The night after I read Confucius’ Analects, I slipped into something of an existential crisis. Nothing big, just your standard reassessment of life direction. The thing is, as much as I had enjoyed reading all the wisdoms, I really didn’t think they’d have an impact. So why was I pacing my kitchen at 10pm lost in thought?

The Analects are a collection of Confucius’ wisdom. Every line reads like a riddle, a clever metaphor with multiple meanings that only become clear after careful contemplation. 

Turns out, those lines weren’t written for people to read them in isolation. Half of The Analects are the oral tradition that goes along with. Two thousand years of teachers passed down context and analysis from one to the other that explains why Confucius takes so many potshots on the kingdom of Lu while praising music from the Shao. Thankfully my copy included much of that analysis, which turned the reading into a fun wisdom puzzle book. I’d read a line, consider it for a minute, then get a full answer from the analysts.

It ages surprisingly well, too. Much of the wisdom is on cultivating a moral approach to life, surrounding yourself with other moral people, and leading from the top-down to reshape a state. Any advice on how to appropriately serve your ‘lord’ easily extends to dealing with a boss at work, and it turns out ‘petty’ people are just as common now as they were in 500BCE.

In the early chapters, I studied each line like a student cramming for a test. This turned out to be unnecessary, as each meaningful piece of wisdom is repeated, reworded, and taken from multiple angles throughout the book. It’s a layering approach that slowly paints Confucius’ vision of appropriate behavior onto your mind through carefully paced character studies and metaphors.

Storytelling is an absolutely key aspect of The Analects. Confucius’ disciples are analyzed one by one throughout, their virtues and vices made clear. Zhong Yu, despite all his positive traits, was impetuous. Despite The Master making multiple interventions, he eventually dies in battle. His passing serves a lesson. A practical example of what happens when you allow certain character flaws to dominate your way of dealing with the world. A tragedy.

Zhong Yu is the most obvious of the tragedies in The Analects, but there’s one that’s far more resonant. The story secretly woven through the entire book. The story that made me run circles around my table in the middle of the night. One character that was present through the whole analects and whose life taught the most important moral of all.

Confucius himself.

By the time The Analects were assembled, Confucius had slipped into legend. The last few sections of the book talk about him as one with the sun and the moon. Down the line, he’s deified. But in the first half of The Analects, he’s a person. A wise person with a whole lot of followers, but a person. And he can’t find a job.

One of the central tenets of The Analects is that leaders shape the morality and culture of the people they are leading. A great minister can shape a state into a moral and upstanding place free of crime. I love this, and I tend to believe this idea extends into the modern day through corporations. A corporation run by a corrupt CEO will inevitably see their own behavior reflected back at them through their employees.

If you accept this statement as true, then talented scholars have an obligation to make every effort to put their talents to use. It’s a cruel world, but you can personally help reshape it by climbing the ladder and showing others the way.

Confucius wants to be hired. That’s his character arc in The Analects. He’s already learned and wise and kind and talented. The only thing missing is the opportunity to put those ideas to work. When he laments his unemployment, it pulls at your heartstrings that someone with so much vision is unable to apply it.

In the later sections, he encounters recluse scholars on the road. Wise men with perhaps as much understanding of the world as Confucius who, rather than taking on the challenge of leadership, retreated into isolation. They encourage him to give up, they tell him his dream of a moral world is an impossible one.

Despite this. Confucius persists. He pushes through the relentless rejections and cajoling of the recluse-scholars. It makes him the hero of the story. A person willing to take on the impossible day after day in the hope he will one day be given the opportunity to reshape the world into a better place.

But The Analects isn’t an uplifting story. It’s a tragedy. Confucius fails. He goes his whole life without the chance to reshape a state into his moral vision.

Yet his wisdom persists. A second chance at Confucius’ vision. A chance for the reader to step up where The Master failed.

This was why I was pacing my kitchen in the middle of the night. Confucius’ tragic failure haunted me and his wisdom echoed in my head. Go out. Apply yourself. Chase opportunity so that one day you can fulfill The Master’s dream of reshaping a piece of the world.

When I went into The Analects, I expected wisdom and wisdom alone. If I was lucky, it would give me a new perspective on how I interacted with others. Instead, I was told a story that tugged on my heartstrings. A tragedy that painted an aspirational vision of a more moral world. Then at the end, I was told the only way to make it happen was to do it myself.