Despite its modest size and marginal situation on the edge of Asia, Korea has played a key role in the development of East Asian civilization. Without challenging China’s claim to be the Central Kingdom or dreaming, as Japan at times has done, that it could become the dominant power in Asia, Korea has afforded again and again throughout its history not only a meeting ground and sometimes a battlefield for its larger neighbors but also cultural achievements to rival those of China and Japan. It is only recently, however, that its stellar contributions to East Asian culture have gained the recognition they deserve.
Three personal experiences, on visits to disparate points in East Asia, have impressed upon me the unpredictable ways in which this Korean contribution has been made. The first occurred in 1960, when I visited the Confucian Society, in what was then known as Saigon. Officers of the society showed me, with a sense of real achievement under difficult circumstances, a new publication of theirs. It was a bilingual edition, in romanized Vietnamese and Chinese characters, of a traditional Confucian primer that had been highly regarded in their country, the Minh-tam bao-giam. On examination it proved to be not a Chinese work but the Myŏngsim pogam, a “classic” compiled by the Korean scholar Ch’u Chŏk (Nodang) at the end of the thirteenth century. Much admired as a primer in Korea down into modern times,1 its diffusion throughout East Asia and the high regard in which it was held for summing up the wisdom of the East even led to its translation into Spanish and introduction to Europe in the seventeenth century. Clearly, the ascending star of Neo-Confucianism in the late Koryŏ and early Yi dynasties had shed its light far beyond what Westerners have called the Hermit Kingdom.
My second visit was to the library of Yi T’oegye, the Tosan Sŏwŏn, in the mountains near Andong, Korea, where I found the writings of the scholar Zhen Dexiu (1178–1235), a Neo-Confucian scholar-statesman of the next generation after Zhu Xi (1130–1200), the great synthesizer of Neo-Confucianism. Though widely influential in the early centuries of the Neo-Confucian movement, these writings had been largely ignored by modern scholarship. Once recognized, however, for their importance to Korean philosophers and kings in the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries, these works and their historical significance for China itself could be recovered and appreciated.
My third visit was to the Cabinet Library (Naikaku Bunko) in Tokyo. There one could examine the charred and smoke-soiled remains from Edo fires of works studied by the Hayashi family mentors to seventeenth-century Tokugawa shoguns. Among them were Neo-Confucian texts, written or commented on by Korean scholars like Yi T’oegye (1501–1570), and reprinted or recopied with handwritten comments in the margin by their Japanese understudies. Here one could see in textual transmission the process by which the seed of Neo-Confucian discourse was propagated from one fertile soil to another across East Asia.
Neo-Confucianism has usually been thought of as a scholastic teaching and philosophy, but as it spread in the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries it carried a new form of cultural and religious contagion—a dynamic way of life that only later settled down into more fixed patterns. To the restless, impatient eyes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Neo-Confucianism has appeared stuck in a rut—an immovable mass of tradition and rigid dogma. Yet viewed from the other end, as it arose in the thirteenth century, the new movement is most striking for its burgeoning vitality and reformist zeal.
True, Neo-Confucianism was far from a mass movement. Its first signs of life appear in the relative seclusion of schools and academies in South China, where Zhu Xi’s disciples quietly propagated his teachings. In those early days of the thirteenth century, the odds were against their achieving any wide success. Zhu Xi’s doctrines had been proscribed by the state as heterodox, and when this inquisition abated, China found itself locked with the Mongols in what seemed to be a life-and-death struggle for the survival of Chinese civilization.
Of this the surprising outcome was that the Mongols themselves, though hardly dedicated to the propagation of Chinese culture, became the unpremeditated sponsors and purveyors of Neo-Confucianism. To them it was a secular teaching not necessarily in conflict with their adherence to Buddhism or with Khubilai’s patronage of Daoist masters. Once the Grand Khan had reconciled himself to governing China through a dyarchy of Mongol tribal and Chinese bureaucratic institutions, he became persuaded by the scholar-statesman Xu Heng (1209–1281) that Neo-Confucianism could serve as the ideological basis for the new hybrid state. Thus Xu became entrusted with organizing a new educational system based on Zhu Xi’s texts and teachings. Thereafter, its successful propagation led in 1313–1315 to the adoption of a Neo-Confucian curriculum for the civil-service examinations—a system that would largely channel the energies and intelligence of educated Chinese down into the twentieth century.
If this were all that Khubilai and his Mongols had done, it might explain how Chinese ideas and institutions endured in their homeland but would not account for the almost revolutionary impact of Neo-Confucianism on the rest of East Asia. What differentiated his situation from the typical dynastic order was that Khubilai’s ambitions and power reached well beyond the traditional limits of China proper. His was a conquest regime, and Peking served as the capital not only of China but of a larger empire comprising other Mongol dependencies. A cosmopolitan city, it housed residents from Central Asia, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere who participated in the cultural life at the hub of a universal empire. Among them were kings and heirs-apparent to the Korean throne, who were obliged to reside in Peking as virtual hostages of the Mongols. They and a retinue of scholarly compatriots had access to the new learning from the South, first brought to the Yuan capital in 1235 by another captive of war, Zhao Fu (c. 1206–c. 1299), who lectured on Zhu Xi’s teachings and his commentaries on the Four Books at the recently opened Academy of the Supreme Ultimate. Until then, for years before the Mongols extended their conquest to the South, North China and Korea had been largely (though not totally) cut off from the Southern Song. There was a pent-up interest in the latest of Song scholarship and philosophy, especially among Confucian activists like the charismatic Xu Heng (himself a student of Zhao Fu). As an advisor to Khubilai and rector of the Imperial Academy, Xu was in a position to direct the cultural policies of the Yuan state and to manifest his missionary zeal in teaching not only Chinese but Mongols, Central Asians, and Koreans as well.
When eventually Neo-Confucian texts were incorporated in the new civil service–examination system, Koreans were among those eligible to take part in the ethnically diverse and highly cosmopolitan field of candidates. Among the non-Chinese, the Koreans were no doubt the best prepared and the most adept of students as well as the most avid collectors of books for transmission back home. It was from these expatriate subjects of the Koryŏ dynasty that a new generation of scholars was to come, and they would, with the introduction to their homeland of the new “Learning of the Way,” first stir up an intellectual and educational revolution and then help bring down the Koryŏ dynasty itself.
The Neo-Confucianism thus introduced to Korea was highly specific in form and in its historical development. It drew, of course, on a large body of tradition, and in much of its content could simply be described as Confucian. Nevertheless, its history begins with Zhu Xi and can be traced in precise detail (as Yi T’oegye and more recently Wing-tsit Chan have done) from Zhu’s disciples down into the Yuan period2 and then to Koryŏ. It spread through identifiable academies, pursuing a well-defined curriculum. Its texts, largely from the hand of Zhu, contained new doctrines concerning human nature and the social order, which at a certain point in time began to displace the traditional subjects in schools and examinations, first in China, then in Korea. Indeed, one can trace its rise in the course of ideological and political struggles at the Yuan court, from which the new teaching emerged triumphant over older forms of Chinese learning.3
This, then, is not just a case of the old Confucianism reaching maturity, developing a comfortable middle-aged spread, and then slumbering off into dreams of China’s ancient glories. It is rather a new offspring, one full of energy and ambition to take on the world. Not content simply to reclaim the Central Kingdom for Chinese culture, it reached out to embrace a multicultural world extending beyond even the Mongol empire.
SPEAKING OF NEO-CONFUCIANISM
In the historical instance just described, the new movement had a quite specific content and character as the Cheng-Zhu Learning or School of the Way (daoxue). This was itself, however, just part of a larger process, and even its centrality in the mainstream of the new social and cultural trend can be appreciated only in relation to the whole enterprise known as Neo-Confucianism. Though of Western coinage, this term has gained some acceptance even in East Asia to designate the groundswell of new thought that arose with the Confucian revival in the Song period (960–1279) and flowed down into modern times.
Much of this term’s currency in the West may be attributed to its use by scholars including Fung Yulan, Carsun Chang, and Alfred Forke, whose historical surveys were among the first to draw attention to the later development of Confucian thought.4 Fung’s translator, Derk Bodde, adopted “Neo-Confucianism” as a rendering for daoxue, the Chinese term used by Fung in volume 2 of his History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue shi).5 In the latter work, as also in his later Short History, Fung took a comparatively broad view of daoxue. He did not restrict it to the so-called Cheng-Zhu School, as the Song History (Songshi) had done, but included within its scope such independent thinkers as Lu Xiangshan (1139–1193) and Wang Yangming (1472–1529). Further, Fung extended the discussion of Neo-Confucian developments down into the Qing period (1644–1911), viewing even critics of the Cheng-Zhu school as variant expressions of a philosophical dialogue initiated in the Song. In his treatment of daoxue in the Song, on the other hand, Fung was less inclusive. No doubt constrained by the selectivity demanded in writing a general history of Chinese philosophy, he focused on the metaphysicians who contributed to the synthesis of Zhu Xi and neglected large areas of Song thought that earlier had been represented in Case Studies of Song and Yuan Confucians (Song Yuan xuean), the classic account of Song thought by Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) and Quan Zuwang (1705–1755).
Beside the fact of its having come into general use in the West, the name “Neo-Confucianism” has the advantage of being broadly inclusive of different schools and successive phases in the later development of Confucian thought rather than being narrowly identified with one particular view of it. At the same time, as one aspect of the larger Confucian tradition Neo-Confucianism includes much that is basic to Confucian thought as a whole. Thus some scholars may well question why elements identifiable with the ethical and political core of a perennial Confucianism should not simply be called “Confucian” rather than “Neo-Confucian.” Why not indeed! The coexistence of old and new, of perennial “fundamentalism” as well as of distinctive new elements in later thought, must be allowed for.
Among the latter, Neo-Confucians often invoke ancient phrases or traditional concepts while putting them to new uses. Thus, for instance, the ancient virtue of “reverence” or “respect” (jing) became supercharged in the Song with a new moral and intellectual “seriousness” as well as with a sense of religious awe and mindfulness or “concentration,” each reflecting a different side of Neo-Confucianism’s flanking attacks on Buddhism. This is also the case with the central Confucian concept of humanity or humaneness (ren), the interpretation of which was greatly amplified by Zhu Xi and others. There are, too, such formulations as the “five moral relations” (wulun) and “three mainstays” (san gangling) among other expressions from the classics especially dear to Neo-Confucians and invested by them with a new importance. One can, of course, identify any of these as Confucian in the larger sense, but often their significance in the context of later thought lies in how and why they were singled out for special emphasis by Neo-Confucian thinkers. In such cases—and others will be cited below—one is warranted in underscoring the “Neo-Confucian” character of even traditional values.
The appropriateness of such distinctions varies from period to period. In the late Song and Yuan, there was open conflict between old-style, conservative Confucians and liberal Neo-Confucians who were quite free in their interpretation of the classics. Later in the Ming and Qing, after specifically Neo-Confucian formulations had become institutionalized and sometimes officially sanctioned, these recently established interpretations themselves became subject to a still newer brand of criticism that exposed the license taken by Song thinkers in their reading of the classics. As to whether such purist or fundamentalist criticism in the late Ming and Qing should be called Neo-Confucian or Confucian, it is perhaps a case of six of one or half a dozen of another, depending on whether one views this scholarship as a further extension of the Neo-Confucian’s critical reinterpretation of received tradition or whether one sees it as a fundamentalist return to an original and supposedly “pure” form of Confucianism that should remain a fixed standard of literal interpretation for all times.
One would underestimate the actual complexity of the problem, however, if one did not take into account the ways in which the great neoclassicists of the seventeenth century, among them Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), were heirs to, as well as critics of, Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism. It was no doubt in recognition of this that Fung Yulan spoke of Qing learning as
a continuation of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism, the major contribution of which lay in new answers and interpretations to the latter’s traditional problems and texts.… Hence those adherents of the Han Learning [in the Qing] who concentrated on philosophy should, despite outward opposition to Neo-Confucianism, properly be regarded as its perpetuators and developers.6
To point out these nuances in the use of terms is also to acknowledge that Neo-Confucianism underwent successive modifications from its very beginning. Neo-Confucians differed among themselves as to whether the Way or Dao should be conceived of as a mainstream of fluid thought, with many tributaries and side currents, or whether it should be seen as a fixed legacy to be handed down intact to later generations. Demonstrably, Neo-Confucianism first struggled and then flourished as a dynamic intellectual movement before it settled down to become an established tradition. When finally it did assume scholastic form, the tradition survived primarily as a dialogue or body of discourse built up by citing earlier texts and historical cases as a way of defining issues for discussion. An example of this, and also of the Confucian/Neo-Confucian dichotomy referred to above, is the new attention given to the so-called Four Books. These texts were “Confucian” in the sense of being drawn from the earlier Confucian classics, but interpreted and repackaged as they were by Zhu Xi, they came to have a new meaning and significance in Neo-Confucian discourse. Unless one is quite familiar with Zhu Xi’s commentaries on the Great Learning (Daxue), for instance, as well as with the intense discussion that his interpretations aroused in ensuing generations, one might miss the specific point of later references to Zhu Xi’s views (as in Wang Yangming’s Inquiry Into the Great Learning) and fail to recognize in what way the Neo-Confucian dialogue was being advanced.
A scholar’s identification with tradition depends not only on his avowed loyalties or antipathies but also on which earlier writers he chooses to converse with over time, and which texts we must be conversant with if we are to comprehend him. He may be more or less of a “traditionalist” and more or less “orthodox” according to current definitions of that term, but he would be working within, or out of, Neo-Confucian tradition as long as it provides him with his basic frame of discursive reference and he does not call into question its underlying assumptions.
A case in point is the Japanese philosopher of the Tokugawa period Miura Baien (1723–1789), who has been cited in recent years as a highly original thinker, one who departed from orthodox Neo-Confucianism and anticipated modern scientific thought. Yet on more careful reflection in the perspective of East Asian thought as a whole, Professor Shimada Kenji finds little in Miura’s thought that is not already anticipated by Song and Ming Neo-Confucians. Miura’s philosophy, he concludes, “was hardly anything more than a variation on the philosophy of qi formulated by Song philosophers.”7 It is ignorance of the latter, more than a failure to recognize Miura’s distinctive achievements, that distorts the picture.
Philosophically speaking, what may be considered irreducibly “Neo-Confucian” in these cases will vary according to one’s reading of Zhu Xi’s or the other Song masters’ thought as a whole. Yet as a system of thought undergoing historical development, Neo-Confucianism was a tangible body of discourse with definable characteristics; we are not without signposts by which to gauge directions or to measure continuity and change in the system. Among these reference points internal to the tradition itself are the new names scholars themselves coined to designate the Confucian Way and the new concepts with which they explained it—names and concepts not previously identified with Confucian tradition, which I shall discuss below. Another set of indicators is the texts accepted by them as authoritative, the shared basis of their common discourse. A third consists in institutions closely identified with the life of Neo-Confucianism, either those that promoted the discourse or those promoted by it—i.e., that were produced by Neo-Confucians themselves as a means of giving practical shape to their ideas. Finally, there are the specific interests served by Neo-Confucianism, or those interests it was made to serve through its official adoption by the state, etc.
Neo-Confucian Designations for the Way (dao) or Learning (xue)
Daoxue/tohak
Although the term “Neo-Confucianism” embraces many trends of thought, it was used in the Fung-Bodde translation to render daoxue, which in Chinese (indeed, in East Asian) usage has generally been identified with the Cheng-Zhu school and often with a narrow definition even of that. Literally translatable as “the Learning of the Way” or “School of the Way,” depending upon whether one emphasizes its thought content or its scholarly transmission, this term has had a special importance in the history of Neo-Confucianism. As used by the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi, it conveyed the sense of ultimate value and the commitment to it that we usually associate with religion. Not surprisingly, this claim to ultimate truth and its followers’ intense dedication to it evoked a comparably strong reaction from those who rejected the claim. Hence the ironic use of the term among the critics of the Cheng-Zhu school or the characterization of it as false or spurious learning (weixue) during the Song period, when daoxue, far from constituting the officially approved learning, was on the contrary ridiculed and officially condemned.8 It was only later, at the end of the Song and during the Yuan period, as a reflection of Zhu Xi’s increasing influence in the scholarly community, that official acceptance of Zhu’s teaching gave daoxue the connotation of an established orthodoxy.9 This is the sense in which the term appears in the Song History (Songshi), wherein a special section is devoted to Neo-Confucian thinkers who qualify as bearers of the True Way, with the implication of their being a breed apart from other Confucian scholars treated in the Rujia section of biographical accounts.
Given this usage of daoxue, I suggest that it be translated as “Learning” or “School of the Way” and that it be understood to represent orthodox Neo-Confucianism insofar as this would differentiate a subset of those thinkers officially considered “orthodox” from the larger numbers of those who accept the basic terms of, and participate in, the wider Neo-Confucian discourse. One must bear in mind, however, that many thinkers claimed to represent the authentic Cheng-Zhu teaching, though not all had official support for their claim.
In the Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism and in Principle and Practicality, I have pointed out that even those who resist official orthodoxy, or a narrow definition of it, rarely go so far as to reject any standard for “true teaching” at all.10 A radical skepticism of this latter sort may sometimes be found in Daoist or Buddhist thought, but Neo-Confucians, for their part, hold to a belief in the existence of “real” values (shi), the possibility of knowing and communicating them, and the correlative obligation to follow a definable Way. One can understand this as “orthodoxy” in the broadest and most liberal understanding of the term, or one can think of it as “Neo-Confucian tradition” in contradistinction to “Orthodox Neo-Confucianism” in the more limited daoxue sense. Huang Zongxi’s conception of the unity and variety of the Way, set forth in his discussion of Yiben wanshu in Case Studies of Ming Confucians (Mingru xue’an),11 conveys his idea of Neo-Confucian thought as carrying on a Way (distinguishable from Buddhism and Daoism) with its own basic integrity and coherence, while at the same time it generates innumerable differentiations in individual schools and thinkers. It is this broad conception of the Confucian tradition, as well as its inherent power of creative diversification, that Huang celebrates in the sweeping panorama of Song, Yuan, and Ming thought presented in Case Studies of Song and Yuan Confucians and Case Studies of Ming Confucians. Objective though Huang tried to be in his exposition of Neo-Confucian thinkers, it would have been inconceivable to him that such objectivity could be altogether “value free” or noncommittal. The Way still provided a definite guide or standard for human life, and Huang decidedly rejected the notion that one could be all things to all men.
Shixue/sirhak
A less frequent characterization of Neo-Confucianism than daoxue is shixue, meaning “solid,” “real,” “substantial,” or “practical” learning. This differentiated Neo-Confucianism from the “emptiness” of Buddhism and Daoism. It asserted the substantiality and knowability of Confucian values, in contrast to the mutability and uncertainty that governed all ordinary existence and cognition in the Buddhist view. For Neo-Confucians, shixue was the study of enduring moral, social, and cultural values, together with the practical benefits that could accrue from acting upon them or from studying their role in the historical process. It is noteworthy that Zhu Xi especially employs this term in his advocacy of an education that would be truly rooted in humane values and be of practical benefit to human society, and in Korea Chŏng Tojŏn (1342–1398) echoes this when he refers to Neo-Confucianism as “the real learning of the ancients which manifests the moral nature and renews the people.”12
As the social and cultural context changed, so too did the view of “reality” in this tradition. This was particularly true in the field of learning, a matter that involved virtually all Neo-Confucians, and in the political and social affairs that concerned many of them. Here the processes of steady differentiation in human affairs produced a “reality” of increasing complexity. From a view of “real learning” that had focused on the human mind as embodying value principles and performing an integrative function in the conduct of life, there was a gradual shift toward the other pole of Neo-Confucian scholarship, the study of principles in things and affairs, with emphasis on their concrete particularity. The later stages of this process then converged on forms of Western learning that produced a utilitarian view of reality or a pragmatism much in contrast to the earlier holistic conception of Zhu Xi.
Xinxue/simhak or xinfa/simpŏp
The Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (xinxue) and the formula of the Mind-and-Heart (xinfa) are terms developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to characterize the Neo-Confucian doctrine of the mind and its proper discipline. They appear in the writings of Shao Yong (1011–1077), the Cheng brothers, and Zhu Xi and refer to a Neo-Confucian view of the mind, distinct from the Buddhist, which was in turn key to the Neo-Confucian political doctrine that the way to govern men was through individual self-discipline and that the key to self-cultivation was mind-rectification. I have discussed this development in Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart.13 Here I wish only to stress that these terms were applied to the Neo-Confucian philosophy of mind as a whole and especially to the Cheng-Zhu school’s central teaching concerning the “Mind of the Way” (daoxin) and the “Mind of Man” (renxin). In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this Learning of the Mind-and-Heart spread through China and into Korea as an integral part of the Learning of the Way, i.e., orthodox Neo-Confucianism. Students of Neo-Confucianism in Korea will be familiar with this aspect of the tradition, so clearly echoed in writings of Yi T’oegye (Yi Hwang), for example, the Ten Diagrams of the Sage Learning (Sŏnghak sipto), of which the seventh is entitled “Diagram of the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart”14 (Simhak to). Coming from a sharp critic of Wang Yangming, this Learning is unquestionably of the Cheng-Zhu School and not the so-called Lu-Wang School.
In the latter case, there has been some confusion because of the recent tendency to speak of the “School of the Mind” as something passed down from Lu Xiangshan to Wang Yangming and opposed to the Cheng-Zhu school as the School of Reason or Principle (lixue). To some extent, this is reflected in the treatment of the subject in Fung Yu-lan’s History of Chinese Philosophy, where the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart is most prominently identified with Lu Xiang-shan and Wang Yangming in chapter 14.15 Actually, Fung himself cautions against drawing too sharp a dichotomy between Zhu and Lu in this respect. In his comparison of the two Fung says, as Bodde has translated it: “A popular way of contrasting Zhu Xi with Lu Jiuyuan is to say that the former emphasizes the importance of study, whereas the latter emphasizes the ‘prizing of one’s virtuous nature.’ … What it overlooks, however, is that the final goal of Zhu Xi, no less than of all other Neo-Confucianists, is to explain the nature and functioning of the inner self.”16 This last expression, “the nature and functioning of the self,” is actually a quotation drawn from a key section of Zhu Xi’s discussion of the method of the Great Learning. It appears in the Words and Phrases from the Great Learning (Daxue zhangju) and Questions on the Great Learning (Daxue huowen), in a context that refers to the formula of the Mind-and-Heart (xinfa).17 What Bodde has rendered as “the nature and functioning of the inner self” might be translated more literally as “the whole substance and great functioning of our mind-and-heart (wu xin zhi quanti dayong).18 This is a central concept in Zhu’s thought and assumes the importance of a “technical term” much discussed in the later Zhu Xi school. Here, it underscores the significance of Fung’s observation in the Chinese text that “the final goal of Zhu Xi was to explain the nature and function of the mind-and-heart.” In early Neo-Confucianism and even in much of the later school, there would have been no disposition to concede this crucial area to Lu and Wang as their special property. To avoid further confusion, it may be wise to translate xinxue as “Learning of the Mind-and-Heart” when it is used in this most general Neo-Confucian sense and to recognize “School of the Mind” as an attempt retroactively to link Wang Yangming’s teaching to the thought of Lu Xiangshan. In this latter case, it would be seen as one significant outgrowth of the earlier Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, along with others like Chen Xianzhang’s, which reflect a changed perception of the mind during the Ming period.
Another consideration here is that our term “school” may only be equated with the Chinese term xue, “learning,” in a very loose sense. In fact, “Lu-Wang School” can only mean a loose affinity of ideas, not an intellectual lineage from teacher to disciple or scholar to scholar. Wang Yangming’s “learning” or “thought” is akin to Lu Xiangshan’s, but Wang did not receive it from a line of teachers coming down from Lu. In the case of the Cheng-Zhu “Learning of the Mind-and-Heart,” however, there is usually some scholastic filiation, some personal link involved. By this criterion, Wang would have to be identified more with Cheng-Zhu.
Shengxue/sŏnghak
“Sage Learning” (shengxue) has several different connotations. It is, of course, the learning that comes from the sages of the past, i.e., “the Learning of the Sages,” but Zhu Xi particularly emphasized it as the Way of learning to be a sage, or learning for sagehood. For him, the important thing was that sagehood could be a practicable ideal in the Song, that one could transform one’s wayward mind-and-heart into a Way-ward one, through a definite process of self-cultivation. Zhu Xi’s lifework and much of Neo-Confucian literature is premised on this idea. Unless one renders it as something like “Learning for Sagehood” rather than simply “Learning of the Sages,” one misses perhaps the most dynamic element in the Neo-Confucian version of this traditional conception.
The alternative rendering, “Way of the Sages and Worthies” (shengxian zhi dao) conveyed the idea that worthies of recent times, like the Song masters, came close enough to achieving sagehood as to be spoken of in the same breath with the ancients. It suggested the possibility that such attainment remained within anyone’s reach. Inscriptions still hanging in the Royal Confucian College (Sŏnggyun’gwan) in Seoul today bear witness to the power of this ideal among the early Neo-Confucians in Korea.
Sagehood was understood in two principal forms. Classically, it had strong associations with the sage-rulers of the remote past and with the Way of the Sage-kings. This perennial political concern of Confucians is still prominent in the minds of Neo-Confucians, whether as proponents of programmatic, institutional reform or as advocates of the intellectual and moral self-reformation of the ruler. Many Neo-Confucian leaders also served as ministers to the ruler, counseling him on how he might revive and follow the Way of the Sage Emperors and Early Kings. From this a new kind of “traditional” learning arose in the eleventh century, along with the Learning of the Way (daoxue), which was known as the “Learning of the Emperors and Kings” (diwang zhi xue) or, for short, “Learning of the Emperors” (dixue). Scholars who propounded it, often in the lectures on the classics at court, were active in the same scholarly and official circles as the adherents of the Learning of the Way. Important among them were Fan Zuyu (1041–1098), a colleague of Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Sima Guang (1019–1086), and Zhen Dexiu, a leader of the School of the Way in the generation after Zhu Xi.19
Sagehood was also conceived as the ideal form of, or model for, the self. Not everyone could expect to be a sage-ruler, but anyone could aspire to sageliness in virtue and wisdom. When Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, Zhu Xi, and other Neo-Confucians talked about learning to become a sage or transforming oneself into a sage, they were said to be pursuing “learning for the sake of one’s self” (wei ji zhi xue), as Zhu Xi had put it using the language of the Analects (14:25): “The ancients pursued learning for one’s own sake; nowadays they learn for the sake of [pleasing] others.”
Whether as sage-ruler or as ideal self, the Neo-Confucian concept of sagehood exhibited certain perennial Confucian features as well as others particular to the Song. As Neo-Confucian ideas made their way into the Ming and other periods, problems of continuity and discontinuity arose with both conceptions. Some of these will be discussed later, but for illustration’s sake one can imagine the difficulties that would arise with a “learning for the emperor,” intended to activate the consciences of Song rulers, if one tried to apply it to Japanese emperors, who reigned but did not rule. Differences between Chinese and Korean monarchies would no doubt present their own problems.
Lixue/ihak and xinglixue/sŏngnihak
In the later development of Neo-Confucianism and in modern works, the Learning or School of Principle (lixue) has been one of the most common terms for Neo-Confucianism. Li, as principle, order, inner structure, was unquestionably a central concept in Neo-Confucian metaphysics. Yet its full significance only emerged with the passage of time. The Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi do not refer to their doctrine in this way, probably because they saw such a concept as only explanatory of, or instrumental to, the study of the Way and pursuit of sagehood. Zhen Dexiu, fully appreciative of the historic contributions of the Chengs and Zhu to the philosophy of principle, also recognized that the concept of li itself had little standing in classical Confucian literature and was not even mentioned in the original text of the Cheng-Zhu school classic, the Great Learning.20
When it came into wider use during the Ming and in Korea, lixue was closely associated with the Learning of Human Nature (xinglixue) and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart. It stressed principle as human nature and principles as inherent in the mind. The imperial Ming Compendium on Human Nature and Principle (Xingli daquan), widely circulated in Korea, reinforced the idea that Cheng-Zhu teaching was to be understood as a philosophy of “human nature and principle.” In the first general accounts of Ming Neo-Confucian thought, the Authoritative Transmission of the Learning of Principle (Lixue zangquan) by Sun Qifeng (1585–1675) and Case Studies of Ming Confucians by Huang Zongxi, references to lixue were understood to include xinxue within its scope. Yi T’oegye, as mentioned before, also speaks of lixue and xinxue as complementary terms, although by his time he felt the need to exclude Wang Yangming from the company of orthodox Neo-Confucians, which neither Sun nor Huang were prepared to do.21
There may be no harm in identifying lixue with reason or rationalism so long as this does not imply a merely logical ratiocination or conjure up a Western-style antithesis of reason versus intuition or emotion. According to Cheng-Zhu teaching, the moral principles that constituted the nature of Heaven in the mind of man were humane feelings and impulses. It was the ordered structure and inherent rationality of these natural feelings that gave the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart its confidence in men’s spontaneous intuitions, and it was the reliability of basic human instincts—their universality and predictability among all peoples—that underlay the rationalism of the Learning of Principle.
A somewhat similar problem is met in describing the relation between principle (li) and ether (or material force, qi) in Neo-Confucianism. The language used for this by Professor Takahashi Tōru in his early accounts of Korean Neo-Confucianism has an aptness that is difficult to reproduce in English usage. The Japanese shuri-ha and shuki-ha can be understood as tending to put a relative emphasis on principle or ether (material force) respectively, without implying a necessary antithesis between monism and dualism.22
It is significant that no such term as qixue came into use among either Neo-Confucians or the critics of Cheng-Zhu lixue despite the rising importance of qi (material force) in later Neo-Confucianism. In the twentieth century, great attention was paid to what in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Chinese thought has been called by “Marxist” writers “materialism” or by Japanese scholars such as Yamanoi Yū the “qi philosophy” or “qi thought” (ki no tetsugaku or ki no shisō).23 Traditionally, however, it would not have been considered appropriate to view learning as primarily aimed at the study of matter or ether apart from the reason or principle inherent in it.
Daotong/tot’ong—The “Orthodox Way”
Daotong was a term widely used among Neo-Confucians after Zhu Xi applied it to the orthodox Way that he believed had been revived by the Cheng brothers. In Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, I have already pointed out significantly different uses of this term in the Cheng-Zhu school depending on whether one stresses, as Zhu Xi did, the inspirational and prophetic elements in the revival and reinterpretation of the Way or authoritative transmission and scholastic filiation. Both of these have an important role in later Neo-Confucianism, but it is significant that when Neo-Confucians wish specifically to express the idea of transmission, daotong alone is not seen as sufficient, and therefore daotong chuan has been used to specify the “transmission of the orthodox Way.”
Tong itself does not necessarily imply direct succession. In the related use of zhengtong as “legitimate succession,” there is no necessary implication that legitimate dynastic rule is something handed on or directly conferred by one dynasty on its successor. Similarly, when Zhu Xi spoke of daotong, he emphasized the lack of continuous succession and stressed rather the repossession of the Way after a long lapse in transmission. In both of these cases, tong has the primary meaning of “control,” “bring together,” “coordinate.” With Zhu Xi, it is effective repossession or reconstitution of the Way that is conveyed by daotong, just as zhengtong meant effective repossession or reconstitution of the empire, often after a period of disunity. For Zhu Xi, zhengtong constituted a recognition of a dynasty’s political legitimacy without necessarily conferring on it the moral legitimacy of daotong. In this respect, Zhu Xi remained true to the earlier Song view that the Han and Tang, though great dynasties in asserting their effective political control of the empire, had failed to fulfill the Way of the Early Kings. Thus the purity of the Sages’ Way was upheld while political common sense was not flouted.
In Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, I have stressed daotong as the active repossession of the Way partly in order to bring out the significance of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy’s being promoted under Mongol rule in ways that had no precedent during the Song or Jin dynasties. The Yuan dynasty’s achieving of legitimate rule by actively reintegrating the whole empire after long years of division had a seeming analogue in the “repossessing of the Way” (daotong), achieved when the Learning of the Way (daoxue) became the established teaching in the Yuan schools and examination system.
Some acceptance of this idea would seem to have been implied when Korean converts to Neo-Confucianism sought to establish it as the orthodox teaching of Korea in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet this same conception of the Way as “broken off” for centuries and only regained late in time by the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi meant that Koreans too could think of it as something they were capable of repossessing directly without the need for any intermediation by the Chinese. Indeed, some Korean writers would think of their own active reconstituting of the Way as retrieving a long-lost Dao originally implanted in Korea by the sage-statesman Kija (Ji Zi), variously identified in classical sources as a survivor of the Shang dynasty who either came to northern Korea as a vassal of the Zhou or chose exile there rather than serve under a new dynasty.24 In this view, the Koreans could be seen as resuming an indigenous “broken” transmission of the Dao, sharing in a larger world order based on Confucian values, while developing their own authentic version of the Way. Here there was room for a Korean identity to assert itself, eventually claiming for the Yi dynasty that it was more orthodox than the Ming itself in fidelity to that shared Way.
Concepts Conveying the Essence of the Way
Along with the foregoing names for the Way or for Neo-Confucian learning, there were other terms taken to express central truths or values in the Neo-Confucian teaching. Many ideas could be included here that individual thinkers and schools advocated as, in their eyes, keys to all others in the system. Humaneness, reverence, filiality (xiao), and innate knowing (liangzhi) are typical examples. Other concepts or doctrines may be identified with individual thinkers as their own distinctive contribution to the development of Neo-Confucian thought: e.g., Zhou Dunyi’s “Nonfinite and yet the Supreme Ultimate” (wuji er taiji) or his “stressing quiescence” (zhujing), teachings that might be taken by some as central to Neo-Confucian metaphysics or spiritual praxis but accepted by others only with reservations.
Korean thinkers, no less than Chinese and Japanese, held diverse views on these matters. Certain ideas and practices were seen to have a special meaning for individual scholars and teachers depending on their own life experience; indeed, their learning would be thought superficial if it conformed simply to one model and did not reflect some personal struggle to “get” or find the Way for one’s self (zide). This idea is not uncommon among Korean Neo-Confucians, but it is most evident in Yi Yulgok’s (Yi I, 1536–1584) frequent reference to “getting it oneself” (chadŭk, for the Chinese zide). Yulgok particularly emphasized the Korean role of Kija as a sage comparable to Confucius and Mencius and, by equating Korea with the native states of the latter sages, Lu and Qi, he naturalized the Way of the Sage Kings with Kija as its spiritual patriarch. Kija thus served paradigmatically to demonstrate that “getting the Way oneself” was not finding it outside and internalizing it but finding the Way within and affirming it as universal.
Beyond these core ideas and individual concepts, however, there are formulations that attempt to characterize the tradition in a broader and more balanced way. Such formulations represent the Way as a comprehensive process or pattern in which it is vital to maintain a balance between polar values. “To abide in reverence and fathom principle” (jujing qiongli) expresses the idea that learning should link scholarly study and moral/spiritual cultivation. “To spend half the day in quiet-sitting and half in the study of books” (banri jingzuo, banri dushu) conveys the same idea in more concrete terms. In a similar vein, there is the classic formulation taken from the Mean (Zhongyong), which speaks of “honoring the moral nature and pursuing intellectual inquiry” (zun dexing, dao wenxue). There has been some tendency recently to dichotomize these values in such terms as intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism or to identify one with Zhu Xi and the other with his “antagonist” Lu Xiangshan, but traditionally both elements were seen as equally necessary, and indeed complementary, aspects of the Way.
Each of these formulations conveys a sense of the Way as embracing certain universal values or developing basic human faculties, while at the same time each can be associated with the particular moral and intellectual concerns of the Song scholar-official (shidafu). Thus “abiding in reverence” may take the form for the Song scholar of quiet-sitting, since he is heir to Buddhist and Daoist meditation techniques (whether professedly so or not) as well as to Confucian ritual. For him too “fathoming principle” is more often pursued in bookish learning than in systematic observation of nature. As it happens, the Korean yangban aristocracy, also scholar-officials with Buddhist influences deeply embedded in their native tradition, inclined toward many of the same pursuits as Song scholars, e.g., office holding, “quiet-sitting,” and classical studies. In principle, however, the expression of religious/moral concern or intellectual inquiry need not, and did not, adhere strictly to Song models, for Zhu Xi himself had acknowledged that such practices would vary with individual circumstances.25
On a more theoretical level, there is the expression of Zhu Xi referred to earlier, which is found in his Words and Phrases from the Great Learning and his Questions on the Great Learning: namely, “the whole substance and great functioning [of the nature as expressed in the mind-and-heart (quanti dayong)].” This formulation appears frequently in the writings of the early Cheng-Zhu School in the late Song, Yuan, and early Ming and conveys the sense of Neo-Confucian Learning as completely integrating the ideal of man’s moral nature with its practical realization in fulfilling the needs of mankind.
As Zhen Dexiu explained it, there could be no separation of principle and practice, no discussion of “substance” that did not take human needs into account, and no resort to practices (functions) that did not conform to the moral nature of man and the Way.26 Here the concept is broad enough to implicate the entire Cheng-Zhu system of metaphysics as the basis for one’s understanding of the moral nature as well as to connote a large body of historical and social experience considered relevant to the “functioning” of that nature in particular human situations.
Professor Kusumoto Masatsugu has written a long essay on this recurrent theme in Chinese Neo-Confucian thought, which also had its Japanese proponents.27 Korean Neo-Confucians too were familiar with this doctrine, and for them also it tended to define the essential tradition. Clearly, “substance” and “function” would have to be understood in terms of the Neo-Confucian discourse and are not comprehensible in classical terms alone.
On the same level of theoretical abstraction is the formula of Cheng Yi: “principle is one, its particularizations diverse,” or “the unity of principle and diversity of its particularized functions” (liyi fenshu).28 This served especially to distinguish Neo-Confucian teaching from Buddhism and Daoism, affirming the reality both of the immutable principle or substance of the nature—in man, his “humanity”—and the innumerable forms of action in which this virtue was given concrete expression. One could also view it as a way of emphasizing the unity of substance and function.
Some persons held that there was no essential difference in principle between Confucianism and Buddhism, since Confucian “humaneness” could be equated with Buddhist “compassion.” According to this view, the only significant difference between the two teachings lay in the functional aspect, i.e., Buddhism’s lack of a practical program such as Confucianism offered for dealing with the needs of human society. Li Tong (1093–1163), Zhu Xi’s teacher, contended that the difference in practice also pointed to a difference in principle. One could not expect Confucian practice to follow from Buddhist principle, nor could one accept as true principle what did not lead to Confucian ethical practice. Hence there could be no dichotomizing, as in Buddhism, of principle and practice to represent two different orders of reality, principle real and undifferentiated and practice less real because it pertained to the world of differentiation and discrimination. To substantiate principle, one must realize one’s humanity in the midst of practice, i.e., by fulfilling one’s individual lot (fen) or station in life with its differentiated duties. This is what was meant by realizing “the unity of principle and the diversity of its particularizations.”
For Neo-Confucians, this doctrine served to distinguish their “real or practical learning” from the “empty learning” of Buddhism, which viewed the world of moral action as a secondary or qualified order of reality in contradistinction to the essential Truth of Buddhist Emptiness.29 Li Tong was unwilling to concede either the Buddhist bifurcation of reality on two levels of truth or the need for transcendental enlightenment as the precondition for coping with the world. For him, on the contrary, true spiritual freedom was to be attained in the performance of the moral task. In Yi T’oegye, such ideas resurfaced with special intensity, as he held Li Tong in even higher respect than Zhu Xi had done.
“Principle is one, its particularizations diverse” was much discussed by Xu Heng, the leading Neo-Confucian teacher of the Yuan period in China, who was a seminal force in the spread of the Learning of the Way.30 Since his influence was strong in Korea as well as in seventeenth-century Japanese Neo-Confucianism,31 one may take frequent reference to Li Tong, Xu Heng, and this concept as confirming the underlying continuity from Chinese Neo-Confucianism to the Korean and Japanese versions. It is understandable that a doctrine linking universal values to particular applications and recognizing the differentiated expression in social and cultural life of one underlying Way would have special significance for Koreans and Japanese, whose adherence to Neo-Confucian teaching was not taken to entail a loss of their own cultural identity.
Still another expression for the same basic idea is Cheng Hao’s (1032–1085): “Humaneness which forms one body with Heaven-and-Earth and all things” (tiandi wanwu yiti zhi ren).32 According to this holistic view, one’s self-fulfillment was achieved by engendering a state of mind and following a way of conduct in which there was no longer any consciousness of a distinction between self and others. Such a view was quite prominent in Ming thought and in Tokugawa Neo-Confucianism. Professor Shimada Kenji, in his early studies of modern thought in China, saw an essential link between this ideal of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism and late nineteenth-century reformers like Tan Sitong (1865–1898)—a continuity running down through almost a millennium of Neo-Confucian thought in China. More recently, in comparing the differing outlooks of the seventeenth-century Japanese thinkers Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714) and Yamazaki Ansai (1611–1682) in relation to Cheng-Zhu thought, Professor Okada Takehiko cited this doctrine of the “Humaneness which forms one body with Heaven-and-Earth and all things” and its importance in Ekken’s thought as the crucial element of continuity in Neo-Confucianism and the key criterion by which to distinguish Ekken’s essential orthodoxy from the skepticism of Ancient Learning [Kogaku] thinkers, which in some other respects Ekken shared.33
As a last example of this type of formulation, I offer the doctrine of “self-cultivation for the governance of men” (xiuji zhiren) or “ordering the state through self-discipline” (xiushen zhiguo). This was an outgrowth of the ethicopolitical thought developed during the Song in connection with the Great Learning and particularly in the lectures on the classics at the Song court. The appeal of this idea lay in its utter simplicity and rich ambiguity. Its primary meaning was that the responsibility for self-discipline fell first of all on the ruler (or his surrogates), who had to set the model for others’ self-cultivation, but its plausibility rested on the idea that truly to govern men was not possible except through their voluntary cooperation and self-discipline.34 Xiushen zhiguo was shorthand for the eight steps (batiaomu) of the Great Learning, and one might refer back to the latter for a fuller idea of what “self-cultivation” consisted in. But shorthand lent itself to oversimplification, and problems could arise from simplistic thinking about governmental administration. Perhaps in periods of decline or transition, when institutions failed, there was some advantage in putting everyone on their own and something hopeful about making a virtue of necessity in the midst of rapid political and social change. At any rate, this may have been the case in the late Song, Yuan, and early Ming, when the idea of “ordering the state through self-discipline,” especially as advocated by Zhen Dexiu and Xu Heng, seems to have played a large role in gaining acceptance for Neo-Confucianism as the dominant public philosophy.
A similar phenomenon is observable in the writing of Fujiwara Seika as a proponent of this philosophy in Japan during the transition from the Warring States Period to the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate.35 From my own reading in the thought of early Neo-Confucians in Korea and from the work of Martina Deuchler,36 I conclude that this aspect of Neo-Confucianism had much the same appeal: it was par excellence an answer to the need for an explicit political philosophy flexible enough to be adapted to varied circumstances. Yet by the mid-Ming period in China and by Yi Yulgok’s time in Korea, the idea was wearing a little thin; one sees a groping for something less moralistic and more substantial, more concrete, to work with. In response to this, there developed the institutional studies and “solid learning” (shixue) that became identified with “practical statecraft” (jingshi zhi yong). In Korea, too, this seems to have prepared the way for the practical learning known as sirhak.
To conclude this discussion of key concepts, I offer as a contrasting example of ostensible continuity in Neo-Confucianism what may, in the end, prove to be a case of discontinuity, the Japanese expression taigi meibun, or meibun taigi, which asserted that the “highest duty is to perform one’s allotted function (i.e., to fulfill the obligations of loyalty to one’s lord or ruler).” This doctrine was developed among the followers of the school of Yamazaki Ansai, especially Asami Keisai (1652–1711), citing Zhu Xi’s writings on the threat of foreign conquest in the Song. By the nineteenth century in Japan, taigi meibun had come to be regarded as a cardinal teaching of Zhu Xi and indeed the very essence of Neo-Confucian teaching on duty and loyalty. Today, one can read through any number of Chinese works on Neo-Confucian thought and philosophy without finding any mention of it. From this one might adjudge taigi meibun to have been a peculiarly Japanese appropriation of Neo-Confucianism. Elsewhere, I have suggested that it may be more reasonable to “take it as a distinctive Japanese formulation of an ethicoreligious attitude which finds diverse expression within and among the cultural traditions sharing the Neo-Confucian legacy.”37
This would seem to be confirmed in the Korean case. Korea was threatened, to an even greater degree than were China or Japan, with the danger of foreign conquest and the loss of its national identity. There, however, a heightened sense of loyalty and resistance to foreigners elicited from Neo-Confucians an intense feeling of fidelity to principle and a self-sacrificing devotion, often spoken of in terms of chŏri, “integrity and righteousness,” which inspired many acts of self-martyrdom. This was not clearly identified with supreme loyalty either to one’s own ruler or one’s own nation but would present itself, for instance, as resistance to the Manchus out of loyalty to the Ming38 or resistance to the ruler in the name of fidelity to principle. For all the acts of heroism one might cite in the name of chŏri, however, it remains only an intense Korean expression of a concept and an ethicoreligious attitude shared among Neo-Confucians in China and Japan as well. Taigi meibun, on the other hand, seems not to have been known or at least much talked about in Korea until modern times, when the Japanese repaid, in their own coin, some of Yamazaki Ansai’s debt to Yi T’oegye.
Authoritative Texts
Another measure of continuity in a tradition is the transmission of texts that establish the terms of the ongoing discourse and are generally accepted as standard or canonical works. Views on which texts can claim primacy vary with individual participants in the Neo-Confucian dialogue, even when they accept in general the authority of the tradition. An illustration of this is given in the paper by Yamazaki Michio for the “Conference on Zhu Xi’s Philosophy and Korean Confucianism” in Seoul, September 1980, wherein he presents the differing views of Yi T’oegye, Yamazaki Ansai, and Miyake Shōsai on the priority to be assigned to the Elementary Learning (Xiaoxue) and Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsilu) as basic texts.39 Neither of these works compiled under Zhu Xi’s direction would have been thought canonical by Zhu himself, but among his followers they became virtual “classics” with a social and educational importance far beyond their derivative status as “scriptures.” The Elementary Learning served, for instance, as the proximate scriptural authority for the adoption of the community compact and village wine-drinking ceremony widely practiced in rural Korea. Indeed, there were times in the political history of the Yi dynasty when the standing of the Neo-Confucians at court was closely correlated to the status of the Elementary Learning and its acceptance as a basis for economic and social reform.40
Competing in these same circles for priority as an introductory text or primer was a third neoclassical work, Zhen Dexiu’s Classic of the Mind-and-Heart (Xinjing), which I have discussed in Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart. This Heart Classic, as I learned after a chance encounter with the text in Yi T’oegye’s library at the Tosan Sŏwŏn had set me off on the path to a rediscovery of its roots in earlier tradition, had once carried great weight in the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart transmitted from China to Korea and Japan.
Another new classic of the greatest practical importance was the Family Ritual of Master Zhu (Zhuzi jiali, or Wen gong jiali). Compiled under Zhu Xi’s direction but left unfinished at his death (he had hoped to do more refining and polishing of it), the Family Ritual reflected Zhu’s sense that the ancient ritual texts, prescribing elaborate ceremonial observances for the Zhou aristocracy, were unsuited to the life situations of scholars in the Song. The rites needed to be simplified and their costs brought within the considerably reduced means of the Song literati. For this purpose, Zhu sought to synthesize writings of Song masters such as the Cheng brothers, Zhang Zai (1020–1077), and Sima Guang, believing that their recommendations on ritual would serve as a more practical guide in the contemporary circumstances than would ritual classics literally adhered to. Of all the East Asian peoples during the Neo-Confucian age, the Koreans seem to have embraced this approach most enthusiastically. They made the Family Ritual virtually the law of the land and “ritual studies” (yehak) a major field of Confucian studies.
Apart from helping us to fill in the early history of Neo-Confucianism, the Family Ritual, Heart Classic, and similar works illustrate how this school of thought was constantly creating and recreating its own past in the attempt to remake the present. In a basic sense, it made up “classics” as it went along—partly with pieces of old fabric from the ancient canon and partly out of the whole cloth of new commentaries lacing these fragments together. This was of course true of the Four Books, which owed their existence as such to Zhu Xi, and especially true of the Great Learning and the Mean, to which he gave a new interpretation and a central position. Another example of a popular classic, though one of less consequence to the canonical tradition, is the aforementioned syncretic work of the Korean Ch’u Chŏk, the Precious Mirror for Clarifying the Mind-and-Heart (Myŏngsim pogam; Viet.: Minh-tam bao-giam), which appeared to sum up the wisdom of the ages in regard to mind-cultivation and the conduct of life.
It would be misleading, however, to suggest that this improvisation knew no limits and that there are no objective tests by which to ascertain the consensus of tradition in respect to its core curriculum. Though this was still a tradition in the making, already by Xu Heng’s time the Elementary Learning had won a place as a text virtually on a par with the Four Books and Five Classics in the basic curriculum of the Imperial College and other state schools during the Yuan dynasty. Indeed, Xu spoke of it as sacred scripture.41 This only reflected a consensus already established in the local academies, where instruction in the new teaching was flourishing well before its acceptance by the state.42 When the Yuan dynasty, after much debate, finally resurrected the examination system and installed the Four Books with Zhu Xi’s commentaries as required texts for the first time, the Elementary Learning did not make it into this official company, perhaps because it was regarded as something to be studied on the elementary level. But in the eyes of Wu Cheng (1249–1333), the leading classicist of his day, it was eminently worthy of inclusion in the curriculum that he unsuccessfully proposed for adoption at that time.43
Against this background, it becomes relevant to ask whether there was much debate over the content of the examinations later adopted in Korea and what selectivity, if any, was shown in the fixing of curricula for state and local schools. Did these tend to follow lines already laid down in China? The Ming dynasty, certainly, followed the Yuan system almost to the letter, without any questions being asked worthy of mention in the record. Having once become fixed in the Ming “constitution,” i.e., in the official enactments of the dynasty’s founder, the content of the examinations was of course not readily subject to change by his heirs, but even the succeeding Qing dynasty did not exercise a new regime’s normal option to install different texts.
In Korea, the examination system underwent many changes, but if the Great Statutes for the Governance of the State (Kyŏngguk taejŏn) may be taken as a standard for Yi-dynasty Korea, the Five Classics and Four Books became required texts for one part of the examinations (the other part being the various literary styles) for both the lower and higher civil-service degrees. No candidate could successfully complete either stage of the exams without showing his mastery, at the lower level, of the Family Ritual and the Elementary Learning, and at the higher level, of the Family Ritual.44
Another kind of official certification is found in the Great Compendia on the Five Classics, Four Books, and [the Philosophy of] Human Nature and Principle (Wujing, sishu, xingli daquan), compiled in 1415 on the order of Ming Chengzu (r. 1403–1425). This went beyond simply confirming the position of the Five Classics and Four Books. It strongly endorsed many writings of the Song philosophers and gave the imperial imprimatur to such texts as Zhou Dunyi’s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate Explained (Taijitu shuo) and his Penetrating the Book of Changes (Tongshu), Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription (Ximing), Correcting Youthful Ignorance (Zhengmeng), and many writings of the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi. In 1426, a set of these Compendia was given by the emperor Xuanzang (r. 1426–1436) to the Korean king,45 and to judge from the frequency with which they were reprinted and appear in the classical collections of Korean libraries, they would seem to have had wide influence.46
As is well known, the Qing dynasty not only reprinted these compendia but sponsored an official abridgement of the Great Compendium on Human Nature and Principle under the title of Essential Ideas of Nature and Principle (Xingli jingyi), published in 1715.47 Comparing the comprehensive scope of the original version (seventy juan) with the later one (twelve juan), one can see two rather different approaches to the perpetuation of the tradition: the earlier one expansive and comprehensive, the later one much more selective and trim. Contrary to the conventional view, traditions do not simply accumulate heirlooms from the past. From time to time, they feel the need to sort out their possessions and clean house to get some room to live and work in. In the process, they reveal what adjustments are being made in their own priorities. Sometimes, too, there is a need to adapt to the level of practical comprehension on the part of a new master in the house, like the non-Chinese rulers of the Qing (Manchus), just as had been done by Xu Heng in educating the Mongols to Neo-Confucianism.48 Thus there was ample precedent within the tradition for such adjustments on the part of the Koreans. Even before the Great Compendium on Human Nature and Principle was abridged under the Manchus, it had been reduced to more manageable proportions by the Koreans. As Martina Deuchler reports, “The famous symposium of Song philosophy, the Great Compendium on Human Nature and Principle was printed several times during Sejong’s reign (r. 1418–50) but seems to have reached its full significance for the development of Neo-Confucian thought in Korea only after it was excerpted by Kim Chŏng-guk (1485–1541) at the beginning of the sixteenth century.”49
If historical circumstances warrant such adjustments, however, we must remember that Zhu Xi himself set a prime example of how one consolidates and encapsulates a tradition for educational purposes, as he did in his commentaries on the Four Books, his simplification of the ritual in the Elementary Learning and Family Ritual, his concise anthology of the Song masters in Reflections on Things at Hand, and his condensation of Sima Guang’s history, among other projects.
In Japan, the nature of the “official orthodoxy” (what I call “Bakufu orthodoxy” in contrast to the Mandarin orthodoxy of China)50 was much looser, with the state less directly involved in education, with no civil-examination system comparable to the Chinese, and with individual scholars taking more independent initiatives. Accordingly, the ruling regime rarely got into the business of defining and publishing an approved canon of Neo-Confucian literature. Indeed, the contrast is so sharp between the Japanese and Chinese cases as to raise similar questions about the Koreans. In the matter of approved texts, is there anything to establish the “official” content of the canon? And among independent scholars, or in the libraries of their academies, is there any consensus concerning the standard works that are seen to represent the core of tradition?
Such questions are not easily answered on the basis of existing scholarly studies, but judging from the holdings of academy libraries (mainly post-1590s and the Hideyoshi invasions) the indispensable texts would appear to have been the Four Books, Five Classics, Chinese dynastic histories, Zhu Xi’s works including the Basic Structure and Selected Details of the General Mirror (Tongjian gangmu), Zhen Dexiu’s Heart Classic and Extended Meaning of the Great Learning (Daxue yanyi), and the aforementioned Great Compendium of Human Nature and Principle.51
In the early days of the Neo-Confucian movement in Korea, scholars and officials drew freely on a considerable body of classical and historical literature for whatever sanction it might offer their plans for reform. They invoked especially the three ritual classics of the Confucian tradition: the Record of Rites (Liji), Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), and Ceremonial Rites (Yili). But they did not stop there. Zhu Xi’s Family Ritual had almost greater authority for them, not despite but indeed because of its being a recent adaptation better suited to their own times than the classic rites prescribed for Zhou aristocracy, which had long since disappeared. As precedents for governmental institutions, classically subsumed under the concept of religiosocial liturgies (i.e., “rites”), Korean Neo-Confucians did not hesitate to cite later historical encyclopedias such as the Comprehensive Institutes (Tongdian) of Du You (735–812) and the Comprehensive Inquiry Into Recorded Institutions (Wenxian tongkao) by Ma Duanlin (1254–1325) in the scholarly lineage of Zhu Xi and Zhen Dexiu. Also, more for historical precedents than institutions, they consulted Zhu Xi’s Basic Structure and Selected Details of the General Mirror.52 In this process, by consensus among scholars rather than by official prescription, the Koreans participated in the identification of Neo-Confucian classics that would have as much effective authority as the original classics in the actual conduct of affairs and of life.
Neo-Confucian Institutions
In the corporate life of Neo-Confucianism, political institutions loomed large. This was not because scholar-officials had effective control over them or had much opportunity to impress on them a specifically Neo-Confucian character but simply because, with the Confucian commitment to public service, they had to live with them and make the best of it. Institutions of state tended to follow the persistent patterns of dynastic rule; for the most part, they remained typical of the centralized bureaucracies of the past, much at variance with Neo-Confucian ideals of a Zhou restoration and return to decentralized feudalism.
To this generalization, the new civil-service examinations of the Yuan dynasty stand as only a partial exception. Neo-Confucian reformers at Khubilai’s court resisted plans to reestablish the examinations, preferring to recruit, train, and bring up leaders through a system of public schools. When, in a later reign, they finally compromised, accepting a system in which the examinations’ content, and to some extent the form, were of Neo-Confucian authorship, the concession was rather typical of the Neo-Confucian’s adjustment to the hard facts of political life and the stubborn persistence of dynastic institutions.
Another partial exception, yet only a qualified success by the Neo-Confucians’ own standards, is the institution at court of “lectures from the classics mat.” These constituted a serious effort to promote Neo-Confucian ideas of rulership, giving leading scholars an opportunity in the presence of the emperor to discuss classical principles in relation to contemporary affairs. We know that Zhu Xi seized this opportunity to stress the importance of the Great Learning as a manual of imperial self-cultivation, often in direct reference to urgent political problems of the day. We also know that Fan Zuyu’s Learning of the Emperor (Dixue) and Zhen Dexiu’s Extended Meaning of the Great Learning are byproducts of this kind of imperial instruction and that recourse was had in these “imperial seminars” (as Robert Hartwell has called them) to manuals of statecraft and political histories that became classics in their own right, offering a practical wisdom for the guidance of rulers rather in contrast to the Four Books. These included the Essence of Government in the Zhenguan Era (Zhenguan zhengyao), the Imperial Pattern (Difan) of Tang Taizong (r. 627–650), the General Mirror for Aid in Government (Zizhi tongjian) of Sima Guang, and the Mirror of Tang (Tangjian) of Fan Zuyu.53
The importance of these works in the political literature of early Neo-Confucianism has not been well recognized in recent times. Perhaps a realization that the classics mat as an institution and these texts as political classics, along with Zhen’s Heart Classic and Classic of Government (Zhengjing), played a prominent role at the Korean court will direct new attention to the Chinese prototypes. As it is, there has been some disposition to believe that Neo-Confucian political thinking was largely limited to well-worn clichés of self-cultivation drawn from the Four Books.54 One cannot dispute this view altogether, inasmuch as the latter texts were basic to the intellectual formation of scholar-officials in later centuries, and the idea of “self-cultivation for the governance of men” or “self-discipline for the ordering of the state” certainly led in this direction. Nevertheless, Zhen Dexiu’s Extended Meaning covered extensive historical ground and went into many political problems never dealt with in the Great Learning itself. Zhen did this by embracing a great deal of practical political lore under the rubric of “the investigation of things and affairs” and the “learning to be pursued by the ruler.” Thus it is significant that Chŏng Tojŏn (1342–1398), in proposing a new constitutional order at the inception of the Yi dynasty, should identify the lectures from the classics mat as one of the most essential institutions of the royal court and should specify Zhen Dexiu and his Extended Meaning of the Great Learning as the model for these discussions.55
Zhen’s scholarly enterprise in this connection reminds us that “broad learning” was one of the twin aims of Neo-Confucian cultivation, along with moral and spiritual discipline. For Zhu Xi to stress “self-cultivation” did not necessarily imply a moralistic reductionism on his part, for he was equally emphatic on the need for intellectual inquiry. And even though Zhu, like Mencius, spoke disparagingly of the pursuit of “systems” or institutions in a utilitarian sense, he did not neglect institutions intended to serve “humane” or “righteous” causes. Zhu himself devoted much attention to the workings of institutions that could benefit people on the local level. The community compact (xiangyue) and local granaries (shecangfa) became classic Neo-Confucian examples of this.56
It may be that such institutions do not loom large in the thinking of scholars for whom practical statecraft is almost entirely an affair of the court and central government and who look somewhat indifferently on problems of lower-level administration. But Zhu Xi’s brand of realism and practicality accepted the need for grassroots organization and for dealing with people in their actual condition. Thus he pursued this interest in the only way feasible to him (given his nonparticipation for most of his career in service at court), that is, through statecraft practiced on the local level. In this way, Zhu remained true to his own belief in the importance of “great functioning” or “great usefulness” (dayong) as a necessary complement to the cultivation of the “whole substance” of the mind. This “great usefulness” may be seen as all the more complementary to self-cultivation if we consider that one of the implications of “ordering the state through self-discipline” was a recognition that the only practical way to administer a vast and teeming empire was to allow for a large measure of local autonomy or self-governance.
It should be no surprise to us that this kind of practicality took diverse forms among Zhu’s followers. For some, like the historians Wang Yinglin (1223–1296) and Ma Duanlin, it meant directing their “broad learning” to the study of social and political institutions in their historical development. For others, like the Neo-Confucian reformers at the court of Khubilai, it meant strengthening Han Chinese institutions under Mongol rule, even those of a traditional dynastic sort, for which they became known as exponents of “practical statesmanship” (jingshi zhi yong).57
Among such institutions in the Yi dynasty the censorate may be cited as one that Neo-Confucians powerfully reinforced as a means of restraining royal power. Recognition of the Confucian censors’ right and duty to censure the king became such a feature of Yi politics as to effect a real sharing of power. According to Edward Wagner, this equilibrium of power “at its finest point of balance represented a constitutional monarchy.”58 For others in the Ming dynasty, practical statecraft meant grafting the Neo-Confucian “community compact” onto the local system of collective security (baojia). And in Korea, too, the practice of Neo-Confucian statecraft on this level apparently proved adaptable to local conditions and of “great usefulness” in meeting practical needs. The community compact was for many Neo-Confucians in Korea a key institution widely practiced on the local level. Curiously enough, the authority often invoked on its behalf was Zhu Xi’s Elementary Learning, which cited the community compact as an “exemplary practice” (shanxing).59
Another set of distinctively Neo-Confucian institutions were the four major rituals prescribed in Zhu Xi’s Family Ritual: “capping” (coming of age), wedding, funeral, and sacrifices for the ancestors. For the perpetuation of these rituals it was essential in the eyes of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi that each family set some land aside to support an ancestral shrine, where filial respect would be shown to the dead and gratitude expressed for the blessings of life received through them. This was to be a modest approximation of the shrines and rites prescribed in the ancient ritual texts for the Zhou aristocracy; by Tang times, these could be maintained by only a few great clans, and by the Song period they were only a vestigial memory of scholars concerned over the fragmentation of property by equal inheritance and the consequent atomization of the social and political structure before the growing power of the state. In China, it remained difficult for any but a few clans to keep up the appearances of the aristocratic lineages (zong) of the past or even to preserve the simplified version Zhu had adapted to the situation of the Song family or household (jia). But in Korea, the hereditary prerogatives and propertied status of the yangban scholar-aristocracy put them in a better position to practice this system and fulfill Zhu Xi’s intentions.
For all this, Korean use of the Family Ritual, according to Martina Deuchler, remained quite selective. The parts most faithfully followed were the ones on ancestor worship (although there were long and, in the end, inconclusive debates about the number of ancestral generations that should be venerated) and on funerals. Capping was most often performed, if at all, as a preliminary to the wedding ceremony, and the latter remained Korean into modern times (just as weddings in Japan have kept to Shinto rites).60
One of the most discussed institutions in Neo-Confucian literature is the well-field system. It appears also to have been one of the least practicable as a system of agricultural organization, though its “utility” may from the beginning have been more symbolic and pedagogical than practical, i.e., it was a vivid illustration of the principles of economic equality and communal cooperation rather than a workable system of land management. Already by Zhu Xi’s time he had tended to belittle Zhang Zai’s attempt to recreate a well-field system as rather idiosyncratic and ineffectual.61 One does not hear much of it thereafter as an actual institutional form in China. In Korea, too, it was often held up as a model for reform but never, it seems, actually instituted in its classic form. Curiously, in Japan there were symbolic reenactments of the system in feudal domains of Neo-Confucianminded daimyō, and one can still see vestiges of nine-squared plots in public parks that had once been gardens of the daimyō62—nostalgic evocations of an Arcadian ideal somewhat reminiscent of the rustic cottages of the Bourbons at Versailles. Perhaps the ultimate adaptation of this idea to the aesthetic tastes of the Japanese is the miniature well field incorporated into a few square feet of the garden at the Zen temple of Tōfukuji in Kyoto.
Of more practical significance in the corporate life of Neo-Confucians was the academy (shuyuan), in which Chinese Neo-Confucian thought first germinated, was then earnestly cultivated, and eventually came to full flower. Several features of Neo-Confucianism reflect this “academic” provenance. Academies (as the name shuyuan indicates) were for the keeping and study of books. Thus book learning and the preservation of the cultural heritage were central to the Neo-Confucian enterprise even before it became known for its speculative philosophy. Second, academies were for teaching and played a large part in the spread of education in the Song, taking up some of the slack from the failure of state schools to fulfill the need for public education. Third, academies were local institutions. Though sometimes winning a wide reputation and attracting students from a considerable distance, they depended essentially on local initiative and support. “Private” in the sense that they were not part of the official state system and had the voluntary support of the community, academies still needed the cooperation of local officials and occasionally received grants from the state. Thus they had somewhat less independence from officialdom than the word “private” would suggest in the West. So far as I know, no Neo-Confucian championed academies as “private,” in contrast to “public,” schools. Universal education through state-supported schools remained the ideal, as Zhu Xi’s writings clearly implied. In both China and Korea, however, academies provided the institutional base for Neo-Confucian scholarship and teaching; they afforded a measure of intellectual autonomy, if not financial independence, and kept alive a spirit of both voluntarism and community involvement in the life of learning.
As a typical social and cultural institution of the Chinese scholar-official class (shidafu) in their home setting, the local academy could well serve a similar function for even the more aristocratic yangban class in Korea, who identified themselves in the same terms as Confucian sadaebu. In Japan, however, the ruling elite or samurai class had military functions, feudal allegiances, and often religious loyalties, much in contrast to the Chinese and Korean cases. Hence the academy could not function in the same way as a meeting place of an upper class conscious of upholding its traditions and position vis-à-vis the ruler. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that the shoin (equivalent term for the Chinese shuyuan and Korean sŏwŏn) should be transmuted into a cultural adornment of the Japanese aristocracy, known best as an architectural feature in a new style of residential villa (shoin tsukuri), and thus assimilated, like the “well field,” as an aesthetic element in the new culture of the Edo period. Meanwhile, the educational functions of the local academy were served by private schools (shijuku), including schools for townspeople (chōnin), as well as by schools (often known as gakkō) maintained by Japanese daimyō as domainal (han) institutions. This difference did not, in the end, prevent such schools from serving many of the same cultural services as the academies, yet they could not quite stand as the embodiment of a class-conscious culture in the way the latter had done during the Ming and Yi dynasties.
As regards the Korean case, the role played by local academies in the development of Yi-dynasty education and culture was perhaps even greater than that of their Chinese counterparts. Moreover, Korea is probably unique in having preserved the academies so well, with their collections of books largely intact.
For all that, the full significance of the academies can only be measured against the failure of the Neo-Confucians to achieve their stated objective of establishing a universal public school system. Neo-Confucians in the Song, Yuan, and early Ming stressed education as a prerequisite to good government and called repeatedly for rulers to establish official schools on all levels from the court down to the village. Yet actual measures to accomplish this under all three dynasties eventually lapsed into ineffectuality. Thus, by default, the local academy was left to perform a function it had limited capacity to fulfill. This too was a pattern to be repeated in Korea.
The Uses of Neo-Confucianism
In its long Chinese life, Neo-Confucianism has served many purposes—educational, political, social, philosophical, and ideological. At its inception in the Northern Song, it was a movement among scholars and would-be officials of a regime strongly oriented toward civil-bureaucratic rule. Hu Yuan (993–1059), an early leader of the movement, was particularly known for his commitment to the education of scholar-officials in both classical learning and practical governmental skills.63
This was well after the Song dynasty had established itself, so the new thought and scholarship, instead of ideologically spearheading the drive to power of a new dynasty, responded rather to the needs of a centralized civil administration following a period of contentious warlordism.
In this situation, Neo-Confucians tended to take power for granted and were more concerned about its legitimate uses. Their scholarship celebrated the civil virtues, their culture the arts of peace. Already by the time of Li Gou (1009–1059), a scholar patronized, like Hu Yuan, by the statesman Fan Zhongyan (989–1052), Li could complain about the failure of contemporary scholars to give due attention to power factors and especially to military affairs.64 This state of affairs was not untypical of Neo-Confucians in later times. Rarely did they give much thought to the seizing and organizing of power or the founding of new dynasties, yet often they found themselves serving as custodians of a power and managers of a state they had not themselves created.
Historically speaking, Neo-Confucianism was a class phenomenon in several important respects. Its rise in the Song was concomitant with the rise to new heights of power of a professional scholar-official class whose scholarship and cultural activities were the beneficiaries of the new affluence, material means, and leisure enjoyed by that class. Its concerns reflected their heightened sense of responsibility for political leadership and for preserving the essential values—“this culture”—on which they believed the polity should rest. With one foot in the land as a kind of landed gentry and the other in the halls of power as bureaucrats, they had a measure of independence from the ruler and fought hard to maintain their own status and integrity, with the alternative of repairing to their home base if need be. Yet often it was not much of a propertied base they returned to. Many Neo-Confucians were not well off, and to maintain their independence required heroic struggle of the kind Confucius spoke of when he said, “Poverty and low estate are what every man detests, but if they can only be escaped at the expense of the Way, [the Noble Man] will not try to escape them” (Analects 4:5).
To a degree, Neo-Confucians functioned as buffers or mediators between dynastic power and the common people. But the insecurities of both property and power were such that scholar-officials could only act as a countervailing force, a kind of political “middle class,” because of the solidarity maintained among the shidafu as sharers in a common mission and culture. Education was a crucial factor in developing that sense of common identity. In the case of the leading Neo-Confucian thinkers, who sometimes experienced great hardships, they could sustain themselves in poverty or dismissal from office only because of the moral and physical support of their own class.
On this basis, they tried to express in their philosophy the highest ideals of that class and their common aspiration for self-fulfillment. As a program of self-cultivation, Neo-Confucianism gave meaning and direction to their individual lives; as institutionalized instruction, first in schools and then in government, it became the public philosophy of the educated elite. As philosophy, it was subscribed to by generations of later scholars; as ideology, it was resorted to by dynasty after dynasty, irrespective of ethnic and even cultural differences among them—by Mongols in the Yuan, Chinese in the Ming, and Manchus in the Qing.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing in the extension of this system to other lands and peoples is its ability to transcend the limitations of the class that produced it. Its first purveyors to Japan were Zen monks, whose social and political role contrasted sharply with that of the scholar-officials of China and whose interest in Neo-Confucianism was cultural in the narrow sense (if not actually commercial, as a commodity in the China trade engaged in by Zen monasteries). Truly transmitters of the teaching rather than its proponents or creative interpreters, the Zen monks were superseded as sponsors of Neo-Confucianism by professional Confucian advisers to the Tokugawa aristocracy, a military elite whose social circumstances differed markedly from the Chinese mandarins. So little did the Tokugawa military government have in common with Chinese civil bureaucracy that it strains credulity to think of Neo-Confucianism as offering explicit ideological support to established institutions in cases as dissimilar as the Ming and Tokugawa. In fact, Neo-Confucianism lent little to the ideological justification or legitimization of Tokugawa rule itself,65 though ethically and philosophically it contributed much to filling a vacuum left by the silence of Zen and Pure Land Buddhism in the social arena. Yet, adapted as it was to the way of the warrior, to the new cultural needs of a reunified Japan, and to the native religious traditions of Shinto, Neo-Confucianism was able to play a substantial role in the social and cultural life of premodern Japan.
More significant in this process than political or economic structures was the spirit of voluntarism and self-determination implicit in much of Neo-Confucian teaching. Here the emphasis lay on individual initiative and local autonomy. It did not renounce formal structures but saw them as growing from within rather than being superimposed from without. This allowed the Koreans and Japanese (and I would suppose Vietnamese too) to adjust Neo-Confucian views on the primacy of moral relationships to their own social and political structures and adapt Neo-Confucian concepts of self-cultivation to indigenous traditions of moral and spiritual discipline.
NEO-CONFUCIANISM IN KOREA
In its own historical development Korean Neo-Confucianism appears to be unique. The case of the Yi dynasty would seem to be a singular instance in which Neo-Confucians played a large role in the creation of a new regime and in the formulating of its institutions. For any comparative study of continuity and change in Neo-Confucianism, the founding of the Yi dynasty and remolding of Korean society at this time offer a fascinating test case for some of the generalizations offered above.
Though unique in the depth of its political involvement, the role of Neo-Confucianism in fourteenth-century Korea is not without significant parallels in other dynastic situations close at hand: e.g., in its relation to the Yuan state and then to Koryŏ. Here, Neo-Confucian social values, as appropriated by both dynasties, may have afforded them some degree of legitimacy, but in the not-too-long run rationalistic and idealistic tendencies in Neo-Confucianism probably worked as a leaven to undermine these regimes and hasten their replacement.66 This reflects an ambivalence in Neo-Confucianism toward any ruling power; i.e., whether one’s primary loyalty should be to one’s royal masters or to higher ideals often at odds with the status quo. Indeed, Khubilai himself seems to have sensed this ambivalence. He had his own suspicions and premonitions concerning the dependability of Confucian support. When urged to adopt Confucianism, he pointedly asked if the weakness of the preceding Jin dynasty and its defeat by his Mongols were not attributable in part to the softening effects of Confucian humanistic teachings.67 In the end, there were committed Neo-Confucians who gave their service to the Yuan, and others to the Ming, some to Koryŏ and others to the Yi. In such cases, too, Neo-Confucianism survived the demise of its official sponsors.
The issue, of course, is not solely one of Neo-Confucian influence. Both Yuan and Koryŏ remained deeply involved with Buddhism and were also heavily dependent on structures of authority, imposed by conquest, which would be jeopardized by reformism of any kind. In this respect, these dynasties faced the classic dilemma of authoritarian regimes that are never so endangered as when compelled to accept a measure of liberalization. There are parallels here to the late Tokugawa shogunate, undone in the midst of its own efforts to reform and modernize in the 1850s and 1860s, and to the reforms of the declining Manchu dynasty in the early twentieth century. How to manage change without letting it get out of hand is a problem for military regimes whose rule has not actually been predicated, as Confucian theory requires, on the consent of the governed.
As regards coexistence or conflict with Buddhism, there is more than one parallel: to the Confucian revival in the Northern Song period; to the intellectual and political ascendance of Neo-Confucianism in Yuan China, the early Ming, and early Tokugawa Japan; and to a concurrent pattern of ideological syncretism drawing on Buddhism as well as Neo-Confucianism for purposes of dynastic legitimation in these same settings. We are not yet in a position to handle, in more than a suggestive manner, the complex questions that arise in the comparative analysis of such cases, but it is perhaps significant that Neo-Confucians in the early years of the Yi dynasty revert to the persisting influence of Buddhism as an important challenge to Neo-Confucian reform efforts.
Regardless, however of the allowances made for prevailing religious attitudes, Korean Neo-Confucians did not conceive of the problem as a matter solely of translating Zhu Xi’s ideas into Korean terms. From the start, they took most seriously the transplantation of Neo-Confucian institutions as well. This is shown, as in the cases of Chŏng Tojŏn and Kwŏn Kŭn, by the readiness to espouse radical reforms, to adapt selectively major Yuan or Ming institutions, and beyond that to put into effect many of Zhu Xi’s practical proposals not even widely adopted in China itself.
During the Early Yi dynasty, education in the capital and the provinces was reformed, first according to the Yuan system and then in ways thought to be more in accordance with Zhu Xi’s own ideas. The twists and turns of successive reforms and counterreforms suggest that even a fundamentalist and literalist approach to the reading of Zhu’s intention was not proof against different interpretations being drawn to serve divergent power interests. Schools and examinations, playing a key role as avenues to power and influence, quickly became subject to partisan controversy and strife.
A special feature of the Korean situation was the yangban aristocracy’s almost exclusive prerogative of admission to the examinations, in contrast to the more open, egalitarian, and meritocratic system in China. Zhu Xi himself, like other Neo-Confucians before him, had not set much store by the civil-service examinations as such. He preferred to train up talented persons through the schools, observe their conduct and moral character firsthand, and then have meritorious candidates personally recommended for government service. A similar rationale seems to have lain behind the substitution of oral, for written, examinations in Korea—a practice never sanctioned in China. Written examinations were favored by scholars at the capital, oral by candidates from the countryside. The latter might lack literary skills and intellectual sophistication, but their moral character could be discerned in personal interviews. Understandably sharp cleavages developed along these lines, as oral examinations were alleged to be too subjective and liable to favoritism, while written exams were said to favor those highly literate in the Chinese tradition.
In education, on the other hand, there were marked similarities between China and Korea in the gradual decline of the public schools and the rise of private study halls (sahak)68 and later local academies as centers of learning and social influence among the yangban,69 a role academies had also served among the local gentry in China. Here too the contest for power between the king and the yangban aristocratic bureaucracy was reflected in the king’s support for public schools as a counterweight to yangban influence, while the latter supported academies as bastions of local power and culture.70 Ironically enough, one would be hard put to find any endorsement in Zhu Xi’s writings for academies versus state schools. The rise in importance of the former simply reflected the failure to carry out what Zhu had urged be done for the latter.
One of the most distinctive Neo-Confucian institutions at the Chinese court during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties were the “lectures from the classics mat,” in which distinguished scholar-ministers lectured to and carried on discussions with the ruler concerning lessons to be drawn from the Confucian classics for contemporary affairs. This role had been performed by several of the great Neo-Confucian teachers who had the greatest influence on the Koreans: Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi, Zhen Dexiu, and Xu Heng.71 For their part, Korean Neo-Confucians went even further in the systematic conduct of these lectures, which emphasized the importance of the scholar-minister as mentor to the throne and sought to enhance the latter’s influence vis-à-vis the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the ruler.
A natural corollary to this kind of royal education in Korea was the provision for the education of the heir apparent. Dr. JaHyun Kim Haboush, who has reported on the conduct of the royal lectures under the Yi dynasty,72 has undertaken to study the education of the crown princes of the Yi dynasty during the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. The significance of the subject lies in the key Neo-Confucian doctrines on which the instruction was premised: the goodness of man’s nature and his potentiality for sagehood, the special responsibility of those who exercise great power to learn how to use it well and commit themselves to becoming sage-rulers, and the importance of the ruler’s self-cultivation as setting an example for others to follow (i.e., fulfilling the basic aim of Neo-Confucian political doctrine: to govern men by “renewing” them through exemplary self-cultivation).
Since adequate studies have not yet been made of the Chinese counterpart to this system of education at court, we are in no position to make comparative assessments. Judging from Dr. Haboush’s evidence alone, which includes many striking individual cases, the results in Korea were at best mixed. She suggests that three special factors may have affected the outcome. One was the lack of significant motivation on the part of princes whose future seemed assured simply by hereditary right. A second was the lack of real leverage on the part of the tutor in dealing with such a privileged student. The third consisted of the attractive diversions from study that were readily available to the crown prince. No doubt other considerations pertaining to the content of instruction played a part. The more his preceptors stressed the heavy responsibility of the ruler, the greater could become the prince’s resistance to this kind of moral overload. In any case, Dr. Haboush’s detailed case studies provide us with fascinating illustrations of the problems encountered at this crucial juncture in the relations of the king and his Neo-Confucian mentors.
The golden age of Korean Neo-Confucian philosophy in the sixteenth century followed upon a period of substantial progress in the development of Neo-Confucian institutions and culture in the fifteenth century, especially during the reign of the renowned King Sejong. Sejong was responsible for marked advances in several areas of cultural life. One of these was the devising of the Korean phonetic alphabet, a unique creative achievement that contributed to the growth of vernacular literature. This development shows how Neo-Confucian influence, though always implying some measure of sinicization, did not necessarily inhibit the growth of native traditions. In fact, it sanctioned and stimulated cultural activity in general and encouraged a people’s natural self-expression.73 In keeping with its central conception of “the unity of principle and diversity of its functional applications,” Neo-Confucianism accepted cultural diversity and, rather than insisting simply on conformity to things Chinese, helped to strengthen the Korean people’s sense of themselves and encourage their distinctive expression of the Way (zide).
The philosopher Yi T’oegye has attracted much attention in East Asia. Professor Wing-tsit Chan, a leading authority on Chinese thought and Zhu Xi in particular, has examined the scholarly work of Yi T’oegye in regard to Zhu Xi’s life and writings. He finds that Yi, while holding Zhu in the highest respect, was most thorough and critical in his scholarly annotations of Huang Gan’s (1152–1221) account of Zhu’s “conduct of life” (xingzhuang), being particularly attentive to details of Zhu’s movements and whereabouts, his relationship to his teacher Li Tong (1093–1163), his deep interest in religious and ritual matters, and his serious concerns over national defense—matters relatively neglected by other writers. In the last three respects, Professor Chan’s observations have heightened significance in that these particular emphases in Yi’s scholarship may well have had a part in shaping Japanese perceptions of Zhu Xi.
In a similar vein, Tu Weiming has discussed the centrality in T’oegye’s thought of the famous “Four-Seven Debate.” This concerned the relation of principle and material force (or ether) in the issuance of the Four Beginnings (feelings or impulses that constitute the inherent tendency to goodness in human nature), on the one hand, and the Seven Emotions, which may work for either good or evil, on the other. Professor Tu analyzes in detail the views expressed by T’oegye and a junior colleague in a continuing exchange on this question. Out of this developed T’oegye’s more mature and refined views on the active or dominating character of principle and the crucial agency of the mind in coordinating reason and emotion. This dialogue in Korea, according to Professor Tu, represented an authentic, independent development of the Neo-Confucian discourse, notable for its thoroughness, frankness, and civility, “a model of scholarly communication for [later] generations.74 From it Professor Tu suggests there emerged a clarified perception of the human feelings, one marked by a precision and finesse not often matched in China.
Not long after T’oegye’s time, the dialogue was resumed by Yi Yulgok, a powerful thinker and worthy rival of T’oegye in the interpretation and propagation of Zhu Xi’s philosophy. Yulgok stressed the primacy of material force in the dialogue he carried on with a friend about the “Four-Seven” issue. Julia Ching, in “Yi Yulgok on the Four Beginnings and Seven Emotions,” emphasizes the complementary relationship or dialectical unity of the “beginnings” and emotions rather than their opposition. Professor Ching concludes that Yulgok, like T’oegye, has detected and clarified certain ambiguities in Zhu Xi’s thought and “has made a real contribution on an issue that Chinese thinkers had not clearly settled.”75 Further, we note that this clarification, though it sometimes has the appearance of hairsplitting, actually deals with a central issue for Neo-Confucians engaged in self-cultivation, whose conscientiousness in regard to moral imperatives and the disciplining of selfish desires was still meant to express the spontaneous goodness of man’s moral nature. It also demonstrates the intellectual and moral seriousness that Koreans brought to their practical realization of Neo-Confucian principles.
Another indication of the Koreans’ active pursuit of Neo-Confucian goals is found in the attention both T’oegye and Yulgok gave to Zhu Xi’s recommendations for the setting up of community compacts—voluntary local charters in the nature of social contracts, by which people subscribed to a code of conduct and various forms of cooperation and mutual aid. Zhu Xi had recommended a model compact worked out in 1076 by Lu Dajun, whose family in Shoanxi had been associated with Cheng Yi. It was one of several schemes for self-governing communities experimented with by such early Neo-Confucians as Zhang Zai. Zhu Xi had written a modified version of the Lu family compact, adapted to his own time and situation, the text of which was included in his collected works. The Lu version was also reproduced in the official early Ming compilation Great Compendium of Human Nature and Principle (1415).
This is an aspect of Zhu Xi’s thought that seems not to have attracted much notice in the early days of the Neo-Confucian movement in Korea, when reform centered on the organization of central government, schools, and examinations; the land system; and the conduct of family affairs according to the prescriptions of Zhu Xi’s Family Ritual. According to Sakai Tadao, interest in the community compact arose after the text became available in Korea during the early fifteenth century,76 and the actual institution of the system was not officially sanctioned until the early sixteenth century. In China itself, adoption of the compact had spread from the mid-fifteenth into the sixteenth century. Thus the Korean development could possibly be seen as an extension of the compact’s propagation in China. If this is so, however, it is more a matter of stimulus than of substantive replication, since the early form of the compacts in Korea follows, if anything, Song models and only later incorporates certain Ming adaptations. In other words, the Korean phenomenon followed its own internal lines of development from shared premises.
In the compacts devised successively by Yi T’oegye and Yi Yulgok, the detailed specifications are based on community consultation and adapted to local conditions, especially to the existing social structure and the tradition of covenant associations, which had deep roots in Korea. Professor Sakai speculates that the community-compact idea in China had sprung from similar roots in local covenants and that in Korea too an attempt was made to ground the compact organization in such indigenous structures and practices. Organizationally, the Korean compacts were fitted into the pattern of yangban leadership in the local community, though Sakai sees Yulgok as more egalitarian than T’oegye and more progressive in emphasizing education in the vernacular for commoners and in linking the administrative direction of the compacts to that for the communal granary and local school, as Zhu Xi himself had done. However, for Zhu Xi the local school had been the official or public school in the districts, whereas by Yulgok’s time in Korea the public schools had seriously declined and been largely superseded by local academies, quasi-private schools maintained by the yangban. Nevertheless, according to Sakai, where T’oegye had tended to buttress yangban authority and uphold class privilege, Yulgok promoted the upward mobility of commoners and cooperation between the upper and lower classes. This he sees as reflecting Yulgok’s more pragmatic and realistic approach, which in turn is linked to his empirical philosophy of material force or ether.
However this may be, we should not fail to note the normative, didactic content of the compact texts and the natural association of the compacts with schools. This shows the strong continuing interest of these major Korean thinkers in education and in the plurality of means by which this was to be accomplished on different levels of society. In this T’oegye and Yulgok were carrying on a major and indeed central commitment of the Neo-Confucian tradition as it came down from Zhu Xi. There may be differences from one Neo-Confucian to another as to their elitism or egalitarianism, but none in respect to the fundamental need for the “renewal of the people” (as Chu Hsi had put it) through education.
This, then, provided the background for the flowering of Neo-Confucian culture, as expressed especially in the teachings of T’oegye and Yulgok and in their personal involvement with the community compact. Finally, this development is linked to the flourishing of the local academies as centers of yangban culture.
If in these respects Professor Sakai draws attention to progressive features of the Neo-Confucian movement, he concedes that more than one class, party, or faction sought to exploit Neo-Confucian ideas and institutions for their own purposes, some of them certainly protective of their own interests and often conservative of the status quo in the midst of economic and social change. In such circumstances, it was only natural that controversy would arise as to who could legitimately claim to speak for Neo-Confucianism as either authoritative teaching or official ideology.
Thus political struggle, factional rivalry, and disputes concerning orthodoxy and heterodoxy may be seen as inseparable concomitants of Neo-Confucianism’s rise to dominance in Korea. Along with this, there was a change in the way “orthodoxy” was conceived or asserted over the course of Neo-Confucianism’s becoming the established teaching.
For Chŏng Tojŏn and Kwŏn Kŭn in the late fourteenth century, the problem had been how, in order to achieve their social goals, the positive values or “correct learning” of Neo-Confucianism could be propagated in the face of entrenched Buddhist influence. The Neo-Confucian scholar Kim Koengp’il (1454–1504), following after Chŏng Tojŏn and Kwŏn Kŭn, felt a need to press the case for a public philosophy centered on a view of the self defined in rational, moral, and social terms, as opposed to the nonrational and essentially private experience of “nothingness” or “emptiness” in Buddhism.77 By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, with the new teaching firmly established, the question had become, rather, which brand of Neo-Confucianism could claim to represent itself as the authentic heir of Confucius and Zhu Xi.
Further, there was the vexed issue of the Korean relationship to China and the extent to which political loyalty required Korean acceptance of the latter’s ideological authority. Koryŏ had identified closely with the Yuan at a time when the Yuan court stood as the principal sponsor of Neo-Confucianism to such an extent indeed that the Mongol collapse in 1368 undermined Koryŏ’s own authority. The Yi dynasty, though initially identified with the Ming, experienced repeated difficulties in its relations with the latter and, while professing loyalty to its suzerain, strongly implied that the exemplary virtue of the Koreans in this respect showed them to be the truer of the two as custodians of the Confucian heritage. Thus total devotion to Zhu Xi became a badge not only of Korean fidelity to the Way but of its independence from the decadent Ming—a form of subtle nationalistic self-assertion worthy of the Neo-Confucian claim to have “gotten” the Way for oneself.
Further advances in Korean thought during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, discussed by Dr. Deuchler, confirmed this autonomous capability. Yi T’oegye developed his own orthodox “learning of the mind-and-heart,” which preempted much of the ground taken up in China by Wang Yangming, while Yulgok’s dual emphasis on the creative mind and concrete reality kept within the orbit of the Zhu Xi school’s tendencies that in late Ming China veered off from the Neo-Confucian center of gravity. T’oegye thus became the great symbol of a conservative orthodoxy and Yulgok of a more liberal one—both claiming fidelity to Zhu Xi and both exemplifying the autonomy and authenticity so central to Neo-Confucianism. Official confirmation of these claims came in 1610, with the enshrinement in the Confucian temple of leading Korean Neo-Confucians who symbolized Korean independence of China and rejection of the corrupt, heterodox thought that allegedly permeated the late Ming.
Dr. Deuchler points to the idea of individual inspiration in both T’oegye and Yulgok.78 T’oegye acknowledged no single teacher as the direct source of his views but rather thought of himself as the true successor to Zhu Xi. In this respect, he was casting himself in the same role as Zhu Xi had cast the Cheng brothers (and, by implication, himself), who had discerned the true meaning of the Way after the tradition had lapsed for more than a thousand years after Mencius.
Elsewhere, I have identified this view of tradition as a “prophetic” one, stressing the unique insight of one who rediscovers and repossesses the long-lost Way, as contrasted to the “scholastic” or apostolic emphasis on lineal transmission from teacher to disciple.79 Typical of the prophetic role is its powerful self-assurance, its sense of direct access to truth, as well as dogmatic conviction of its own hold on the Way and its rejection of any other. This was as true of their Song predecessors as of their Korean emulators, and since there could be no inherent limit on such claims, rivalry and partisanship were the almost certain consequences.
Ironically, Yulgok availed himself of the same privilege by declaring his independence of T’oegye, whom he accused of being too slavish in his devotion to Zhu Xi. For Yulgok, the key to authentic possession of the Way was “getting it oneself.”80
In this light, many of the leading Korean Neo-Confucians would appear to be acting out roles already modeled for them by their Song predecessors, though no doubt doing it their own way and reacting to situations in Korea for which there could be no exact parallel in China. The outcome, while an autonomous development within Korea and not merely a response to external stimuli, was in significant part, as Dr. Deuchler has put it, a “result of the intellectual challenge inherent in Neo-Confucian philosophy.”81 Hence, while further research may well differentiate the historical conditions or social forces impinging on this process, there would seem to be nothing in the Neo-Confucian discourse itself to mark the Korean sense of orthodoxy as unique, except in the Neo-Confucian sense that all human activity partakes of both commonness and distinctiveness, i.e., the underlying unity of principle and diversity of its manifestations.
For all that, at least some tentative conclusions may be arrived at. One is that the Koreans showed a remarkable capacity for assimilating both Neo-Confucian thought and institutions, as well as their social and cultural adjuncts. Another is that the process of assimilation was not merely one of skilled copying but from the beginning involved creative adaptation to Korean needs and conditions. Individual thinkers and statesmen achieved a thorough grasp of different aspects of Neo-Confucian thought as well as their historical antecedents in China and the relevant background in Korea. Early on, a statesman like Chŏng Tojŏn, and later on a scholar like Yi Yulgok, could make highly original contributions to Neo-Confucian statecraft thought that bear favorable comparison to, and often anticipate the handling of similar problems by, leading Chinese thinkers. Because of their native versatility and the range of fields they were prepared to deal with, Koreans at the end of Koryŏ and the inception of the Yi dynasty were able to undertake ambitious reforms in their national life beyond anything attempted in China. Though many of these were subject to later modification, the experience gained in a massive program of political and social engineering, as found in the record kept of it, must be considered one of the richest chapters in East Asian, if not world, history. This is especially true of the efforts to implement Zhu Xi’s political and social thought, which often go beyond anything attempted in China and Japan, e.g., the implementation of his Elementary Learning and Family Ritual, his recommendations for the community compact, communal granary, village ceremonies, schools, etc. Truth to tell, in many instances little attention has been given to their counterpart ideas or institutions in China, and it is only their inescapable importance in Korea, once one gets around to looking at them, that compels us to reexamine these neglected areas of Chinese—and perhaps Japanese—intellectual and social history.