Zhu Xi and the Four Books

The Great Learning owed its extraordinary later importance to the Neo-Confucian revival of the Song dynasty, and above all to Zhu Xi (1130-1200), who reorganised and re-edited the text, supplied it with a commentary, and placed it first among the Four Books as the natural gateway to Confucian learning, the text that sets out the overall framework which the Analects, Mencius and Doctrine of the Mean then fill in.

Zhu Xi's interpretation of the opening phrase gewu, the "investigation of things," as the patient study of the principle (li) inherent in things and affairs, became a central and much-debated tenet of Neo-Confucian philosophy; later thinkers such as Wang Yangming contested it, reading the same phrase as the rectification of the mind rather than the investigation of the external world. Through Zhu Xi's edition the Great Learning became a foundation of Chinese education and of the imperial civil service examinations from the fourteenth century to 1905, memorised by every aspiring scholar, and it exerted a comparable influence in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. It remains a compact statement of the Confucian conviction that good order in the world is rooted in the moral cultivation of the self.