Returning to the Heart – A new e-course on Mencius for our time

After finishing a few e-courses on Confucius’s teachings and I Ching, this year I started with a new e-course on Mencius’s teachings.

Written more than 2000 years ago, Mencius’s words continue to be relevant and inspiring, carrying a powerful force that speaks directly to us today. In an era when so much feels fractured — morally, verbally, technologically — his emphasis on our innate goodness offers something steady and human.

Mencius taught that every person is born with four “hearts” or moral sprouts: compassion (the pang we feel at another’s suffering), moral disgust and shame (our instinctive recoil from wrongdoing), courtesy and yielding care (the impulse to defer and share for others’s sake), and discernment of right and wrong. These are not abstract ideals; they are natural impulses, like seeds that need nurturing to grow into full virtues. When cultivated, they align us with the greater natural order and guide us toward right action, clear thinking, and meaningful living. His words remind us that true strength begins inward, in the heart-mind, not in louder arguments or faster tools.

We are living in an age of overwhelming noise and deep fear. Headlines twist reality, social media amplifies outrage, politicians evade clear answers, and AI advances so quickly that many wonder if their skills — or even their purpose — will soon become obsolete. We face public moral rifts, verbal battlefields, and existential anxiety. In this turbulence, it’s easy to feel swept along, manipulated, or diminished.

That is why this e-course, Returning to the Heart: Mencius Amid Modern Noise and Fear, is so relevant. With three lessons in this e-course, each one draws on Mencius’s wisdom to navigate one layer of our current challenges.

The first explores the Luigi Mangione case — the 2024 shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, the extraordinary grassroots support for Mangione (over $1.4 million donated by the end of 2025), and the deeper societal pain it reveals. Here, Mencius’s four hearts offer a lens beyond legal debates, showing how compassion, moral disgust, mutual care, and conscience drive public sentiment.

The second confronts the “word traps” saturating our discourse — partial framing, inflammatory exaggeration, truth-inverting falsehoods, and evasive hedging — using Mencius’s ancient categories to help us spot and resist them. From fraud scandals to geopolitical equivocation (like Western leaders’s responses to the January 2026 U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro), these tools restore mental clarity and sovereignty.

The third reframes AI anxiety: machines can code, create, and analyse, but they lack the four hearts — genuine feeling, moral drive, passion. By fully expanding our heart-mind (尽心), knowing our nature (知性), and aligning with the era’s flow (知天), we discover what remains irreplaceably human.

The core message of this e-course is that, in turbulent times, Mencius reminds us, the path forward often begins with listening to our own hearts.

Just as other MSL Master e-courses, I also want to make this e-course as accessible as possible. It is available for HKD 29.9 or free to barter. Purchase here or make an offer: https://www.mslmaster.com/index.php?view=article&id=249:msl-master-e-courses&catid=11 

If you are interested, watch a video that I produced before, introducing a quote from Mencius. See below!