After the introduction of Zen (or Ch’an) Buddhism into China in the first century CE,1 enthusiasm for its ideas spread rapidly. As it gained hold, the new Zen movement became a threat to the stability of traditional Chinese Confucianism, which began to appear lifeless and degenerate by contrast. At the same time, the increasing popularity of Zen functioned as a spur to the reaffirmation and reform of Confucianism. The ensuing revival of the latter was named the School of Nature and Principle. In the West it became known as Neo-Confucianism.
As Neo-Confucianism, over several centuries, acquired philosophical vigour and sophistication, it developed and elaborated idealist, rationalist and, eventually, empiricist forms, and encompassed a broad range of interests including education, politics, linguistics, the study of texts, ethics, science and engineering. By the seventeenth century, its expression in the entrenched, rationalistic philosophy originally propounded by the twelfthcentury Neo-Confucianist, Chu Hsi, was undergoing close critical scrutiny from scholars and philosophers embarked on an empiricist programme of enquiry, and in the eighteenth century this long-gathering critical reaction came to a head in the work of Tai Chen, a philosopher who represents the culmination of the empiricist movement in Neo-Confucian thought. Tai Chen replaced the broadly dualistic, abstract and speculative approaches of Chu Hsi and other Neo-Confucianists with a philosophy of material monism and a mode of investigation based on facts, evidence and inductive method. The movement of which he is such an eminent representative is often known as the Han Learning because it took the classics of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–AD 220)2 for its basic texts and the Han interpretation of the concept of Principle (Li)3 as the order immanent in things for its central idea. Under Tai Chen’s influence Neo-Confucianism shed many of the Taoist and Buddhist ideas with which it had become imbued.4 His development and consolidation of the burgeoning empiricism of the time earned him the title of Great Master of Investigation Based on Evidence.
The unassuming family of cloth merchants into which Tai Chen was born lived quietly in Siuning at the southern border of Anhwei province. His scholarly and critical abilities became apparent when he was still quite young. It is reported that at the age of 10 he questioned his schoolmaster about the reliability of the Confucian text The Great Learning,5 pointing out that during the many centuries that had elapsed since Confucius lived the numerous interpreters and transmitters of his work might have wrought considerable change in the Master’s ideas. ‘How’, asked Tai Chen, ‘do we know that this is what Confucius said?’6 The anecdote certainly exhibits the boy’s critical acuity, but what is more significant is that it reveals the intellectual temper characteristic not only of Tai Chen’s own mind but of the whole approach and methodology of the Ch’ing movement, the school of learning of which he was to become such an important member.
In his late teens Tai Chen was sent to study with Chiang Yung, a learned and prosperous man who taught his pupil across a broad curriculum that included the doctrines of Sung Neo-Confucianism,7 the school of thought Tai Chen was later to oppose. His polymath ability soon began to manifest itself in the writing of books and treatises that covered many topics8 and for most of his lifetime he was known chiefly for his work in mathematics, waterworks, engineering, phonetics and the analysis and criticism of texts. In 1773 he was appointed to the Board of Compilers of the Imperial Manuscript Library (Ssu-k’u Ch’uan-shu).9 It was not until a century after his death that his philosophical writings, which had been largely ignored by his contemporaries, began to command the respect they merit.
Tai Chen’s critical assault on the Neo-Confucianism of his predecessors is substantially contained in his book Elucidation of the Meaning of Words in Mencius. His critique takes its impetus from three things: his dedicated study of early Confucian texts; his adherence to empiricist methods of investigation; and his passion to discover the exact words and truths of the early Confucian sages. He was always ready to challenge any pronouncement that was merely authoritarian, and worked always to verify for himself anything that was offered as evidence for an assertion or belief. He wrote: ‘To aspire to get at the truth, a man must purge himself completely of all his dependence’; and, ‘A scholar should be deluded neither by others nor by himself.’10
Tai Chen’s fundamental objection to the received Neo-Confucianism of his time was that it erred from the truth in that it offered a dualistic rather than a monistic account of the ultimate nature of things. His own view, derived in part from his study of ancient texts, in part from his empiricist methodology, was that the universe is an organized physical unity whose coherence and orderliness are embedded or immanent in its physicality rather than imposed by a principle external to it. Central to the Neo-Confucian debate on this topic was the elucidation and understanding of the meaning of the concept of Principle, or Li, and its relationship to another major Confucian concept, Ether, or ch’i, the stuff or matter from which evolved the particular things of the world.
Li is not a simple concept. Even at its most primitive level, and before it had acquired its full philosophical weight, it was of large importance in Confucianism and carried a range of meanings. In the teaching of Confucius li was the word for the religious rites and the rules governing familial respect and social relations: those structures of life which, in Chinese culture, were held to render all things well wrought, clearly defined and harmonious. Broadly speaking, the li were understood to be imposed from without on to natural human propensities in order to regulate them and achieve a mean in conduct. They were not seen as unchanging and so could vary according to circumstances. Nevertheless, they were not merely superficial rules of conduct expedient for the smooth running of society, but had profounder implications relating to the moral integrity of individuals and their relationships with the cosmos. For the committed practitioner, the external enactments of the li were the concomitants of a genuine inward disposition to exercise the virtues they formalized and to realize a harmony between heaven and earth.
After Confucius’ own time, the term li gradually acquired more complex meanings and a metaphysical dimension. Instead of broadly referring to the formulated rules and customs of human conduct in society it came to be used to signify some kind of ruling principle of the physical universe, the order or organization of Nature as a ‘dynamic pattern . . . embodied in all living things . . . in human relationships and in the highest human values’.11 This use of li has a close metaphorical affinity with its original and literal meaning of ‘veins or markings in a block of jade’ and it is not difficult to see how, from such thinking, questions about the philosophical status of Principle can arise. Is it, for example, to be conceived of as immanent, like the veins in jade or the grain in wood; or as something transcendent, bestowed by heaven to impart form to ch’i and existing, rather in the manner of a Platonic form, independently of the stuff it rules?
It was, as already noted, this latter rationalistic conception of the universe that Tai Chen opposed, primarily on philosophical grounds but also in an awareness of the unsavoury political uses to which the notion of a transcendent and unchallengeable ordering Principle could and had been put.12 Moreover, he saw the heresy of dualism as well as the speculations of idealist and rationalist Neo-Confucianism as the consequences of the tainting influences of Taoism and Buddhism. In The Meaning of Mencius he wrote:
According to the Taoists and Buddhists, as far as the individual self is concerned, it may be divided into a physical body and a spiritual intelligence, the latter being primary. Extending this idea upward, they regard this spiritual intelligence as the primary factor in Heaven and Earth, from which they go on to seek for whatever lacks shape and form, regarding it as genuine existence, whereas whatever possesses shape and form they look upon as illusory.13
Tai Chen’s countering of the dualist thesis of the separation of Nature and Principle deploys all the major categories of Neo-Confucianism: Tao, yin and yang, li and ch’i, jen, and the Five Elements. He characterizes Tao, or the Way, as a continual and compensating motion that includes not only the alternating movements of yin and yang but also the Five Elements, since each of the Five Elements possesses yin and yang. The Five Elements are water, fire, wood, metal and earth; yin and yang are two forces. Yin is negative, passive and weak; yang is positive, active and constructive. In placing the Five Elements and yin and yang within the Tao, Tai Chen is associating the Tao with Nature (Ether, or ch’i) rather than with a transcendent realm, as in Chu Hsi’s teaching. Chu Hsi had claimed that ‘Within the universe there are li and ch’i. Li constitutes the Tao that is “above shapes”; it is the source from which things are produced. Ch’i constitutes the instruments (ch’i) that are “within shapes”; it is the [material] means whereby things are produced.’14 Tai Chen makes no such sharp division between Principle and Ether (Nature), but he does draw a distinction within Ether concerning what is ‘above shapes’ and what is ‘within shapes’. He says that ‘shape’ designates the individual object that is produced when Ether (ch’i) condenses and evolves, but ch’i itself is ‘above shapes’ in that it is logically prior to them. Similarly yin and yang, when thought of as forces, are ‘above shapes’, as are the Five Elements insofar as they are not manifest as particular entities consisting of wood, fire, water, metal and earth. These latter, particular entities are ‘within shapes’, as are individual human beings.
The question arises whether Tai Chen, in locating what is ‘above shapes’ as well as what is ‘within shapes’ within the evolutionary processes of Ether, has abolished all need for the concept of Principle. But in fact, he has no thought of abolishing it; it has an essential place in his account and the part it plays there is consonant with the original meaning of li as veins in jade. Principle, he maintains, is jen, or love, that orderly and harmonious pattern of production and reproduction that manifests propriety and righteousness and that allows for the flourishing of the distinct essences of things. Principle, conceived of in this way, does not rule from a position of transcendence but is contained in material things as the necessary forms of their respective species.
Jen is a concept that is not easily translated in a way that imparts its full or exact meaning. It is variously paraphrased as ‘benevolence’, ‘goodness’, ‘perfect virtue’, ‘humanity’, ‘human-heartedness’ and ‘love’. It signifies what is highest and most noble in human sentiment and conduct: the disposition to a comprehensive virtue that engenders a harmonious communion between all human beings and between humanity and heaven. In characterizing Li as jen, or love, Tai Chen effectively consolidates his doctrine of monism, developing his materialist thesis to encompass the moral as well as the material aspects of existence. He maintains that the moral life is the full and proper expression of human physicality. Human beings are part of the motion of the universe, that ‘unceasing production and reproduction brought about by the evolutionary operations of the Ether’.15 They naturally possess capacities for feeling (ch’ing), desires (yu) and knowledge (chih), and when desires and feelings are supplemented by knowledge, then they achieve a full and virtuous expression. ‘The ancient sages’, he wrote, ‘did not seek benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom outside the realm of [human] desires, and did not consider these in isolation from blood, breath, mind and spirit.16 He maintained that ‘all activities in the world should consist of nothing more than encouraging this fulfilment of [human] desires, and expression of [human] feelings’17 and he believed that through careful, scientific observation of the orderliness and the distinctions that operate in nature, human beings might acquire the sagacity to live in harmony with Li, in awareness of the grain and veins of things. Tai Chen did not advocate the total sacrifice of personal interests and self-fulfilment any more than he advocated the kind of desireless life of contemplation associated with the Buddhist and Taoist traditions that he believed had damaged the purity of Confucian thought. For, he argued, ‘When a man is void of all desire, he would take a wholly apathetical attitude toward the miserable and hardpressed life of the people throughout the world. To let others live but not to live oneself is against nature.’18
It is no surprise that Tai Chen’s philosophy was neglected during his lifetime. Although he was an inheritor rather than a founder of the empirical and investigative method, he was radical and innovative in developing it. To many of his contemporaries his views were alien and unacceptable once they were seen to extend beyond the borders of orthodox scientific investigation. What was so daunting to others was that he was comprehensively scientific in his outlook much as was the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He believed, much like Hobbes, that a scientific model of enquiry could be transposed from the study of objects to the study of the moral and social life of humankind, and yield a similar, indeed, a total understanding. It could not have been easy for his contemporaries to welcome a philosophy the starting point of which was the tenet that everything, including the moral life of human beings, is fundamentally matter in motion. Perhaps more difficult still, even for those who recognized the significance of his ideas, was to align themselves with his repudiation of the established and revered doctrines of Chu Hsi. Two of his contemporaries, Hung Pang and Chang Hsueh-che’ng, made some efforts to disseminate his thought but with little success.19 It was not until the early years of the twentieth century, when articles on Tai Chen’s ideas began to appear in journals of philosophy and sinology, that he was accorded what is surely his rightful stature: that of a philosopher of remarkable modernity in his own time, and one whose ideas would continue to enrich the intellectual investigation of the nature of things. Joseph Needham has remarked that ‘Tai Chen, though a contemporary of Rousseau and almost of Blake, would have found himself at home in a post-Freudian world’.20
1 For a fuller account of the introduction of Zen (Ch’an) Buddhism into China, see the essay on Huineng, pp. 140–144 in this book.
2 The Han dynasty marks the full flourishing and maturity of early Confucianism and the wide propagation of its central texts, subsequently organized as the Four Classics or Four Books: the Doctrine of the Mean, The Great Learning, the Analects, and the Book of Mencius.
3 The meaning of ‘li’ as ‘Principle’, rather than the ‘rites’ of early Confucianism, is indicated in this essay by the use of the capital letter (Li).
4 The interrelationships of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism are not easily summarized. Some commentators have maintained that Chu Hsi had synthesized the three in his philosophy, others that he had stripped Confucianism of the influences of the other two. What is certain is that Tai Chen would have been critical of any elements of Taoism and Buddhism that Chu Hsi had retained or incorporated in his doctrine. For more on Taoism see the essay on Lao Tzu in this book, pp. 135–140.
5 The Great Learning is one of the Four Classics of Confucianism. See note 2 above.
6 There is a version of this story in Mansfield Freeman, ‘The philosophy of Tai Tung Yuan’, Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 65, 1933, pp. 50–71.
7 The Sung dynasty (960–1279 CE) encompassed many brilliant cultural achievements including the philosophy of Chu Hsi, whose ideas largely dominated Confucianism until the eighteenth century.
8 Tai Chen’s first book was completed in 1744 when he was only 20. It was a short treatise on the use of Napier’s rods (John Napier [1550– 1617] was a Scottish mathematician, the inventor of logarithms, who devised a calculating machine using a set of rods called ‘Napier’s Bones’). Thereafter he rapidly became known for his annotations of works dealing with a wide range of technological and scientific subjects.
9 Tai Chen’s academic career was remarkably full and varied. He held a number of posts as tutor, researcher and editor of ancient texts. During this busy time he took and failed the Chinese civil service exams six times. After the sixth failure he was allowed by special decree to be deemed to have passed and was appointed a graduate in the Hanlin Academy where he worked until his death two years later.
10 Quoted in Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Intellectual Trends of the Ch’ing Period, trans. Immanual C.Y. Hsiu, Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1959, p. 56.
11 Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. D. Bodde, 2 vols, Vol. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 444, footnote.
12 It has been pointed out that there had developed a tendency ‘to justify the activities of the government of the day by viewing them as natural corollaries of the universal “laws of Nature”’. (See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 2 vols, Vol. II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 514.)
13 Fung Yu-lan, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 652.
14 op. cit., p. 542.
15 Tai Chen, Elucidation of the Meaning of Words in Mencius, Peking, Ancient Texts Press, 1956, 3.105.
16 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, op. cit., p. 61.
17 Tai Chen, op. cit., 3.105.
18 Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, op. cit., p. 60.
19 Hung Pang died young and so his attempts to spread Tai Chen’s philosophical thought were cut short. Chang Hsueh-che’ng could not fully accept Tai Chen’s castigation of Chu Hsi’s doctrine and his enthusiasm for Tai Chen was tempered by that reservation.
20 Needham, op. cit., p. 515.
Yüan Shan (1763), trans. Cheng Chung-ying as Tai Chen’s Inquiry into Goodness, Honolulu, East-West Center Press, 1971
Meng-tzu tzu i su cheng (1769), published as Elucidation of the Meaning of Words in Mencius, Peking, Ancient Texts Press, 1956
Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, Hui-neng, Chu his
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
Fang Chao-ying, ‘Tai Chen’, in Arthur W. Hummel (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 1644– 1912, Vol. I, Washington DC, USA Government Printing Office, 1944, pp. 695–700.
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