Analects 4.10: 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 4.10
子曰、君子之於天下也、無適也、無莫也、義之與比。
The Master said, “An exemplary person takes no fixed side for or against anything in the world, but stands with what is right.”
Commentary
ethics A side chosen by rightness 無適 and 無莫 balance favoring and opposing; 義 then supplies the ground for alignment. “Fixed” makes explicit the relation between these clauses: the exemplary person has no prior commitment that overrides what is right. The final 比, standing alongside or joining, makes rightness an active basis of allegiance.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium