Analects 17.3: 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 17.3
子曰、唯上知與下愚不移。
The Master said, “Only the wisest and the most foolish do not change.”
Commentary
ethics A limit to change Placed after the claim about practice, this saying exempts the highest wisdom and the lowest foolishness from change. It does not explain whether those extremes are present at birth or reached through development. The two brief sayings therefore leave the relation between nature, habit, and settled character partly unresolved.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium