Ascribed to Zengzi · A text carried in the Book of Rites · China · 11 chapters · 1,945 Chinese characters
A piece of fewer than two thousand characters, and one of the most committed to memory in all East Asia. It opens with "making bright virtue bright, being close to the people, and coming to rest in the utmost good," and threads eight steps on a single line, from measuring things and extending knowing to the full all the way to bringing all under heaven to a level — the investigation of things, the extension of knowing, making the intent true, making the mind upright, cultivating the person, setting the household in order, governing the state, and bringing peace to all under heaven.
About the middle, "being careful when alone" comes twice, and the last chapter is given over wholly to wealth and to men. The saying that when wealth is gathered the people scatter and when wealth is scattered the people gather, and Meng Xianzi's word that one would sooner have a minister who steals than a minister who gathers in, are both here.
Eleven sections fully translated. The graph counts were matched against the source text section by section and confirmed to differ by not a single graph (1,945 graphs).
★The source text is the text as it stood in the Book of Rites. The edition read in Joseon was the Daxue zhangju, in which Zhu Xi (朱子) changed the order to 「one section of Classic and ten sections of Commentary」 and wrote in the passage on the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge; it is not used here. What is not in the source text is not drawn in and attached.
So the opening reads 「在親民」 (to be close to the people). Zhu Xi changed this and read it as 「在新民」 (to renew the people), but the graph in the source text is 親, so it is translated as 親. The sections have no names in the source text either, so only the ordinal number of the passage is attached.