Analects 4.7: 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 4.7
子曰、人之過也、各於其黨、觀過、斯知仁矣。
The Master said, “People’s faults differ with the kind of person they are. Observe their faults, and you can tell whether they are humane.”
Commentary
translation What a fault reveals 黨 can mean a group or kind; the English takes a person’s pattern of faults as evidence of their moral character. 知仁 names the discernment of humaneness without an explicit possessive. Legge gives the conclusion a specifically favorable force: a fault can reveal that someone is virtuous. “Tell whether they are humane” makes the judgment open, rather than assuming the person already possesses humaneness.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium