What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others

“What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others” is presented as a reciprocal ethical test: a person who wishes to live cannot consistently claim the right to kill others. In the novel, the maxim is voiced amid combat, where its appeal to humane conduct also serves as a deliberate attempt to distract an opponent and interrupt the violence.

Meaning and Form

The saying makes another person’s vulnerability the measure of one’s own conduct. Rather than grounding its appeal in status or force, it asks the listener to recognize that the wish to escape harm is shared. In the scene, this reasoning is framed as a Confucian teaching and directed at XuanTong by a bookworm who is fighting alongside a scholar carrying a judge-pen.

Use in the Fight

As XuanTong attacks the scholar, the bookworm stays close, moving around him and urging him to reconsider. He argues that if other people wanted to kill XuanTong, XuanTong would naturally be unwilling to die; that unwillingness, he contends, makes it unjustifiable for XuanTong to kill others. The maxim therefore operates not as a detached reflection but as an appeal made under immediate threat.

The bookworm’s ethical argument is also part of the fight’s tactics. XuanTong suspects that the speaker is trying to divert his attention and will exploit an opening if one appears. He consequently divides his focus between guarding against the bookworm and attacking the scholar, giving the scholar a much-improved position. When XuanTong grows impatient after ten exchanges and orders the bookworm away, the latter continues to press for forgiveness and an end to the fighting.

Ethical and Dramatic Significance

The scene holds principle and strategy together without making them identical. The maxim calls for reciprocity and restraint, while its speaker’s movement and persistence have a practical effect on the balance of combat. Its force lies in that double use: it asks XuanTong to imagine himself as the threatened party even as the appeal itself helps protect the bookworm’s companion. The saying becomes both a moral challenge to violence and an intervention within it.