Confucius draws a sharp line between performing ceremonies and understanding them. A man without the virtues proper to humanity — without ren — has no business with the rites of propriety, and no business with music. The forms are not empty: they presuppose and require the inner life that gives them meaning. Without benevolence, ceremony is only performance.
Correct ceremony is not rigid formality. Confucius's disciple Yu notes that the ancient kings prized natural ease in the practice of propriety — a quality that belongs to small things and great alike. The danger lies on both sides: observing propriety so mechanically that its spirit is lost, or seeking ease so freely that the forms that structure social life dissolve. The master finds a middle path: grace within the rule.
Li is not a private discipline. It is the medium through which relationships — between ruler and minister, parent and child, friend and friend — are acknowledged and maintained. When rulers perform their duties to their relations well, the people are aroused to virtue. When propriety is observed, social order becomes a living reality rather than an enforced constraint.
Late in the Analects Confucius challenges a shallow understanding: when people say "it is according to the rules of propriety," do they mean only gems and silk? When they say "it is music," do they mean only bells and drums? The outward tokens of ceremony are real and necessary, but they are not the thing itself. Propriety stripped of its inner substance is no more than the word.
Li is examined throughout the Analects, with concentrated discussion in Books III and XVII (Chapters 2 and 9 of this edition). Confucius's own ceremonial conduct — described in detail in Book X — is itself a lesson in what proper form, lived from within, looks like.
