贤贤易色章

Original text

子夏曰：“贤贤易色，事父母能竭其力，事君能致其身，与朋友交，言而有信，虽曰未学，吾必谓之学矣。”

Translation

Tsze-hsia said, "Having more appreciation on virtue than on appearance for one's spouse, laying oneself out for one's parents, serving devotedly for one's master, always keeping faith for one's friends, for such a person, even he or she is said not to have been formally educated, I must say he or she has completed the education already."

Annotation from research

The four cardinal relationships among Chinese: the husband-the wife, the parents-the children, the master-the lieges and relationship among friends, are repeatedly mentioned. Adding relationship among siblings, it is usually called five cardinal relationships among Chinese. Certainly, while not everybody has brothers and sisters, the former four relationships affect everybody, so they are considered more important.

The original and full meaning of the first clause should be as follows:

Change your mind from appreciating only for appearance, to appreciating for virtue as well.

Literally there isn’t a word about the couple relationship, but it can be easily deduced from the context. But the word change reminds us of the effect of the civilization: what leads to such change in mind? And, what differentiates human beings from the animal world? After all, appearance counts. But, the term virtue only makes sense among human beings. The more one is socialized, the more he or she will value virtue. That is what Confucian followers mean for education: to form an order to the extent of the whole society by means of socializing each individual and evaluation system is based on their virtue, their moralities, rather than their endowment such as appearance or intelligence, which is very different from the western evaluation systems.

Tsze-hsia became a disciple, a student of Confucius when Confucius was in his old years.