CONFUCIUS

"THE GREAT LEARNING"

The Way of Great Learning is to brighten and brighten up one’s inner cultivation of Virtue. That is to make progress of our people. Placing one on the point of ultimate kindness.

When knowing to remain within one’s boundary, then one can be firm. When one can be firm, then one can become quiet. When one can be quiet, then one can secure his destiny. When one can secure his destiny, then one can think. When one thinks, then one can have gains.

In Ancient, one who wished to brighten and brighten up of all of heavenly below, he must firstly be able to manage his nation. One who wished to manage his nation, he must firstly be able to level up his family. One who wished to level up his family, he must firstly be able to train on his personality. One who wished to train on his personality, his must firstly be able to set right his heart. One who wished to set right one’s heart, he must firstly be sincere in his insight. One who wished to be sincere in his insight, he must extend his knowledge. The extension of knowledge rests upon reason and science. Through reason and science, knowledge can be extended. Through knowledge in extension, we can be sincere in insight. Through sincerity in insight, one can set right his heart. Through setting right of one’s heart, he can train his personality. Through the training of his personality, he can then level up his family. Through leveling up of one’s family, he can then seek to manage the nation in success. Through the success of national management, then four seas of heavenly below would be in equalization.

From The King to an ordinary person, oneness is all in that training of personality. If one’s principle is wrong, and yet, his ending means can be managed. Impossible! Of what spiritually thick becomes thin, his thinness becomes thick. Never happens.




CONFUCIUS Bio

K‘ung Fu-tsze, "the philosopher K‘ung," whose name has been Latinized into Confucius, was born in the year 551 (or 552) B.C. His father, Shuh-hang Heih was an officer in charge of the district of Tsow in the State of Lu and had been famous for his strength and daring; he was of the Kung family and lineally descended from Hwang-Ti, an almost legendary character of ancient China.
At the age of seventy, Shuh-liang Heih, the father of ten children of whom but one was a son and he a cripple, sought a wife in the Yen family where there were three daughters. The two elder of them demurred when apprised by their father of the old man's suit; but the youngest, Ching-tsai, only seventeen years of age, offered to abide by her father's judgment. The following year Confucius was born and three years later she was a widow.
Confucius was married, in accordance with Chinese custom, at nineteen and accepted public employment as a keeper of stores and later as superintendent of parks and herds. At twenty-two, however, he commenced his life-work as a teacher, and gradually a group of students, eager to be instructed in the classics and in conduct and government, gathered about him.
He was a contemporary of Lao-tsze, the founder of Taoism, who, however, was of the next previous generation. Confucius is said to have had several interviews with him about 517 B.C. Up to the age of fifty-two, he was not much in public life. He was then made chief magistrate of the city of Chung-tu, which so thrived and improved under his care, that the Duke of Lu appointed him minister of crime which resulted in a great reduction of wrongdoing. The Duke accepting a present of female musicians and giving himself over to dissipation, Confucius withdrew and wandered among the various states, giving instruction as opportunity offered. His disciples during his lifetime rose to three thousand and of these some seventy or eighty were highly esteemed by him. Confucius when he set forth on his wanderings was fifty-six; it was thirteen years before he returned to Lu.
In 482 B.C., he lost his only son; in 481 B.C., his favourite student, Yen Hwuy, and in 478 B.C. Tsze-lu, another of his favourites, passed away, and the same year Confucius himself died at the age of seventy-two (or seventy-three). He was buried in the K‘ung cemetery outside the gates of K‘iuh-fow, where most of his descendants, said to number more than forty thousand, still live. His tomb is yet preserved and is annually visited by vast numbers of his followers.

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