Analects 17.14: 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 17.14
子曰、道聽而塗說、德之棄也。
The Master said, “To repeat on the road what you heard along the way is to throw virtue away.”
Commentary
ethics Passing words along 道 and 塗 both name the road here. Hearing on one stretch and speaking on the next makes the transmission almost immediate. The judgment suggests that passing on words without first taking them into one’s own understanding or conduct wastes an occasion for cultivating virtue. The phrase need not concern false reports alone.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium