Mingxin baojian
14th-century Chinese book
The Mingxin baojian (simplified Chinese: 明心宝鉴; traditional Chinese: 明心寶鑑; pinyin: Míngxīn bǎojiàn; Wade–Giles: Ming-hsin pao-chien; lit. 'bright heart-mind precious mirror') is an ancient Chinese book containing "a collection of aphorisms and quotations form the Chinese classics and other works" The author and date of authorship are not reliably known, although later references suggest that it was compiled in 1393 by Fan Liben (Chinese: 范立本). The quotations and aphorisms in the book appear to be from scholarly writings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, with "a great many of the quotations... taken from Taoist writings", suggesting to a few researchers like Wang Chonmin that the author was a follower of Taoism, while most of the text comes from the Confucian School.
The Mingxin baojian was the first book translated from Chinese into a Western language. "The Ming-hsin pao-chien seems to have widely circulated among the people in Fukien in the late Ming period. It was brought by the Chinese to the Philippines". Circa 1590, it was translated into Spanish by a Dominican friar named Juan Cobo who arrived in the Philippines in 1588. In 1595, the Dominicans presented this translation, along with a copy of the original, to Philip III of Spain, then Crown Prince. Juan Cobo´s manuscript is bilingual, and contains comment in the margins, and a introductory letter by Miguel de Benavides y Añoza.
The public source identifies “Mingxin baojian” as 14th-century Chinese book. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mingxin, baojian and 14th-century.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6864853. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1393, 1590, 1588 and 1595.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mingxin baojian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.