Analects 15.7: 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 15.7
子曰、可與言、而不與之言、失人、不可與言、而與之言、失言、知者不失人、亦不失言。
The Master said, “When someone is ready to listen and you do not speak, you lose that person. When someone is not ready to listen and you do speak, you waste your words. The wise lose neither people nor words.”
Commentary
philology Losing a person or losing words The two clauses repeat 失, loss, first with a person and then with words. “Ready to listen” takes 可與言 as the possibility of a fruitful exchange; the Chinese does not specify whether the obstacle is disposition, understanding, or circumstance. The point requires judgment in both directions: silence can waste an opening just as speech can be wasted.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium