Analects 4.1: 里仁 (Li Ren)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 4 asks what it means to make humaneness a settled home. Love and hatred, poverty and wealth, haste and adversity test that commitment. The exemplary person’s concern with what is right is set beside the petty person’s concern with gain. Master Zeng explains the Master’s single thread as wholeheartedness and consideration for others. A cluster of sayings then places devotion to parents under the pressure of disagreement, distance, continuity, and aging. The closing sayings connect restraint in speech with action, return to the image of neighbors, and consider the cost of pressing correction on rulers and friends.
Analects 4.1
子曰、里仁為美、擇不處仁、焉得知。
The Master said, “Humaneness makes a neighborhood beautiful. If you choose a home where humaneness is absent, how can you be wise?”
Commentary
philology Where to make a home 里 can name a neighborhood, and 處 means to dwell or remain. The opening takes the choice of a home as a choice of moral surroundings. Reading 里 more verbally, as dwelling in humaneness itself, gives the sentence an inward emphasis. The neighborhood reading also prepares the neighbors who appear near the book’s close.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium