It is Master Zhu who also provides the philosophical interpretation of the rise of Neo-Confucianism that defines the historical accounts of the tradition from the Southern Song on.
Zhu Xi inherited the rich complexity of the revival of Confucian thought from a variety of Northern Song masters. In organizing this heritage into an enduring synthesis, Zhu was highly selective in his choices about who he placed in the daotong or the succession of the way or the true teachings drawn from the legendary sages; historical paladins such as the Kings Wen, Wu and the Duke of Zhou, and then Master Kong and Master Meng as the consummate philosophers of the classical age.
Anyone interested in the history of Song Confucian thought will need to pay careful attention to thinkers as diverse as the Northern Song scholars and activists such as Fan Zhongyan , Ouyang Xiu , Wang Anshi , Sima Guang , Su Shi and Southern Song colleagues and critics of Zhu such as Lu Xiangshan and Chen Liang —just to give a short list of major Song philosophers, scholars, politicians, historians, social critics and poets.
What Zhu Xi did was to give a distinctive ordering to the kinds of terms listed above; he gave them a pattern that became the philosophical foundation of daoxue. For those who disagreed, such as Lu Xiangshan and the later Ming thinker Wang Yangming , Zhu provided the template of Song thought that must be modified, transformed or even rejected, but never ignored.
Zhu understood his analysis of principle and vital force to be the answer to the question of interpreting the relationship of the human mind-heart, human natural tendencies and the emotions. Trying to resolve how all of this fit together, Zhu borrowed a critical teaching of Zhang Zai to the effect that the mind-heart unifies the human tendencies and the emotions.
Zhu then went on to claim that analytically understood this meant that the principle qua human tendencies or dispositions gave a particular order or pattern to the emerging person and that the dyad of principle and vital force coordinated and unified the actions of the mind-heart. In other words, Zhu discerned a tripartite patterning or principle of the emergence of the person, and by extension, all the other objects or events of the world in terms of form or principle, dynamics or vital force and their unification via the mind-heart: the mature schematic is form, dynamics and unification.
Moreover, once this unification of the principle and vital force was achieved and perfected, the outcome, at least for the human person, was a state of harmony or balance. First, its breadth of vision provided Confucians with a response to the great philosophical achievements of the Chinese Buddhist schools such as the Tiantai or Huayan.
Second, and more important, it outlined a Confucian cosmological axiology based upon the classical Confucian texts of the pre-Han era as well as an explanation for and analysis of the coming to be of the actual objects or events of the world.
Zhu achieved this feat by showing how all the various concepts of the inherited Confucian philosophical vocabulary could be construed in three different modalities based on the pattern of form, dynamics and unification. For instance, the analysis of the human person was very important for Zhu Xi. Each person was an allotment of vital force generated by union of the parents. Along with this allotment of qi or vital force, each person inherited a set of natural tendencies or what has often been called human nature.
The subtlest portion of the vital force becomes the mind-heart for each person. The mind-heart has both cognitive and affective abilities; when properly cultivated, the mind-heart, for instance, can recognize the various principles inherent in its own nature and the nature of other objects and events. In short, the mind-heart, as the experiential unity of concern consciousness becomes the human agent for creative and humane reason.
There is nothing evil in an Augustinian sense of the human emotions save for the fact that they are much too prone to excess without the guidance of principle. The whole system was predicated on the daoxue conviction of the ultimate moral tendency of the Dao to regulate the creative structure of the ceaseless production of the objects and events of the world.
The world was thus to be seen as endlessly creative and relentlessly realistic in the sense that this cosmic creativity of the Dao eventuated in the concrete objects and events of the world. The experiential world of the human mind-heart and the analytic schema of the unification of principle and vital force could also be described by the use of classical Confucian selective or mediating concepts such as cheng or self-actualization of jen or ultimate humanization as the paramount human ethical norm.
Hence the concern-consciousness of the person is the basis of individual creativity and manifests the particular principle of the mandate of heaven in a specific time and place for each person. Cosmic creativity or the ceaseless production of the objects and events of the cosmos replicates itself in the life of the person, and when properly actualized or integrated, can cause the person to find the harmony and balance of a worthy or even a sage.
Both the tensions of the contrasting pairs such as nature and emotion are preserved and yet re-inscribed in the various allotments of the qi of each of the objects or events of the cosmos with a vision of their harmonious and balanced creative interaction.
Zhu Xi was equally famous for this theory of the praxis of the self-cultivation of the ultimately moral axiology of his multi-level system of philosophical analysis. His preferred method was that of gewu or the investigation of things.
Zhu Xi believed that all the objects and events of the world had their own distinctive principle and that it was important for the student to study and comprehend as many of these principles as possible. It was a method of intellectual cultivation of the mind-heart that included both introspection and respect for external empirical research. In many respects, gewu was an attempt toward finding an objective and inter-subjective method to overcome pian or the perennial human disinclination to be one-sided, partial or blinkered in any form of thought, action and passion.
The debates about the proper way to pursue self-cultivation and the examination of things proved to be one of the most highly debated sets of interrelated philosophical concerns throughout the Neo-Confucian world. In terms of philosophical debate about the worthiness of daoxue , there was a great deal of disagreement about a variety of issues in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties.
The Qing scholars were the most radical in their critique and merit a separate section; however, there were immediate Song dynasty rejoinders to Zhu Xi who argued against part of the synthesis on philosophical grounds.
Here Chen broke with Zhu and suggested that good laws were needed just as good Neo-Confucian philosophers trained in a metaphysical praxis such as daoxue. Such arguments for pragmatic political theory and even an appeal to the beneficial outcomes of carefully constructed legal regimes were never well received in the Neo-Confucian period, even if they did point to some genuinely diverse views within the Song Confucian revivals.
In a dialogue with a student, Lu pinpointed his argument with Zhu:. Bomin said: The ten thousand things under Heaven are extremely multitudinous; how, then, can we investigate all of them exhaustively?
The teacher replied: The ten thousand things are already complete in us. It is only necessary to apprehend their principle Huang First, in many ways Lu does not disagree with the basic cosmological outline provided by Zhu Xi. Second, the philosophic sensibility, however, becomes even more focused on the internal self-cultivation of the person. Of course, this is not to be understood as a purely subjective idealism.
Rather, Lu would argue that only by finding principle in the mind-heart could the person then effectively comprehend the rest of the world. The point is not a solipsistic retreat into subjective and relativistic reveries of isolated individuality but rather a heightened ability to interpret and engage the world as it really is. The critical question is to find the proper place to start the investigation of things.
If we start with the things of the world, we fall prey to the problems of self-delusion and partiality that infect the uncultivated person. But if we can find the correct place and method to investigate things and comprehend their principles, then we will understand the actual, concrete unity of principle.
Wang also had the richest life of any of the major Neo-Confucian philosophers: he was a philosopher of major import, a poet, a statesman and an accomplished general.
The band of young scholars obviously thought that this would be an easy task. One by one they fell away, unable to make any progress in their quest to understand bamboo principle.
Wang was the last to give up and only did so after having exhausted himself in the futile effort. Later during a painful political exile in the far south of China, Wang Yangming had a flash of insight into the problem of finding the true location of principle.
Wang clearly understood this enlightenment experience as a confirmation that Lu Xiangshan was correct when Lu had declared that principle was to be found complete within the mind-heart of the person.
In much greater detail than Lu, Wang then set out to develop the philosophical implications of the primordial insight into the proper way to carry out Confucian moral epistemology and self-cultivation. And after having straightened out the epistemology, Wang then went on to explain how the Confucian worthy should act in the world. The way Wang taught about the task of realizing what he called the innate goodness of human nature was his famous doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action.
There was yet another philosophical realignment within Ming thought that is harder to identify with the specific teachings of any one master, namely the debate over the role of qing or emotion within the Neo-Confucian world of discourse [representative scholars would be Li Zhi and Ho Xingyin ]. The nature of the emotions or human feelings was always a topic of reflection within the broad sweep of the historical development of Confucianism because of the persistent Confucian fascination with moral anthropology and ethics.
Zhu Xi had a very important place for the emotions in his teachings of the way, though many later thinkers felt that Zhu was too negative about the function of the emotions. While it was perfectly clear that Zhu never taught that the emotions per se were evil or entirely negative, he did teach that the emotions needed to be properly and carefully cultivated in terms of the conformity of the emotional life to the life of principle.
Zhu thematized this as the contrast between the daoxin or the Mind of Dao and the renxin or the Mind of Humanity the mind of the psychophysical person. Moreover, it was also perfectly clear that Zhu taught that the truly ethical person needed to realize the Mind of Dao in order to actualize the human tendencies as mandated by heaven for each person.
If not hostile to the emotions, Zhu was wary of them as the prime location for human self-centered and partial behavior. By the late Ming dynasty many of the followers of Wang Yangming harshly questioned what they took to be the negative Song teachings about the emotional life. In fact, many of these thinkers made the bold claim that the emotions were just as important and valuable philosophical resources for authentic Confucian teachings as reflections on the themes of principle or vital force.
In fact, they contended that it was a proper and positive interpretation of human emotions and even passions that distinguishes Confucianism from Daoism and Buddhism. Whether or not these thinkers were correct in their interpretations of Daoist and Buddhist thought need not detain us here.
What is more important is that these thinkers developed a more positive interpretation of qing than had been the case in earlier Song and Ming thought.
It might be argued that such a concern for the emotions was just another marker of the Neo-Confucian turn toward the subject, a flight to contemplation of an inner subjective world as opposed to the much more activist style of the Han and Tang scholarly traditions. However, this speculation about emotion, even romantic love, had the unintended effect of allowing educated Chinese women to enter into the debate.
Debarred, as they noted, from active lives outside the literati family compounds, the women observed that although living circumscribed lives compared to their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, they did know something about the emotions—and that they had something positive to add to the debate. All three were eventually the wives of Wu Ren, with Chan and Tan dying very early in life and leaving what would be called the Three Wives Commentary on the famous Ming drama The Peony Pavilion to be completed and published in by the third wife, Madame Qian.
The three women demonstrated just as great scholarly exegetical and hermeneutic skills as their husband, and he always acknowledged their authorship and their collective and individual genius against those who thought women unable to achieve this level of cultural, artistic and philosophical sophistication.
Although not widely accepted in late Ming and Qing society, these Confucian women defended the notion of companionate marriage based, in part, on a Confucian analysis of the emotional needs of women and men. After the conquest of all of China by the Manchu in , there was a tremendous cultural backlash against the radical thinkers of the late Ming dynasty. Rather than seeking validation of the emotions and human passions, many Qing scholars took a completely different approach to rediscover the true teachings of the classical Confucian sages.
The point of departure for all of these thinkers was to reject the philosophical foundations of both Song scholars such as Zhu Xi and Ming teachers such as Wang Yangming. The charge the radical Qing scholars made against both Zhu and Wang Yangming was that both lixue and xinxue were completely infused with so much extraneous Daoist and Buddhist accretions that the true Confucian vision was subverted into something strange to the teachings of the classical Confucian masters.
Therefore, the task of the Qing scholars was to strip Neo-Confucianism of its Daoist and Buddhist subversive inclusions. The method that the Qing scholars chose has been called hanxue or Han Teaching or kaozhengxue , Evidential Research Learning. The chief tactic was to argue that the best way to return to true Confucian teachings in the face of Song Neo-Confucian distortions was to return to the work of the earliest stratum of texts, namely the work of the famous Han exegetes.
The theory was that these Han scholars were closer to the classical texts and were also without the taint of undue Daoist or Buddhist influence. The other way to describe the movement is to note that these scholars promoted a various rigorous historical-critical and philological approach to the philosophical texts based on what they called an evidential research program. The grand axiom or rubric of the kaozhengxue scholars was to find the truth in the facts.
They abjured what they believed to be the overly metaphysical flights of fancy of the Song and Ming thinkers and went back to the careful study of philology and textual and social history in order to return to a true Confucian scholarly culture.
The better philosophers of this group, with Ku Yanwu and Dai Zhen as the bookends of the tradition, recognized that such an appeal to research methodology as opposed to Song metaphysics was also a philosophical appeal in its own right. Yet all these Evidential Research scholars were united in trying to find the earliest core of true Confucian texts by a meticulous examination of the whole history of Confucian thought.
Along with major contributions to Confucian classical studies, these Evidential Research philosophers also made major additions to the promotion of local historical studies and even advanced practical studies in agriculture and water management. They really did try to find the truth in the facts. Yet the world of the Qing Evidential Research scholars was as ruthlessly destroyed as the metaphysical speculations of Song-style philosophers with the arrival of the all-powerful Western imperial powers in the middle of the 19th century.
It is extremely important to remember that Neo-Confucianism was an international and cross-cultural tradition in East Asia, with different manifestations in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. For instance, a strong case can be made for the strong philosophical creativity of Korean Neo-Confucians in the 15th and 16th centuries and in Japan after the inception of Tokugawa rule in Two examples will have to suffice to demonstrate that in some eras the most stimulating and innovative Confucian philosophical work was being done in Korea and Japan.
As mentioned above, little study has been devoted to the Vietnamese reception and appropriation of Neo-Confucian philosophy at that time, and thus it is still impossible to speak with as much confidence about it as we can about the creativity of the Korean and Japanese Neo-Confucian philosophers.
The debate was framed as a technical discussion of two different lists of emotions one list of four and another of seven different emotions, and hence the name for the Four-Seven Debate inherited from the classical Confucian texts. But the most interesting underlying philosophical issues that emerged had to do with the analysis of the nature of and relationship between principle and vital force. The problem was put this way in a famous metaphor: how could a dead rider principle as a purely formal pattern guide the living horse of vital force?
In other words, the Korean scholars understood clearly that the whole sensibility of the daoxue project was suffused with an emphasis on cosmic process. Yi Yulgok, the younger of the two giants of Korean Neo-Confucianism, gave the most creative response to this question. Yulgok is often portrayed as a proponent of a qi -monism wherein Yulgok defends the primacy of process sensibilities in daoxue by augmenting the role of vital force at the expense of principle.
While Yulgok does indeed have all kinds of illuminating insights into the role of vital force, he never abandons a deep concern for the role of principle.
Yulgok forthrightly links the notion of principle creatively with the equally important concept of cheng or the self-actualization of the mind-heart. In making this strong linkage, Yulgok is able to defend the thesis that principle itself is a vital manifestation of the living creativity of the Dao as the ceaseless generation of the myriad things. In 17th century Tokugawa Japan Kaibara Ekken provides an exemplar of the Japanese contribution to the refinement of Neo-Confucian discourse.
Ekken, like so many other great Confucian scholars, was something of a renaissance figure. This social concern manifested itself in some very traditional ventures such as the publication of his famous Precepts for Daily Life in Japan , wherein he tried to give advice about how Confucian principles could be applied to the conduct of concrete daily life.
Moreover, this passion for the concrete details of daily life also led to a fervent naturalist concern for the world of plants, animals, fish and even shellfish.
Ekken not only wrote about these humble creatures but, like many early Western naturalists, provided illustrations of these plants and animals. Ekken made a further deduction from his re-evaluation of the role of vital force, namely that there is no ontological or cosmological ground for holding to a distinction between the ideal nature, mandated by tian , and the physical nature or endowment of the particular creature or person.
The fate of Korean and Japanese Neo-Confucianism was subject to the same immense impact of the arrival of the Western imperial powers. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, Foster, Robert W. Edited by Jeffrey L.
DOI: NNNThis is a brief overview of the development of Song Neo-Confucianism in light of two converging realities: first, the desire to prove the truly moral nature of the universe, and second, the desire to promote a sociopolitical revival through ethical education.
Intended for non-specialists. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Translated by Derk Bodde. Fung received his PhD from Columbia University, so this work mixes texts and interpretation of all Chinese philosophy with comparisons to Western philosophy. An excellent starting point, particularly the second volume.
Reprint, Keenan, Barry C. Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation. NNNA brief, readable introduction. Discusses the rise of Song Neo-Confucianism and its later forms. Concerned with the program of learning as laid out in the brief Great Learning , Keenan organizes the second part of his book to demonstrate how one might follow the eight-step program of self-cultivation. For upper-level college students and beyond. Westport, CT: Praeger, Written by a modern Confucian to explain the underpinnings of the current New Confucian movement.
Makeham, John. Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, NNNA collection of articles each focusing on a theme within the work of a key figure of the Neo-Confucian tradition.
The volume covers a range of themes and figures by leading scholars in the fields. For upper-level undergraduates and above. Fuzhou, China: Renmin chubanshe, Read in tandem with Meng cited under Terminology. Zhu Xi was also active in the theory and practice of education and in the compiling of a practical manual of family ritual.
In Confucian teaching, the family is the most basic unit of society. Everyone should respect and obey his or her parents and put the interests of the family before personal interests. It was considered essential that everyone marry, so that family lines would continue and male heirs make offerings of food and drink to their deceased ancestors.
During the Song dynasty, the text became one of the thirteen classics of the Neo-Confucian canon and remained a cornerstone of traditional Chinese moral teaching until modern times. More about this painting at the Metropolitan Museum website. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Girls left their families when they married.
Mothers and grandmothers had important and respected places in their families. The Song is often seen as a time when the status of women declined. Compared to Tang times, women were less active in politics and less commonly seen on the streets. Song Confucian teachers argued against widows remarrying, and footbinding began in Song times.
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