Word: mencius
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...where you also know that the truth is the best thing for everybody involved. Friends point out each other's hypocrisies and get past the resentment that comes out of it. Friends help you be honest. Friends guard your integrity both for you and from you. As wise old Mencius said many years ago, "Friendship with a man is friendship with his virtue...
...scare stories about China that circulated in the '60s, especially during the brief ride of the Red Guards, was that Maoism had flung out the past: 3,000 years of willow-pattern tranquillity overthrown, Confucius and Mencius consigned to the paper shredder, and the arts of the ancestral dynasties-Chou and Han, T'ang and Sung, Ming and Chi'ing-abandoned as relics of decadent feudalism, replaced by the cast-concrete colossus of Mao or the agitprop poster of beaming, eupeptic tractor drivers exceeding their norm in Szechwan province...
...prayer and meditation. At his age, any man would have much to reflect on. He has more than most. Perhaps he remembers the wartime meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill, the great victories and the shattering defeats. Perhaps he also recalls one of his favorite lines from the Confucian scholar Mencius, which he used to quote to his aides: "If, on self-examination, I find that I am upright, I will go forward against thousands and tens of thousands...
...family was virtuous, all was well with the land; but if the country fared ill, it must be because the Emperor had fallen into evil ways and the "mandate of heaven" had been withdrawn. That was the traditional rationale for the periodic rebellions that brought down every Chinese dynasty. Mencius, a revered follower of Confucius, proclaimed the people's "right to rebellion"-but only as a last resort...
...meditation (he was converted to Christianity and became a Methodist, at the urging of his wife, in 1932). He kept a diary with a page at the end of every week for rigid self-examination, instructed his chief officials to do likewise. He quoted the famed Confucian sage, Mencius: "If, on self-examination, I find that I am not upright, shall I not be in fear even of a poor man in his loose garments of hair cloth? If, on self-examination, I find that I am upright, I will go forward against thousands and tens of thousands...