Analects 15.37: 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 15.37
子曰、事君敬其事、而後其食。
The Master said, “Attend reverently to your duties when serving a ruler, and put the pay second.”
Commentary
politics The work before the pay 其食 is literally one’s food or sustenance, here the support received for service. 後 puts that consideration after reverent attention to the duties. The sequence ranks motives and attention; the wording does not describe a timetable for paying officials. It recalls the separation between learning’s possible stipend and the Way as its aim.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium