Is 40 the Age of No More Doubts? The Rarest Freedom in Chinese Philosophy Is Not What You Think

In America, a 40th birthday comes with black balloons, an over-the-hills sign, a cake shaped like a tombstone. In Beijing, the same birthday comes with a title, Bu Huo, no more doubts, which is hilarious to anyone who has ever met a 40-year-old. But that title was never meant as a compliment. It's one rung of a ladder drawn by a teacher near the very end of the climb. On the top rung is a kind of freedom almost nobody thinks to want. Hey everyone, it's Jared Madsen here, and this series is called Lost Meanings. Every episode, I take one word everybody thinks they understand, and we open up the books it came from. And today's word is a birthday present nobody has earned. Picture the dinner. Somebody raises a glass to the birthday boy and announces, 不惑之年 The age of no more doubts and the entire table cracks up because everybody there knows exactly how many doubts a 40 year old has and it isn't just 40. Chinese has a name like that for every decade from 30 to 70 and all of them come from one man. Now in the west we know that man is a punchline. Around 1940 there was a whole craze in America. Newspapers ran columns of jokes that started Confucius say, People greeted each other with, you know what Confucius say? And he's been stuck inside a fortune cookie ever since. Which is funny because he never actually saw a fortune cookie in his life. And Confucius isn't even his name. Jesuit missionaries took 孔夫子 Master Kong and turned it into Latin. In Chinese, he's just 孔子 So in the West, Confucius is the rules guy. Obey your parents. Respect your elders. Know your place. And then, there's the other piece of advice we all grew up with. Every graduation speech, every greeting card, every animated movie, follow your heart. In English, those two are opposites. Confucius is the rules, your heart is freedom, pick one. But near the end of his life, the rules guy described his own life in six lines. And the last one says, I could follow my heart. Here it is, 论语, the Analects, Book 2, Passage 4. In Chinese, it's one sentence, 38 characters. Let's go one line at a time. 诗有五,而志于学。 At 15, I set my heart on learning. Take a look at that one. 志, which kind of means aspiration. Now look at the bottom of the character. 心, a heart. The oldest commentary on this line about 1500 years ago says it plainly. 志, aspiration, is in the heart. And this was not a rich kid. His father died when he was a baby. His mother died before he was 17. Later he said, I was poor when I was young, so I can do a lot of menial jobs. And 孟子, Mencius, tells us which jobs. He kept the books for a granary, and he said, the accounts balanced, that's all. And he looked after cattle, and he said, the cattle grew fat, that's all. 三十而立。 At 30, I stood. The character 立 is a little person standing on the ground. Standing on what? He told his own son once, passing him in the courtyard, if you don't learn the rites, you'll have nothing to stand on. 四十而不惑。 At 40, no more doubts. There's our birthday present. Now look at 惑, doubt. There's the heart again, at the bottom of the character. And sitting right on top of it is huo, which means or, maybe, this or that. A heart with an or sitting on it. So, wuhuo isn't a prize they hand you at 40. It's the or coming off your heart. 五十而知天命 At 50, I knew the mandate of heaven. Hold on to that one. It's the strangest line in the whole passage, and we're coming back to it. 六十而耳熟 At 60, my ear was attuned. The oldest note on it says, whatever he heard, he understood what was underneath it. Nothing graded. And look at the word for a sage, sheng. On the top left corner, er, an ear. And then the last line, listen to this. 七十而从心所欲 At 70, I could follow my heart's desire. There it is. Follow your heart. Two and a half thousand years before the graduation speech, written by the rules guy about himself. But he doesn't stop there. 不逾矩, without stepping over the square. This is a 矩, a carpenter's square, the tool a builder holds against the wood to get a true right angle. The oldest form of the character is a hand holding one, and you still hear it every day. Put a compass next to the square, and you get 规矩. Which, in modern Chinese, means manners. If you've ever reached across the table at a Chinese family dinner, you've heard it. I've heard it. No manners. So, the passage starts with a heart set on something. And it ends with a heart you can follow. It's not a map of a career. It's a map of a heart. And one more thing. He never mentioned 80. That same old commentator explains why. He only lived to 73. He wrote this after he was 70. So it's a ladder, school at 15, a career by 30, confidence at 40, wisdom at 50, everybody listens to at 60, and 70, you've earned the right to do what you want. That's how the modern world reads it, and it only maps the first half of a life. Now, here's the problem. His life didn't go like that at all. At 50, the old history book says nobody would employ him. Then he finally got his chance. Acting chancellor of his home state, Lu, at 56. And within months, the rival state sent over a gift. 80 dancing girls and 120 horses. The court stopped meeting for three days. And Confucius walked out. He spent the next 14 years on the road, looking for a ruler who'd listen. He never found one. So what did he mean? At 50, I knew the mandate of heaven. The word is ming. And the character is a mouth giving an order. Remember episode 2 of this series? The English word fate comes from the Latin for a thing spoken. Both languages heard a voice. Now, the oldest reading of that line comes from a brilliant young scholar named Wang Bi, around 1800 years ago. And stop me the first time I read it. At 50, he knew the way would not be carried out in the end. The way. At 50, he knew he was going to fail, and he kept going. People saw it too. A gatekeeper once asked one of his students, isn't he the one who knows it can't be done and he does it anyway? And right after he lost his post, a border official asked to meet him. He came out and told the students, Why are you worried that he lost his job? The world has been without the way for a long time. Heaven is going to use your master as its bell. That's the mandate. Not a destiny, an assignment. And the assignment wasn't succeed, it was ring the bell. One of the oldest commentators put it in a line I love. He never let getting stuck or getting through change where his heart was set. That's zhi, aspiration, line one, still holding at 50. And there's one day when he was about 60 that shows you what the ear line really means. It might be the funniest moment in Chinese history, and he's the one who laughed. He's on the road, in the state of Zheng, and in the crowd, he loses his students. So, he goes to the east gate of the city, and he stands there alone, waiting. A local walks up to one of the students, Zegong, and says, there's a man at the east gate, forehead like the sage king, Yao, but from the waist down, he's three inches short of the great Yu, and he looks worn out and lost, like a stray dog from a house in mourning. Zi Gong goes and finds his teacher and tells him, word for word. And Confucius laughs, delighted. He says, the looks, that's a small thing. But a stray dog, that's right, that's right. That's Er Xun. At 60, he hears the cruelest description of his life anyone ever gave. And it doesn't bother him. He agrees with it. Years later, he went home. And in his last years, he buried his only son. Then his favorite student, Yan Hui, and he wept so hard his students told him he was grieving too much. Then Zi Lu, the bravest of them all. And around then, he said this, nobody understands me. Zi Gong asks, why do you say nobody understands you? And he says, I don't resent heaven. I don't blame people. I learn what's below and I reach up to what's above. The one who knows me, is it heaven? That's the man who wrote, at 70, I could follow my heart. Not a man whose life worked out. A man whose heart didn't need it to. Now, here's what I believe. The second half of life isn't for getting more. It's for becoming someone whose heart and heaven want the same thing. If that just changed how you hear the name Confucius, that's what this series is for, one expression at a time. So if you're not subscribed yet, hit like and subscribe, because next I'll show you how to find your own line on his map and the one question that goes with it. Here it is. Find your line. I'll put all six on on the screen, each one with its question. At 15, zhi, what have I actually set my heart on? At 30, li, what am I standing on besides my job? At 40, bu huo, what maybe is still sitting on my heart? At 50, zhi tian ming, what is heaven asking of me? Not what will I get, what's being asked. At 60, er shun, what did I hear this week that I fought? At 70, bu yu ju. Where does what I want still not fit the square? Find your age, then read the line before it and the line after it, because nobody's exactly on schedule, and write down one honest answer. Now, these aren't deadlines. The old commentator said he wrote this to encourage people not to grade them. Nobody's behind. Then, once this week, when what you want and what's right aren't the same shape, choose the square on purpose. That's how a heart grows into it. He once described himself like this, so fired up he forgets to eat, so happy he forgets his worries, and he doesn't even notice old age coming. That sounds like a pretty good way to get older. The goal was never to follow your heart, it was to grow a heart worth following. Now, if you know someone with a big birthday coming up this year, send them this video. And tell me in the comments, which line are you on right now, and what's your honest answer? If you'd like to see this whole map play out in one life, there's a story for exactly that. The ancient Greeks hid their own map of a human life inside the most famous riddle in the world. What walks on four legs, then two, then three? One man solved it. But he could answer it for everyone except himself because he spent his whole life running from what the gods had said about him. That story is on your screen right now. Click it to watch. And until next time, Zaijian!