On Removing the Obstacle of Limitations

This is a philosophical treatise illustrating the method of thinking. Having witnessed the situation in which the feudal lords employed different principles of government and various schools of thought promoted their own doctrines, Master Xun attempted to find the epistemological origin of gain and loss, prosperity and decline, success and failure, order and chaos in politics through the analysis and comparison of historical experience with a view to providing theoretical guidance for the unity and stability of a country. He traced the cause of chaos on different levels to obscurity in cognition resulting from one-sidedness, and pointed out that the corresponding approach to removing such obscurity consisted in the mastery of Dao that runs constant through all things and events and exhausts all variations and changes.