In the light of the unearthed literature, the word “Du” means “forgetting body” , a certain mental state in which people cannot distinguish pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy from one’s unity of sincerity, rather than “live in solitary existence”, merely laying emphasis on dwelling place.In terms of Literary Expositor, “Shen” should be explained as the perfect truthfulness (absolute sincerity), one phase which means to seek to be sincere in their intention. Zhengxuan interpreted the Shendu as being cautious of one’s behaviors when he is alone,Zhuxi believes Zheng’s commentary was not persuasive enough. This is why Zhuxi, in his theorizing of the Doctrine of the Mean, enlarged the meaning of the word “Du”to make it coincident with the spirituality and intention creatively. Unfortunately, in the statement of the mean man who used to do evils , resulting from the misleading of conventional commentary, Zhu twisted the meaning of the text. Owing to the complicacy of the Doctrine of the Mean, some inconsistency remained in Zhu’s illumination on the Shengdu therein. As to the theories of cultivating of the Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming periods, the concept of forgetting body is useful to clarify the ambiguity of Shengdu. Because of the loss of Chinese ancient literature, the Neo-Confucians didn’t discard old prejudice of the dwelling alone when they read and explained Shengdu. As this article reveals, etymology is important to Zhuxi’s classical hermeneutics.
