Analects 3.5: 八佾 (Ba Yi)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 3 examines what gives ritual its authority and meaning. Household displays borrow the forms of rulers, while humaneness, restraint, grief, and reverence test what those forms can express. Questions about poetry, inherited rites, sacrifice, and music show understanding at work: a learner carries an image further, the Master asks about everything, and a musical whole holds its parts together. Rulers and ministers each receive a standard of conduct. The book ends by distinguishing beauty from goodness and by asking what high office, ritual, and mourning are worth without the qualities they require.
Analects 3.5
子曰、夷狄之有君、不如諸夏之亡也。
The Master said, “Even with rulers, the Yi and Di peoples fall short of the Xia states without them.”
Commentary
philology What is being compared? 諸夏, “the Xia states,” names the states of the speaker’s cultural world, distinct from the ancient Xia dynasty whose rites appear in 3.9. The Yi and Di peoples stand opposite them. Reading 不如 as “fall short of” makes the comparison favor the Xia states even without rulers. Legge instead takes it as “are not like”: the Yi and Di have rulers, unlike the Xia states that lack them. That reading rebukes the Xia states. The English follows the comparative force of 不如, while 亡 is read as absence, “without.”
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium