文以载道
wén yǐ zài dào
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 文以載道
Literature as a bearer of moral truth: the traditional Chinese view that writing should transmit the Way and teach, not merely entertain. Cited in discussions of what literature and art are for.
Văn chương là để chở đạo: quan niệm truyền thống cho rằng viết văn trước hết phải truyền tải đạo lý, giáo hoá con người chứ không chỉ để giải trí. Thường dẫn khi bàn về chức năng của văn học.
Register: literary
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 062 (2026-11-13). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 以 = dĩ · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “văn dĩ tải đạo” (van-di-tai-dao). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “文以载道” mean?
Literature as a bearer of moral truth: the traditional Chinese view that writing should transmit the Way and teach, not merely entertain. Cited in discussions of what literature and art are for. Literally: writing, used to convey the Way
Is “文以载道” formal or informal?
文以载道 is generally literary.