When I was invited to give the Qian Mu Lecture for 1982 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the honor of being asked to participate in such a distinguished lectureship was enough to compel my acceptance, whatever the doubts I had about being able to meet the expectations aroused by so great a name in Chinese scholarship. I had, too, strong personal reasons for taking up this charge. For many years, Qian Mu had been a teacher of mine through his writings, and though others also have taught me in this way, he was one of the earliest and most influential in guiding my studies of Chinese thought. If a request comes in the name of a teacher to whom one is so indebted, it cannot be refused.
Qian Mu’s impressive scholarly contributions are linked in my mind to the name of an earlier scholar, the seventeenth-century Huang Zongxi, who attracted my attention soon after I first ventured into Chinese studies. That was in 1937–1938, when most people would have thought that only missionary connections could draw one to such an out-of-the-way field. But in New York and at Columbia then, the interest in China was just as likely to be political as religious, and I soon found myself in a Chinese class with the singer Paul Robeson and others of a radical persuasion, sharing with them socialist leanings and a youthful enthusiasm for Mao Zedong’s revolutionary exploits. Later, there was to be some disenchantment on my own part, as I and others of my generation watched the course of events in Europe—the betrayal of revolutionary idealism in Stalin’s purges; the Hitler-Stalin pact, which let loose the violence of World War II; the division of Europe between Nazi and Soviet forces; the spreading holocaust and Soviet gulag; etc. Less optimistic about Western-style revolution as the way out of China’s difficulties, I began to search for something in the life and history of the Chinese people themselves that might offer grounds for hope in a future less torn between revolution and reaction.
Casting around, I lit on Huang Zongxi, about whom not much was then known in the West. At the turn of the century, he had been something of a hero—some called him “China’s Rousseau”—to Chinese reformers and anti-Manchu revolutionaries, who looked to find some sanction in the past for democratic values, though they rarely pursued the comparison very far or examined Huang’s ideas closely in the context of his own times. Later, the revolutionary tide swept all such Confucian reformism aside, as a “brave new world” burst forth that saw total emancipation from China’s past as the only solution.
It was here that Qian Mu came into the picture for me, his approach to Chinese history and thought offering a larger perspective in which to view these disjointed times. As he later reaffirmed this view and articulated it more fully in his inaugural lecture for this series, China’s true liberation would not be achieved in the manner of the Cultural Revolution, by trying to root out all vestiges of the past and destroy them, but only by coming to terms with Chinese culture, whatever its virtues and deficiencies, and seeing the future of this great people as authentically rooted there. While some Chinese might emigrate to other countries and adapt to different cultures, this was not possible for the great mass of Chinese, who had to live with one another in a condition, and with an outlook, very much shaped by their common past.1
As a rare and accomplished historian of Chinese thought, Qian Mu earlier had reopened the Neo-Confucian record and established the context of Huang Xongxi thought in the intellectual history of the Song, Ming, and early Qing periods. I discovered Professor Qian’s work, especially his History of Chinese Thought in the Last Three Centuries (Zhongguo jin sanbainian xueshu shi), just at the time (after my World War II service in the Pacific theater) when I was digging into Huang’s own studies in intellectual history. Professor Qian prefaced his history of seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century thought by reminding his readers of its roots in Song Neo-Confucianism.2
Huang’s best-known work, the Mingyi daifang lu (Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince), had been written in 1662, not long after his retirement from years of struggle in the resistance movement against the Manchus. His frustrations as a participant in reform efforts at the end of the Ming and then as a member of remnant Ming forces holding out against the invader were given powerful expression in this critique of Ming despotism and decadence. As a loyal minister of the Ming, he rendered his penultimate service to it (in the Confucian sense) by offering forthright criticism of its weaknesses, and as a Neo-Confucian with a broad grasp of history he extended his analysis of these evils back into the earliest of the imperial dynasties.
The outcome of this scholarly effort stands as probably the most sweeping and systematic critique of Chinese despotism in the premodern period. It was indeed a radical attack on traditional imperial institutions, and the succeeding Manchu dynasty, notwithstanding Huang’s excoriation of the Ming, saw his work as no less threatening and subversive to them. To me it remains a major landmark of Confucian political thought, remarkable for its breadth of historical scholarship, depth of moral passion, and power of trenchant expression.
In these respects, then, Huang’s work is almost in a class by itself, yet one would be mistaken to think of it as wholly unique or exceptional. Huang was no solitary genius, breaking with his past and at odds with the scholarship of his time. Rather, his protest only gave more pointed expression to political views that other thinkers of the day shared with him, and his radical manifesto, though sharpened by the crisis of dynastic upheaval and foreign conquest, was but one culmination of a liberal Neo-Confucian tradition he was glad to acknowledge and reaffirm.
Huang’s essay was not, however, to be his last word on the Ming. He did not just expose its bankruptcy and divest himself of a bad business. Most of the remaining years of his life he devoted to preserving the record of Ming Confucian scholarship in thought and literature. Representative of this later work is his Case Studies of Ming Confucians (Mingru Xuean), a critical anthology of Ming Confucian thought that has come to be recognized as a major monument in the writing of Chinese intellectual history and one much emulated (even by Chien Mu himself, in his Zhuzi xinxuean). In an explanatory note at the beginning of this magnum opus, Huang asserted that whatever the other failings and shortcomings of the Ming, in the central domain of Neo-Confucian thought (lixue), Ming scholars had won unprecedented achievements.3
It is a claim with more than one significance for us. On the surface, Huang’s massive work of compilation could be seen as a conservative effort—a typical example of Confucian scholarship conserving tradition. But since Huang was so critical of the Ming in other respects, his expressed admiration for its philosophical achievements cannot be taken for granted or dismissed as conventional praise. Moreover, Huang’s generally sympathetic approach to the subject and his insistence on the positive importance of preserving Ming thought contrasts with the prevailing judgment against it in the latter half of the seventeenth century, when it was seen as empty, decadent, and best left interred with the ashes of the fallen Ming. Indeed, Huang had to buck a tidal wave of reaction against Ming thought, one that was to carry down into the present century. From this standpoint, in his effort to “conserve” the Ming Neo-Confucian legacy, Huang was adopting an independent stance vis-à-vis the dominant intellectual trend and certainly one counter to the official view in his time.
I shall have more to say later about the deeper significance of this commitment on Huang’s part. Here it may not be out of place for me to suggest that the more recent scholarship of Qian Mu, likewise, has had to withstand some of the same hostility to Neo-Confucianism and, even more, violent political attacks against Confucianism as a whole. Qian was one of a very few distinguished scholars who resisted the prevailing trend in his own time and thus effectively emulated, in my view, the earlier example of Huang Zongxi in preserving, though not uncritically, his Neo-Confucian heritage.
When Huang spoke for Ming lixue, he referred to a distinctive phase in the development of thought trends that had first appeared in the Song period (960–1279). Later, having completed his anthology of Ming thought, he extended his survey backward in time to cover the Song and Yuan periods as well, leaving at his death an unfinished anthology, the Song Yuan xuean (Case Studies of Song and Yuan Confucians). These works covered the whole broad movement of Confucian thought that was traceable from the Song period, as its formative phase, down through the Yuan and Ming. Clearly, he still hoped in the late seventeenth century that the flowering of thought he so admired in the Ming would bear further fruit in his own time and thereafter.
The modern Western expression “Neo-Confucianism” as it has been used by Fung Yulan, Derk Bodde, Carsun Chang, and in our Neo-Confucian Studies Series at Columbia is generally coextensive with the new trends covered by Huang. This means that it embraces a range of schools and thought currents stemming from the Song masters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, including lixue in the form not only of the Cheng-Zhu school but also of the so-called Lu-Wang school (so-called because of a certain affinity of thought between Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming, though the latter actually emerged from the Cheng-Zhu school of the early Ming and was linked to Lu by no line of scholastic filiation coming down from the Song). For Huang Zongxi, and for other historians of Neo-Confucian teaching like Sun Qifeng, the school or learning of principle (lixue) included Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming,4 and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (xinxue) was as much identified with the Cheng-Zhu school as with Lu and Wang.
Recently, certain Western writers, falling in with one particular claim to orthodoxy, have identified Neo-Confucianism exclusively with the Cheng-Zhu school and with what the latter spoke of as the School or Learning of the Way (daoxue). But Huang Zongxi explicitly rejected the claim of Cheng-Zhu adherents to an exclusive hold on the Way and refused to confine lixue to daoxue.5 The latter term has a valid historical basis as a designation for the Zheng-Zhu school, since both Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi owned up to the name. Moreover, since this school’s claim to orthodoxy was accepted by many later Neo-Confucians in China, Korea, and Japan, there is a sense in which one can legitimately speak of the School of the Way (daoxue), or the Cheng-Zhu school, as “orthodox Neo-Confucianism.” However, to limit the term lixue or Neo-Confucianism to the Cheng-Zhu teaching alone would run contrary to historical fact in respect to lixue and be a departure from established usage regarding “Neo-Confucianism.”
The terminological issues faced here are not trivial. They go to the heart of the matter I shall be addressing. For Huang Zongxi fought on two fronts against a narrow conception of Neo-Confucianism. He rejected the conservative, proprietary, and authoritarian claims of a narrow orthodoxy and, with equal vigor, the antipathetic reaction of those who, repudiating that “orthodoxy,” would dismiss the whole tradition as moribund and irrelevant. In other words, as both historian and philosopher he argued for a broader, more liberal, and more vital interpretation of Neo-Confucianism.
In using the word “liberal,” I must of course anticipate other possibilities for misunderstanding. There will be objections from those who adhere to a narrow, purist view of liberalism as defined within a specific Western context (as identified, say, with John Stuart Mill) and others too who, reacting against certain libertarian features of the presumed Western prototype, would reject it as alien and inapplicable to China. To me, these are small risks to run. Indeed, I welcome the fullest possible discussion and delineation of differences in historical experience between China and the West, as long as this does not preclude the finding of some common ground between the two and thus arriving at a deeper understanding of each other.
A few years ago, in a symposium held at Columbia, my late colleague Charles Frankel, well known as an articulate spokesman for both liberalism and the humanities in America, defined six senses of the term liberalism, which I summarize as follows:
1. Cultural liberalism, as opposed to parochialism and fanaticism: “An affirmative interest in the promotion of diversity and qualities of mind which encourage empathetic understanding and critical appreciation of the diverse possibilities of human life”;
2. Political liberalism: “emphasis on procedures for the legitimation of peaceful change”;
3. Economic liberalism: “policies designed to correct imbalances of economic power”;
4. Philosophic liberalism: “belief in the supremacy of rational methods of inquiry”;
5. The liberal temperament or style, characterized by moderation, restraint, and compromise;
6. Liberal education: “commitment to long-term moral ideals, long-term ideals of culture, long-term ideals of civilization,” and to “compromise without complacency.”6
It is not difficult to cite aspects of the Confucian tradition corresponding to each of those just listed, though any satisfactory treatment of them would also have to qualify the comparisons substantially and deal with significant differences between what we might call Confucian liberalism and the Western variety—for instance, under number 4, in how one would understand the supremacy of rational methods of inquiry—differences equally illuminating with regard to the limitations of both.
Confucian teaching was humanistic in the sense that it saw man as playing a central, creative role in the transformation of the world. Insofar as Confucius viewed human life and experience as the focus of all valid learning, “humanistic” here means “this-worldly.” It was not, however, seen as opposed to the divine order of things; rather, Confucius conceived of the human order itself as revelatory of the divine (“Heavenly”) order.
The enduring value of human experience was affirmed by Confucius in his efforts to conserve what was best in traditional culture. In this sense, he could be called conservative. But Confucius was, at the same time, liberal in viewing past ideals and models as the basis for a critique of existing institutions and as a reminder of the greatness to which man was called by Heaven. “Liberal” here could stand for “reformist” vis-à-vis existing unjust governments, which denied men the opportunity to fulfill their legitimate wants and aspirations. As Gilbert Murray has said of conservatism and liberalism in the West, they are not contrary principles but complementary. “The object of conservatism is to save the social order. The object of liberality is to bring that order a little nearer to what … the judgment of a free man—free from selfishness, free from passion, free from prejudice—would require and by that very change to save it the more effectively.”7
Confucians in later centuries were also reformist in their advocacy of humane social-welfare policies. Revolutionary Maoism, or “leftism” as it might now be called in the People’s Republic, acknowledged the existence of this kind of liberal reformism among Confucians but criticized it as a misguided, meliorative approach to social infections that should have been allowed to fester and erupt into revolutionary action. Confucian reformism, according to the Maoist view, temporized or compromised by pursuing methods of peaceful change rather than insisting on radical surgery.
Nevertheless, Confucius himself was far from complacent or content with the status quo. He spoke of himself as struggling on with his efforts to change things even when these efforts seemed to be getting nowhere, and he lamented it when, with advancing age, he could no longer conjure up visionary dreams of his political ideal as a spur to reform. Men had a positive obligation to respond to the needs of others; for their leaders to be unresponsive was to be less than human. Thus Confucian reformism was inspired by a positive commitment to human welfare and informed by a critical attitude toward established institutions that reflected an awareness of alternative possibilities for improvement.
The Confucian revival in the Song, which had given birth to Neo-Confucianism, brought it to a new stage of development in ways characteristic of that age. In what follows, I call “Neo-Confucian” those elements in this movement that have a distinctive quality of their own, though they are not without some precedent in the Confucian past, and I shall continue to call “Confucian” perennial values or attitudes that, though inevitably different in some ways from the past, are not markedly so. Among the new developments I would point to are some that draw upon traditional Confucian values yet move in a “modern,” “liberal” direction. I shall refer to certain key concepts of Neo-Confucianism representative of these general trends. My method follows the history of ideas, much in the style of Qian Mu himself, citing central concepts prominent in the Neo-Confucian discourse of the Song and Ming periods but with occasional reference to Korean and Japanese uses of the same in the extended East Asian dialogue. Neo-Confucianism, as a whole, in the broad sense of Huang Zongxi’s lixue, provides the larger context for the discussion of these ideas, but the concepts themselves will mostly be drawn from the mainline of Neo-Confucian thought usually identified with the Cheng-Zhu school or “orthodox” Neo-Confucianism.
One last point of resemblance between Qian Mu and Huang Zongxi: Huang spent much of his early adult life in diehard resistance to the invading Manchus, retreating with the Ming loyalist forces into the southeastern coast and offshore islands. It was only in his late middle age that he gave up the struggle and returned home to study, teach, and write his major works.
Much later, when Mao’s forces overran the mainland, Qian Mu took refuge in Hong Kong, where he helped set up New Asia College and later carried on his scholarly work in Taiwan. It was there that I last saw him, on a most memorable occasion for me when he thanked me for making his work better known in the West. Qian Mu had experienced the vicious anti-Confucian campaign of the Maoists but finally witnessed the thawing of that campaign in the late 1970s and after, just as Huang survived long enough to witness the official Manchu recognition of Confucianism and Huang’s work in the late seventeenth century. One trusts that Qian Mu’s work will likewise gain increasing recognition in his homeland.
