Rising Together to the Ranks of Lords: Innate Equality and the Pre-Qin Vision of Self-Cultivation, Compared with Western Freedom and Equality
Starting from a brief episode in the Analects, in which the noble Wenzi of Wei promotes his own household steward, Zhuan, to stand alongside him among the lords, this essay reads that small event against the great declarations of freedom and equality since the Renaissance: the West places its ideal at the starting line, while the pre-Qin thinkers built the ideal into lived reality.
I. An Opening: A Five-Character Recommendation, and the Weight of a Posthumous Name
1.1 The Text of "Xian Wen" and a Reading of Its Figures
The "Xian Wen" chapter of the Analects (Lunyu) records an extremely brief story: "The steward of the noble Wenzi of Wei, Grand Master Zhuan, rose together with Wenzi to stand among the lords. When the Master heard of it, he said: 'This is worthy of being called wen.'" Wenzi of Wei was a high minister of the state of Wei; Zhuan had originally been his household steward, and later entered the ranks of the ministers together with his master. The word rendered here as "rose" is not some abstract spiritual ascent — it is the concrete act of rising into the public ranks of government. And "rising together" did not erase the difference in the two men's origins; rather, it let a person who had originally occupied a lower position attain, through his own talent and virtue, a public standing equal to his master's.
When the Master heard of this, all he said was: "This is worthy of being called wen." He offered no elaborate eulogy, yet he compressed a man's achievements, capacity, and way of treating others into the single word wen ("cultured," "accomplished"). Wenzi's wen did not lie merely in literary refinement; it lay in his ability to recognize others, to receive them, and to bring them to completion. He did not lock his steward permanently into the position of steward — instead he sent him forward into a larger community. A five-character recommendation thus became a specimen case in learning, self-cultivation, and political order.
1.2 The Posthumous Title of "Wen"
What the pre-Qin era called posthumous naming (shifa) was the practice of judging a person's whole life, after death, by a shared public standard. It was not a private eulogy, nor an offhand compliment bestowed on the winners of the day — it was the crystallization, into a transmissible word, of virtues that the whole community recognized in common. The Yi Zhou Shu, in its "Explanation of Posthumous Titles," says: "To weave together Heaven and Earth is called wen"; "to be diligent in learning and fond of inquiry is called wen." What is meant is a person able to order the affairs of the world through learning, and who is still willing to keep asking and seeking instruction; wen therefore combines intelligence, virtue, and benefit to the people. Once a posthumous title was fixed, it stood like a mirror held up for later generations: what people mourned was not a body of flesh, but a judgment about what kind of conduct deserved to be imitated.
That the Master bestowed the title "wen" on Wenzi of Wei is especially worth dwelling on. Had he judged people only by military merit, wealth, or lineage, Wenzi could easily have kept his steward as a permanent subordinate. Instead he let Zhuan cross over the rank he had originally occupied and take part in public affairs. What the posthumous title honored was precisely this largeness of heart — the ability to turn a private talent into a public asset. It suggests that the highest praise a civilization can offer does not lie in how many people one possesses, but in whether one can help others grow; not in guarding one's own high place, but in letting those with virtue and ability attain the position they deserve.
1.3 Posing the Question: How Can a Small Matter Speak Across Three Centuries of Declarations$1
From the Renaissance down to the modern revolutions, the West wrote, one after another, grand declarations of "human dignity," "liberty," and "equal birth." They transformed political language and gave courage to the oppressed. And yet — does declaring that all people are equal, by itself, explain how a person in a lower position is to learn, to be seen, and to attain a new position$2 Can it answer how a leader ought to yield precedence to the worthy, how colleagues ought to treat one another, and how an organization can remain legitimate even while differences of rank persist within it$3
"Rising together to the ranks of lords" offers a different point of entry. It does not begin by assuming that reality is already equal; rather, while acknowledging differences of position, it accomplishes a single testable act of ascent. It does not write the ideal on some distant horizon, but embeds it in the concrete acts of recommending the worthy, receiving instruction, and bringing one another to completion. In reading this small matter alongside three centuries of declarations, what we are pursuing is not whose slogan sounds better, but which mode of thought more successfully carries the "ought" into the "is."