Page 141 - 2022(1) International Confusion Studies

134 J. Yuan

This passage came from the same era of the Western Han Dynasty as the
concept of “being mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded” in “Explanation of
the Six Arts” of The Book of Rites. It contains the cultural idea put forward during
the Western Han Dynasty in view of the harsh, ungrateful, and ruthless theory of
human nature and political philosophy espoused during the Qin Dynasty. The
idea was extended to poetry education in order to reconstruct the system of poetry
and music education whereas the term “being mild and gentle, sincere and
broadminded” was used to repair the interpersonal relationships of the Chinese
nation that had been destroyed during the Qin regime. On this point, Qian Mu
(钱穆 1895–1990) once stated that:

Many of the 300 poems of The Book of Songs are about family emotions and family morality.
Whether it is between father and son, between siblings, or between husband and wife, all family
sorrowsandchangesreflecttheneedto be loyalandcompassionate, mildandgentle, sincereand
broadminded. Only such inner emotions and true morality could sustain the life of ancient
Chinese families for centuries and more than tens of hundreds of years (Qian, 1994, p. 54).

This can be said to be a precise summary of the cultural psychology and moral type
of the Chinese people presented in The Book of Songs.
The idea of harmony is the basis of the doctrine of the mean, and it is the
abstraction and philosophizing of the idea of being mild and gentle, sincere and
broadminded. “Explanation of the Six Arts” of The Book of Rites states that, “If the
people are mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded, this is because they study
The Book of Songs.” This idea considers personal cultivation from the perspective
of external edification, and the idea of harmony emphasizes that the inner nature is
the root of a mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded personality. According to
the chapter of “The Doctrine of the Mean,”“The way of junzi (君子, a man of virtue)
may appear insipid yet never boring; (his writing) may be simple and elegant; is
mild and yet sensible; he knows that what is far starts from what is near, from
where a (new) trend comes, and that what is latent may become dominant. Such a
man may acquire great virtue” (Ruan, 2009, p. 3548). On the contrary, if the notion
of being mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded is cultivated from the root, it is
at best a kind of personal decoration. It was on this theoretical basis that the neo-
Confucianists of the Song Dynasty (960 –1279) integrated the concept of being mild
and gentle, sincere and broadminded with the cultivation of the mind. In this way,
being mild and gentle, sincere and broadminded belongs not only to the realm of
personality, but also gained the support of philosophical ontology, becoming a
kind of cultivation of the mind.