孔伋

Kong Ji was a Confucian scholar in ancient China. His life, nationality and exact dates of birth and death are not clearly recorded in publicly available sources. Judging from the three works held in the library, his writings focus on Eastern philosophy. His representative works include Zhongyong (The Doctrine of the Mean), Zisizi and a modern Chinese edition of Zisizi. Zhongyong has long been regarded as an important Confucian classic; concise in wording and profound in meaning, it discusses the relationship between the Way of Heaven and human nature and has exerted a strong influence on later Confucianism. Zisizi preserves fragments of his thought and sayings, much of which concerns self-cultivation and the art of governance. Because public information is limited, the details of his life cannot be described at length, yet these few works already show his place in the transmission of Confucian thought. His style is calm and restrained, devoted to expounding principles rather than to narrative.