Analects 17.13: 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 17.13
子曰、鄉原、德之賊也。
The Master said, “The village worthy is a thief of virtue.”
Commentary
ethics The title of village worthy 鄉原 names a figure regarded as worthy in the village, yet the sentence calls that figure a thief of 德, virtue. Keeping the respectable title makes the reversal audible. 賊, rendered “thief” here, names the harm caused by trustworthiness without learning in 17.8; the wall-crossing thief in 17.12 is 盜. Read among the warnings about surfaces and speech, this saying suggests that an accepted appearance of goodness can damage the very quality it claims to represent. It does not list the conduct that makes the figure objectionable.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium