The Great Learning is arranged as a compact yet carefully layered text, traditionally understood as a brief core statement followed by a more extensive exposition. At its heart stands an opening passage that sets forth the “Three Cardinal Principles” or “three guiding aims”: manifesting bright or illustrious virtue, loving or renewing the people, and resting in the highest good. This initial section functions as the axis of the work, announcing that personal moral clarity, care for others, and orientation toward the supreme good are inseparable. From the outset, the text thus links inner cultivation with the ordering of human relationships and the wider world.

Flowing from this core, the work unfolds through what later tradition calls the “Eight Steps,” which provide a graded path from inner refinement to social and political harmony. These steps are: investigation of things, extension of knowledge, sincerity of the will or intention, rectification of the heart-mind, cultivation of the person, regulation of the family, ordering of the state, and bringing peace to the world or “all under Heaven.” The structure is not a loose list but a deliberate progression, in which each stage depends upon and deepens the previous one. Personal inquiry and understanding ripen into sincerity and inner rectitude, which in turn ground ethical self-cultivation and radiate outward into family, governance, and the wider realm.

The textual organization mirrors this inner-to-outer movement. A concise main text, attributed in the tradition to Confucius, presents the overarching aims and the sequence of the Eight Steps in highly compressed form. This is followed by a longer commentary, associated with the disciple Zengzi, which elaborates each principle and step in turn, often through maxims and illustrative remarks. The commentary does not merely repeat the core claims; it teases out their implications for rulers, officials, and ordinary people, showing how the same moral logic governs self, household, and polity. Later scholarly arrangements, especially those that distinguish clearly between the core text and its commentary and emphasize the sequential logic of the Eight Steps, have further highlighted this unified program of personal cultivation leading to social order and peace.