Analects 4.5: 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 4.5
子曰、富與貴、是人之所欲也、不以其道得之、不處也。貧與賤、是人之所惡也、不以其道得之、不去也。君子去仁、惡乎成名。君子無終食之間違仁、造次必於是、顛沛必於是。
The Master said, “Wealth and high rank are what people desire. If you cannot gain them in the right way, do not remain in them. Poverty and low rank are what people detest. If you cannot leave them in the right way, do not leave them. If an exemplary person leaves humaneness, how can they live up to that name? An exemplary person does not depart from humaneness even for the time it takes to eat a meal. In haste they hold to it; when stumbling and falling, they hold to it.”
Commentary
translation The repeated phrase about gaining 不以其道得之 repeats exactly in the clauses about wealth and poverty. 得之 literally means gaining or obtaining them. The English takes the second occurrence as obtaining escape from poverty, as Legge does. Another reading keeps the literal object: even poverty that comes undeserved must be borne. The chosen construction makes right means the condition both for acquiring wealth and for leaving poverty.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium
ethics Living up to the name 成名 asks how an exemplary person can make good the name while abandoning humaneness. The time of a meal supplies an ordinary measure of how briefly that commitment might lapse. 造次 suggests haste or urgency; 顛沛 evokes stumbling and falling, extending the demand to moments when life loses its footing.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium