‘A student need not be inferior to the teacher, nor the teacher superior to the student.’ The sentence comes from Han Yu's Tang-dynasty essay On Teachers. Here, ‘need not’ means ‘not necessarily’. The preceding passage recalls Confucius learning from several people, and the next line says that people encounter the Way at different times and specialise in different fields. Han Yu is not dismissing teachers; he is rejecting age and status as automatic tests of who may teach. Read today, the sentence places learning back inside a particular question: someone may teach me here and learn from me elsewhere. Roles can change without making standards of knowledge disappear.
https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?chapter=959513&if=gb
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