顏氏家訓·勉學（節選）颜氏家训·勉学（节选）

Since ancient times even enlightened kings and sage emperors have had to study hard; how much more ordinary people. The point is made everywhere in the classics and histories, and I need not labour it; I will only give some important recent examples to wake you up. The sons of gentlemen are all taught from the age of a few years; the furthest along reach the Rites and the Commentary, and the least still get through the Songs and the Analects. By the time they are capped and married, when their temperament has begun to settle, they need twice the guidance to make use of this natural moment. Those with ambition can then polish themselves and take up a scholar’s calling; those without resolve slide from then on into idleness and become ordinary men. Everyone alive ought to have a calling: farmers plan their ploughing and sowing, merchants talk over goods and prices, craftsmen bring their implements to perfection, the skilled think hard about methods and techniques, soldiers practise with bow and horse, and scholars lecture and debate on the classics. I often see gentlemen who are ashamed to touch farming or trade and embarrassed to work at a craft; their archery cannot pierce a plate of armour, and their writing can just about manage their own names. They eat their fill and drink till they are drunk, idle and empty, and so pass their days and end their years. Some, on the strength of what is left of the family name, get a rank or two and are satisfied with themselves, and forget about study altogether. When there is a great occasion, auspicious or grievous, and its rights and wrongs are being discussed, they gape blankly as if sitting in a cloud of mist; at gatherings, public or private, when the talk turns to the past and poems are composed, they hang their heads in silence and only yawn and stretch. Those who know better, watching, want to sink into the ground on their behalf. Why grudge a few years of hard study and suffer a lifetime of shame?

If you understand the meaning of the Six Classics and range through the books of the hundred schools, then even if it does not improve your virtue or strengthen the common morals, it is still a skill to support yourself by. Father and elder brothers cannot always be relied on, and home and country cannot always be kept; if one day you are a refugee with no one to shelter you, you will have to look to yourself. The proverb says: “Ten million in savings is not worth a small skill in your own person.” Of the skills that are easy to learn and worth having, none is greater than reading. People, wise or foolish, all wish to know many people and see many things, yet they will not read: that is like wanting to be fed but being too lazy to cook, or wanting to be warm but too idle to cut out clothes. As for the reader: since the days of Fuxi and Shennong, under the whole of the heavens, how many people he has come to know, how many affairs he has seen! The successes and failures, the loves and hates of the living are hardly worth mentioning; nothing escapes him that Heaven and Earth could keep, or ghosts and spirits could hide.

Learning is for gaining something. I see people who have read a few dozen scrolls and at once think themselves great, insulting their elders and slighting their equals; others hate them like enemies and loathe them like owls. To harm yourself with learning like that is worse than not learning at all.

Those who learned in ancient times learned for themselves, to make up what they lacked; those who learn now learn for others, only to be able to talk about it. Those who learned in ancient times learned for others, practising the Way to benefit the world; those who learn now learn for themselves, cultivating themselves to get on. Learning is like planting a tree: in spring you enjoy its flowers, and in autumn you gather its fruit. Discussing and writing are the spring flowers; cultivating yourself and bettering your conduct are the autumn fruit.

When people are small, their spirit is single and sharp; once they are grown, their thoughts scatter. So they must be taught early, and the moment must not be missed. When I was seven I learned by heart the Rhapsody on the Hall of Numinous Light, and to this day, going over it once in ten years, I have not forgotten it; but the classics I learned after twenty, if I leave them for a month, run to weeds. Still, if someone meets misfortune and misses his prime, he should learn late rather than give himself up. Confucius said: “If at fifty I study the Changes, I may be without great faults.” Cao Cao and Yuan Yi grew more devoted with age; they learned young and did not tire of it into old age. Zengzi began to learn at seventy and became known throughout the world; Xun Qing came to study at fifty and still became a great scholar; Gongsun Hong first read the Spring and Autumn after forty, and by it rose to be chancellor; Zhu Yun also began the Changes and the Analects at forty; Huangfu Mi first received the Classic of Filial Piety and the Analects at twenty; and all of them became great scholars in the end. These were people lost early who woke late. People who have not studied by the time they are capped and married say it is too late, and so stay as they are, facing a wall; that too is foolish. Learning when young is like the light of the rising sun; learning when old is like walking at night holding a candle, and that is still better than shutting your eyes and seeing nothing.