The Analects, in the chapter Wei Zheng, gives only four Chinese characters: “A junzi is not a vessel.” Traditional commentary understands a vessel as an object confined to a particular use. The line therefore does not reject skill. It says that a mature person should not be exhausted by one fixed function.
It is easy today to turn this into “everyone should be good at everything”. That misses the point. The issue is not the number of skills but whether one role completely captures a person’s judgement. An engineer is more than code, a manager more than supervision, and a piano learner more than a list of completed pieces. Expertise requires boundaries, but a person should not become equivalent to a job description.
Source text:
https://ctext.org/analects/wei-zheng/zhs
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