Chu Hsi is the major representative of a group of Neo-Confucian philosophers who flourished in China in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE.1 His ideas exerted a powerful influence on Chinese life and culture from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. He worked in the rationalist tradition, seeking to understand the principles of things and their relationships within a metaphysical unity. His philosophy is remarkable for its comprehensive synthesis of traditional doctrines: he drew together into one system Confucius’ teaching on benevolence, Mencius’ on humanity and righteousness, the yin-yang doctrine of cosmic forces, the doctrine of the Five Agents of water, fire, wood, metal and earth, and a number of important elements of Taoist and Buddhist teaching. It was he who arranged and wrote commentaries on the Four Books, strength ening their Confucian components and presenting them in the form in which they became the basis of the Chinese civil service exams. His writings are contained in sixty-two volumes.
Chu Hsi was born in Fukien province in southeastern China. For several years he studied with his father who was an important civic official and from 1154 to 1157 he held the post of a district keeper of records. Although dedicated to scholarship he had a keen political consciousness. He frequently petitioned the emperor concerning the inefficiency of administrators and officials and he opposed the acceptance of what he regarded as the humiliating terms of a peace agreement made with invaders from the north. After 1163 he refused all offers of public office for some years, preferring to undertake the work of a temple guardian so that he could study in peace and at the same time benefit from conversation with other scholars. When he did return to public life, as a prefect, as a minister in the army department and as a junior expositor, his denunciations of incompetence and corruption provoked repercussions from the officials whose mismanagement he exposed. He was accused of numerous crimes and a petition was made for his execution. The result was that all his posts were taken from him. In spite of much disfavour from officialdom, when he died almost a thousand people attended his funeral.
Chu Hsi’s chief philosophical concern is to give an account of the ultimate nature of things in relation to which everything else about the world and humankind might be understood. The account derives from two major concepts: those of Principle (Li) and material force (ch’i). Chu describes ultimate reality as Principle. It is eternal, unchanging and wholly good. In itself it is an undifferentiated unity but it is also actualized in each individual entity by means of material force, which is the fundamental physicality, or energy-matter, of the cosmos. Each individual entity, although temporal and incom plete in its material aspect, embodies Principle in its entirety. Chu Hsi writes:
There is principle before there can be material force. But it is only when there is material force that principle finds a place to settle. This is the process by which all things are produced, whether large as heaven and earth or small as ants . . . Fundamentally, principle cannot be interpreted in the senses of existence or non-existence. Before heaven and earth came into being, it already was as it is.2
Chu Hsi also refers to Principle as the Great Ultimate, remarking that ‘the Great Ultimate is nothing other than principle’ and that it is ‘the principle of heaven and earth and the myriad things’.3
The distinction between Principle and material force should not be thought of as exactly resembling the distinction, prevalent in much western philosophy, between mind and matter. What has to be remembered is that Neo-Confucianism sees the individuation of both mental and physical entities as being brought about by means of material force and that the emphasis in Chu Hsi’s philosophy is not so much on a dualism of Principle and matter as on an organic unity in which an individual mind is as much dependent on material force as an individual body is. Thus he writes:
That which integrates to produce life and disintegrates to produce death is only material force. What we called the spirit, the heavenly and earthly aspects of the soul (hun-p’o) and consciousness, are all effects of material force. Therefore when material force is integrated, there are these effects. When it is disintegrated there are no more . . . as this material force integrates into a particular instance, its principle is also endowed in that instance.4
Chu Hsi accounts for motion and change in the cosmos by reference to the doctrine of yin-yang. The doctrine is an extremely ancient one that was formulated in writing as early as the third century BCE. It is usually expounded in conjunction with that of the Five Agents already mentioned. The term yin refers to passive, weak, negative processes or forces and yang to active, strong, constructive ones. Their alternations between activity and tranquillity produce the Five Agents of wood, metal, water, fire and earth. In his account of change Chu Hsi says: ‘There is no other event in the universe except yin and yang succeeding each other in an unceasing cycle. This is called change. However . . . there must be the principles that make them possible. This is the great Ultimate.’5 He maintains that through the yin-yang motion of material force, sediment from water formed the earth; that waves, over long periods of time, gradually solidified into mountains; that ‘the most turbid water formed the earth and the purest fire became wind, thunder, lightning, the stars and the like.’6 Principle, he maintains, becomes visible through yin and yang. It ‘attaches itself to yin and yang as a man sits astride a horse’7. Once yin and yang have produced the Five Agents the Agents are fixed in their physical natures and become differentiated in individual things.
Chu Hsi’s moral theory is extrapolated from his metaphysics. An individual human nature is a manifestation of Principle in the individual and since Principle is fundamentally good it follows that human nature is fundamentally good. But, as Chu Hsi observes, ‘there are those who are good from their birth and those who are evil from their birth’.8 How then does evil enter into human beings? Chu Hsi’s answer is that the goodness of an individual’s nature may be constrained by the kind of material force in which it is embodied. He says:
If the sun and moon are clear and bright, and the climate temperate and reasonable, the man born at such a time and endowed with such material force . . . should be a good man. But if the sun and moon are darkened and gloomy, and the temperature abnormal, all this is evidence of violent material force. There is no doubt that if a man is endowed with such material force, he will be a bad man.9
In saying this, Chu does not want to posit a dichotomy of good and evil or the existence of a positive power of evil. Material force, he says, is differentiated into good and evil in accordance with its purity and impurity; there are not two distinct things in nature opposing each other. He quotes some words of Ch’eng I: ‘What is called evil is not original evil. It becomes evil only because of deviation from the mean’.10
Moral goodness, then, consists for Chu Hsi in balance, harmony and appropriateness in relationships between the elements of things. It depends on an organic and ultimately monistic integration of the cosmos. In contrast, evil is an imbalance brought about by a turbidity or density of material being. Proper moral activity, Chu maintains, aims at achieving an understanding and realization of jen, or humanity, the Confucian virtue, variously translated as benevolence, human-heartedness, altruism, sympathy and community with others, and described by Chu Hsi as the character of man’s mind and the principle of love. When the natural goodness of principle is able to operate unimpeded in an individual the result is jen. Benevolence, selfmastery, righteousness and wisdom will flow from the person who has achieved it. Impartiality is the condition of jen, though it is not identical with it.
Evil, according to Chu Hsi, may be overcome by the acquisition of true knowledge. The ethical dimension of human nature is fostered by what he calls ‘the investigation of things’. Knowledge of things and of their principles enables the individual’s capacity for self-mastery to develop. Knowledge is the means to the attainment of an increased understanding of the role of feelings in human life and of the ways in which a person who has jen will respond to the multiplicity and complexity of the world. The fundamental natural goodness of a person needs to be preserved, and knowledge of what that goodness consists of enables the person to function well, thereby bringing material force into harmony with the principle it embodies and allowing the individual’s true destiny to be realized. He urges the cultivation of a discipline of mind which he describes as ‘seriousness’: a steadfast dedication to right thinking and truth.
Chu Hsi’s ethical theory is extremely well balanced. It is agnostic concerning the existence of a God as the source of all things and as architect of a design and purpose for the universe. Thus it does not place humankind in thrall to a cosmic plan or end. Its claims concerning the fundamental goodness of Principle and its presence in human beings do not create a burden of original sin, while the account of material force offers an understanding of human moral variety. At the same time, Principle and material force, taken together, provide the possibility for change and self-improvement in that knowledge of Principle is necessarily knowledge of good; and since Principle is always embodied in material force, this knowledge is also knowledge of how particular goods are manifested in the realm of human experience and human action.
Chu Hsi’s synthesis of traditional ideas and his grounding of them in a comprehensive metaphysical scheme gained an enthusiastic following and provided material for much philosophical debate in the centuries succeeding his death. His whole philosophical system became the structure that supported the Chinese cultural edifice until the early years of the twentieth century and expressed something that is present in almost every manifestation of Chinese philosophy, namely, the aspiration to become harmoniously integrated with the natural processes of the cosmos. It has been pointed out that Chu Hsi’s thought, and Neo-Confucianism in general, represent the synthesis of a dialectical movement in which the classical period of the sixth to third centuries BCE was the thesis and the succeeding Neo-Taoist and Buddhist era the antithesis. His organic conception of the cosmos has been compared with that of Alfred North Whitehead, and numerous similarities have been noted between his ideas and those of the seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. In the 1930s Chu Hsi’s philosophy became the basis of the new rational thought of Fung Yu-lan, one of China’s most eminent modern philosophers.
1 The other major members of this group were the Ch’eng brothers, Ch’eng Hao (1032–1085) and Ch’eng I (1033–1107).
2 Translated from the Complete Works of Chu Hsi (1714 edition) in Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 529.
3 Chan, op. cit., p. 638.
4 op. cit., pp. 637, 638.
5 op. cit., p. 641.
6 op. cit., p. 642.
7 op. cit., p. 641.
8 op. cit., p. 624.
9 op. cit., pp. 624, 625.
10 op. cit., p. 598.
Chu Hsi arranged the Analects of Confucius, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean and the Mencius to form the Four Books that became, in 1313, the basis of the Chinese civil service examinations. Many of his writings are published in a collection of his literary works, available in Chinese only. Translations of selected passages are in Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963.
For a fuller picture of the breadth of Chu Shi’s competence see Carsun Chang’s The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1957, pp. 243–248.
Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, Tai Chen, Mao Tse-tung
Chan, Wing-tsit, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963
Chang, Carsun, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1957
Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. D. Bodde, 2 vols, Vol. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983
Fung Yu-lan, The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy, trans. E.R. Hughes, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1947