4 Evils of Government
Confucius was asked by Zizhang, one of his younger disciples, what a man must be like to be suitable for a government post. It’s a good question with an appropriately Confucian emphasis: getting yourself right before attempting to rule others. Somewhat gnomically, Confucius replies that that the key is to respect the five ‘beautiful traits’ and to avoid the four ‘abhorrent ones’ (or the ‘four evils’). After a discussion of the beautiful traits, Zizhang asks for the bad ones.
4 Symbols & the 28 Mansions
The four symbols, which could be translated 'signs', are the traditional way of dividing the night sky. Each quadrant then gets subdivided further into seven 'mansions' (宿), which is something like a resting place or a temporary lodging, making a total of 28. They are linked to the movement of the moon, so that each mansion is crossed in turn as the moon orbits the earth.
5 Essential Skills of the Charioteer
Driving a chariot in the Shang and Zhou dynasties was serious business. Generally led by a team of four horses and surrounded by troops, chariots were the mainstay of military strategy; so much so that charioteering is one of the 'Six Arts' listed in the Book of Zhou (周禮, 2nd century BCE). A later commentator laid out the list though, as we shall see, quite a bit of guesswork is needed to decipher the items.
6 Hallmarks of a Good Bow
In his Dream Pool Essays of 1086 (夢溪筆談), Shen Kuo (沈括) gives six qualities to look for in a good bow. Next time you're looking for a composite bow à l'ancienne, be sure to take this checklist along with you.
7 Feelings of Cheng Yi
feelings of Cheng Yi 7 Feelings are problem for the Neo-Confucian, Cheng Yi. In his view, these seven feelings have the power to corrupt people’s original purity if allowed free rein. Even though human nature starts off pure, the social world that we inhabit corrupts it. The task we all face, therefore, is the endless struggle of protecting this tender shoot of goodness from the onslaught of life at large. This list of seven feelings is an interesting departure from notions more familiar to the Western reader, such as the Seven Deadly [...]
8 Trigrams of the Yijing
A divination tool originally developed from casting yarrow stems, the eight trigrams (八卦) represent every configuration possible from combining two types of line - broken and unbroken - in sets of three.
6 Schools of Sima Tan
Sima Tan (司馬談) 165-110 BC was a grand historiographer and astrologer of the Western Han dynasty, who classified the philosophy of his time into six main traditions. Of the six, Sima Tan favoured Daoism as the one school among them with the breadth of thought to encompass the others.
12 Beauties of Jinling
One of the titles considered for the Hong Lou Meng (Dream of Red Mansions), "The 12 Beauties of Jinling" refers to twelve principal female characters in the novel. In an early dream sequence, the male protaganist Baoyu is shown poetic records of the twelve in question via a registry, with their fates foreshadowed in riddle form.
4 Books of Zhu Xi
Zhu Xi (1130-1200) was a Confucian scholar of the Southern Song (1127-1276). Incredibly learned and prolific, he ushered in a Neo-Confucian revival. His commentaries on the Four Books, which he singled out as the core classics of the Confucian canon, became prescribed reading for government officials.
5 Virtues of a Thief
virtues of a thief 5 Robber Zhi (盜跖) is one of the stock characters of the Zhuangzi, frequently invoked to poke holes in the tenets of other philosophers and generally Confucians. This cheeky list, which sums up the ‘dao’ of being a thief, is a comical subversion of the qualities that the ruists (Confucians) espoused. The satirical passage is part of a broader point; the sages disturbed the natural order by introducing the artificial desire for virtuous qualities. Though a few good people may result, the society they create gives rise to [...]
