Liao-Fan’s Four Lessons

Yuan Liaofan, an official of the Ming Dynasty, wrote these four lessons to teach his son, Yuan Tian-Chi. Their central idea is that destiny is not fixed: cultivating kindness and humility can change it, so a person is bound by their own actions rather than by fate. A Taoist monk named Kong told him he would live only to 53 and have no son, and when Kong's other predictions came true, Yuan set out to rewrite his fate. The four lessons deal in turn with creating destiny, the ways to reform, cultivating kindness and the benefits of humility. More than 400 years on, the text is still studied as a foundation of both Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism.

A reader of The CEO Library named it, through an anonymous form, as one of the three best books they read in 2019.