Analects 15.38: 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 15.38
子曰、有教、無類。
The Master said, “In teaching, there are no distinctions of class.”
Commentary
translation Teaching and kinds of people 類 means kinds or categories. Legge takes the saying as refusing distinctions of class in teaching, the reading followed here. The four Chinese words can also suggest that teaching breaks down such classifications. Either reading makes inherited or assigned categories less decisive, but the brief sentence does not specify an educational institution or a method.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium