Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics

Yi T’oegye’s Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (Seonghak sipdo) stands as one of the masterpieces of Neo-Confucian thought. In ten diagrams, he leads us from a grand vision of the cosmos into ethics and the question of how we should educate ourselves and spiritually cultivate our inner lives to realize the fullness of our natural endowment, concluding by describing just what a well-lived day might look like. More than two decades ago, I had the great privilege of translating and commenting on this insightful and wise crystallization of T’oegye’s lifetime of learning and spiritual cultivation.¹ Since then, T’oegye’s diagrams and understanding of life have been a quiet but continual presence in my mind, even as I extended my investigation into contemporary systems thinking and environmental concerns.

In many ways, we live in a world that no one in T’oegye’s sixteenth century could have imagined. The concepts that were central to their understanding of the world—the Supreme Ultimate, li

, dao

, qi

, and many others—are little used now, and psychological categories such as the Four Beginnings and Seven Feelings are no longer central concerns as we consider the proper ordering of our lives. Even our concerns and problems seem new and distinctive: our ancestors never imagined anything like modern economies, globalization, or the radical environmental crisis of sustainability. T’oegye meant to teach his audience the meaning of the world and how we humans should cultivate and conduct ourselves accordingly. Can we still learn from him, given the very changed circumstances of our times, or is his Ten Diagrams only of historical interest, a record of the thoughts of a good and wise man who belongs to a past age?

My own experience has been that this is a voice not only of the past but of the present as well. As an intellectual, I have found that the background understanding and ways of thinking that I learned from my work on T’oegye constantly leads me to new, deeper, and often unexpected understandings as I wrestle with contemporary materials, questions, and problems. T’oegye’s description of the inner life of the mind and heart still is full of insight, and his suggestions on appropriate cultivation are much to the point for our contemporary world. In this chapter, I will follow the order of T’oegye’s Ten Diagrams, discussing the meaning of each and how it relates to the much changed circumstances of the twenty-first century.

What is the nature of existence?

This question for Neo-Confucians was practical rather than speculative: they assumed that we needed to understand the origins and depths of the universe in order to know how to live. T’oegye begins with Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate to frame the most essential knowledge we need as human beings (see the frontispiece, on page ii).

The central message of this diagram is that a single, formative unity runs through and encompasses all existence. The same original circle is purposefully repeated; the Supreme Ultimate does not become multiple even as it becomes the ground of a multiple existence. Whatever is going on here, whatever forms and events emerge, there is in the depths of all existence a unity, a oneness that means that everything takes place interdependently, in terms of everything else. Contemporary systems theory has arrived at a very similar understanding, as is evident in both the physical and life sciences. On whatever scale of consideration, whether it be the formation of galaxies and planets, the evolving structure of an ecosystem, or the transforming social and economic lives of a community, every sort of process is deeply shaped by a web of interdependent relationships.

This understanding, so graphically represented by the repeated circles of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, has critical practical consequences: Therefore the sage, “with respect to Heaven and Earth is at one with their character, with respect to the sun and moon is at one with their brilliance, with respect to the four seasons is at one with their order and with respect to the spirits is at one with the good fortune and the misfortune [which they mediate].”² The superior man in cultivating these qualities enjoys good fortune, while the inferior man in violating them suffers misfortune.³ This is a mighty proposition: Zhou is claiming in the broadest terms possible that whether things work out well or ill in human life hinges on this quality of being at one with the relational network to which we belong.

T’oegye picks up on this theme, for it discloses “the Mandate,” the most fundamental directive for life: “When the day of reaping the fruits arrives and one completely returns to the Single Origin, he will have arrived at the condition described as having ‘exhaustively comprehended principle, fully realized his nature, and so completely fulfilled the Mandate.’”⁴ Our shared “Single Origin” mandates that our lives are complete only when we are at one with many-layered dynamic system within which we exist, from the universe to the earth; to the everyday society of our associates, friends, relatives, families; and the encompassing processes of the natural world about us. In the language of self-cultivation and practice, the imperative is to fit with appropriate responsiveness to all of these throughout all the affairs of our daily lives.

For his second diagram T’oegye reaches for Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription, which calls forth the most powerful motivating force in Confucian society to support our quest to live at one with the shared life coursing through Heaven and Earth. Confucians reflected deeply on the family, understanding it as the shared flow of a single life force; consequently filial piety, the proper alignment of feelings and conduct within this shared life, became both a powerful motive and the criterion for the rightness of one’s life. In the Western Inscription, Zhang Zai calls on this deep feeling by celebrating the cosmic and global flow of life as weaving all creatures into a single family: “Qian [Heaven] is called the father and Kun [Earth] is called the mother. I, this tiny being, am commingled in their midst; therefore what fills up all between Heaven and Earth, that is my body, and that which directs Heaven and Earth is my nature.”⁵ His conclusion, modeled on the family, is an unprecedented expansion of the relationships that count: “All people are from the same womb as I, all creatures are my companions.”⁶ The accompanying diagram makes this the central organizing statement: “All others and I, the people and other creatures, are brothers; their principle is all one.”⁷

For Neo-Confucian philosophers who saw li, a single formative and organizing principle

flowing through all things, this statement of the familial unity of all life was more than a metaphor. And contemporary science, understanding genes as the formative organizing factor passed down an evolving family of life, strongly enforces a similar understanding. On Earth, all life does indeed belong to a single family tree, and branches of the family are closer than one might think: mice and humans, for example, share 85 percent of the same genes. The contemporary community is excited by the implications of this knowledge for enhancing medical research, but unlike the Western Inscription, we have not yet thought deeply about its moral implications.

Nor did the Confucians in fact pay much attention to the nonhuman branches of the family tree. While the Inscription describes accurately a family of life, its consequential focus quickly shifts to the human community: “All persons in the world who are exhausted, decrepit, worn out, or ill … are my own brothers who have become helpless and have none to whom they can appeal.”⁸ It was beyond imagining at the time that polar bears or dolphins or eagles or bluefin tuna or whales might also fall into the category of the “exhausted and decrepit,” the “helpless” that stand in need of our attention. They could not suspect that the very atmosphere that “fills up all between Heaven and Earth” could be modified by humans in ways that would shift the character of the life-giving seasons.

We are yet far from realizing and practicing the implications of even the human race constituting a single family, let alone the care and fellow feeling that should go with recognizing the interdependent family of life that relates us to all living beings on earth. But caring for this larger family has become the neglected imperative of our times. Both the best insight of T’oegye’s second diagram and the best understanding of contemporary life sciences points to the fact that the exhausted and decrepit creatures that perish due to the scope of our exploitation of the Earth “are our own brothers who have become helpless and have none to whom they can appeal.” None other than us, that is.

The next three diagrams address the question: how should we educate ourselves to live appropriately responsive lives? In the contemporary world, the overriding reason given for education is to “equip us to compete in the global market.” For traditional Confucians, in reality education may well have been not that much different, a matter of equipping young men to further their family’s well-being by competing in the civil-service exams. But that was never the publicly announced or ideal purpose of education. Instead, education was conceived in terms of the Mandate: it was to ensure and enhance our fit as life-giving members of the community. This ideal motivated the most serious tohak

Neo-Confucians such as T’oegye, separating them and making them harsh critics of the civil service exam–oriented system of their time. One wonders what they would have to say today, when education prepares us for “success” in a global market economy that drains the larger community of life on a scale that the Confucians could never have imagined.

Confucians were always aware of the fact that our individual life exists only as a participation in a larger systemic flow of life, that we live in and through a matrix of interdependent relationships. Thus the essence of the education that they envisioned centered on relationships. The famed Five Relationships of the Confucian tradition appear prominently in the center of the Diagram of the Elementary Learning and again in the Diagram of the Rules of [Zhu Xi’s] White Deer Hollow Academy. These basic relationships, encompassing family, friendship, and public service, reflect the inherently social character of human nature. But however familiar and even inherent in our nature such sociability might be, Confucians also regarded these relationships to be the most important instruction for the young and—as evident in the Academy Rules—as a matter for ceaseless reflection and pondering thereafter. Being central to the flow of communal life, nothing could be more important.

China was in the midst of the strife and civil dissolution known as the Warring States period when Mencius wrote of the Five Relationships. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the deep social character of Confucian thought originated as a profound response to conditions during a time when human relationships were in critical disarray. What then would the Confucian response be to a time where the critical disarray has infected our relationships with a myriad of species in the interwoven community of life? Both science and the evidence of our daily experience reveal an environmental crisis that can be solved only through a relational understanding, reflection, and self-cultivation as deep and profound as Confucius and Mencius directed to the social crisis of their time.

Zhu Xi and T’oegye never doubted that the single life-giving pattern of the universe wove itself into our nature and related human nature to the world at large. But only the sage is so perfected that the relationships patterned into human nature spontaneously and reliably shape and guide activity. The rest of us have other, more distorting tendencies to deal with. So further on in his Introduction Zhu explains: “The ordinary man is foolish and ignorant; the desire for things beclouds his vision and causes his inborn good qualities to decline, and he is content to thus do violence to himself and throw himself away. The sage, pitying this [miserable condition] set up schools and established teachers in order to fertilize the roots and make the branches arrive at their full growth.”⁹ This conviction caused the Cheng-Zhu school to place great emphasis on the need for education—an emphasis reflected in T’oegye’s devoting three of his ten diagrams to the topic.

In the contemporary world we also emphasize the need for education, with main attention to our ever-growing economy. In this context, the “desire for things,” mentioned above by Zhu Xi as a major distorting influence, is conceived of as a high value. Economists tell us the desire to possess ever more is a market-enhancing and appropriate response, one inherent in our economic nature. So we can understand why nowadays so much education is directed toward maximizing profit but almost none toward rectifying “the desire for things.” In fact, an entire industry, advertising, is now devoted precisely toward maximizing and shaping (“educating”) that desire.

The classic Tae hak

, the fourth of T’oegye’s diagrams, holds the final goal of learning to be no less than the proper ordering or “tranquility” of the whole world. The Zhongyong

suggests that a proper ordering of human feelings can bring it about that “Heaven and Earth assume their proper order and all things will be nurtured and flourish.”¹⁰ Now that human learning and technological power have reached a condition where the order and nurture of the living world indeed hang in the balance, the goal and content of our education process has become critical. “Consumer” has become the most widely shared human identity, and the economic thought that guides entire nations assumes that the “desire for things” forms the essence of our profit-maximizing human nature. The next diagram will present a far deeper, wiser, and more life-giving view of human nature.

This section, which discusses three diagrams, delves into understanding the dynamics of our inner life in terms of the complex structure of our responsiveness. The first diagram outlines the life-giving world framework within which our own responsive natures are formed. The second of these three diagrams clarifies the traditional Mencian affirmation that our natural dispositions are in themselves perfectly fitting; because we inherently fit within the system, we should expect its life-giving qualities to be part of our own nature.

Many people now regard nature as good in this sense, and the adjective “natural” is often used as the equivalent of “good, safe, fitting, life-giving.” But those who view nature this way often exclude human society, thinking we humans are somehow outside of nature, and thus our actions are liable to be unnatural and suspect. T’oegye’s analysis in this second diagram would suggest that this view of the matter is mistaken. If we consider the way the entire system is interwoven, fit is the essential character of the weaving. This is true whether one thinks in terms of the all-encompassing unity of li/dao (Supreme Ultimate) or in contemporary terms of the dynamic process of co-evolution.

Certain sorts of feelings in humans, the Seven Feelings (joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, desire) were often associated by Confucians with going astray. But T’oegye’s analysis ranks them in this second diagram along with the feelings that Confucians thought of as inherently good. On this level of consideration, there is a fitness in all our inborn tendencies. They are natural and have their place, just like everything else in nature.

But human society rarely appears to be an unalloyed manifestation of fitting, life-enhancing conduct. What, then, goes wrong? This is the question T’oegye addresses in the chapter’s third diagram. His basic answer is the perennial Confucian view: self-centeredness distorts the appropriate manifestation of our dispositions. Neo-Confucians gave this explanation further depth by associating it with ki

, material force, the stuff of all concrete and thereby particularized existence. Perfect clarity of ki allows for undistorted relational dynamics and perfect responsiveness, because the appropriate dispositions of our natural endowment are functioning with full integrity. More turbid ki conditions people who get “blocked up” in the individuality of their persons, distorting the dynamics of their inherently relational existence through an inappropriate self-centeredness.

T’oegye ventures further: his third diagram suggests that different sorts of feelings relate differently to the ki of our individuality. The Four Beginnings (humanity, rightness, propriety, wisdom) had long been considered the constitutive core of our natural dispositions; as inherently social dispositions, they were regarded as emblematic of the goodness or fittingness of human nature. The Seven Feelings (anger, joy, etc.), by contrast, are closely related to maintaining the well-being of our physical individuality and thus are much more liable to slip over into an ill mode of centering on self at the price of relationships. T’oegye describes this difference in his famous formula: “If one considers the Four Beginnings, principle issues and material force follows in accord. … As for the Seven Feelings, material force issues and li mounts it.”¹¹

T’oegye’s reflection here insightfully explores one of the most fundamental dynamic tensions of living systems, that between the well-being of the parts and the well-being of the whole system. The parts of a single organism are inherently shaped only for fit, for all parts work together for the well-being of the whole organism. But an ecosystem or a social system is made up of many whole organisms, and the fitness of these organisms involves taking care of themselves as well as with fitting in with all the other members of the system. The dynamics of such a system are much more complex than simple cooperation, for they must also take in the competition among creatures.

In a system of natural mutual constraint, living creatures try to maximize their own lives but are fittingly limited by others in an interdependent dance of predator and prey, plant and herbivore, herbivore and carnivore. In a balanced ecosystem, the dynamic pursuit of individual gratification is interwoven into a relational whole, a fluctuating system of life that nonetheless achieves a basic equilibrium and furnishes a fitting life and well-being to the many creatures that constitute it. Individual-oriented instincts, the equivalent of the Seven Feelings, are not a problem in the natural world, because everything else in the system works to constrain such behaviors in an interlocking network. The human case is far different, for we have managed to escape the network of mutual constraint that marks the natural world.

Much like the natural world, human society self-organizes in ways that include mutual constraints on individual self-maximizing conduct. We achieve this through our cultural and legal systems; the educational emphasis on the Five Relationships in the earlier diagrams are a clear example of how a society seeks to constrain individual self-seeking. But our power of speech and thought, and therefore of contriving novel strategies, is such that we can easily devise ways around constraints when we are so inclined. The unconstrained profit-seeking strategies that led to the worldwide financial crisis of 2008–2009 are an example on a global scale of the human capacity to damage the system upon which we all depend in order to maximize personal profit. As Confucius observed, if you set up laws but do not teach people to feel shame, they are of no use.¹² What fits us into a life-giving flow of common life is partly systemic, but it also depends to a unique degree upon the cultivation of the individual mind-and-heart.

Confucians had deep insight into the extent to which systemic social relational fit is inherent in our inborn dispositions. T’oegye added an interesting further dimension when he noted that these dispositions, conceptualized as the “Four Beginnings,” are self-moving along relational (social) lines (li), an important difference from the feelings that move us to take care of ourselves (the Seven Feelings). Contemporary economic theory has led many to a superficial view of humans as inherently self-interested; Confucian learning does a service in balancing that picture, calling attention to an instinctive sociability that is evident all around us if we but look for it.

In the human case, then, the life-giving order of a networked society and world pivots on sets of inherent dynamics that pull in different directions, the one involving an appropriate relational fit, the other directing us to take care of ourselves. The latter is also appropriate and necessary (cf. the second diagram) but can get out of hand and distort relationships in a way that diminishes the life of all, including our own selves.

Confucians, including T’oegye, thought that if we got this right, the world would be in proper, life-nurturing order. But in this, they missed a critical consideration: with their intense focus on human-to-human relationships, they never imagined that human-to-nonhuman relationships could present an equal or perhaps even more threatening problem.

The structural dynamic of this problem is much as T’oegye has described, except in this case it is human society’s collective instinct to take care of itself that is in tension with dispositions to fit and enjoy a life-giving relationship with the natural world. Now the disordering factor is not just inappropriate self-centeredness but an inappropriate centeredness on our whole species at the expense of the larger community of life. A short-sighted and anthropocentric form of the Four Beginnings can, in fact, inspire ferocious insistence upon economic development for humans even at the expense of the extinction of whole species. There may be a fairly strong social instinct in human beings to take care of one another, but that seems to fall off quickly when it comes to nonhuman life.

Here the Cheng-Chu emphasis on the necessity of learning

becomes critical. The exhaustive investigation of the dynamic patterning of the affairs of life

cannot stop at matters such as the Five Relationships, unless learning enables us to understand them in the inclusive framework of the whole Earth. The modern power with which we make our own living (“the economy”) operates on such a scale that it affects the way all creatures in the earth, air, and water are able to go about making their livings. This, and its consequences, can be understood only by study. We may indeed be deeply shaped for an interdependent relational existence, but what this requires of us is far more challenging, complex, and removed from our immediate instincts than could have been imagined in earlier centuries.

In the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, we saw that the Mandate is the imperative that we fit with the dynamic pattern

of not only human relationships but of the entire relational system to which we belong. This section investigates this dynamic pattern and the way it constitutes context for our spiritual self-cultivation.

The Book of Changes, in its hexagram for spring (

, literally “return” of the life force) describes the character of Heaven and Earth (the cosmos) as “continually producing life”

.¹³ Zhu Xi goes further, seeing the humane

, life-giving dispositions of the human mind-and-heart as just our way of sharing in the life-producing dynamism of the cosmos. The life-giving quality of humanity is then a quality of the universe first, and it thereby becomes a quality of humans: “Humanity is the mind of Heaven and Earth whereby they produce and give life to creatures, and this is what man receives as his own mind.”¹⁴

The cycle of the four seasons had long been correlated with the Four Beginnings, the social dispositions that constitute the essential dynamic of the mind-and-heart, and Zhu Xi notes how the seasons and our social dispositions are really only differing manifestations of this single life-giving force that flows through the seasons:

The mind of Heaven and Earth has four characteristics: they are origination, flourishing, benefiting, and firmness, and origination runs throughout all. As they move in rotation, we have the cycle of spring, summer, fall, and winter, and the generative force of spring runs throughout all. Therefore in the mind of man there are likewise four characteristics: they are humanity, rightness, propriety, and wisdom, and humanity encompasses them all.¹⁵

This understanding of both the natural world and the inner life of our minds-and-hearts derives from deep reflection on the experience of an agricultural society. In the minds of our contemporary urban cultures, the place of the seasonal growth cycle has been replaced by the vision of an ever-growing industrial feedback loop of raw materials, productivity, and consumption. It is not surprising, then, that we should more easily think of profit maximization or acquisitiveness as the fundamental dynamic of the human mind-and-heart. Many thinkers of the last century even imagined that this was the essential dynamism of the whole life system, as in Social Darwinism or the more recent “selfish gene” theories.¹⁶

We now see and experience that the difference between the agriculturally informed vision and the industrial vision has become a pressing and urgent matter for the future of the entire system of life. In the industrial world, we have our eyes on the GNP and we calculate the flow of goods and services, to which the Earth simply furnishes an endless supply of raw materials. Zhu Xi explicates a far different kind of circulatory system:

Thus although Heaven and Earth and man and other creatures each are different, nevertheless in reality there is, as it were, a single circulatory system running through them. Therefore if one personally realizes this mind and can preserve and foster it, there is nothing that the principle of the mind does not reach and one naturally loves everything. But if one’s capacities are small and [this mind] is beclouded by selfish desires, then its flowing forth is cut off and there are those to whom one’s love does not reach.¹⁷

This difference of understanding cuts to the heart of our contemporary sustainability crisis: a beclouded, short-sighted, and self-centered human mind can cause spreading death as it heedlessly stops the flow that is the life-giving dynamic of the world. Although we now mainly inhabit large cities rather than rural areas, the agricultural understanding of the patterned, dynamic flow of life is critically important, for all other considerations depend on maintaining that flow. Without it, the GNP and the rest of the humanly constructed world become meaningless.

The Diagram of the Study of the Heart-and-Mind (see p. x) lays out for us the essential features of the terrain of our inner life and the stages of its cultivation as these appear against the background of the Neo-Confucian view of the world. Not surprisingly, its assessment of the dynamics of our inner life is rather different from the view of what is appropriate to human nature as described by contemporary economic thinkers.

The mind-and-heart is the relational conduit through which life flows as we interact appropriately with the family of our fellow creatures. Feelings are the motivating force that shapes our initial responsiveness in this relational network, so feelings become a central object of spiritual cultivation. The various phrases in the diagram indicate aspects of our feelings and the cultivation appropriate to them. The distinctive role of the mind-and-heart is to preside over the feelings-led responsiveness as we participate in the flow of life, and thus it occupies the central circle in this diagram and is inscribed with the words, “the master of the entire person.”

The diagram portrays the interior life of the feelings as divided into two distinctive aspects, the “Human Mind” and the “Dao Mind” or “Mind of the Dao.” These expressions come from a brief but very influential passage in the Book of Documents: “The human mind is perilous, the mind of the Dao is subtle; be discerning, be undivided. Hold fast the Mean!”¹⁸ As is evident in the way that these categories structure this entire diagram, this passage came to epitomize the Confucian view of the essential task of self-cultivation. The text that accompanies the diagram clarifies: “This does not mean that there are two kinds of mind; but since in fact man is produced through the material force that gives one physical form, no one can be without the ‘human mind’; and [at the same time] origination [as a human being] is from the nature, which is the Mandate [of Heaven], and this is what is referred to as the ‘mind of the Dao.’”¹⁹

We have already encountered this tension between physical individuality and the mandate for systemic fit in relation to T’oegye’s sixth diagram. This inherent individual/social tension gives rise to two complementary facets in cultivating the full integrity of our inner life. The “perilous” Human Mind easily slips into inappropriate forms of self-centeredness. We must struggle to keep the powerful instincts by which we take care of our own well-being selves within proper bounds. On the other hand, the problem with the Dao Mind is that the feelings that weave all life together are very “subtle,” especially in comparison to the robust demands of our individual physical bodies. The characteristic cultivation of this side of our inner life calls for a heightened alertness and careful nurturing of dispositions too easily neglected.

The mastery of the mind-and-heart in presiding over these dynamics of our inner life is described in the lower part of the diagram as the exercise of “mindfulness.” Both Zhu Xi and T’oegye regarded mindfulness as the central feature of all spiritual self-cultivation, and the remainder of the Ten Diagrams is devoted to this practice.

The ninth diagram focuses specifically on what is involved in mindfulness, the exercise of appropriately presiding over the dynamic inclinations of the mind-and-heart. Where earlier diagrams brought out the flow of life as what is ultimately at stake in cultivating the mind-and-heart, here the focus closes in on the practice of a discerning awareness of the motivations that guide and inform the way that we respond to the constantly shifting situations of daily life. Small misaligned currents can carry us far from a life-giving fit: “If one should falter for a single moment, selfish desire will put forth ten thousand shoots.” And, “if there is a hair’s breadth disparity, Heaven and Earth will change their places.”²⁰

This sounds exaggerated to those accustomed to thinking of morality as a matter of making choices between good and evil: great evil, we think, happens because very evil people choose great evil. Confucians are much more aware of how great wrongness can unfold from seemingly minor inappropriate actions.

Mindfulness means maintaining a self-possessed, focused state of mind. “Concentrate on one thing without departing” occupies the central place in this diagram: “Let your mind be undivided as it watches over the myriad changes.” And, “when you encounter some affair, attend only to it; do not set off about something else.” There is great optimism about the life-giving potential of simply paying close attention to what we are doing, but the optimism is tempered by a keen awareness that however available guidance may be, it cannot help if we do not attend to it. And the phrase “without departing” draws attention to how subject we are to distracting influences. Self-possession and the ability to pay attention are two sides of the same coin, but they draw on somewhat different sides of cultivation practice. Various forms of disciplined conduct, such as propriety in dress, speech, and behavior, feed into the ability to maintain a self-possessed frame of mind, while meditative practice, nurturing a profound inner quietness, enhances the ability to pay close attention in the more active situations of our complex lives.

The cultivation of mindfulness recommended in this diagram addresses a problem that has become even more difficult in the contemporary world. We have entire industries—advertising, media, entertainment—largely devoted to distracting us. We learn “multitasking” as a strategy for lives that have become so busy and stuffed with so many activities that the diagram’s advice, “because of two do not divide your mind into two” sounds quaint and impractical. But how life giving are the responses of our preoccupied minds-and-hearts? On scales both large and small, personal and global, there is a price to be paid for inattention and distraction, and that price seems to steadily grow larger. Deep in a global recession, we now ask how we could have allowed the most inappropriate kinds of financial practices to ramify to a point where the global financial system threatened to melt around us. Future generations may well wonder how we could let the polar icecaps melt and the climate change around us without decisive action. Surely the practice of mindfulness would challenge us to realign lives of mindless production and consumption that drain the life vitality from the communities—human and nonhuman—to which we belong.

This final diagram describes a model day lived mindfully. A model day in the life of a semiretired Confucian scholar-official in an agrarian society seems set in an entirely different world than that of the fast-paced, hectic, demanding urban life of this century. But though the external characteristics of the lifestyles have changed greatly, the nature of the challenge of self-cultivation has not changed at all. We are still human, still engaged from rising until bedtime with a flow of situations to which we must respond, and we must cultivate ourselves so that we will respond appropriately, in a life-giving way. From T’oegye’s time to our own, that has always been the human situation, and that is the subject of this diagram.

The day presented in this diagram is shaped by a deep conviction that we live in a world of dynamic, interlocked, relational unity, so that everything is shaped in terms of everything else; there is always a relational shape to all affairs and situations that renders some ways of conducting ourselves more appropriate than others. And our minds-and-hearts, which belong not just to our own persons but, in a deeper sense, to this whole relational system, are informed with the sensitivity to read the situation, be guided aright, and respond in a life-giving way. T’oegye refers to this always available guidance in his remarks accompanying the diagram: “Indeed, the uninterrupted flow of the Dao throughout the affairs of daily life is such that there is nowhere one can go that it is not present; thus there is not a single foot of ground in which principle is absent.”²¹

If indeed guidance is surrounding us always and everywhere, a mode of life that fosters a habit of close and responsive attentiveness (“mindfulness”) seems appropriate. But the mind-and-heart presides over a situation that is both inward (our feelings) and external (affairs). The mastery of mindfulness is precisely the quiet attention to the interplay between these two as situations give rise to feelings that motivate, guide, and shape our activity.

Neo-Confucians anticipated a natural rhythm of quiet and activity that could be turned usefully to each of these aspects. Quiet provides the context in which to cultivate the deep inward calm and harmony of our emotions. Then, in activity, careful focus on what is happening would call forth the most fitting kind of feelings or motivational response. This rhythm is built into the day depicted in this diagram. “Over the cyclic alteration of activity and quiet, the mind alone presides; it should be possessed in quiet and discerning in activity.”²² And again: “When the matter has been responded to and is finished, then be as you were before, with your mind clear and calm.”²³

Now this rhythm seems not only hard to attain but even beyond the imagination of many. We are constantly overloaded with information from sources near and far, constantly on call or calling from cell phones, or plugged into iPods, constantly stimulated. In such a setting, the advice to “be as you were before, with your mind clear and calm,” sounds like irony. When, indeed, are our minds “clear and calm”? We have global awareness, but we do not know what to pay attention to until disaster strikes. We multitask but seem never to catch up, and what gets done is frequently not well done.

The major message of the tenth diagram for contemporary daily life, then, would be: SLOW DOWN! Especially the relational, social side of our dispositions (the “Four Beginnings”/Dao Mind) has become stressed and starved for time and development as we hasten to maximize our production and consumption (the “Seven Feelings”/Human Mind). An inner hunger for deeper, more thoughtful, more meaningful relationships with families, friends, colleagues, and community runs through industrial societies as they climb the steep path to economic development. And a deeper appreciation and relationship with the natural living world about us has become an urgent imperative in exact proportion to the way our fast-paced search for human comfort has mindlessly drained life from the rest of our living community.

T’oegye’s Ten Diagrams explores for the contemporary mind the human ramifications of existing in what science tells us is a relational web. It raises for us challenging questions regarding the way that we live that T’oegye could not have imagined: advertising, entertainment, constant stimulation, multitasking, the plugged-in life, economic growth, and the whole meaning of “development.” The Dao Mind/Human Mind categories pick up a tension inherent in our systemic social-individual lives and suggest deep problems in our contemporary way of thinking about development or personal fulfillment. Contemporary institutions that foster and emphasize what T’oegye spoke of as the “Seven Feelings” are problematic not because they do not fit into T’oegye’s worldview but because they do not fit with the systemic, relational nature of existence and the condition of life on our planet.

A thorough contemporary reading of T’oegye’s Ten Diagrams raises many unsettling questions about the institutions, values, and perhaps even the whole way of life that we now take for granted. We should be grateful that the framework within which he worked out his ideas about education, cultivation, and an appropriate mode of life is so similar to our best knowledge of the world today. In reading T’oegye’s ideas, we are brought to confront our own inconsistencies and contradictions between what we know about the world and the way we live. But even more valuable, in the techniques of cultivation that Neo-Confucians investigated so deeply, there is a deep wisdom concerning how to go about living in accord with the mandate to fit into the community of life.

1. Michael Kalton, To Become a Sage: The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning by Yi T’oegye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Most references in this paper will be to this translation and commentary, hereafter referred to as Ten Diagrams. The complete text of this book, as well as T’oegye’s original Chinese text, is available for downloading on my Web site: http://faculty.washington.edu/mkalton.