The Great Learning

The Great Learning (Daxue) is a brief but immensely influential Confucian text, originally a single chapter of the ancient ritual compendium the Book of Rites (Liji), which the Neo-Confucians extracted and elevated to the status of a classic in its own right. Though short, it lays out a comprehensive programme connecting inner moral cultivation to the right ordering of society. Its celebrated core is a chain of eight steps linking the individual to the world: the investigation of things (gewu), the extension of knowledge, making the intentions sincere, rectifying the mind, cultivating the self, regulating the family, ordering the state, and finally bringing peace to all under Heaven.

The logic is that the great work of governing well begins in the interior life of the person: only one who has cultivated himself can order his household, and only well-ordered households make a well-ordered state. "From the Son of Heaven down to the common people," the text declares, "all must regard the cultivation of the self as the root." It also names the "three guiding principles," including the manifesting of bright virtue and the renewal of the people.

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.