Neo-Confucianism in general, and the Learning of the Way (daoxue) in particular, had their inception in the great reform movements of the Northern Song period (960–1127). Politically, these reached a high point in the determined efforts of Wang Anshi (1021–1086) to effectuate his New Laws (xinfa), which can be read also as new formulas, methods, systems, or policies. Here, however, the key word is “new,” for it stands in seeming contrast to tradition as expressed in the dominant restorationist ideal of the time, that is, to the idea that the institutions of the ancient Zhou dynasty should be revived and put into practice in eleventh-century Song China. Actually, what this signifies is that tradition and innovation went hand in hand rather than going in opposite directions. When Wang An-shi invoked the Confucian classics, especially the Rites or Institutes of Zhou (Zhou guan), as sanction for his radical reforms, it was because tradition in this form afforded him a high ground from which to attack existing institutions, not because his new institutions would bear any close resemblance to their presumed models in the Institutes of Zhou.
Confirmation of this innovative use of tradition is further found in the need Wang felt to write a new commentary on the Zhou guan, with the revealing title New Interpretation of the Institutes of Zhou (Zhouguan xinyi). This reinterpretation of the classics employed a new criticism, by which neoclassicism was made to serve the purposes of reform. Thus “restoration of the ancient order” (fugu) ushered in a new day, and the “Way of the Sage-Kings” of the past was to prove in practice to be a new Way.
Though berated for his authoritarian ways and dogmatic manner in the pursuit of his goals, Wang was not alone among the great scholars of his day in believing that one could find in the ancient order the basis for a new one. Speaking in terms reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” the philosopher Cheng Yi asserted no less insistently than Wang the need for a “great reform” to bring about a “Great Order” or “Great Benefit” in those times.1 Politically at odds with Wang, he was equally dogmatic in claiming the authority of the classics for his own ideas. And this was possible for both Wang and Cheng because they shared a view of the Way as not fixed in the past but as vital and adaptable to new human situations.
One branch of Confucian scholarship in the Song that encouraged this thought was the study of the Classic of Changes (Yijing), the Great Appendix to which gave prominence to a conception of the Way as vital, creative, and life renewing (shengsheng). To Cheng Yi, the early proponent of the Learning of the Way (daoxue), this conception contrasted with the negative Buddhist view of change as impermanence and its view of the Way as deliverance from the cycle of life and death. Instead, the Confucian metaphysics of the Changes offered a positive view of the Way as readily accessible to human understanding and adaptable to ordinary human needs. Rediscovery and renewal then became significant values presupposed in Cheng Yi’s neoclassicism. Truth was directly available in the classics and immediately applicable to the renewing of human life. As Cheng Yi quite consciously put it, the Way of the Great Learning called for the “renewing of the people” (xinmin), which he substituted for “loving the people” (qin min) in the earlier version.2 Zhu Xi, in his own commentary on the Great Learning (daxue), greatly stressed the idea of self-renewal as the basis for a larger human renewal. In turn, the dynamism of the early Neo-Confucian movement in the Yuan and Ming periods drew heavily on this promise, for it was on Zhu Xi’s new articulation of the moral nature of man and individual perfectibility that this hope of social renewal rested.3
One cannot take this emphasis on renewal or innovation as necessarily expressing a “progressive” view of history, if by that one would imply a linear development toward some higher stage. Its “newness” is like the regeneration of the New Year, or of spring, which may allow for an evolutionary process but is not predicated upon it. Nor can one understand “vitality” or “creativity” here as setting a high value on individual “originality,” with a Western connotation of utter uniqueness. There remains a strong sense of the underlying human continuum, and Cheng Yi’s “renewing of the people” implies a humanity deeply shared in common.
Nevertheless, when Cheng spoke of the advancement of the Way among men, he was quite prepared to credit certain personages with extraordinary individual contributions. Indeed, if it had not been for the insight and independent effort of a few such individuals, the Way of the Sages would have been totally lost. Among these few, of course, were Confucius and Mencius, but after the death of the latter there was a long lapse in the handing on of the Way until, according to Cheng Yi, his own elder brother Cheng Hao, “born 1,400 years after Mencius, resolved to enlighten the people with this Way.… He said that, after Mencius, the Learning of the Sage was no longer transmitted, and he took it as his own responsibility to restore the cultural tradition.”4
Later in Zhu Xi’s preface to the Mean (Zhongyong), when he was explaining the nature of the repossession or reconstitution of the Way (daotong), Zhu took up the same theme. After recounting how the Way had been passed down from the sage kings, he said:
As for our master Confucius, though he did not attain a position of authority, nevertheless his resuming the tradition of the past sages and imparting it to later scholars was a contribution even more worthy than that of Yao and Shun. Still, in his own time those who recognized him were only [his disciples] Yan Hui and Zeng Can, who grasped and passed on his essential meaning. Then in the next generation after Zeng, with Confucius’ grandson Zi Si [reputed author of the Mean], it was far removed in time from the sages and heterodoxies had already arisen.…
Thereafter the transmission was resumed by Mencius, who was able to interpret and clarify the meaning of this text [the Mean] and succeed to the tradition of the early sages; but upon his demise the transmission was finally lost.… Fortunately, however, this text was not lost, and when the Masters Cheng, two brothers, appeared [in the Song] they had something to study in order to pick up the threads of what had not been transmitted for a thousand years.5
In these passages, what is emphasized is not the effective imparting of the Way through some unbroken apostolic or patriarchal succession but, first, its being cut off for so long; second, its rediscovery by an inspired individual; and third, the heroic dedication required to defend it in a decadent age. Inner inspiration and personal dedication are the marks of the heroic individuals who manage to rescue the Way from oblivion.6
Zhen Dexiu (1178–1235), a leader of the School of the Way just after Zhu Xi’s time, emphasizes the same qualities in the Song masters who had led in the resurgence of the Learning of the Way, but he underscores the extraordinary—almost supernatural—nature of their inspiration. “Man could not have achieved this without the aid of Heaven,” he says. And speaking of the insights of Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, and Zhu Xi, he says: “How could they have offered such novel views and put forward new interpretations, such as their predecessors had not been able to arrive at, were it not simply due to Heaven?”7
Zhen uses similar language in a memoir on Cheng Hao, crediting him with the discovery of the truth concerning Heaven’s principle (tianli). Darkness, he says, had enshrouded the Way for more than a thousand years after Mencius, when “Zhou Dunyi appeared and was able to grasp the long-lost secret. Master Cheng Mingdao [Cheng Hao], when he came upon this, recognized it immediately, penetrating the surrounding darkness and shedding further light.” Further on in the same memoir, he says, “therefore Master Cheng once said to his students, ‘although there are things I have learned from others, as regards Heaven’s principle, what I have set forth is based on my own experience.’”8 And in still another memoir, he expresses in vivid terms the wondrous creativity of Heaven: “Do we not have here the full revelation of the sagely learning, the dispelling of the blindnesses of this generation of men, and the correct succession to the orthodox teaching handed down from a thousand ages past? Indeed, has not Heaven shown the most extraordinary favor to this Way?”9
In Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, I have characterized the above view as a “prophetic” element in the Learning of the Way. By this I mean to indicate an extraordinary access to truth not vouchsafed to everyone, which by some process of inner inspiration or solitary perception affords an insight beyond what is received in scripture and by appeal to some higher order of truth gives new meaning, significance, and urgency to certain cultural values or scriptural texts. Confucian tradition does not customarily speak of such a revelation as “supernatural,” but it has an unpredictable, wondrous quality manifesting the divine creativity of Heaven. By contrast, I use “scholastic” to represent an appeal to received authority by continuous transmission, with stress on external or public acceptance of it as the basis of its validity.10
There is, of course, an obvious difference in context between this and the more theistic traditions of the Semitic world, where the prophet speaks for a God whose “ways are not man’s ways” yet whose demands on man’s obedience and judgments on his actions are pronounced with awful finality. Still, this difference need not keep us from recognizing the inner-directedness of the Neo-Confucian moral vision or the extent to which Heaven acts on the human conscience to maintain a dynamic tension between the ideal order and man’s actual condition—that is, how it provided a leverage on the human situation that the Weberian analysis of Confucianism failed to take into account.
These contrasting attitudes, prophetic and scholastic, might also be said to differentiate liberal and conservative tendencies in Neo-Confucianism. Some caution is called for, however, lest too facile a contrast be drawn between the two. The prophetic voice, both in East and West, has often lent itself to a radical critique of existing institutions or alternatively to a fundamentalist reaction against permissive societies. In such cases, Confucian liberalism, seeking the Mean (which could correspond to Charles Frankel’s description of “the liberal temperament or style as characterized by moderation, restraint, and compromise”) would turn to the seasoned wisdom of the scholastic tradition and weigh the strident demands of conscience against the collective experience embodied in written texts or formal institutions.11
Even allowing for such countervailing tendencies, I would nevertheless point to the seminal role played in the minds of creative thinkers by this conception of the “repossession of the Way” (daotong) so central to the orthodox tradition of Neo-Confucianism. Again and again, recourse is had by reformers and nonconformists to the ideal of the heroic individual rediscovering and revivifying the Way. Prominent examples are found in almost every age—Zhen Dexiu in the Late Song; Xu Heng, Liu Yin, and Wu Cheng in the Yuan; Wu Yubi, Chen Xianzhang, He Xinyin, and Lin Zhaoen in the Ming. Here we shall let the better-known example of Wang Yangming suffice for purposes of illustration, as it is described by one of his followers, Wang Dong (1503–1581), in Huang’s Case Studies of Ming Confucians:
In the Qin period the true-learning was destroyed and when the Han arose scholars of the classics appeared who would only memorize and recite texts handed down from the ancients. From one to another they passed on a learning which became the exclusive property of classicists and literati. Lost and untransmitted was the learning which the ancient sages had intended to be understood and shared in by all men. Then Heaven gave birth to our teacher [Wang Yangming] who sprang from the eastern shore [i.e., Eastern Zhejiang]. Large-spirited and uniquely enlightened, he directly succeeded to the legacy of Confucius and Mencius which went straight to the mind-and-heart of man. Then untutored common folk and unlettered persons all could know that their own nature and spiritual intelligence sufficed for their self-fulfillment and self-sufficiency, and that it did not depend on externals, whether by oral, aural or visual instruction. With that the message untransmitted for two thousand years was restored to man’s comprehension again as if in a single morning.12
Tinged though it is with a certain social and philosophical coloration of the Wang Yangming school, what we have here again is the mythic role of the singularly endowed individual rediscovering the Way and renewing mankind, in which Wang is now cast. Some critics would question his orthodoxy, and others would insist against him on the continuing importance of scholarship, but the claim that Wang spoke for the Way was still put in the familiar terms of the orthodox tradition as a “repossessing of the Way” (daotong) and a reawakening of men. The name of almost any leading Neo-Confucian could be substituted in the same formula. In the Yuan and Ming, the frequency with which this inspirational model was cited by writers of all Neo-Confucian persuasions makes clear that it served as a powerful symbol for the renewal of the tradition, which in turn kept pressing ever outward on the limits of orthodoxy.
One element that lent both color and plausibility to this claim on behalf of Wang Yangming was the key agency of the mind in the orthodox version of the transmission of the Way. By this I mean the crucial role of the mind as self-critical and self-renewing not only in the later teachings of Wang Yangming but even in the original doctrine of Zhu Xi himself. In the passage from Zhu’s preface to the Mean, cited earlier as the scriptural source for the concept of “repossessing the Way” (daotong), the idea is introduced by allusions in the Classic of Documents to the sage-king’s doctrine concerning the mind of man and the mind of the Way, which call for man to achieve utmost discrimination and oneness of mind in order to keep himself morally and spiritually attuned to the Way. In Zhu’s preface, it is this state of mind that is prerequisite to perceiving the truths in the Confucian classics. Without it, the current texts are mere vehicles of classical pedantry; with it, one may perceive the special importance of such texts as the Great Learning and the Mean, which had been previously overshadowed and not fully appreciated among the extensive array of documents on ritual in the Record of Rites (Li ji).
So central was this doctrine of the mind to Zhu’s thinking that it found expression in memorials to the throne as well as in classical exegesis. Thus in a memorial to the throne of 1162 he says: “Everything depends on what the ruler studies, and correctness or incorrectness here depends on his square inch [of mind-and-heart].”13 Alluding to the steps of self-cultivation in the Great Learning, Zhu goes on to say: “Thus the extension of knowledge and investigation of things is like Yao and Shun’s ‘discrimination’ and ‘oneness’; to rectify the mind and make the will sincere is like Yao and Shun’s ‘holding fast the Mean.’ What the ancient sages passed on by word of mouth and transmitted from mind to mind was just this and nothing more.”14
Zhu reiterated this view in a sealed memorial of 1188, presenting six matters requiring the emperor’s urgent attention.
None of these six points can be neglected, but they all have their root in Your Majesty’s mind-and-heart. If the mind-and-heart is correct, then these six things cannot go wrong. But if even one iota of selfish-mindedness or selfish desire is allowed to intervene, then no matter how much mental effort or physical exertion go into the rectifying of these matters … the empire still cannot be well managed. Therefore this root of empire is also the most urgent of all urgent needs and cannot be put off even for a little while.15
Contributing to this view at the time was the rising importance of the Great Learning in a genre of imperial instruction, the “Learning of the Emperors” (Dixue), promoted in the days of the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi by scholars such as Fan Zuyu (1041–1098) and Zhen Zhangfang (1108–1148).16 In the latter’s “Essay on the Learning of the Emperors,” he again quotes the Great Learning: “What is called ‘cultivation of the person’ lies in ‘rectifying one’s mind.’ If the person is moved by passion, he will not achieve correctness; if he is moved by fear, he will not achieve correctness; if he is moved by fondness for something, he will not achieve correctness; if he is moved by sorrow and distress, he will not achieve correctness.”17
It is in this essay of Zhen Zhangfang that we also find one of the earliest references to the so-called method or formula of the mind-and-heart (xinfa), a term applied to the Neo-Confucian method of mind-rectification developed at this time. I have discussed elsewhere how this term came into use among Neo-Confucians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.18 Here, the point to be observed is that Zhen describes it as a method deriving from the sage-kings, Confucius and Mencius, in much the same way as Zhu Xi’s daotong. Thus he makes an explicit correlation between the Learning of the Emperors and Kings (diwang zhi xuewen), the “ruler’s method of the mind-and-heart” (renzhu xinfa), and the Great Learning’s method of self-cultivation through rectifying of the mind, as well as an implicit correlation with what Zhu Xi would later describe as the “repossession of the Way.” In fact, in the opening lines of his commentary on the Mean, Zhu Xi himself made the correlation explicit when, after identifying the Mean as a vessel of the orthodox tradition, he quoted Master Cheng to the effect that “this work represents the method of the mind-and-heart as transmitted in the Confucian school.”19
Simply put, these ways of learning all focused on the moral mind, but given the specifically political context in which the matter is discussed, the social conscience of the ruler is especially emphasized. Given further the heavy responsibility that attaches to the exercise of power, especially imperial power, and the consequences in human suffering attendant upon its abuse, the Neo-Confucians magnify the potentialities for good and ill in this mind, which is of course the human mind writ large in the person of the ruler. Such being the essence of the Neo-Confucian Way as it appears in these several formulations, one can recognize in it Tang Junyi’s characterization of Neo-Confucianism as a “revival of the Confucian faith in man” and as an “acceptance of the need to face all the negative factors [in man’s nature] and to find a way of realizing the positive ideal.”20
There is further significance in the appearance together of the Learning of the Way (daoxue) and Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (xinxue) at this critical juncture in the development of Song thought. Not only does it suggest a correlation between the newly asserted autonomy of the mind and the claim of direct access by the individual to the Way, with the authority to speak for it implicit in the term daoxue, but also it implies a different relation on the part of the individual scholar to the classics. While the authority of the Institutes of Zhou may be invoked by Wang Anshi, or of the Great Learning by Cheng Yi, the individual’s reinterpretation of it takes precedence over the tradition of commentary attached to the classic. Thus, though the text is still important, the individual’s understanding of its significance becomes far more so. If the Great Learning could have lain fallow for two thousand years while classical exegetes failed to discern its true significance, as Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi said, the mere physical transmission of texts becomes far less vital than the discernment of the individual mind into its real meaning. Hence in the “repossessing of the Way,” the orthodox tradition too is seen to depend less on the “handing on” of the classics and more on individual perceptivity.
During the reign of Shenzong (r. 1068–1085), the emperor was told that the Confucian Way had been taught by Hu Yuan under the aspects of substance, function, and literary expression (wen), with the latter providing the means for communicating and disseminating the Way.21 Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, for their part, emphasize substance and function but rarely mention “literature” or “texts” (wen) in this same connection, though texts and scholarship were hardly unimportant to Zhu Xi. And Zhen Dexiu, a prime proponent of the Cheng-Zhu Learning of the Mind-and-Heart in the early thirteenth century, substitutes “transmission” for “literary expression” or “text” in the threefold formulation of substance, function, and transmission (chuan),22 as if again to allow for the crucial agency of the mind-and-heart in this process, with its own direct access to the Way (dao). To the extent that subjectivity was thereby granted a larger role and the objective record or formal canon was assigned a diminished one, the ground had been prepared for the individual to exercise greater autonomy in relation to received text and classical tradition. The freedom with which Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi rearranged the Great Learning to suit their own ideas, and the ease with which their followers accepted the change, is a good illustration of this.
Thus the concept of the orthodox tradition or “repossessing of the Way” expressed a certain ideal of the heroic individual as the reactivator of traditional values and as the agent of social reform and human renewal. Associated with this prophetic role was a view of the mind as morally and socially conscious and with a keen sense of responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions and of the need this implies for the sensitization of the individual conscience—a conscience freed of excessive dependence on external authority by the Cheng-Zhu doctrine that inherent in the mind of man were all the “heavenly principles” needed to guide his conduct of life. I believe that each of these values—the importance of the individual, his duty to exercise his own conscience, and his relative autonomy in the creative interpreting of tradition—would be recognized as values in the Western liberal tradition. But before we draw any conclusions from this seeming resemblance, we shall need to explore other aspects of Neo-Confucian individualism in its social context.