Abstract
The present study aims at exploration and a nuanced description of the semantic structural of the lexical unit yì , which has been traditionally translated as "righteousness" but also by many other more adequate terms. A good understanding of the meanings of the word is especially urgent because of its crucial importance for ancient Chinese ideology and philosohpy, but also because it tends to be mistranslated or at least translated in a misleading way, for example as "justice".
Although the palaeographic and etymological aspects are discussed too, the argument is primarily based on scrutiny of practically all occurrences of the word in the pre-imperial transmitted texts as recorded in the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (more than 1.200 cases), with emphasis on systemic relationships, such as synonymy, antonymy or parallelism. The particular meanings arrived at with this method are presented with examples and more appropriate Czech translations of the term are suggested.