The Four Books with Annotations

Author: Song) Zhu Xi
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-08-01
Features: The Four Books, comprising The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects, and Mencius, are a collective name for the most renowned classics of Confucianism. They were essential reading for ancient Chinese scholars and had a profound influence. The famous Southern Song Dynasty Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi drew upon and utilized the research of his predecessors. While compiling annotations from previous scholars, he also proposed his own unique insights to articulate the essence of Neo-Confucianism, thereby forming Collected Annotations on the Four Books (also known as Annotations on the Four Books). Annotations on the Four Books was a lifelong dedication of Zhu Xi, becoming his most celebrated masterpiece and an important research document for the Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties. As a result, its versions are numerous and widely circulated. Among them, the annotation by Wu Ying and Wu Zhizhong father and son during the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty is considered one of the better extant editions. For this compilation, it was used as the base text, with reference to other popular editions to select the best and follow suit. To facilitate modern readers in reading and referencing, in addition to using horizontal simplified characters, the original text annotations were specially moved to the end of each section for concentrated annotations, with annotation numbers corresponding to the original text.