Analects 16.3: 季氏 (Ji Shi)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 16 opens with a threatened attack and a sustained argument about responsibility: ministers cannot excuse their part in a policy simply by saying their lord wants it. Two sayings then trace political authority as it passes into lower hands. Lists of friends, pleasures, errors, dangers, and concerns bring questions of judgment into ordinary conduct. Learning remains possible under difficulty, while words must be tested against lives actually seen. Wealth and lasting praise diverge in the contrast between a duke and two hungry men. A son’s account of learning the Poems and ritual makes the absence of special treatment itself a lesson. The book closes with the different titles used for a ruler’s wife, giving speech a precise place within social relations.
Analects 16.3
孔子曰、祿之去公室、五世矣、政逮於大夫、四世矣、故夫三桓之子孫微矣。
Confucius said, “Revenues have been out of the ducal house’s hands for five generations now; government has been in the hands of the great officers for four. That is why the descendants of the three Huan have grown weak.”
Commentary
translation Revenues and governing power The sentence distinguishes 祿, rendered “revenues,” from 政, governing power, and gives each its own count of generations. Legge also reads the first term as state revenue; it can carry the narrower sense of stipends or their allocation. The closing weakness of the three Huan families brings the preceding warning about inherited power into a particular case, without supplying names or dates for the generations.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium