Within the Confucian tradition, the touchstone for understanding the Great Learning is Zhu Xi’s commentary, often referred to as his collected annotations on the text. By extracting the work from the Book of Rites and reorganizing it into a main text and accompanying commentary, Zhu Xi offered not only clarification but a new architecture for reading the classic. His interpretation of themes such as the sequence from self-cultivation to ordering the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to the world became a kind of spiritual map for generations of scholars. Because this version was adopted as the standard for education and official examinations, it came to embody an institutional as well as a moral authority.

Beneath Zhu Xi’s synthesis lies the earlier current of thought associated with the Cheng brothers, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi. Their reflections on principle, human nature, and moral cultivation, though not cast as a single, systematic commentary on the Great Learning, shaped the soil from which Zhu Xi’s reading grew. In this sense, their interpretive line functions as a foundational stratum: less visible as a discrete text, yet deeply present in the later orthodox understanding. For those seeking to trace the inner genealogy of Neo-Confucian spirituality, the Cheng brothers’ influence on the Great Learning stands as a crucial, if often implicit, authority.

A different yet equally earnest spiritual path emerges in the commentary and reinterpretation associated with Wang Yangming. Accepting Zhu Xi’s basic textual arrangement, Wang Yangming turned the spotlight toward the lived unity of knowledge and action and the role of innate moral knowing. For adherents of the so‑called School of Mind, his reading became the principal alternative lens through which the Great Learning could be approached, emphasizing interior illumination over external investigation. This alternative authority does not so much overthrow Zhu Xi as offer another doorway into the same moral landscape.

Behind these later developments stand the earlier annotations embedded in the Great Learning’s original place within the Book of Rites, including the work of Han scholars such as Zheng Xuan. These classical notes, while less philosophically elaborate than Neo‑Confucian constructions, provided a philological and ritual framework that anchored the text in concrete practice. Taken together, the early exegesis, the Cheng brothers’ reflections, Zhu Xi’s systematizing vision, and Wang Yangming’s inward turn form a layered tradition. Each commentary, in its own way, seeks to guide the reader from the refinement of the self toward harmony in family, society, and the wider world.