Analects 4.13: 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 4.13
子曰、能以禮讓為國乎、何有、不能以禮讓為國、如禮何。
The Master said, “If you can govern a state through ritual and willingness to yield, what difficulty is there? If you cannot govern a state through ritual and willingness to yield, what can you do with ritual?”
Commentary
politics Governing requires yielding 禮讓 joins ritual with a willingness to yield. The first question treats this combination as making government workable; the second tests what relation to ritual remains when it cannot be put into practice. Yielding gives the forms a mode of conduct: the person governing must know how to make room for others.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium