Analects 17.12: 陽貨 (Yang Huo)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 17 puts learning under pressure: Confucius faces invitations to serve amid rebellion, and students question his choices. A sequence on six qualities shows how even humaneness, trustworthiness, and courage can go wrong without learning. Poetry, music, and ritual recur as practices that shape feeling and conduct; polished speech and respectable appearances repeatedly come under suspicion. The mourning debate asks whether ritual’s duration answers to gratitude and grief as well as to public continuity. The closing sayings rank rightness above courage, make room for moral hatred, generalize harshly about women and petty people, and treat a person’s reputation at forty as settled.
Analects 17.12
子曰、色厲而內荏、譬諸小人、其猶穿窬之盜也與。
The Master said, “Someone stern in appearance but weak within—to find a comparison among ordinary people, are they not like a thief who breaks through a wall or climbs over it?”
Commentary
ethics An imposing surface and a furtive act The saying opposes a severe outward appearance to inward weakness, then reaches for a thief’s concealed or evasive movement. The comparison makes the imposing surface suspect. 譬諸小人 is taken as looking for an analogy among ordinary people, giving 小人 a social sense here; it can also suggest a comparison with morally petty people.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium