Liaofan's Four Lessons

Liaofan's Four Lessons (《了凡四训》) is a didactic family text by the Ming scholar Yuan Huang (courtesy name Liaofan, 1533–1606), written to instruct his son. Its four parts — establishing one's destiny, reforming faults, accumulating goodness, and the effect of humility — make the best-known Chinese argument that cultivating goodness and humility can change one's fate. It is widely described as the first Chinese "morality book" and is treated here as a named, datable historical text rather than a claim the product makes.