A cloud-laden landscape...

For Confucius, precision in language usage meant virtue, was virtue. He would deride his interlocutors not for failing to know or failing to will, but for failing to articulate with exactitude. Because a cloud-laden landscape is a dangerous one. Because the Truth, the knowing of which yields impossible harmonies, is exact, not cloud-laden, crisp. He was convinced that evil and suffering arose out of error, out of imprecision, and there are many ways in which a misspoken word can provoke undesirable effects.