
“The Master was entirely free from four things: presumption, insistence on certainty, rigidity and self-centredness.” The line appears in the Zi Han chapter of the Analects. It is not framed as a command spoken by Confucius, but as his disciples' description of him. In this context, the four uses of wu are traditionally read as “absence”, rather than four prohibitions.
The sentence does not ask us to abandon judgement. It asks us to leave judgement open to correction. When evidence is incomplete, restraint means distinguishing “this is how it presently appears” from “this must be so”. Conviction can coexist with the acknowledgement that we may be wrong.
https://ctext.org/analects/zi-han
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