linguistic:translation
The Four Books

During the Song Dynasty, Zhu Xi's teachings were considered to be unorthodox. Rather than focusing on the I Ching like other Neo-Confucians, he chose to emphasize the Four Books: the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects of Confucius, and the Mencius as the core curriculum for aspiring scholar officials. For all these classics he wrote extensive commentaries that were not widely recognized in his time; however, they later became accepted as the standard commentaries. The Four Books served as the basis of civil service examinations up until 1905, and education in the classics often began with Zhu Xi's commentaries as the cornerstone for understanding them.

The sources of Zhu Xi's new approach to the Confucian curriculum have been found in several works of the Cheng brothers. Zhu Xi "codified the Cheng brothers' teachings and reworked them into his own philosophical program," moving "from philology to philosophy."