When the wind blows over the grass, it always bends." (12:19) In this wind and grass simile, de clearly does not mean moral "virtue", but something like "nature; character". Compare these two semantically similar usages. Confucius said: "Heaven gave birth to the virtue within me. What can Huan T'ui [who wanted to kill Confucius] do to me?" (7:22) Confucius said: "The Southerners have a saying: 'If a man is not constant in his self-cultivation, he cannot be a shaman or a healer.' It is a good proverb. If you are not consistently developing your virtue, what can you give to others? You will not even be able to give a diagnosis." (13:22) Confucius recurrently disparaged his Spring and Autumn period contemporaries for having diminished their natural de virtue. One notably ironic Analects passage accuses the Master himself of having lost it. Chieh Yu, the madman of Ch'u, passed by Confucius, singing: "Phoenix! Phoenix! How your virtue has declined! Your past cannot be corrected, But your future is yet to come. Give up! Give up! Those who involve themselves in Government now Will be in danger." Confucius jumped down, wanting to talk to him, but he ran away, so Confucius couldn't talk to him. (18:5) Here are some Confucian quotations about the rarity of people who possessed true de "virtue". Confucius said: "Yu, those who understand virtue are few and far between." (15:3) Confucius said: "Even over a long period of time, there have been few people who have actualized the Mean into Manifest Virtue." (6:27) Confucius said: "I have never seen one who loves virtue as much as he loves sex." (9:17, repeated in 14:12) Confucius said: "The virtuous will certainly have something to say, but those who have something to say are not necessarily virtuous. The humane man is always brave, but the brave man is not necessarily possessed of humaneness." (14.5) Confucius said: "Clever words disrupt virtue. Lack of patience in small matters leads to the disruption of great plans." (15:26) Confucius said: "The 'conventional townsman' is a thief of virtue." (17:13, cf. Mencius 7B:37) Confucius said: "To apprehend the Tao and lecture on it before actualization is to throw away your accumulation of virtue." (17:14) This last quote implies that de can be accumulated, and Confucius was not completely pessimistic about virtue going astray. For example (14:6), he praised his disciple Nangong Kuo as "a Superior Man,