Analects 8.17: 泰伯 (Tai Bo)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 8 places personal conduct beside the use and relinquishment of power. Taibo’s yielding opens the book; praise of Shun, Yu, Yao, and Zhou closes it. Between these stands a sequence in Master Zeng’s voice, beginning in illness and extending to the lifelong burden of humaneness. Ritual gives qualities their measure, while poetry and music form a person’s response. Learning is tested against talent, salary, public service, and withdrawal. The book ends with Yu’s choices: little for personal comfort, full care for ritual and waterworks.
Analects 8.17
子曰、學如不及、猶恐失之。
The Master said, “Learn as though you could never catch up, and still fear losing what you have learned.”
Commentary
ethics Reaching and retaining 不及 pictures failing to reach or catch up; 失 pictures losing. Learning faces in both directions: toward what one has yet to reach and toward keeping what one has learned. “What you have learned” supplies the implied object of the second image, while the urgency comes from the comparison itself.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium