The San Zi Jing (Three Character Classic),
written in the 13th century, is not one of the
traditional six
Confucian classics, but rather is a distillation of the essentials of
Confucian
thought expressed in a way suitable for teaching young
children.
Until the latter part of this century, it served as a child's first bit
of formal education at home, at least in South East Asia. It
is written in couplets of three characters
(syllables) for easy memorization. One might call it a
Confucian
catechism.
George Yeo, then Singapore's Minister for Trade and Industry
in an address given
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong described the work thus:
For centuries, Chinese children, before they could
read or
write, were taught to recite the San Zi Jing through which the
Confucianist
idea of society being one big happy family is programmed into young
minds.
The three-character phrases are like strands of cultural DNA which are
passed on from generation to generation.
The author of the San Zi Jing is said to be to have
been Wang Yinglin
(1223-1296), but this fact is not universally accepted; see, for
instance,
"the only
genuine
Wang Yinglin page on the whole WWW!"
The Chinese text
The Chinese version of the San Zi Jing from which I
worked was downloaded
from the net; it is essentially the same as the one found here,
or at the following links.