ABSTRACT
The importance of the Daxue as a canonical text of classical Confucianism is beyond any serious doubt. From the implicit critique of Zhu Xi, scholars see the charges of sporadic branching, lost-in-emptiness, and absurdity in Zhu Xi's emendation and interpretation of the Daxue text. So now the issue is whether there are independent reasons for Zhu Xi to rearrange, emend and section the old text or for Wang Yangming to insist on the original order and sequence of the guben text as the basis for proposing his own interpretation of the Daxue. There is the ontological level, where the question of ultimate truth of the interpretation is raised. The chapter examines the meaning issue of the Daxue guben text on the linguistic level of textual consistency, and focuses on to the theoretical level of conceptual cogency, and finally come to the philosophical level of ontological truth.
