Reading group: Toegye’s Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning, two diagrams a week
Its coordinates: 3.2.3 Character-Based Approaches
In 1568 the scholar Yi Hwang, better known as Toegye, presented a short work to the new, very young King Seonjo: the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning. Toegye was nearly seventy. He had taught for decades, and he condensed what he thought a ruler needed into ten diagrams, each with a short text and his own comments.
It is, in today's terms, a manual for answering "who should I be?" for someone who would soon have power over everyone else.
Some diagrams are borrowed. It opens with Zhou Dunyi's Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, moves through Zhang Zai's Western Inscription and Zhu Xi's teachings on learning, includes a diagram of how the heart-mind unites and governs human nature and the feelings, and ends with practical admonitions on reverence through the day, from rising in the morning to retiring at night.
Plan: five weeks, two diagrams a week. Michael Kalton's English translation (1988) has the diagrams with full commentary.
A question to bring each week: how does this diagram turn a metaphysical idea into a habit? Toegye's central virtue is gyeong, usually translated as reverence or mindfulness, and he believed it had to be practised in posture, attention and daily routine, not only understood.
My students know Toegye only as the face on the 1,000-won note. I'd like to know him better than they do.