Analects 4.21: 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 4.21
子曰、父母之年、不可不知也、一則以喜、一則以懼。
The Master said, “You must know how old your parents are: their years are a cause for joy and a cause for fear.”
Commentary
ethics One fact, two feelings The parents’ years occasion joy at their continued life and fear of losing them. 一則…一則 places both responses beside the same fact. Knowing their age makes time felt within the relationship: gratitude and apprehension belong together.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium