ABSTRACT
Chu Hsi's commentary on the Ta-hsueh, completed in 1189 when Chu was fifty-nine, was a paradigmatic philosophic reconstruction of a classic Confucian text; it was also an audacious manifesto for the emerging tao-hsueh movement. In 1190 Chu Hsi published the Great Learning commentary, along with its sisters on the Analects, the Mencius, and the Doctrine of the Mean, as the Four Masters. Chu Hsi's commentary on the Great Learning illustrates this pattern of the creation of a social self concerned with fundamental axiological patterns of action among the object-events of a creative cosmos. The very way in which Chu Hsi decided to reorder the Great Learning is important for more than textual or even historical reasons. Chu Hsi's commentary on the Great Learning illustrates this pattern of the creation of a social self concerned with fundamental axiological patterns of action among the object-events of a creative cosmos.
