As for the sentence "Rotten wood cannot be carved, and a wall of dung and soil cannot be built." We also use this word in our daily life, but the latter one is not often used. .
The reason why this sentence has been circulated for thousands of years is because the truth of this sentence can always be applied to people today. It is meant to alert future generations, and it also reminds myself all the time that we should not behave like this.
The general meaning of this sentence is that rotten wood cannot withstand carving, and dung walls cannot withstand painting. Rotten wood cannot be carved, and a wall of dung cannot be built. A wall of dung cannot be built. There is actually another sentence behind this sentence: Yu Yu and He Zhu. The meaning of this sentence is that for people like Jaeyu, what else can be blamed?
This also leads to a story. Jaeyu is a disciple of Confucius. At the beginning, Jaeyu was a very decent speaker and his words were quite beautiful. Confucius also liked this disciple very much at first, thinking that Jaeyu would be very promising in the future.
But the good times did not last long, and Jaeyu revealed his laziness. One day, Confucius came to give lectures to his disciples, and Jaeyu was sleeping alone in his room. thus. It was only then that Confucius had this sentiment: "Rotten wood cannot be carved."
Nowadays, this idiom is often used to describe a person who cannot be transformed with the help of external forces or whose quality has deteriorated to the extreme and has reached a hopeless point. It is also used to describe things or situations where failure is a foregone conclusion and there is no room for recovery.
So this sentence can also be called "Rotten wood cannot be carved," or "Rotten wood cannot be carved." On the basis of these, it can also be called "rotten wood and dung", which means that this person has been corrupted to the point of hopelessness.