The Four Books include the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean. As the embodiment of the teachings of the ancient sages and worthies of Confucius, Mencius, Zengzi and Zixi, they had long been venerated as sacred texts by Confucian scholars. They, however, did not form an organic set of philosophical treatises until Zhu Xi (1130-1200), the renowned Neo-Confucian great synthesizer in Southern-Song, grouped them together. Apart from giving them the specific format, Zhu also wrote them prefaces and commentaries, highlighting their themes and suggesting how they should be read and understood, as a result of which he produced the Collected Commentaries on the Four Books. Zhu’s commentaries, alongside with the Books upon which they elaborated, were the most widely read and, thus, the most influential Confucian texts from the early 14th Century onward up until the early 20th Century. The significance they had attained in late Imperial China can be compared to that of the Bible in medieval and early modern Europe. Their popularity, of course, had much to do with the fact that they constituted the core of the official curriculum for the Civil Service Examinations during those six centuries. But, what is even more fundamental is that as the fruit of a lifetime search for the ideal personality, Zhu’s Collected Commentaries was indeed a major source of inspiration for generations of Confucian gentlemen whose aspiration was nothing but to become a sage or a worthy. This course will guide students to read carefully through the lines of the Books, as well as those of Zhu’s commentaries, to investigate into the following questions: 1) What actually it was that constituted the Confucian education program of inner-sageliness and outer-kingliness? 2) What were the concrete methods that had been recommended for the achievement of those aims?, and 3) What were the underlying assumptions on which the whole education program was predicated? It is expected that through examining these crucial issues, students will not only appreciate better the essence of the Confucian teachings of learning to become a sage, but also gain a deeper understanding of the philosophy that lies behind: the peculiar metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, ethics, social and political philosophies that characterize the Confucian tradition.