Analects 4.9: 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 4.9
子曰、士志於道、而恥惡衣惡食者、未足與議也。
The Master said, “A scholar whose heart is set on the Way, yet who is ashamed of poor clothes and food, is not yet worth deliberating with.”
Commentary
ethics What causes shame? The scholar declares the Way as an aim yet treats poor food and clothing as a disgrace. The saying tests that declaration through an ordinary reaction to material circumstances. The mismatch between declared purpose and felt shame makes deliberation premature.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium
source variant A repeated chapter heading In the printed Chinese edition this reader follows, this saying is headed “chapter eight” a second time, repeating the number of the saying about morning and evening. The facing English in that edition calls it chapter nine, and this reader counts it as the ninth saying.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: high