Hands down the best and finest Taobao comment I’ve seen, and great art too:

In the eyes of Confucian literati, if nature’s cycle (or “Heaven”) is to endure and grow in fecundity without ever being depleted, and if the virtue of the Sage is to operate and exert its influence unceasingly on all that exists, then it is essential that neither Heaven nor the Sage deviates from its or his respective path or veers towards one side or another. All such partiality, in both senses of the word, bespeaks a corresponding lack in or retreat from the inherent capacity of the real to communicate through and throughout itself, to incite and to respond (that is, to react constantly in the sense of 感通), and, by virtue of that ability, to maintain itself ever in process. When this capacity is thus compromised, there appear a corresponding decline in vitality and all manner of barriers to the continuum of the real. Under these conditions, opacity and inertia — apathy and sterility — arise in things as well as in consciousness (indeed, these deviations constitute the only “Evil”). And as for Heaven and the Sage, their only virtue consists in their never allowing themselves to be restricted or blocked. It is a virtue that, almost by definition, depends on the ability to maintain at all times the position of centrality (中), which alone permits a reaction to the totality of a given situation and the avoidance of both excess and insufficiency and encourages the full development of the capacity to “bring about” (成).

The Confucian idea, then, has nothing to do with the “mediocrity” of the middle of the road — aurea mediocritas, or faint-hearted prudence — with which it is so often confused. Nor can it be reduced to an Aristotelian “mean” (μεσότης, Nicomachean Ethics 2.5), which is uniquely moral in nature and pertains only to the realm of emotions and actions. Rather, it is based on the perception of the fundamental neutrality of all nature — that of the world as well as that of man. Insofar as man originates in the supreme font of reality (“Heaven”), he naturally finds himself in this position of perfect centrality. All he need do to ensure that “Heaven and Earth are in their proper places” and that “all beings flourish”, then, is to keep his emotions in harmonious balance. There is no other basis in reality apart from this value of the neutral: not leaning in one direction more than in another, not characterized more by one quality than by another, but preserving, perfectly whole within itself, its capacity for action. From this neutrality derives, in the eyes of Confucians, all true efficacy. And to the neutral we owe, of course, the ineluctable blandness that is the mark of the Sage.

François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness, pp. 48–49