Read, reflect, pray
Taishang Ganying Pian 11: Taking responsibility and preserving livelihoods
English rendering of the Japanese reader’s section 11. The 24 divisions are this site’s editorial divisions, not original chapters.
English rendering
Claiming others’ kindness as one’s own credit and shifting one’s faults to them. Transferring calamity and the blame for evil to others. Buying empty reputation and harboring dangerous schemes. Undermining others’ strengths while hiding one’s own weaknesses. Borrowing authority to threaten, and indulging violence, killing and injury. Wastefully cutting cloth without need and slaughtering creatures without a fitting ritual reason. Scattering grain and troubling living beings. Destroying homes to seize valuables, breaking dikes or setting fires to damage dwellings. Disrupting plans and rules to ruin others’ work, and breaking their tools so they cannot use them.
Reading note from this site
The old commentary explains needless cutting as wasting cloth. The passage invites attention to the labor and lives behind material things.
Chinese source passage
認恩推過，嫁禍賣惡；沽買虛譽，包貯險心；挫人所長，護己所短；乘威迫脅，縱暴殺傷；無故剪裁，非禮烹宰；散棄五穀，勞擾眾生；破人之家，取其財寶；決水放火，以害民居；紊亂規模，以敗人功；損人器物，以窮人用。
Based on the classical text and this site’s independently prepared Japanese rendering. Classical source edition