- Lived:
- 1017–1073 · Yingdao, Daozhou (modern Hunan), Song-dynasty China
- Tradition:
- Chinese; founder-figure of Neo-Confucianism (daoxue, "the learning of the Way")
- The Big Idea:
- The Confucian moral life is not a set of manners floating in a void — it is the human expression of the same living pattern that moves the whole cosmos, and anyone, by learning, can come into alignment with it.
- In their words:
- "Can one become a sage through learning? Yes."
- If you remember one thing:
- A minor provincial judge with one small diagram and two very short texts gave Confucianism the cosmology it had lacked for a thousand years — and insisted that sagehood is a learnable skill, not a birthright or a miracle.