“If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yî”

The saying “If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yî” serves as historical evidence for the Yî’s existence in Confucius’s time and as a compact portrait of his late-life return to a difficult classic. Its extravagance is precisely what makes it revealing: the translator rejects the fifty years as a credible literal intention, yet reads the utterance as proof that Confucius regarded the work as worthy of prolonged study.

Reported Saying and Historical Setting

The translator attributes the remark to the closing period of Confucius’s life, after his long and painful wanderings among the States, when he had returned to his native Lu and was nearly seventy. The wording imagines an extraordinary extension of life, but the translator notes that the best critics generally admit corruption in the text’s specification of fifty years. He adduces the passage for a narrower historical purpose: to show that a Yî King was already known in Confucius’s time.

A second account, preserved in the history of Confucius by Sima Qian, reinforces that conclusion while shifting the emphasis from the saying to a pattern of study. In the final years of his life, Confucius became devoted to the Yî, wrote several appendixes, and read his copy so often that the leather thongs binding its tablets wore through three times. The associated report that he wished for several more years in order to master the work echoes the saying’s desire for additional time, but frames it as a scholar’s unfinished labor rather than as a precise forecast of lifespan.

A Late Reordering of Study

The account places this devotion against Confucius’s earlier intellectual priorities. He had delighted in discussing the books of History, Poetry, and Rites and Ceremonies with his disciples; the Yî, by contrast, had received too little of his attention in the prime of his days. Before he died, it occupied him deeply as a monument of antiquity. The saying therefore marks not simply admiration for an old text but a late reordering of attention: the classic that had once been neglected became the object of an ambitious, apparently still incomplete course of study.

The image of the repeatedly read book gives that ambition a material measure. The binding thongs did not endure the pressure of repeated handling, while the student’s wish for more years acknowledged that reading had not yet yielded mastery. The account’s contrast between worn bindings and the desired additional time makes the saying an emblem of sustained inquiry, not a claim that the work could be mastered quickly.

The Text and Its Appendixes

The saying also belongs to a distinction the translator insists readers maintain: the Yî comprises an older Text and later Appendixes, which should not simply be treated as one undifferentiated composition. The older work is explained through lineal figures; the Appendixes are associated with Confucius by the historical tradition and were received by many Chinese readers and foreign scholars as integral to the classic. The translator reports that Sima Qian attributed nearly all of the Ten Appendixes to Confucius, while emphasizing that the two textual layers differ in date and should be distinguished.

This distinction clarifies what the story of Confucius’s study can and cannot establish. It attests to the classic’s presence in his era and records a tradition connecting him with interpretive writings appended to it; it does not erase the difference between the older Text and those commentarial materials. The saying’s evidentiary value lies in that modest but consequential claim of acquaintance and sustained engagement, not in proving that every part of the received work originated with Confucius.

Translation as an Encounter of Minds

The translator’s own account of translating the Yî gives the saying a further resonance. His first translation, made in 1854, tried to reproduce the original’s concision and ended up as disconnected English words, scarcely more intelligible than the excessively literal Latin version by P. Regis and his collaborators. He concluded that a literal rendering could not solve the problem, because Chinese written characters function as symbols of ideas rather than representations of words, and their combinations convey what the writer thinks rather than simply what the writer would say.

His alternative was to let the symbols bring the translator’s mind into contact with the author’s, then express the perceived ideas as accurately and concisely as possible in another language. He invoked the maxim, “We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence, and then we shall apprehend it.” This approach is explicitly not a license for free invention: occasional added words may make implicit relations intelligible, and the translator says he generally marked such additions with parentheses. The reported wish to spend far longer studying the Yî thus stands beside a translation method founded on patient participation in thought rather than mechanical equivalence. Together, they present understanding as labor that may be renewed without ever being reduced to a quick, literal decoding.