Confucius: The Doctrine of the Mean and Great Learning

The twentieth-first Century global community revolves around the idea of joint responsibility - our selves, the neighborhood we live in, our planetary home, all of these need attention. The Chinese Confucius has much to teach us - about self-care, human nature, truthfulness, and the very best in life and how to get on together. According to these classics The Doctrine of the Mean and The Great Learning, it all hinges on how we interact with and treat our¬selves and others. Both sensibility and spirituality exist in these writings, some verses dating back to before 500 BC. In ancient times these terse poetic paragraphs supplied any young person, looking towards a social vocation, with the moral rule against which he or she might be measured. Yet a moral rule has implications for us all. In a nut-shell, its message is that control of the state rested in controlling of one’s self, as individual. This also resonated with reverence, or respect for others - not the least, deference to a superior. The primary virtue in old China was jen, ’human-heartedness’ or ’love’ - a very physical thing. In a sense, Confucianism also embraced the Taoist’s notion of ’primal qi’. Richard has published many translations of classical Chinese medical and philosophical texts. But this was his first love, and has always been closest to his heart.