Examine yourself three times a day

Twenty-five centuries ago a teacher in China, whose students wrote down his sayings after he died, laid out a program for becoming a good person that is still, in its plainness, hard to improve on. The teacher was Confucius. The book is the Analects. The program is self-cultivation.

One of his disciples, Zengzi, summarized the daily practice: each day I examine myself on three points. Have I been faithful in what I did for others? Have I been trustworthy with my friends? Have I practiced what I was taught? Three questions, every evening. That's the Examen from day sixty-two, two thousand years earlier and on the other side of the world.

Confucius's goal was the junzi, usually translated as the exemplary person, the gentleman, the one who does the right thing because it's right and not because anyone's watching. His method had three parts. Daily reflection. Ritual propriety, which sounds stiff and means something simple: there are right ways to do ordinary things, greet a person, share a meal, bury a parent, and doing them well shapes who you are. And the rectification of names: call things what they are. If a father isn't acting like a father, say so. Most disorder, he thought, begins with words that no longer match things.

It belongs in Awareness because Confucius's whole method is attention to conduct. Not to feeling, not to belief. To what you actually did today, measured against what you said you'd do. That's a log. You've been keeping one for eighty-one days.

The thing I love most in Confucius is his humility. Asked whether he was a sage, he said he was only someone who never tired of learning and never tired of teaching. That's a bar anyone can reach.