Examine Every Claim and Test It by Reason

“Whenever you hear a claim, examine it fully; where people and events are concerned, test it by reason.” The sentence comes from “Examining Transmission” in the Lüshi Chunqiu. It asks us to inspect what we hear rather than accept its surface form.

The chapter immediately tells of a man who said that digging a well had “gained one person”: the household no longer needed one worker to fetch water. Retelling turned this into finding a person inside the well. The fault was not simply that the message had passed through several mouths; its crucial wording had been detached from the event. Today, the restrained response is not to distrust every report, but to recover the original words, restore their context and ask whether the interpretation fits the facts.

https://ctext.org/lv-shi-chun-qiu/cha-zhuan/zhs