From the standpoint of the Chinese population as a whole, the family was the predominant social and economic institution in an agricultural society, and in many respects it furnished the theoretical model for other institutions such as the patriarchal dynastic state. But as a literate tradition, Confucianism was also concerned from the start with individuals in relation to one another, as well as with the role of the scholar-official in his relations with the ruler and other scholars, teachers, and students.
Classically, the paradigm of human relationships was stated by Mencius as:
Between parent and child there is to be affection
Between ruler and minister, rightness
Between husband and wife, [gender] distinctions
Between older and younger [siblings] an order of precedence Between friends, trustworthiness.
(Mencius 3A:4)
Since this paradigm was strongly reaffirmed in later (especially Neo-Confucian) tradition as well as in other East Asian countries, we should note some of its implications. First, it focuses on human moral relationships and the priorities among them, particularly within the family. The setting of personal priorities and the making of value distinctions is fundamental to Confucianism. Next, it should be noted that all of these relations involve reciprocity. The obligations are differentiated but mutual and shared. Thus, for instance, the relation between parents and child is not characterized exclusively in terms of the filial duty of child to parent but in terms of mutual affection, and in other formulations of the husband/wife relationship, the same mutual affection and love is stressed.
It is also true that the respect for precedence (seniority), here identified particularly with the sibling relationship, was more broadly generalized in practice to apply to all five relationships, so that, for instance, the relationship of friends, here spoken of in terms of xin, mutual trust, and reliability and thus based on mutuality and equality, was often analogized to that of older and younger brother (i.e., fictively, between persons who were not actually blood relations). Similarly, the relation of ruler and minister was in later discourse often analogized to that of parent and child (though this was also disputed by leading Confucians, who saw the ruler/minister relationship as a collegial one).
Nevertheless, in this classic formulation of moral relations it is as striking that the ruler/minister relationship should contain no reference to loyalty as it is noteworthy that the parent/child relationship should lack any reference to filial piety. In later common (popular) discourse, loyalty and filial piety are often spoken of as the typical Confucian virtues, and it is to this customary Confucian formula that implicit reference is made by those today who look to Confucianism as a support for superior authority. Yet loyalty and filial piety are totally missing here. From this one can see the incongruity in the recent news from Singapore, reporting the enactment of legal processes to compel children to meet their filial obligation to support their parents. Chinese law, it is true, traditionally recognized the importance of filial obligation, and the state often honored it, but it was considered rare and abnormal for such cases to come before a magistrate. Such matters were to be settled in the home or local neighborhood. And it is clear that Confucius, as recorded in the Analects, would have nothing to do with mindless conformism or coercive measures to enforce filial duty. Many passages affirm Confucius’s belief that a forced or mechanical conformity to the norms of filial duty was not filial piety at all.1 Indeed, Confucius pointedly insisted on moral cultivation and consensual social rituals rather than legal compulsion as the way to deal with such human problems. This underscores how pertinent to the present situation is the historic experience of China with a genuine but neglected tradition of Confucian ritual in the authentic communitarian form, rather than in the authoritarian, law-and-order form.
Those familiar with high Confucian tradition and its finer nuances would be more conscious of the particular implications of Mencius’s dwelling on the ruler/minister relation rather than on what is sometimes translated as “ruler/subject.” Insofar as any subject might participate in governance, the same principle would apply, but in fact, as Mencius well understood, most “subjects” did not so participate in the political process, and what Mencius had in mind (as is the case later on with most Confucian scholarly literature) was the particular but at the same time mutual obligation of ruler and minister to adhere to what is right and to consider the relationship at an end if they cannot agree on what is right. In this case, undying loyalty attaches to principle, not persons.
In modern times, awareness of this basic Confucian teaching has often been lost, and superficial notions of unquestioning loyalty to the ruler have taken over. But as late as the Ming and Qing dynasties, Mencius was well understood by those familiar with his teachings as reaffirmed by the great Neo-Confucian scholar-teacher Zhu Xi. Spectacular cases can be cited of heroic Confucian ministers standing up for what was right against all the despotic power of Ming rulers. One of the most celebrated cases is that of the outstanding Confucian scholar/minister Fang Xiaoru (1357–1402). Fang defied the Yongle emperor, who tried to silence him by threatening death not only to Fang himself but to all his kin as far as the ninth degree of relationship if Fang did not cease his remonstrance against the emperor. Fang did not yield, and all his family paid the price—and Fang had him add a tenth degree: his disciples.
Another case is that of the Ming official Hai Rui (1513–1587), whose martyrdom was cited in the Mao era by the historian and playwright Wu Han as an example of courageous criticism of the ruler. In this instance, Hai Rui’s example was taken as an oblique reference to Peng Dehuai, a critic of Mao Zedong’s policies: Mao, while encouraging people to speak out, reserved to himself the right to have them punished for it, as, indeed, Peng and Wu were.
An even more revealing example of the “freedom of speech” issue is the case of the founding emperor of the Ming, Taizu (r. 1368–1398), no less of a despot for being a peasant and populist. Taizu sought to reserve to himself the prerogative of offering the ritual sacrifice to Confucius and to withdraw this privilege (with its accompanying authority) from local Confucian officials, who had performed it since at least the Tang dynasty. Then, after expurgating the text of the Mencius (used in the civil-service examinations) of what he considered contumacious passages insulting to rulers, Taizu sought further to have Mencius’s tablet removed from the Confucian temple. When his Confucian ministers objected, Taizu threatened death to any who opposed him, whereupon the minister Qian Tang, when he next came to court, brought with him a coffin, saying: “It would be an honor to die for Mencius.”2
Taizu’s attempt to suppress ministerial opposition goes to the heart of Mencius’s dictum that the ruler/minister relationship should be governed by mutual respect for what is right. It is not, then, a matter of legal rights or of free speech in general but of what Confucians would call proper respect or civility in the decorum that should prevail at court. In other words, it came under the Confucian heading of ritual decorum—of “rites” and not of legal rights or entitlements. (Indeed, in whatever ruling court or cabinet would not the conduct of such debate be a matter of personal decorum or civility rather than one of legal rights?)
The further significance of the episode lies in the specificity of the personal relations involved. This is freedom of speech in the particular context of the ruler/minister relationship. By logical and natural extension, it could apply to any subject who entered into such a personal or collegial association with the emperor (or into his official service), but ministerial remonstrance could not be taken as a right generally enjoyed by all subjects. It amounts, then, only to a restricted or limited freedom of speech, yet at the same time, asserted here as a basic human principle it is extendable to others who might assume that duty, and it could become applicable to any wider extension of people’s participation in the political process. In other words, embedded here in a particular personal, historical, and institutional context is a classic case of a Confucian universal human value. One could quibble about it and say that the Confucian case does not exactly fit the modern understanding of human rights, but if instead one is disposed to respect human values as experienced and expressed in different cultural settings, one could recognize here a rough parallel to the prophetic, protesting voice in other times and places, as in ancient Israel and thereafter in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Confucian “rightness” in the ruler/minister relation does not exactly correspond to the “righteousness” of God invoked by the Hebrew prophets, with which God’s “people” were to identify themselves, but as it was associated in Confucianism with the order ordained by Heaven (Tian), this “rightness” had a universal aspect as well as a particularistic one: it characterized the special relationship of ruler and minister as meant to serve the larger public interest and general welfare (gong).
On this basis, in the modern period reformers could take Confucian principles as an indigenous Chinese cultural soil in which to ground legal rights and democratic institutions. Indeed, since the Japanese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century shared the same Confucian moral ground, they claimed it as the basis and rationale for the adoption of “people’s rights” and parliamentary institutions in the Meiji period, to be followed in this shortly afterward by Chinese reformers who likewise sought to interpret Western democratic institutions in Confucian terms and transplant them to Chinese soil.
“Transplant” is a key word here because it leaves open the question of how such institutions, developed in the West, could become rooted, grow, and thrive, or perhaps not, in soil that was admittedly foreign yet at the same time recognizably human, irreducibly both common and diverse. To get a perspective on this modern adaptation, however, we must look further into the relationship of the individual and the community, so much at issue in the charge that Western human rights thinking is too individualistic for the more communitarian “Asian” traditions, then further we should consider this in relation to the Chinese historical process as it emerged from the time of Confucius and Mencius down through the imperial dynasties to the modern era. Indeed to my mind, the weakness of many discussions of China, Confucianism, and human rights is that they tend to operate purely on the conceptual level—attempting to compare or contrast values in the abstract rather than seeing how they have been observed and experienced in time, in a developing historical process.
First, let us examine the status of the “individual” in Confucian thought. Spokesmen for what is called an “Asian” communitarian position are not wrong in supposing that the concept of a radically freestanding, autonomous individual is foreign to Confucianism, but the contrast is more with the modern age than it is with some earlier Western traditions, themselves more communitarian (or even with contemporary communitarian movements in the West that react against the recent trend). Modern libertarian individualism, as a product of rapid economic development and social change, presents the individual with a new abundance of “choices” to be made, while the extraordinary power of modern technology inspires and inflates the dream of unlimited expansiveness and liberation from all constraints. However, today these are phenomena of both East and West, wherever industrialization takes place; it is not a case of East versus West. Moreover, advocates of a traditional Asian “communitarianism” are wrong if they suppose—as Western writers too often have done—that in Confucianism the individual’s worth is found only in the group, that he is no more than the sum of the social roles he is expected to perform, or that he is content with subordination to the group and established authority.
Confucius himself in the opening line of the Analects sets the matter in perspective when he speaks first of learning (from past tradition) and practicing it in the present, then of welcoming friends from afar (to share experiences with them), and finally of characterizing the truly noble man as one who is unembittered even if he is unrecognized by others (especially the ruler). The first two lines express the idea of a self shaped in the process of learning from others, but the last line conveys the sense that this should produce a person able to stand on his own. Later in the Analects, this process is spoken of as “learning for one’s self,” in contrast to “learning for the sake of others’ [approval],”—that is to say, for true self-development rather than to gain social acceptance or political advancement.
This concept of a fully realized personhood is reaffirmed in Confucius’s concise résumé of his own life experience:
At fifteen I set my heart on learning.
At thirty I was established [stood on my own feet].
At forty I had no perplexities.
At fifty I learned what Heaven commanded of me.
By sixty my ear had become attuned to it.
At seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing.3
Here Confucius characterizes his lifelong learning as centered on his own self-development and self-fulfillment in the course of meeting the demands of Heaven. If we are to judge from the rest of the Analects, what he learned had much to do with his relationship to others and his sense of responsibility for them, but here he describes his life experience as one of inner growth in response to the providential guidance of Heaven—Heaven as representing a higher moral authority in the universe and Heaven’s Way as defining his own mission in life. In his case, “Heaven’s command” (tianming) is not the same as a dynastic mandate, though it shares with that mandate responsibility for what Heaven ordains morally and politically. Instead, his is a very personal commission and vocation to public service that demands difficult and unexpected things of him, which is not easily accepted at first but eventually brings a sense of personal freedom and self-fulfillment.
This is no less true of the human condition and the human ideal as we see it in Mencius, for whom the Way and the imperatives of Heaven are found in the inmost depths of one’s own being, just as the sense of “rightness” (yi) is said by him to spring from within one’s deepest natural sentiments. Moreover, among the other two classic texts that for later Confucians constitute the canonical Four Books, the Mean (Zhong yong), while paying due respect to social roles and obligations, extols above all personal sincerity or integrity (cheng), which means being true to one’s innermost self, especially when one is not observed by others or answerable to them. In the same vein, the famous Eight Items of the Great Learning give clear priority in the first five items to the individual’s self-development, before extending this further to family or state.
It is these texts and these concepts that later became formative of Neo-Confucian self-cultivation, reaffirming the morally responsible and affectively responsive self in the face of profound philosophical challenges from Buddhism and Daoism. And it is this same sense of the Way and its rightness, deep within one’s self, from which a long line of Ming Neo-Confucian scholars from Qian Tang, Fang Xiaoru, Hai Rui, and on down to Liu Zongzhou drew the conviction and courage to challenge Ming despots. When one risks one’s life in order to be true to one’s own inmost self, it cannot be thought of as merely performing for others, fulfilling a social role, or conforming to the values of the group. Though it would be equally inappropriate to call this self-centeredness simply a form of “individualism” (if by that one means individual freedom of choice or emancipation from social constraints), it does affirm a strong moral conscience, shaped and formed in a social, cultural process that culminates, at its best, in a sense of self-fulfillment within society and the natural order. Given its special Confucian features, one might call this a distinct “Confucian individualism,” but I prefer the term “personalism” to “individualism,” since it shares some common ground with forms of personalism in Western tradition as distinct from a modern liberationist “individualism.” Here, “personalism” expresses the worth and dignity of the person not as a raw, “rugged” individual but as a self shaped and formed in the context of a given cultural tradition, its own social community, and its natural environment to reach full personhood.4
On a portentous occasion in Hong Kong, anticipating its takeover by the People’s Republic of China, Professor Anthony Yu of the University of Chicago discussed some of the issues at stake there. He described one factor threatening the future of education: the view that in China the collectivity always takes precedence over the individual, which inhibits the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Characterizing the Western educational tradition as “grounded upon the supreme good of individual self-fulfillment,” he contrasted this to the Chinese tradition wherein “political and moral virtues unite as an indivisible homology in which the communal and collective take precedence over the individual.”5
This is not a new view in the West, and, of course, in China it is one the state is glad enough to accept. It remains nonetheless questionable as a characterization of the Confucian standpoint, which looked for a balanced relation between self and society. Although Confucius himself spoke for and to an educated class of scholar-officials whose sense of political responsibility was inseparable from their privileged status as beneficiaries and custodians of a civilized learning tradition, he had little success himself in government and had to reconcile himself to a life of scholarship and teaching. In the end, however, he insisted that teaching and education themselves fulfilled the obligation of public service—one need not take office in order to fulfill this duty.6
No doubt Confucius had something of this in mind when he spoke, in the paradigmatic account of his own life experience cited above, about how he came, albeit slowly and reluctantly, to accept what Heaven had ordained for him: that is, learning in what capacity he could conscientiously fulfill Heaven’s commission (his political vocation) as he tried to cope with the specific life situation Heaven presented to him—the difficulty he encountered in trying to obtain official employment on terms consistent with his principles. Could we perhaps call this belated discovery of his true vocation (teaching, not serving in office) an affirmation of “truth” as the supreme value? In Western terms, yes, we might, but in Confucian terms not exactly congruent with our own, it would more likely be expressed as Confucius’s adherence to and following of the right Way (Dao).
When taunted for his fastidious refusal to serve rulers if it meant being co-opted by them for unworthy purposes, while yet he persisted stubbornly in the idealistic hope of political reform, Confucius replied: “One cannot herd with the beasts or flock with the birds. If I am not to serve in the company of other human beings (i.e., act as a responsible social being), then what am I to do? If the Way prevailed among men, I would not be trying to change things.”7
Here Confucius insists on the following of the Way as a higher duty than simply taking office, and, without abandoning the moral struggle, he persists in acting on behalf of the Way to reform an imperfect human society. Clearly, he did not take service of the state or subordination to the established order as an ultimate obligation. Rather for him, pursuit of the Way came close to what Professor Yu has called “the pursuit of truth” in the West. Yet if one considers that both “Truth” in the West and the “Way” in China open out on unlimited horizons and in some indefinable way ultimately converge, there would seem to be little use in drawing a fine line between them—much less in opening up a large chasm between East and West on this score.
The more relevant distinction to be made here is one Confucians drew between the Way of the Ruler and the Way of the Teacher. Ideally (in ancient legend), these two roles had been joined as one in the sage-kings, but by Confucius’s time the Way had become split apart. For all later Confucians, Confucius as teacher and not as ruler was the personification of sageliness, the highest standard and model for anyone to follow. No later ruler ever commanded the same respect.
Another point of common confusion in regard to the issue of the individual versus the community or collectivity has been in positing the dichotomy of public (gong) and private (si) as necessarily an antithetical one—“public” as standing for the common good and “private,” negatively, for individual selfishness. It is true that these concepts are sometimes found in opposition, as when individual desires are seen to conflict with the common good. This is the case in the section on the “Evolution of Rites” in the Record of Rites compiled in the Han dynasty, which contrasts the primordial ideal of “all-under-Heaven as shared in common” (Tianxia weigong) with the historical reality of people pursuing their own private interests at others’ expense—a social condition Confucius himself had to face and was unable to change, sage though he was. In the same Record of Rites, there is also a discussion of the opposition between “Heaven’s principles” (identified here with the common good) and “human desires” (understood here to be “selfish”). In the given context, however, this dichotomy refers to actions of the ruler that are selfish, when properly he should be acting in the common interest and holding himself to a higher, self-sacrificial standard of service to the public good.8 Indeed, the implication of the passage is that the ruler should not indulge his own selfish desires at the expense of the people’s legitimate desires, appetites, and material needs. It is not a question of ordinary persons sacrificing their natural desires to the group.
Thus, though “Heaven’s principles” and “human desires” are juxtaposed in this case, it is not meant to suggest a necessary opposition or conflict between private and public, individual and collectivity, but rather to assert the obligation of rulers to uphold a public standard that keeps in balance individual desires and the common good. Even the great Confucian thinker Xunzi, though he is generally identified with the view of human nature as evil, subscribed to this idea that the social order should aim at the satisfaction of people’s desires.9
The same issue arises in the famous Han-dynasty “Debate on Salt and Iron.” Here the spokesmen for the state claim that their instituting of state monopolies over key resources, their maintaining of state marketing controls, and their general policy of state intervention in the economy is meant to defend the public interest against private exploitation. In this debate, however, spokesmen for the Confucians argue against this, charging that such regulation and intervention is contrary to the people’s interest, which would be better served by a free-market economy and private enterprise, allowing “the people” to act in their own interest and on their own initiative. In this debate, both sides claim to speak for the public interest, but it is the Confucians who argue that this interest is better served by encouraging the people’s private initiative, while the bureaucrats’ claim to speak for the public interest is questioned as only a cover for the pursuit of their own vested interests.
From this it may seem again that the Confucian ideal was a balance of public and private, not an assertion of one over the other. In fact, from the Confucian point of view the state’s responsibility for the public interest was to encourage legitimate private initiative. How to define what was legitimate remained an issue, and the state, historically, was not slow to assert its own authority in this respect (any more than it is today), but Confucians were just as ready to challenge any such claim on the part of the state bureaucracy (guan), asserting instead that the public interest (gong) consists in serving the legitimate desires and material needs of the people.10 A balance of public and private (gongsi yiti), not the person or individual subordinated to the collectivity or state, remained the Confucian ideal.
When Western notions of liberalism and individualism reached East Asia in the nineteenth century, they had no precise equivalents in Chinese or Japanese parlance, and neologisms had to be invented for them. Geren zhuyi (Jap.: kojin shugi), the term devised for “individualism,” emphasized the discrete or isolated individual. This contrasts with the Confucian personalism referred to above, which conceived of the person as a member of the larger human body, never abstracted from society but always living in a dynamic relation to others, to a biological and historical continuum, and to the organic process of the Way. The term ziyou zhuyi (Jap.: jiyū shugi), which was used to represent “liberalism,” emphasized the autonomy of the self, the idea that one should be able to “follow one’s own inclination.” Ziyou has appeared in many modern compound terms rendering different aspects of “liberty” or “freedom” in Western political or legal thought. The current term for “liberalization” (ziyouhua) in the People’s Republic is an instance of this.
In these cases, while a special emphasis on the individual was perceived as the distinctive feature of these Western attitudes, East Asian translators were not completely at a loss for words to express it, nor were they forced to fall back on transliteration as the only way to represent ideas utterly strange to them. In fact, the importance of individual autonomy or being able to “follow one’s own inclination” (ziyou) was not foreign to traditional ways of thinking, and there may indeed be a certain Neo-Confucian predilection expressed in the choice of these terms to represent the nineteenth-century Western concept of “liberalism,” which put more emphasis on individual freedom than more recent definitions do. Thus the latter, though usefully broad when applied to Western or Confucian tradition as a whole, may not be as appropriate for present purposes as the definition of liberalism in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: “a philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of man and the autonomy of the individual, and standing for tolerance and freedom for the individual from arbitrary authority in all spheres of life.”11
Some years ago, I noted tendencies toward individualism in sixteenth-century Ming thinkers considered radical in their own day and no less so by many modern writers.12 Yet for all their radicalism, it seemed to me then that these thinkers in the Taizhou wing of the Wang Yangming school, and especially Li Zhi, could only be understood as products of a long Neo-Confucian development. In what follows, I will return to the Neo-Confucian sources of that individualism.
The Vocabulary of Neo-Confucian Individualism
The zi of the ziyou in “liberalism” is a term for “self,” frequently used in combination with ji, shen, or si. Like ji and shen, it is often translatable simply as “self.”13 In classical Chinese usage, zi also has the connotation “from, in, or of itself,” much like our prefix “auto-.” This sense of self-originated or self-motivated gains added emphasis when used in combination with you, “from” or “out of.” Thus zi readily forms compounds corresponding to ours with the prefix “self-.” For instance, in the Great Learning it says: “to make the will sincere means allowing of no self-deception (ziqi), as when we hate a bad smell or love what is good-looking, which is called self-satisfaction (ziqian).” In both cases, self-deception and self-satisfaction, the implication is that the source of value lies within the self and that the immediate, affective, visceral response to things is the authentic one. The Neo-Confucians proceeded on the same assumption, and one could compile a virtual lexicon of terms with the prefix zi- that recur frequently in their discussions. A few of the more common examples follow:
Ziran: “natural” in the sense of what is so of itself and not made to be or appear so (wei). The Neo-Daoists had made almost a supreme value of naturalness (ziran), in the sense of uninhibited spontaneity or an amoral, pragmatic adaptability. For their part, Neo-Confucians were unwilling to concede that moral effort and rational calculation were unnatural to man. They followed Mencius in trying to steer a middle course between a laissez-faire, value-free pragmatism on the one hand and forced effort or conscious manipulation on the other, often citing Mencius’s eschewal of either “forgetting” or “abetting” the moral nature as equally prejudicial to the natural process of growth in accordance with the inner directedness of things. How to sustain a moral life that is natural, nonmanipulative, and unfeigned was a central concern of both Song and Ming thought. Thus Wu Cheng (1249–1333), in explaining the opening lines of Zhu Xi’s commentary on the Great Learning, points out how naturally the cultivation of the moral nature leads to the “renewing of the people” because it evokes a natural response in accordance with the inherent propensity of their own natures.14
Ziren: “taking it upon oneself” or “bearing the responsibility oneself.” This is in accord with voluntarism in the moral life and of action that is in keeping with “learning for the sake of one’s self”—that is, with the idea that one must take full responsibility for one’s own actions, since actions undertaken with a view to pleasing others lead, as Zhu said above, to “self-destruction.” The locus classicus for the term is in the Mencius (5B:1), where it refers to “taking on the weight of the world.” In Neo-Confucianism, this is closely associated with the conception of the moral hero and becomes a key concept in Neo-Confucian moral individualism.
Zide: literally “getting it by or for oneself.” This expression was used in two important senses. One, relatively low keyed, is that of learning or experiencing some truth for oneself and deriving inner satisfaction therefrom; here zide has the meaning of “learned to one’s satisfaction,” “self-contented,” “self-possessed.” The other sense of the term is freighted with deeper meaning: “getting or finding the Way in oneself,” as referred to by Mencius: “The noble man steeps himself in the Way because he wishes to ‘get it’ himself. When he gets it himself, he will be at ease with it. When he is at ease with it he can trust it deeply, and when he can trust it deeply, he can find its source wherever he turns. That is why the noble man wishes to get it himself” (4B:14). Zhuangzi also uses the term in the sense of a deep inner fulfillment in accord with the Way.15 Zhu Xi’s commentary on zide in Mencius explains it as a silent recognition and penetration of the mind, so as to find the Way naturally (ziran) within the self. He cites Cheng Hao’s view of it as “learning that is unspoken and is acquired naturally is truly ‘getting it oneself.’ Learning that is contrived and forced is not ‘getting it oneself.’”16
The centrality of zide in the Cheng-Zhu system is indicated by the fact that Master Cheng’s discussion of it is the first cited passage at the head of the “General Introduction to Learning” in the Great Compendium on Human Nature and Principle (Xingli daquan), the Ming-dynasty compilation long accepted as the official “bible” of Neo-Confucian philosophy. Here Cheng speaks of learning as seeking within oneself and says “the most refined of principles should be sought and found in oneself (zi qiu de zhi).17 Hence among the possible translations of de as “acquire,” “obtain,” “possess,” any of which may be appropriate in a given context, I have in general used “get” as the most basic meaning, despite its colloquial tone, but sometimes “find,” as in “finding the Way in oneself” or “finding [satisfaction, contentment, joy] in oneself.”
Both ziren and zide recur frequently in descriptions of the crucial learning experiences or decisive conversion experiences of leading Neo-Confucians.
Much of chapter 4 in Zhu Xi’s Reflections on Things at Hand on “Preserving One’s Mind” is concerned with the problem of naturalness and getting the truth or the Way for oneself as a matter of practical self-cultivation. This was a particular concern of Cheng Yi. Of the many passages quoted from him on this point, the two following will illustrate the point.
Master Yichuan [Cheng Yi] said: “The student should revere and respect this Mind. He should not anxiously try to force it. Instead he should cultivate it deeply, nourish it richly and steep himself in it. Only thus can he get it for himself (zide). If one anxiously presses in pursuit of it, that is mere selfishness (siji). In the end it will not suffice for attaining the Way.”18
Nowadays students are reverent but do not get [the Way] for themselves [zide]. All this is because in their minds they are not at home with reverence. It is also because they carry reverence [seriousness] too far in dealing with things. This is what is meant by “Respectfulness, without the rules of decorum, becomes laborious bustle. …”19 Rules of decorum are not a body of ceremonies but natural principles (ziran de daoli). Because one is only respectful, without practicing natural principles, he is not at home with himself (zizai). One must be respectful and yet at ease.20 Now the reason why one must be right in appearance and correct in speech is not merely to attain goodness for himself and see what others will say. It is because according to the Principle of Nature (tianli), he should be so [i.e., it is both natural and proper to be so]. Basically there should be no selfish ideas but only being in accord with principle.21
The relevance of this to “learning for the sake of oneself” as opposed to “learning for the sake of others” need not be elaborated here. This is a familiar problem of the spiritual life in other religious and ethical traditions: how to balance or reconcile moral effort with religious awe and acceptance.22 In Cheng Yi’s case, it is complicated by the built-in ambiguity in his use of the term jing, meaning both “reverent” and “serious.” As understood in the Cheng-Zhu school, it was meant to combine moral effort and religious acceptance in a way that was “natural” for a man of conscience.
For Zhu Xi too zide had a special significance in relation to finding or possessing the Way in oneself. In the Mean (14), the term is used in this sense in a passage that describes the Way of the Noble Person (junzi) as applicable to and practicable in all life situations. “The noble person can find himself in no situation where he is not himself [i.e., does not find within himself (zide) the Way that will enable him to deal with all circumstances].” And in Zhu’s summation of the significance of the Mean as a whole, he says:
Zisi relates the ideas that had been handed down to him as the basis of his discourse. First he explains that the Way originally derives from Heaven and cannot be altered. Its substance inheres in the self and cannot be departed from. Next it sets forth the essentials of preserving and nourishing this [substance in the mind] and of practicing self-examination. Finally, it expresses the ultimate achievement of sagely and spiritual men in the transforming power of their virtue. In this Zisi wished for the learner to look within and get it [the substance of the Way] for himself.23
From this it is understandable that Zhu’s “repossessing of the Way” (daotong) should reflect the Cheng brothers’ view of “getting it oneself” as well as Chen Changfang’s linkage of the sages’ learning of the mind-and-heart to “getting it oneself.” Wing-tsit Chan, in discussing how Zhu arrived at his concept of daotong, notes Cheng Yi’s central role, saying of him, “Cheng’s main point was that his brother found the Confucian Way, meaning the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, in surviving Classics himself. Like most Neo-Confucianists, his emphasis was on ‘acquiring for oneself’ (zide).” In the same vein but in a quite different area of Chu’s thought, Richard Lynn cites zide first among the qualities Zhu Xi appreciated in great poetry, along with others emphasizing naturalness, freedom, and spontaneity.24
The Sage as Ideal Self
Sagehood and how to attain it is the central theme of Cheng-Zhu thought, which is to say, of “learning for the sake of one’s self.” It was already the unifying conception of Zhou Dunyi’s (1017–1073) major work Comprehending the Changes (I-Tongshu),25 and from it Zhu Xi drew the initial selection for “The Essentials of Learning,” which set the pattern for his Things at Hand (Jinsilu).26 Cheng Yi contributed to the development of this theme with his youthful essay “What Yanzi Loved to Learn” (i.e., how to become a sage),27 which Zhu likewise quoted early in the same chapter of Things at Hand. Consistently with this, Zhu’s own work concludes with a discussion of those qualities in the sages and worthies that make them fitting models for the individual.
Sagehood had long been a dominant ideal of Chinese thought for classical Confucians as well as for Daoists and Neo-Daoists. What gave special significance to its discussion in the Song by the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi was their view of the sage as not just a lofty and remote ideal but a model for their own times. They shared a conviction that sagehood could be “learned” by anyone, and Zhou Dunyi’s positive assurance to this effect became one of the most quoted, and also disputed, passages in later Neo-Confucian literature:
“Can one become a sage through learning?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any essential way?”
What follows in Zhou’s own work and in other major texts of Neo-Confucianism sets forth this “essential way.” Thus sagehood not only was a generalized human ideal of symbolic value but became specifically a model for self-cultivation. The meaning of this is especially clear in Cheng Yi’s discussion:
The way to learn is none other than rectifying one’s mind and nourishing one’s nature. When one abides by the mean and correctness and becomes sincere, he is a sage. In the learning of the noble person, the first thing is to be clear in one’s mind and to know where to go, and then act vigorously in order that one may arrive at sagehood.… Therefore the student must exert his own mind to the utmost. If he does so, he will know his own nature. And if he knows his own nature, examines his own self and makes it sincere, he becomes a sage.29
It is just as simple as that. The message, directed to any and all students, could not be more straightforward or matter of fact. No one lacks the essential capability for sagehood, if he will just make up his mind to achieve it.
Later, Cheng adds:
In later years people thought that sagehood was basically due to innate genius and could not be achieved through learning. Consequently the way to learn has been lost to us. Men do not seek within themselves but outside themselves and engage in extensive learning, effortful memorization, clever style, and elegant diction, making their words elaborate and beautiful. Thus few have arrived at the Way. This being the case, the learning of today and the learning that Yanzi loved are quite different.30
Again, the relevance of this “learning to be a sage” to “learning for the sake of oneself” rather than “for the sake of others” is evident. The requisites for the one are the same as for the other; both are contrasted to the prevalent forms of literary learning and indiscriminate erudition. The path to sagehood, practically speaking, represents the method of “finding the way in oneself,” and the sage becomes the ideal self for purposes of Neo-Confucian self-cultivation.
The meaning of this is twofold. When Zhu Xi explains the point of “Reverencing the self or the person” (jingshen) in the Elementary Learning, he says, “This section presents a basic model for emulating the sages and worthies.”31 Elsewhere, however, Zhu stressed that sagehood came from within the self. In answer to a question about relying on the teachings of the sages as a guide to one’s own learning and conduct, he said, “In talking to students we can only teach them to act according to the teachings of the sages. When after making some effort they realize something within themselves, they will know naturally (of themselves, zizhi) what it really is to be a sage.”32 In other words, one draws on one’s own experience as well as on the model put before one, and the result partakes of both individuality and commonality. The sage is the self writ large, but in both of these senses: an internalization of others’ representations of sagehood (in the classics, histories, etc.) and a projection, an objectification, of one’s own experience.
In this process, the experience of one’s own age and the preconceptions of one’s own generation enter in. Zhu Xi himself understood this when, at the end of Things at Hand, he drew more heavily on the personal experience and example of the Song masters than on the ancients as a guide to sagely learning. Indeed, the point of compiling Things at Hand was to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of sagehood by drawing on the teachings and achievements in self-cultivation of his near contemporaries. In turn, much of the effectiveness of this work and its appeal to Zhu’s followers lay in its modernity or contemporaneity. Its readers could identify with the Song masters, whose experience of life was closer to their own. Thus sagehood, instead of remaining a lofty abstraction from the past, became defined, and the ideal self to some extent delimited, in ways characteristic of that age.
Some of these delimitations are more apparent to us, with the hindsight of history, than they were to Zhu Xi. He believed deeply in the perfectibility of the moral nature in all men. Philosophically, this was based on his doctrine that each man possessed the moral nature or principle inherent in all, sharing a common nature that could form a unity with Heaven and earth and the myriad things, while at the same time each had his own individuality. Zhu Xi sometimes used the metaphor of the moon and its reflection in different bodies of water to illustrate the universality and particularity of principle (or man’s nature), expressed in the formulation “principle is one but its particularizations are diverse” (liyi fenshu). But this metaphor, drawn from Huayan Buddhism, had the defect that, since the one moon was real while its many reflections were only passing phenomena, the particular nature manifest in the individual might be taken as only an insubstantial reflection of some transcendental reality. Wishing to affirm the substantiality of the individual in his concrete humanity, morally as well as physically, Zhu later chose to express it in terms of the metaphor of growing grain:
One substance is expressed in the myriad things, but the one substance and the myriad things are integral by themselves, while the largeness and smallness of each has its own definiteness.… The myriad objects embody in themselves, each and every one of them, their own principle. This is what is meant [in Zhou Dunyi’s Comprehending the Changes (I-Tongshu)] by “changes in the Heavenly Way resulting in each possessing its endowed life and acquired nature.…” It is like a grain of millet, which gives birth to a seedling, which gives birth to a flower. When the flower bears seeds, which become millet again, the original figure is restored … they will go on producing like this eternally.33
Here the reality of principle in each individual, which is the basis of his self-perfection and his aspiration to sagehood, is made clear in a most concrete way. There is no human being not similarly endowed.
This universal principle and potentiality in all men is much in the mind of Zhu Xi as he addresses them in his written works. His preface to the Great Learning and the opening lines of his commentary stress universal education as the basis for renewing the people and leading each person to the perfecting of his own nature. In a preface to Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsilu), he expresses the hope that it could serve as a guide to the cultivation of self and sagehood even for “young lads in isolated villages.”34 Likewise, when he recommended the Elementary Learning and its “Reverence of the Self” as a guide to sagehood, he spoke of it as “serving for the edification of unlearned shi.”35 Just exactly what shi meant to him in contemporary terms is not clear; probably Chu thought of this class as not essentially different from the scholar-knights or scholar-officials of ancient times in regard to their basic human functions and commitments, even though he knew that conditions of life had changed since then (for instance, in regard to the conduct of education and the institutionalization of the examination system). We today would probably be more conscious of the elite status and leadership functions of the shi as differentiating them from the common man in the country village.
“Taking Responsibility Oneself”
The educated man, Song Confucians understood, should be prepared to serve in government and develop specialized skills where appropriate to serve humanitarian purposes. For its part, the Cheng-Zhu school held, as we have seen, that the essence of government lay in universal self-discipline, beginning with the ruler’s self-rectification. This obliged the minister, in his relation to the ruler as defined in the Five Constant Relations (i.e., “Between prince and minister there is [a bond of] rightness”), to assist the emperor in his self-cultivation and in the conduct of his moral life. In other words, he is to be a minister in the sense of counselor, mentor, preceptor.
This was all the more the case with the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi, who as court officials often served in preceptorial roles such as “lecturer from the classics mat,” discussing current affairs in the light of the values and principles set forth in the classics. They directed the counsel given in their memorials and lectures toward the primary motivation of the ruler: his need to take full personal responsibility for the conduct of the Way. Often, this is expressed, as we have seen, in terms of ziren, “taking responsibility oneself,” closely accompanied by the related ideas of learning for oneself, making up one’s own mind, and making a definite decision or commitment on behalf of the Way.
Cheng Hao told the Emperor: “To rule with a sincere mind-and-heart is to be a true king.… Your majesty has the natural endowment of Yao and Shun, but only if he takes it as his personal responsibility (ziren) to have the mind-and-heart of Yao and Shun can he fulfill their Way.”36
Here the close connection in Cheng Hao’s mind between sincerity, making up one’s own mind, and taking personal responsibility is evident. Cheng Yi, for his part, speaks in much the same terms and to the same point:
The way of government may be discussed in terms of its fundamentals and of its practice. In terms of its fundamentals it is nothing but “rectifying what is wrong in the ruler’s mind”37 and “rectifying one’s mind in order to rectify the minds of the officials at court.”…38 In terms of its practice nothing can be done if the ruler does not want to save the country.39
In a lengthy memorial to the throne, Cheng Yi reiterated the need for the emperor to make a definite decision and commit himself to the Way. Three things were most needful in rulership: for the emperor to commit himself, to share the responsibility he personally accepted for the Way, and to find worthy men able to accept the same responsibility.
Committing oneself means to be perfectly sincere and single minded, to take up the Way as one’s own responsibility (yi dao ziren), to take the teachings of the sages as trustworthy, to believe that the governance of the kings can be carried out, to avoid following rigidly the advice of those nearby or being swayed by public clamor, but to be determined to bring about a world like that of the Three Dynasties.40
In Zhu Xi’s sealed memorial of 1162, an early expression of his approach to politics, he urges the emperor not to rely on what he is told by Zhu and others but by objective study, subjective confirmation, and discussion with others, to find out and get for himself (zide) the truth of the Way.41 In this and many other passages, Zhu Xi stresses mind-rectification as the essential method by which the ruler fulfills his personal responsibility for the conduct of the Way. In one sense, it can be said that this approach is derived from the view of education discussed earlier, extending it into the domain of politics. On the other hand, it is significant that the essential elements in this doctrine of the examination of conscience or rectification of mind were voiced first by Zhu Xi in this memorial, i.e., in a political context, before it appeared in his preface to the Mean as a more generalized doctrine for human cultivation. It was via the public man and the political function that the more fundamental human problem was first addressed.
It has often been asserted that the distinctive feature of Song political life was the increased centralization of authority and bureaucratization of dynastic rule. Sometimes this has been spoken of as “Song autocracy,” a new stage in the long-term development of an increasingly autocratic dynastic system. Yet it can also be argued that the Song represented a new stage in the rise of the scholar-official class as well and in the extension of their influence in government.42 Modern scholars have confirmed the impression given by the Song statesman and historian Fan Zuyu, who credited the Song with encouraging freer discussion and debate at court than any previous dynasty.43
These trends were concurrent and coexisted in a relation of complementarity as well as in a state of tension. There was an increasing centralization of bureaucratic rule, but in certain areas and on different levels of government this thrust greater responsibilities on the managerial class as well as concentrating greater power in the hands of the ruler. This power of the ruler was perceived as both an ominous threat and a promising possibility by the new class of educated, civil-oriented Confucian officials. When lecturing the emperor, they stressed how crucial it was that he use his power for good rather than ill, trying to bolster his confidence in the power to do good and impress on him the consequences of failure.
In the Northern Song especially, there had been an air of optimism concerning man’s ability to accomplish great and good things by the creative use of human reason. Economic growth and cultural affluence encouraged this optimism and to some extent sustained it even through repeated frustrations and failures to achieve the idealistic goals of Song reformers. Thus with the Cheng brothers and even with Zhu Xi in more trying circumstances later there is a sense of political and cultural crisis but also a stubborn, idealistic faith that man has it within his power to meet the challenge.
No doubt the readiness, indeed resoluteness, of scholars like the Chengs and Zhu Xi to express themselves so vigorously in writing and to speak out with great frankness at court reflected some of the trends of the times and the characteristic attitudes of their class. The economic development of the country, especially in central and southern China, supported a significantly larger number of educated persons in the performance of their political and cultural functions and gave them a new sense of their own importance, a lively esprit de corps, greatly reinforcing their own self-image and self-confidence.44 This is seen not only in the Cheng brothers but in their opponents, such as Wang Anshi and Su Dongpo.
This self-confidence cannot be compared with the more aggressive and expansive attitude of the Western bourgeoisie in later centuries, and if the scholar-officials of the Song can be thought of in any sense as performing the political functions of a middle class, it is only because as local gentry they had one foot in the land and one in the bureaucracy.45 The “sprouts of capitalism” that have been detected in the China of this period did not grow and flower into anything like the economic and political pluralism of the West.46 Available evidence suggests that neither the Cheng brothers nor Zhu Xi were propertied or at all well off,47 and their later followers saw them as having led lives of great hardship.48 This was no doubt possible, even within a generally rising trend for the gentry as a whole, because of differential rates of growth in some regions and the varying fortunes of individuals and families. Nevertheless, Song scholars did have the leisure to pursue their cultural interests, enjoyed the immunities and protections that their class had managed to win in return for its performance of essential bureaucratic functions, and were supported when in difficulty by other members of that class.
The essence of the Cheng brothers’ own situation is captured in an episode involving Cheng Yi’s stipend as a “lecturer from the classics mat.” The convention at court was that the lecturer should submit an application for his salary to the Board of Revenue—in itself an example of the increasing bureaucratization of life. Cheng refused to do this, even though he had to borrow money to live on. When asked about this, he replied that to apply for his salary as if for a favor was demeaning, especially for the lecturer from the classics mat, who was supposed to serve as mentor to the emperor and should be treated with appropriate respect. “The trouble is that today scholars and officials are accustomed to begging,” he said. “They beg at every turn.”49
The matter was eventually handled by proxy, in typical Chinese face-saving fashion, so that Cheng did get his stipend, but for us the story registers several significant points: first, there is Cheng Yi’s attempt to assert an independent role for the scholar-official at court vis-à-vis the increasing power of the ruler; second, there is his own acknowledgment that the principle or standard he wishes to uphold was not in practice widely respected; and third is the fact that he was only able to make this rather striking gesture with the help he received from his colleagues. Class solidarity supported him in this rather strained affirmation of self-respect, but the net effect, if any, was more to register a moral point than to score a political gain. Thus, when Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi urged the emperor to emulate the sages and to take full personal responsibility for the conduct of the Way, it was a projection of the same sense of individual integrity and self-respect that they wished to assert for themselves.
Much the same purpose was served by Zhu Xi’s strong emphasis on the relationship between prince and minister as essentially a moral one. It tried to establish the moral equality of the two as well as their collegial solidarity, in contrast to the prevailing view of the minister as the servitor or virtual slave of the emperor. In this respect, it sought to gain moral leverage on the ruler, for want perhaps of a stronger position for the minister at court. Cheng Yi, reaffirming the stance of Mencius, insisted that the relation between prince and minister was primarily a moral one and obliged the latter to depart from the service of a ruler with whom he had fundamental differences in principle. “Unless the ruler honors virtue and delights in moral principles … it is not worth having anything to do with him.”50 In Zhu Xi’s Things at Hand, Cheng Yi is quoted as saying, “When a scholar is in high position, his duty is to save his ruler and not to follow him in wrongdoing.”51 And further, “when one has resolved that ‘if he can hear the Way in the morning, he will die content in the evening,’ he will not be content for even a single day with what should not be acquiesced in.”52
Julia Ching has characterized the stance of the Neo-Confucians in these terms:
The authority to which they gave adherence was higher than the state, which saw itself as guardian of classical exegesis, higher even than the classics. They relied primarily on their own authority, as self-appointed interpreters of the sacred message. Their claim was to solid classical learning, but particularly to their own insights into the spiritual meaning of the texts. For this reason, in the political realm, they acted as moral judges of their sovereigns rather than as dutiful ministers.53
To this one amendment may be made, concerning the word “rather.” In the view of the Chengs and Zhu Xi, it was precisely by judging the sovereign, by holding him to the highest standards of political morality, that they served as “dutiful ministers.” This is what they meant by saying that the relation of ruler and minister was fundamentally a moral or righteous (yi) one, i.e., a relation between two individuals who had freely joined in taking responsibility (ziren) for the way of governing.
To assert this high standard of political rectitude may have accomplished little politically, but as embodied in the lives of the Chengs and Zhu Xi it set an inspiring example for many of their later followers, some of them scholar-statesmen who themselves manifested a great personal initiative, strength of purpose, and stalwart independence against overwhelming political odds. Fang Xiaoru (1357–1402) and Hai Rui (1513–1587)54 in the Ming are two examples among many that could be cited. Against the formidable pressures operating to compel conformity, this side of the Neo-Confucian tradition upheld a lofty conception of the dignity, integrity, and independence of the individual scholar-official. It had a high estimate of the moral and spiritual resources of man, and while its celebration of the heroic virtues may seem hopelessly idealistic to modern minds, it aimed, like Mencius (6A:16), at the “nobility of Heaven,” i.e., the moral nobility of man, judged on the basis of individual worth rather than special rank or social status.55
Thus far I have touched on the functional roles of the Neo-Confucian in the school, in the family and community, and in the state. Traditionally, Confucians thought of these as primary roles of the individual, corresponding to the moral duties that Confucius said (Analects 1:6) must have first claim on one’s attention, after which, if one has time and energy to spare, he could devote himself to “letters” (wen). Neo-Confucians reconfirmed this priority in the Song, but as members of a class in more comfortable circumstances they also enjoyed more leisure for cultural activities than most earlier generations and with increased material and technical means at their disposal. Generally speaking, the centers of Neo-Confucian scholarship were also areas that led in agricultural production, trade, and population growth in the late Tang and Song period, i.e., modern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, Sichuan, and—for political and cultural reasons rather than economic—the capital region.56 Whatever it may have lacked in military prowess, the Song certainly displayed brilliant cultural achievements, and it is no surprise that the outburst of individual creativity in arts and letters, especially the greater freedom of individual expression in painting, calligraphy, and other arts taken up by scholar-officials, should have expressed itself also in Neo-Confucian thought.57
There was a larger sense of the term wen, however, in which it represented something more than polite letters and aesthetic pastimes. This was the sense in which Hu Yuan was said to have spoken of wen as the literary expression or cultural transmission of the Way. Wen stood here for the highest values of the culture, for human civilization as carrying out the Way and the will of Heaven. Confucius had talked of his own mission in the world as bound up with “this culture” (siwen), and many Neo-Confucians likewise took it as their personal responsibility in life to make the Way manifest in the world through “this culture.”58
By so doing, the Neo-Confucians, as an educated elite in relatively prosperous times, dedicated their new affluence and leisure to serious purposes, attempting to convert it into a higher form of culture and a better life for the people. This they did in ways characteristic of their class and time, and in particular with a sense of vocation as leaders in the society who felt keenly their responsibility to meet the social and cultural crises of their time. Led by this humane concern, they sought to revitalize tradition so that, instead of merely perpetuating antiquarian studies, it would express the highest aspirations of the Confucian elite as bearers of that culture in the Song.59
From this point of view, we may say that “learning for the sake of one’s self” as the substantive pursuit of the Neo-Confucian was not only revealed through his functional roles in society (yong) but in how he related to his tradition, to his culture (wen), and, increasingly, to the Way (dao) as representing the highest values of that culture. It may well be that in all major ethicoreligious traditions some relation to the scriptures is important to the process of self-discovery and self-definition and that St. Augustine’s tolle lege (“take up and read”)—or, by contrast, the Zen master’s tearing up of the scriptures—are paradigmatic acts of almost universal significance. Nevertheless, there has probably been no other tradition so clearly committed to scholarship as the Confucian, and in the absence of sacerdotal, pastoral, or monastic activities, it was book learning and literary activity that became for the Confucian even more central tasks than for the Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. Accordingly, it is in this cultural context that we must look for the defining characteristics of Neo-Confucian personhood or individualism.
In the writings and conversations of the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi, this relation between the self and the Way as tradition is a central topic of discussion. Generally speaking, equal emphasis is put on (1) the need to learn the Way through the classics and histories and (2) the importance of some personal engagement and live interaction with the mind of the sages revealed therein. One of these without the other will not do. Cheng Yi and Zhu were quite methodical in their approach to the subject, and Zhu, in his Questions and Answers on the Mean (Zhongyong huowen), left a succinct statement of the procedure to be followed. It pertains to the same passage referred to in his Articles of the White Deer Grotto Academy—namely, the order among “studying, inquiring, thinking, sifting, and practicing”:
After one has studied extensively, he can have the principles of all things before him. He can therefore examine them and compare them to get the right questions to ask. Then, as he inquires carefully, his teachers and friends will wholeheartedly engage in give-and-take with him, and he will begin to think. As he thinks carefully his thoughts will be refined and free from impurities. Thus there is something in it he can get for himself (you suo zide). He can now sift what he has acquired. As he sifts clearly, he can make his decisions without making a mistake. He can therefore be free from doubts and put his thoughts into action. As he practices earnestly, all that he has achieved from studying, inquiring, thinking and sifting will become concrete demonstrations and will no longer remain empty words.60
The same theme is repeated many times by Cheng Yi. He says: “Students must get it for themselves (zide). The Six Classics are vast and extensive. At first it is difficult to understand them completely. As students find their own way, each establishes his own gate, and then returns home to conduct his inquiries himself.”61
In the learning process, a problem could arise too if the teacher did not take into account the need for the young to find their own way into the classics rather than accept the readymade interpretations of others:
Explaining books orally is certainly not the intention of the ancients, for it would make people superficial. A student should think deeply and accumulate his thoughts, cultivating himself in a leisurely way so that he may get it for himself (zide). Today a book may be explained in just one day. This is merely to teach people to be superficial.62
Study of the classics must be an intensely personal experience if it is to fulfill the purpose of learning the Way, which demands of the individual that he himself activate or advance the Way:
The classics are vehicles of the Way. To recite the words and explain the meanings of the terms without attaining the Way is to render them useless dregs.… I hope you will seek the Way through the classics. If you make more and more effort, some day you will see something lofty before you. Unconsciously you will start dancing with your hands and your feet. Then even without further effort you will not be able to keep yourself from going on.63
Here, and in numerous other passages from Cheng Yi’s writings, the affective aspects of the learning process are greatly stressed. One should be moved by learning and not left unaffected. It is true that Cheng Yi also sanctioned the practice of quiet-sitting as a means of achieving tranquility, composure, or “reverence,” as he would most prefer to put it. But the aim here was to quiet down or curb only selfish desires while directing active emotions toward unselfish ends. The reverent man would not be lifeless and unfeeling; on a basic level, he would be experiencing the “self-enjoyment” (ziqian) that goes with “making the will sincere” (Great Learning 6); on a higher level, his affective nature would be fully engaged in the pursuit of sagehood. Study of the classics, then, if approached without ulterior motives or self-seeking expectations, should be inspirational and uplifting. It should induce a conversion experience, a natural exhilaration of the spirit over the prospect of being able to improve and transform oneself into a sage, a worthy, or a noble man. Thus Cheng Yi says of reading the Analects: “If, after having studied it, one is still the same person as before, he has not really studied it.”64 And again, disapprovingly, “There are people who have read the Analects without anything happening to them. There are others who are happy after having understood a sentence or two. There are others who, having read the book, love it. And there are those who, having read it, unconsciously dance with their hands and feet.”65
To achieve this latter result, one must approach study of the classics through the spirit and the affections as well as the intellect. One must “taste” or “savor” the essential flavor of the texts and assimilate the nourishment that true wisdom provides to the mind-and-heart.66 Necessary though it is to understand the meaning of the words in the text, if one tries to explain classics like the Analects and Mencius literally, he will not get the full meaning, which often goes beyond the spoken word.67 To apprehend and appreciate this, deep thought and reflection are necessary. Yet at the same time, one should try to formulate his own understanding in words because the process of articulating one’s thoughts in words helps to clarify them. “Whenever in our effort at thinking we come to something that cannot be expressed in words, we must think it over carefully and sift it again and again.”68
Learning so understood as both active and reflective, affective as well as cognitive, also had both its critical and creative sides. It called on the scholar to doubt and to question received tradition as the prerequisite for giving full assent and active implementation to his understanding of the Way. Cheng Yi said, “The student must first of all know how to doubt,”69 and Zhang Zai (1020–1077) also asserted the need to take a fresh approach to things: “Whenever there is any doubt about moral principles, one should wipe out his old views so new ideas will come.”70 Zhu Xi called this a “wonderful method,” cited it in his methodological discussions with Lu Zuqian, and quoted it in Things at Hand.71 Morohashi Tetsuji, in his monumental study of the Song school, also cited this skeptical method as a hallmark of the Neo-Confucian approach to learning.72
This questioning attitude toward received tradition was a major feature of Song learning as a whole. A skeptical attitude toward the “classical” learning of the Han and Tang underlay the Song scholars’ wholesale reinterpretation and reformulation of the classics.73 It was also a notable feature of Song historical studies from Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) down to Ma Duanlin (1254–1325).74 Further, as the more extroverted outlook of the Northern Song turned inward and as dissatisfaction with the immediate past and present became increasingly directed toward self-awareness and self-reform as the precondition for social reform, this questioning attitude and critical method became deeply embedded in the new Cheng-Zhu tradition of self-cultivation. Influential texts of the new movement like Things at Hand and the Four Books as formulated by Zhu Xi gave explicit encouragement to this self-conscious, critical attitude75 and concretely exemplified that spirit at work in classical studies. Thus, later scholars who studied these texts would find their attention drawn to the self-conscious mind and its autonomous operations. In the view of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, nothing would substitute for the individual’s inner reflection on the scriptures and reevaluation of it in the silence of his own mind.
No less importantly, along with this questioning attitude went a positive and creative approach that drew something new from its reassessment of the old. True, the established convention called for scholars to follow the example of Confucius, who had professed to be a transmitter rather than a creator. In such a tradition, complete originality would have been seen as a dubious merit. Nevertheless, while making no claims for themselves, Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi freely credited other Song scholars with making their own distinctive contributions.
Cheng Yi greatly admired Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription (Ximing), with its eloquent expression of a Confucian natural mysticism, affirming man’s kinship with all creation. Praising its purity and sublimity, his older brother Cheng Hao had said it was unmatched by any other teaching since the Qin and Han, and Cheng Yi went further to say that it revealed what earlier sages had never taught. As an original contribution he likened it in importance to Mencius’s doctrines of the goodness of human nature and the nourishing of the dynamic power within the self that reaches out to all creation.76
Zhu Xi, in his turn, credited Cheng Yi with “discovering” or bringing to light (faming) the doctrine of the physical nature of man, which he regarded as a major contribution to the Confucian school. “With his disclosure of the doctrine of the physical nature, none of the other theories of human nature would hold water.”77 Zhu also gave credit to Cheng Yi for his new interpretation of the Book of Changes. Modern scholars have seen this interpretation as an unwarranted construction of Cheng’s own devising, and Zhu himself acknowledged that it was not in accord with the original meaning of the Changes, but this did not deter him from affirming its high value.78 Similarly, Zhu considered Cheng Yi to have developed a Confucian doctrine and discipline of the mind, in response to Buddhism, where nothing of the sort had existed before.79 And in the generation after Zhu Xi, his follower Zhen Dexiu credited Cheng Hao with developing the philosophy of principle out of his own brilliance of mind; the classics themselves had barely mentioned it in an obscure passage of the Record of Rites.80
Small wonder, then, that Ming and Qing critics would look back on this as a revolutionary period in scholarly thought. “Classical scholarship,” said the editors of the Imperial Library Catalogue, “as it came down from the Han, underwent a complete change in the Song.”81 And the Ming writer Zhu Yunming (1461–1527) castigated members of the Cheng-Zhu school for their claim to have rediscovered the true meaning of the classics lost in the Han and Tang and for having set themselves up as the private custodians of a supposedly new revelation without acknowledging their actual indebtedness to Han and Tang scholarship.82
From these examples and others given earlier, it can be seen that the Cheng-Zhu school and especially Zhu Xi saw tradition as dynamic rather than static, a living growth and not a fixed monument to the past. It consisted not only of truths revealed in the classics but also things brought to light (faming) by individual Song scholars, without whose contributions the Way would have been lost in obscurity. This view of the Way cannot be equated with the notion of progress underlying modern Western liberalism, but neither can it be minimized as a basis for affirming the value of individual creativity.
Later scholars, especially in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, tended to view the Song learning historically and critically and had little sympathy with the liberties taken by Neo-Confucians in reinterpreting the classics. In their view, the new constructions of the Song masters only adulterated the supposedly pure legacy of Confucius and Mencius. But in the Song, a purely critical or skeptical approach would not have sufficed. The Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi, in an age of renewal and reconstruction, had larger needs and purposes in mind. To doubt and to adopt the questioning attitude was only the starting point, not the end, of scholarly inquiry. Repeatedly they expressed their belief in a method that would lead to some personal or social result—not perhaps to a conclusion that was final and fixed forever but to one that would give one a goal in life and enable one to make one’s own contribution to the advancement of the Way. We have seen this already in Zhu Xi’s Articles and in Cheng Yi’s explanation of the learning process. In the passage cited earlier from Zhang Zai, he does not stop simply at “wiping out old ideas” but says that “new ideas will come.” “Moreover, one should seek the help of friends. Each day one discusses things with friends, each day one’s ideas will become different. One must discuss things and deliberate like this every day. In time one will naturally feel that one has advanced.”83
In this passage and in others cited earlier, the individual was seen to make his personal contribution in the context of a thoughtful interaction with the classics and in a free exchange with colleagues. Thus the individual’s distinctive contribution was recognized and encouraged, yet it was not for the sake of novelty or innovation or because being different was valued in itself but because the individual was expected to develop his own talent and offer his own share to the common scholarly enterprise. A delicate balance was to be maintained between self and tradition, individuality and collegiality.
With these important qualifications, then, we may be entitled to speak of a kind of individualism expressing itself in the cultural activities of the Neo-Confucian scholar, and we may observe certain values associated with the autonomous mind—self-consciousness, critical awareness, creative thought, independent effort and judgment—finding their way into the basic texts of the school. As I discussed earlier, perhaps “personalism” is a better way to describe it.
This attention to the individual and the conscious celebration of his creative faculties is most noticeable in the cultural sphere, where it would seem to be a natural outgrowth of the high degree of cultural activity sustained in the Song by the scholar-official class and by the classes supporting them. In other words, the types of personalism asserted here reflect the special status and functions of the scholar-official class, the general affluence of the times, the influence of a religious atmosphere pervaded by the Buddhist preoccupation with the problem of self, and the interaction of these with a humanistic tradition already disposed to value highly the cultural and political contributions of the individual scholar.
In conclusion—and in relation to our larger theme—we may note the similarity of these developments to characteristics of Western liberalism described by Gilbert Murray, who saw it not just as a modern political attitude but as a humane tradition linking classical antiquity to the present—the product of a leisured and in some ways privileged class, working “to extend its own privileges to wider and wider circles,” aiming at freedom of thought and discussion, and equally pursuing the free exercise of individual conscience and promotion of the common good.84
In the Chinese case, there would be a question whether this individualism or personalism, as the product of a privileged elite, would serve simply to inflate the scholar-official’s sense of self-importance or whether an active effort would be made to share these values more widely. This is a question on which some light is shed by developments in the Ming.
