试探《论语·卫灵公篇》“小知大受”句之确诂

Probing the accurate meanings of one sentence in the Analects of Confucius

正确判定了《论语·卫灵公篇》"君子不可小知而可大受也,小人不可大受而可小知也"的句式;利用故训、排比用例和推理等手段,指出了"知"的真义——用、任用;解释了该义项在知的词义系统中的合理归位;确诂此句为:"君子,不可小用而可以大用;小人,只可以小用而不可大用。"

Throughout the ages, most of the exegetes misread the syntactical structures and misapprehended the meanings of the word ＂zhi （ 知 ） ＂ in the sentence ＂君子不可小知而可大受也,小人不可大受而可小知也＂ of the Analects of Confucius. We comment on their mistakes of the syntactical structures, and sum up the exact senses by inducing the parallelism cases, summing up the ancient annotation and especially reasoning the examples. Finally we give some tentative examination of the sense orientation in the word ＂zhi （知） ＂ lexical system.