吾日三省吾身章

Original text

曾子曰：“吾日三省吾身。为人谋，而不忠乎？与朋友交，而不信乎？传，不习乎？”

Translation

Tseng Tzu said, "I review my behavior several times a day to discover whether it happened that I served for somebody, yet I disobeyed the loyalty; or I affiliated with some friends, yet I violated the honesty; or I tried to instruct some pupils in something, yet I was not learned about it."

Annotation from research

In this section, foreigners can easily understand the former two clauses. The loyalty to the lord, and the faithfulness among friends, these two characters are certainly considered necessary for being a good person in any evalution system. However, why it is juxtaposed with the third one, which talks about something almost irrelevant from the social behavior, and focuses on the educational activity?

Well, it implies a very unique cultural aspect in Chinese society, that the relationship between teachers and students supports an extraordinarily big part of social relationship in China. The school system produces most politicians and thus has deep involvement in the policital system. And the friendship in China also has an obvious educational background. In the later chapters, we can see it more clearly. But here we can get the general idea that political system, ethical system and educational system are three fundamental systems in China society. We can see that the educational system has countless ties with other two systems, so it is the key one. From the educational tradition, we can deduce most Chinese cultural phenomenon, and it is sure the key to the door of the Chinese culture research, which is very different from the western ones.