(September 27,1915)
Esteemed Zisheng:
I have received your letter, and now I know how very busy you are with your
teaching duties. The letter was written on the seventh, but the date was changed to
the tenth. [I appreciate your thoughtfulness] very much. I sent my last letter on the
ninth day of the month, and today is the nineteenth:62 exactly ten days. Now I have
also received another letter, and your kindness ought to be repaid. In expounding our
ideas,63 we should place primary importance on the cultivation of body and spirit,
and on the acquisition of learning, and secondary importance on politics and current

--- Notes

60 The Jinsi lu (Reflections on Things at Hand) is a compilation, by Zhu Xi and Lu Zuqian, of the
writings of Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, and Zhang Zai.
61 The Guwen ci leizuan (Classified Compilation of Old-style Literature) is a work in seventy-five
volumes by Yao Nai. For further details on Yao, see note 47 to the “Classroom Notes.”
62 According to the editors of the Wengao, the date of the nineteenth at the end of this letter
means the nineteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, which corresponded in 1915 to
September 27. On that basis, the letter of the ninth to which Mao refers here would have been written
on September 17. No such letter appears to be extant.
63 The term Mao uses, li yan, means literally “to establish one’s words”; this is the last of the three
imperishable features of a man in the traditional view, the first two being, respectively, to establish
one’s virtue and to establish one’s merit.