Analects 4.26: 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 4.26
子游曰、事君數、斯辱矣、朋友數、斯疏矣。
Ziyou said, “Keep correcting a ruler you serve, and you will be disgraced; keep correcting your friends, and they will grow distant.”
Commentary
translation When correction becomes insistence Ziyou closes the book by comparing service to a ruler with friendship. 數 means repeated or persistent action; the particular action is left implicit. The English supplies correction, as Legge does. The paired outcomes distinguish the ruler’s power to disgrace from a friend’s withdrawal, placing a limit on how insistently advice can be pressed.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium