Analects 4.25: 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 4.25
子曰、德不孤、必有鄰。
The Master said, “Virtue does not stand alone; it is bound to have neighbors.”
Commentary
ethics Virtue finds neighbors 德 is given the position of a person who can be alone or have neighbors. The image suggests that moral character draws company and finds affinity. The book opened with choosing a humane neighborhood; here virtue itself becomes the center around which a neighborhood can form.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium