Ever been fooled by a frozen dinner box? The photo shows perfectly crispy mac and cheese next to a full turkey dinner with all the fixings. You get home, tear it open, and discover... a sad little tray of orange goop. That's when you notice the tiny disclaimer: "Serving Suggestion." Welcome to passage 13.27—Confucius's take on why your own packaging shouldn't need a disclaimer.

In this eighth episode, host Elliott Bernstein digs into a six-character phrase listing four qualities that can help you "approach human-heartedness"—剛, 毅, 木, and 訥. But what do a durable blade, a bristling wild boar, an uncarved block of wood, and being slow to speak have in common? Why does Confucius care whether your outside matches your inside? And what exactly IS 仁, this "human-heartedness" concept that translators have been fighting over for centuries?

Along the way: why Bob's Red Mill oat bags are basically Confucian philosophy in action (WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get), the ancient Chinese tradition of 比德 or learning virtues from nature, why jade was valued not for its rarity but for its qualities (it would rather break than bend—that's courage), the 詩經's lyrics about "carving and filing, grinding and polishing" yourself into a masterpiece, how this passage connects to the 質 vs 文 debate from Episode 4 (raw material versus polish—you can't polish a turd, but you can definitely put one in a fancy box), why Confucius was deeply suspicious of people who were too clever with words, and what the archaeological discovery of the Guodian Bamboo Texts revealed about how 仁 was originally written (hint: it involves a body and a heart).

Plus: how 剛 has a different meaning in modern Chinese, what happens when you combine 剛 and 毅 into one word, and the character 訥 that's basically impossible to find in contemporary Mandarin.