Lu (Lû) appears in the book chiefly as a place in Confucius’s late-life history and as the setting associated with an earlier saying later incorporated into an Appendix. These references give the state a limited but revealing role: it connects the sage’s renewed study of the I Ching with the book’s evidence about the layered origins of its commentaries.

Confucius’s Return to Lu

The account places Confucius’s return to his native Lu near the close of his life, after long and painful wanderings among the states. By then he was nearly seventy. A saying attributed to him expresses the wish for more years to study the I Ching, though the author notes that the stated fifty years is generally regarded as a textual corruption. He adduces the report not to establish the precise number, but to support the existence of the I Ching in Confucius’s time.

A further account, attributed to Sima Qian, says that Confucius became devoted to the I Ching in his final years, wrote appendixes, and read the book so intensely that the leather thongs binding its tablets wore out three times. The Lu setting thus marks a late turn in his intellectual life: texts on History, Poetry, and Rites and Ceremonies had earlier occupied him, while the I Ching increasingly drew his attention toward the end.

An Earlier Saying and the Appendixes

Lu also enters the discussion through a passage in the fourth Appendix. Its first three paragraphs, the book argues, derive from a narrative in the Zuo Commentary and record words spoken by a Lu marchioness-dowager fourteen years before Confucius was born. The passage therefore predates both Confucius and the compilation of an Appendix that elsewhere quotes him.

This chronology creates a problem for the traditional attribution of the Appendixes to Confucius. Zhu Xi offered an explanation in which an old interpretation was used by the marchioness-dowager and later by Confucius, while a chronicler marked the sage’s own words with the formula “The Master said.” The author questions this account, observing that the chronicler cannot be identified, and concludes that material introduced by that formula may be Confucius’s, but that the two Appendixes under examination were not his compositions and were compiled after his death.

Lu in the Book’s Historical Argument

The references to Lu support a distinction between the older Text and the later Appendixes. The book dates the Text to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, while placing the Appendixes in a substantially later period; it cautions that the two should not be treated as a single work simply because common editions interleave them. The earlier saying associated with Lu becomes one piece of internal evidence for that layered history.

Lu is not described here through its institutions or political development. Instead, it serves as a point of return in Confucius’s biography and as the provenance of testimony that complicates claims about authorship. Together, these uses place the state at the intersection of personal intellectual history and the later transmission of the I Ching.