Mencius

Mencius is the primary text presenting the teaching of the Confucian philosopher Mencius on human nature and the cardinal virtues, ren, yi and zhi, and this Penguin Classics edition is D. C. Lau's standard scholarly English translation, long regarded as the reliable academic rendering of the text for English readers. Its strength as a primary source is direct, it is Mencius's own argued teaching, in a translation by a respected classicist, rather than a secondhand paraphrase of his positions. Its limit is that it presents Mencius's own teaching specifically, not how later Confucian thinkers received or reworked it, so a claim about how Zhu Xi's later Neo Confucian synthesis reinterpreted these same virtues needs a source addressing that later tradition directly rather than being read back into Mencius's own text.