Abstract

To extract some psychological lessons from the works of Hsun Tzu one of the great Confucian philosophers in the pre-Ts'in period, the author reviewed and classified Hsun Tzu's main ideas which have deep psychological implications into three categories : theory on the human nature, on the rites and on the self-cultivation. Before delving into each of these theories to draw psychological implications, the author tried to search for the Hsun Tzu's basic theoretical paradigm, which seems to be the coherent backbone of all his ideas, from his theory on the relationship between the Heaven and the human being, and found out that it is. This paper dealt with this basic theoretical paradigm and showed that all of the Hsun Tzu's thoughts is built on this paradigm and the psychological implications of them can be analyzed based on it.