Analects 17.22: 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 17.22
子曰、飽食終日、無所用心、難矣哉、不有博弈者乎、為之猶賢乎已。
The Master said, “To eat your fill all day and put your mind to nothing—what a problem! Are there not games of bo and yi? Even playing them is better than doing nothing.”
Commentary
philology Games as a lower threshold 博 and 弈 name the games left as bo and yi in English. The comparison values even playing a game above spending the day full of food with no use of the mind. 難, “difficult,” leaves the exact difficulty unexpressed; “what a problem” retains that open judgment. The immediate contrast is mental engagement with total inactivity.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium