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Hanfeizi (The Book of Master Han Fei)韓非子

Han Fei and his later school · 3rd century BC · China · 55 pieces · 115,012 Chinese characters

The book where the Legalists come together in one place. Han Fei took the law of Shang Yang, the technique of Shen Buhai and the positional power of Shen Dao, and bound the three into one. He held that men are not good because they are good but because they cannot do wrong, and said that what a ruler must lean on is not benevolence but law, technique and position. The contradiction of spear and shield comes from here. With the tale of the man of Chu who sold together a shield nothing could pierce and a spear that pierced everything, he showed that Yao and Shun cannot both be praised, and in "Objections to Positional Power" he takes up the same figure again over benevolence and position. The man of Song who kept watch by a stump waiting for a hare, and Master He's jade, which was known for jade only after his feet had been cut off twice, are stories of this book as well. "The Difficulties of Persuasion," on how hard it is to speak, has the tale of the scales below a dragon's throat that grow the wrong way. A ruler has such scales too, and to touch them is death — yet Han Fei himself died in prison in Qin. "Preserving Han" carries the memorial Han Fei sent up to the king of Qin and, set down directly after it, the memorial in which Li Si urged that "Han Fei has come for the sake of Han; do not send him back." The document that drove a man to his death is kept in that man's own book.

Fifty-five chapters fully translated. The graph counts were matched against the source text chapter by chapter and confirmed to differ by not a single graph. The order of the chapters follows the order written on the contents page just as it stands. That is the order of the twenty volumes. The fetching script draws the chapter names out of the contents, and the source-text building matches that order against the order written down here and stops if even one of them disagrees. ★It is the cleanest of the source texts fetched so far. Unlike the Lunheng and the Huainanzi it has no missing graphs □ and no broken graphs, and almost no annotation templates. All that was touched was settling the half-width : ; , ． that had slipped in onto full-width forms, and taking A as the text at the one variant template {{另|A|B}}. The paragraphs that the source text divides by blank lines were followed as they are. Six chapters, among them The Ten Faults and Portents of Ruin, have blocks running past seven hundred graphs, and these were divided at around four hundred graphs, after a 「。」 and before 故, 夫, 是故, 今 or 凡. This division is not the source text's but was made here. The Inner Collection of Sayings, the Outer Collection of Sayings and The Eight Canons are built with the guiding text (經) in front and its exposition (說) behind. A short line at the end of the guiding text, such as 「參觀一」, is the name of that item, so it is translated as a single line, 「matching things against each other is the first」. A passage opening with 「一曰」 is another transmission of the same story, so it is opened with 「some tell it thus」.

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Measuring the Mind
Ordering the Commands
Loyalty and Filial Duty
The Eminent Learnings
Eight Canons
Eight Discourses
Six Contrarieties
Contradictory Commands
Doubts on Persuasion
Fixing the Law
Questions by Tian
Questioning Disputation
Objection to the Doctrine of Position
Objections, Four
Objections, Three
Objections, Two
Objections, One
Outer Congeries, Right, Part Two
Outer Congeries, Right, Part One
Outer Congeries, Left, Part Two
Outer Congeries, Left, Part One
Inner Congeries, Part Two — The Six Subtleties
Inner Congeries, Part One — The Seven Techniques
The Greater Body
Merit and Fame
Keeping to the Way
Correcting Error
Guarding Against the Inner Circle
Three Things to Guard
Treacherous Ministers Who Usurp and Murder
The Jade of Mr He
Ten Faults
Eight Villainies
Wielding Authority
Favoured Ministers