Analects 15.3: 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 15.3
子曰、由、知德者鮮矣。
The Master said to You, “Few understand virtue.”
Commentary
philology You and the knowledge of virtue You is the personal name 由, not the English pronoun. Zilu uses it of himself at 11.25, when he proposes governing a hard-pressed state. Master You, 有子, is a different speaker. Here 知德 asks for an understanding of virtue: the short judgment concerns recognition of its character, beyond accumulating the many things mentioned just before.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high