Discerning the Worldview in Confucian Proverbs: A Preliminary Reflection on S. C. Malan's Selection of Confucian Proverbs from The Four Books

Confucianism has very often been taken as a representative school of humanism, yet humanism is a complex concept with many layers of accumulated meaning. Solomon Caesar Malan in his Original Notes on the Book of Proverbs collected many proverbs from literary works in many languages created and developed in numerous countries around the world. Wolfgang Mieder, a contemporary authority of the study of proverbs, defines the term in a way that can be summarized as follows: A proverb is a short, generally known sentence produced and popularized by a group of people using the same language, a saying which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional views expressed in metaphorical, literary, fixed and memorizable forms, so that they can be handed down from generation to generation. Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) has advocated the idea of the autonomy of any text in his hermeneutic theory.