Book 6: 《雍也》 Yong Ye (As for Yong)
《雍也》 Passage 6.5
Legge Translation (1861)
Yuan Si being made governor of his town by the Master, he gave him nine hundred measures of grain, but Si declined them.The Master said: "Do not decline them. May you not give them away in the neighborhoods, hamlets, towns, and villages?"
Word by word
- 原思 yuán sī
Yuan Si, the disciple Yuan Xian, styled Zisi
- 原 Yuan, a surname (that of a disciple of Confucius)
- 思 Si, courtesy-name element in 子思, the courtesy name of Yuan Xian (原憲)
- 為 wéi
to serve as, to act as
- 之 zhī
his (possessive pronoun referring to Confucius)
- 宰 zǎi
steward, household manager, chief officer
- 與 yǔ
to give, grant (here: as salary or stipend)
- 之 zhī
him (object pronoun referring to Yuan Si)
Only Legge keeps an active construction with an explicit object.
- 粟 sù
grain, unhusked millet
- 九百 jiǔ bǎi
nine hundred
- 九 nine
- 百 hundred
- 辭 cí
to decline, refuse
- 子曰 zǐ yuē
the Master said
- 子 Master, honorific title for Confucius
- 曰 to say, said
- 毋 wú
don't!, prohibitive negation
Some translators keep this as a separate imperative (do not refuse); Peimin Ni fuses it into a single question (why don't you...) and Watson renders it as an exclamation (oh, no!).
- 以 yǐ
by means of, using (the grain)
- 與 yǔ
to give, share, distribute
- 爾 ěr
your (second-person possessive pronoun)
- 鄰里鄉黨 lín lǐ xiāng dǎng
neighbors and fellow villagers, one's local community
- 鄰 neighbor, one who lives nearby
- 里 hamlet, a small cluster of neighboring households
- 鄉 township, rural district
- 黨 community, a grouping of villages
Legge alone preserves the four terms as a distinct list (neighborhoods, hamlets, towns, villages); the others collapse them into one or two general terms for 'neighborhood' or 'community'.
- 乎 hū
interrogative/exclamatory final particle marking a rhetorical question
Roberts and Ames & Rosemont drop the interrogative force altogether and render the clause as a plain statement.
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