The Students

Abstract

According to the record of the famous Han historian Sima Qian—written centuries after the Master’s death— Confucius is supposed to have said that he had 77 students of some note (or notoriety), who were, the record has him adding, “All of exceptional ability.” (Some of their abilities, as we shall see, were matched by shortcomings which the Master regularly noted bluntly in the Analects.) Only 22 names can be assigned to students with any certainty in the text itself, however, with another three or four possible others mentioned depending on how the context is interpreted.