Analects 17.20: 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 17.20
孺悲欲見孔子、孔子辭以疾、將命者出戶、取瑟而歌、使之聞之。
Ru Bei wanted to see Confucius. Confucius declined, pleading illness. As the messenger went out through the door, Confucius took up his zither and sang so that Ru Bei would hear him.
Commentary
ethics An audible refusal Confucius gives illness as his reason for refusing a visit, then deliberately makes his singing audible. The action makes the refusal conspicuous. The English takes the person meant to hear as Ru Bei, though the messenger is the nearer participant. Its placement after the wish to say nothing suggests another way of communicating through conduct. The text gives no reason for the refusal and no account of Ru Bei’s response.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium