Constant Virtues

Constant Virtues holds the Confucian wu chang, the five constants of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness that Han dynasty scholars formalized as the core of a cultivated moral character. Later correlative thought paired each of the five with one of the five elements and a cardinal direction, a symbolic architecture with no equivalent among the Western or South Asian virtue schemes gathered nearby, and it belongs to Confucian ethics specifically rather than to Chinese religion as a whole.