Analects 15.24: 衛靈公 (Wei Ling Gong)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 15 tests exemplary conduct under pressure: hunger, going unrecognized, bad government, and the pull of clever speech. Its sayings ask how learning becomes judgment, how humaneness directs action, and how ritual gives that action form. The portraits of unwavering straightness and timely withdrawal leave room for different responses to public disorder. Praise must answer to examination, and responsibility repeatedly returns to oneself. Short assurances sit beside difficult tensions about reputation and the cost of humaneness. The book closes with the Master guiding a visitor through a room, giving the call for consideration a precise human setting.
Analects 15.24
子曰、吾之於人也誰毀、誰譽、如有所譽者、其有所試矣。斯民也、三代之所以直道而行也。
The Master said, “In my dealings with people, whom do I disparage, whom do I praise? If I praise someone, I have tested them. These are the people through whom the Three Dynasties followed the straight Way.”
Commentary
translation Praise and a test The opening questions reject careless disparagement and praise, while the next clause allows praise grounded in 試, testing. Legge supplies the idea of going beyond what is proper in both judgments. The Chinese does not state that qualification directly, so the English retains the questions and lets the testing clause qualify them. What sort of test was used remains open.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium
philology These people and the dynasties 斯民, “these people,” connects present judgment with the straight Way of the Three Dynasties. 所以 can give the people as the means through which that way was practiced or as the ground for it. The English chooses “through whom.” The compressed sentence leaves the relation between the people before the speaker and those of the dynastic past unexplained.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium