Collect famous sayings and thoughts of Confucius or Mencius

There is a famous saying in Mencius _ Gao Zixia, and the sentence goes like this: "Therefore, if the sky is to fall on the people of Sri Lanka, we must first suffer their minds, work hard on their bones and muscles, starve their bodies, and empty their bodies, so we can't do things, so we can be patient." The fifteenth chapter of this famous saying is selected from the fifth volume of Mencius Chapter II, a junior high school Chinese textbook published by People's Education Publishing House, and it is entitled Born in Worry and Died in Happiness. This passage of Mencius is very enlightening and has been told by people for more than two thousand years. However, the traditional sentence break of this sentence is inappropriate and can't stand scrutiny, which leads to far-fetched and absurd phenomena in translation and interpretation. What is wrong with this is that it is "empty and chaotic." In my opinion, the sentence break here should be changed to "empty its body line and confuse its line", that is, the word "line" is connected with the word "body line" to form a compound word "body line" Then, can "body" and "line" in Mencius be linked as "body line"? According to ancient records, the words "body" and "behavior" can be combined into the word "body and behavior" in Mencius era, and there are many use cases that mean "standing up and doing things" and "behaving", which can be used as nouns or verbs. Such as "Xunzi _ Wang Zhi": "On rites, music, integrity, extensive education, beauty and vulgarity, it is also official business." "Although Shu Ren's descendants also have literary accumulation, they are upright and can return to propriety, but they will return to the Qing dynasty literati." "Xunzi _ Wang Ba": "Zhong Ni has nowhere to stand. His sincerity is based on ambition, his righteousness is based on deeds, his words are not hidden in the world, and his name hangs on the future generations." "Zhuangzi _ Fisherman": "Confucius is loyal and benevolent." It can be seen that Mencius' passage connects "style" with "line", which is an example of language expression and conforms to the combination of words and usage habits at that time. On the basis of making it clear that "body" and "line" can be related, let's see why this sentence is broken down into "walking empty and confusing what it does". First of all, grammatically speaking, the first half of this famous saying (before "so") consists of several clauses, each of which has a subject "Tian" with the same grammar. Accordingly, the predicate verbs in each clause respectively express the various measures taken by Tian to hone those who will bear great responsibilities in the future, including words such as "bitterness", "fatigue", "hunger" and "confusion". Therefore, according to the traditional method, the "line" in the last clause (so-called "line confuses what it does") also becomes the subject of confusion, which inevitably conflicts with the pre-existing subject "day", resulting in confusion with two subjects at the same time. This is obviously a contradiction in grammar and difficult in semantics. However, if the sentence is "empty body, empty line", this contradiction and absurdity can be avoided, so that the clauses of the whole paragraph are closely linked, the expression is smooth, and the tone is communicated, which is also in line with Mencius' majestic and hearty characteristics. Secondly, from the structural point of view, because each clause in the first half of this famous saying has a subject with the same meaning ("Tian") and each clause is a causative sentence, the structure of each clause should be consistent as a whole. If the word "xing" is connected to form "body and behavior", the structural consistency can be achieved, which is embodied in "suffering+its mind", "fatigue+its bones and muscles", "emptiness+its body and behavior" and "confusion+its behavior". However, according to the traditional method, the structure of the latter two clauses is "emptiness+body" and "confusion+its behavior" Literally, "his behavior disturbed what he did" obviously doesn't make sense. ) Source: Modern Chinese (Language Studies)