Analects 17.21: 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 17.21
宰我問、三年之喪期已久矣。君子三年不為禮、禮必壞、三年不為樂、樂必崩。舊穀既沒、新穀既升、鑽燧改火、期可已矣。子曰、食夫稻、衣夫錦、於女安乎。曰、安。女安、則為之、夫君子之居喪、食旨不甘、聞樂不樂、居處不安、故不為也、今女安、則為之。宰我出。子曰、予之不仁也、子生三年、然後免於父母之懷、夫三年之喪、天下之通喪也、予也、有三年之愛於其父母乎。
Zai Wo asked about three years of mourning: “A full year is already a long time. If an exemplary person does not practice ritual for three years, ritual will surely decay; if they do not make music for three years, music will surely fall apart. The old grain is used up, new grain has come in, and the fire has been renewed with the fire drill. After a full year it could end.” The Master said, “Would you feel at ease eating rice and wearing brocade?” “I would.” “If you feel at ease, do it. When an exemplary person is in mourning, fine food has no savor, music gives no joy, and they find no ease where they live. That is why they do not do these things. But if you now feel at ease, do it.” Zai Wo went out. The Master said, “How inhumane Yu is! Only after three years does a child leave its parents’ arms. Three years of mourning is the mourning shared by all under Heaven. Did Yu have three years of love from his parents?”
Commentary
ritual A year and three years Zai Wo argues from the annual cycle of grain and renewed fire, and from the danger that suspending ritual and music will weaken them. 期 is read as a full year, made explicit by that cycle and the proposed endpoint. Legge explains the fire renewal through changes of wood; the English preserves the fire drill and renewed fire without importing that expanded account into the dialogue.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium
ethics Feeling at ease is itself judged 安, being at ease, recurs in the question, Zai Wo’s answer, and both permissions to proceed. The later charge of inhumaneness shows that those permissions do not amount to approval. The Master tests whether ordinary pleasures can feel right in mourning, then connects its duration to the child’s early dependence on parents.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high
philology Whose three years of love? 予, Yu, is the name used for Zai Wo after he leaves; here it is not the first-person pronoun used in the wish to be silent. The final question can concern love received from parents, as the English and Legge take it, or love felt toward them. The preceding image of being held in their arms favors the received-love reading. The question is a rebuke within this exchange, not evidence about Yu’s childhood.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium
ritual The claim of shared mourning The Master calls three years the mourning shared by all under Heaven. That is the scope of his assertion in the dialogue; the passage supplies no survey of actual observance. Keeping the claim attributed preserves its force without turning it into an independently established account of everyone’s practice.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high