The Foundation Of The World Lies

From Mengzi 4A:5, this passage encapsulates the Confucian "inside-out" model of moral and political order. Mencius, extending the teaching of Confucius, argued that genuine order in the world cannot be imposed from above but must grow outward from the moral cultivation of each individual through the family. The same structure appears in The Great Learning (Daxue), one of the Four Confucian Classics, which moves through the same sequence — self, family, state, world — as a programme of moral development.