Analects 17.16: 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 17.16
子曰、古者、民有三疾、今也或是之亡也。古之狂也肆、今之狂也蕩、古之矜也廉、今之矜也忿戾、古之愚也直、今之愚也詐而已矣。
The Master said, “In ancient times people had three failings; perhaps even those are gone today. The wild of old were free in their conduct; the wild today are unruly. The proud of old held to strict standards; the proud today are angry and obstinate. The foolish of old were upright; the foolish today are simply deceitful.”
Commentary
philology Even the old failings are lost The opening calls all three traits 疾, failings. The comparisons then give their older forms a relative value: freedom, strict standards, and uprightness, against unruliness, anger, and deceit. 廉 suggests an edge or boundary and is read as holding to strict standards. The contrast is a judgment of deterioration, with “perhaps” preserving 或.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium
ethics Wildness and its changing force 狂 here names one of the three imperfect dispositions being compared across times; its excess once allowed a freer bearing and now becomes 蕩, unruliness. In the earlier sixfold warning, 狂 is itself the damaging outcome of firmness without learning. The two constructions give the same word different work, rather than making wildness a uniformly approved or condemned quality.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium