Analects 4.23: 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 4.23
子曰、以約、失之者鮮矣。
The Master said, “Those who restrain themselves seldom go wrong.”
Commentary
philology Restraint as a safeguard 約 is constraint or restraint. Here it describes a way of acting that limits errors; it can include sparing use of resources or keeping one’s demands within bounds. Earlier in the book, the same word described hardship that a person must endure. Here restraint is a discipline one adopts. 鮮 keeps the claim at “seldom.”
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium