and polishes himself even less.

In Ye there was a young man who went out to be magistrate of Xiangguo, and he was quite diligent and earnest of himself. He kept the public business in mind and was always soothing and relieving the people, and in this he sought repute. Whenever he sent men off to service he took their hands and saw them away, and sometimes he brought pears and dates and cakes and gave a parting gift to each man, saying, "The order from above troubles you, and in my heart I cannot bear it. When you are hungry and thirsty on the road, think of me by this." The praise of the common people did not stop in their mouths. When he was moved to be aide to the governor of Sizhou, this cost grew wider by the day and could not always go round. Once there is a feigned feeling, it is hard to keep it up wherever one turns, and so his good record fell down in the end.

Someone asked, "When the spirit is destroyed and the form melts away, the sound and the worth that are left are only the shell of a cicada or the slough of a snake, the track of a beast or the trace of a bird. What have they to do with the dead, that the sages made the name a teaching?" The answer was this. "It is to urge men on. Urge them to establish a name, and they gain the reality of it. Urge on one Bo Yi, and a thousand and ten thousand men set up a pure custom. Urge on one Jizha, and a thousand and ten thousand set up a benevolent custom. Urge on one Liuxia Hui, and a thousand and ten thousand set up a constant custom. Urge on one Shi Yu, and a thousand and ten thousand set up an upright custom. So the sages wished them to be like the scales of a fish and the wings of a phoenix, crowded and overlapping and uneven, never cut off from the world. Is that not broad? The far reaches of the four seas are all men who long for a name, and the sages went by that feeling and brought them to what is good. And consider it further. The fair name and the fine repute of the forefathers are the cap and robe and the wall of their descendants, and from of old until now many have had the shelter of them. To cultivate goodness and establish a name is like building a house and planting fruit trees. Living, a man gets the use of them; dying, he leaves their bounty behind. Those in the world who scramble after it do not reach this meaning. If a man thinks that his name will rise together with his soul and flourish along with the pine and the cypress, he is deluded."