The pleasure of it.
The first line of the Analects is that to learn and to return to it at intervals is a pleasure. Not a duty, not a discipline — enjoyable. It is a striking thing to put first, and everything demanding that follows in the book depends on the claim being true.
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At ease in it.
The junzi is described as composed and unhurried; the small man is perpetually agitated. Confucius said that at seventy he could follow whatever his heart wanted without overstepping the bounds — which is the tradition's whole promise, that constraint practised long enough stops being felt as constraint.
held by most
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As if they were present.
The instruction is to sacrifice as if the spirits were there — and Confucius, asked directly about serving the spirits and about death, said that if you cannot yet serve the living, or understand life, you should not be asking. The as if is doing deliberate work, and the tradition has left it doing that work for two and a half millennia.
held by most
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Liangzhi — you already know.
Wang Yangming's claim is that moral knowledge is innate and immediate: you know a wrong is wrong before you have finished reasoning about it, and the work is uncovering that rather than acquiring it. Zhu Xi's followers found this alarming, because if everyone already knows, the curriculum is optional.
⚖ contested within
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