The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean.
Two short chapters that Zhu Xi lifted out of the Book of Rites and promoted into free-standing classics. The first gives the ladder from investigating things through making the intention sincere to bringing peace to the world; the second makes sincerity a cosmic principle. With the Analects and Mencius they became the examination curriculum for six hundred years.
The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean were originally chapters 42 and 31 of the Book of Rites. Zhu Xi extracted them, rearranged the text of the first, supplied a missing section he judged lost, and promoted both into free-standing classics alongside the Analects and Mencius as the Four Books — a curricular decision that determined what the East Asian governing class read for six hundred years. The Great Learning supplies the eight-step ladder: investigating things, extending knowledge, making the intention sincere, rectifying the mind, cultivating the person, regulating the family, ordering the state, and bringing peace to the world. Its force is the claim that these are continuous — that the ordering of a world begins with the ordering of a self, with no break in the chain. The Doctrine of the Mean is the more metaphysical text, treating cheng, sincerity or integrity, as a cosmological principle: complete sincerity is said to allow a person to form a triad with Heaven and Earth.
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