Analects 17.7: 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 17.7
佛肸召。子欲往。子路曰、昔者由也、聞諸夫子曰、親於其身、為不善者、君子不入也、佛肸以中牟畔、子之往也、如之何。子曰、然、有是言也、不曰堅乎、磨而不磷、不曰白乎、涅而不緇。吾豈匏瓜也哉、焉能繫而不食。
Bi Xi summoned the Master, who wanted to go. Zilu said, “In the past I heard you say, Master, ‘An exemplary person does not join someone who personally does evil.’ Bi Xi is holding Zhongmou in rebellion. How can you go to him?” The Master said, “Yes, I did say that. Do we not speak of what is hard—ground, yet not worn thin? Do we not speak of what is white—steeped in black dye, yet not darkened? Am I a gourd, to hang there without being eaten?”
Commentary
ethics Can contact leave character unchanged? Zilu confronts the Master with his own earlier rule against joining a person who does evil. The Master acknowledges it, then compares hardness and whiteness that withstand grinding and dyeing. His reply claims resistance to corruption; it does not withdraw the account of Bi Xi’s rebellion. The gourd image adds the competing desire to be of use.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high
philology The gourd and its use The final 不食 can be heard as not being eaten or not eating. The English takes the gourd as something left uneaten, making the complaint one of unused capacity. A reading in which the speaker cannot live by merely hanging there gives the image a more immediate sense of livelihood. The question remains an impatient rejection of inactivity.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium
philology You and Zilu In this exchange Zilu refers to himself as 由, You, within “I heard you say.” That gives the next section’s direct address to You a source-visible connection with Zilu. It is a different name from the honorific Master You, 有子, in the opening book.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high