Analects 4.8: 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 4.8
子曰、朝聞道、夕死、可矣。
The Master said, “To hear the Way in the morning and die that evening would be enough.”
Commentary
ethics A morning can be enough Morning and evening compress a lifetime’s value into a single day. 聞 is hearing or coming to hear of the Way; 可 declares the outcome acceptable. The saying measures what hearing the Way is worth against the stark limit of death, leaving the content of that encounter unstated.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium