Confucian ethics eventually settled on a canonical enumeration, the five constant virtues, wuchang: ren, humaneness; yi, rightness; li, ritual propriety; zhi, wisdom; and xin, trustworthiness. The first four were grouped by Mencius as the four sprouts native to the human heart; the Han thinker Dong Zhongshu is generally credited with fixing xin as the fifth, completing the set that would be memorized by schoolchildren for two thousand years.
Xin's position in the list repays attention. It is the only member that is essentially relational in its very structure: humaneness, rightness, wisdom and even propriety can be described as states of the agent, but trustworthiness exists only where a word has been given and another person leans on it. The tradition sometimes ranked it accordingly as the completing virtue, the one that makes the others socially real; a humaneness that cannot be relied upon, a rightness that shifts with convenience, are private weather.
Later cosmological schematizers correlated the five virtues with the five phases, five directions and five organs, lodging xin at the center or in the earth phase in most arrangements, the stabilizing element on which the cycle turns. However fanciful the correlations, the placement preserved the old insight of the carriage-pin passage: trust is the fixed point. In contemporary Chinese the word remains everywhere, in credit, in letters, in confidence, so that the Han list's fifth member is, of the five, the one modern life still invokes daily by name.