Download PDF | Yüan Thought_ Chinese Thought and Religion Under the Mongols-Columbia University Press (1982).
568 Pages
Preface
THIS SYMPOSIUM IS the outgrowth of a conference on Chinese thought under Mongol rule held at Issaquah, Washington, in January 1978 on the initiative of Professor Hok-lam Chan and with the sponsorship of the Committee on Studies of Chinese Civilization of the American Council of Leamed Societies. The study of premodern Chinese thought has been the subject of a continuing series of conferences held under the auspices of the Subcommittee on Chinese Thought and Religion in recent years. These conferences have resulted in the publication of Self and Society in Ming Thought (1970), The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (1975), and Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning (1979). The present volume, by focusing on the Yiian period (1260-1368), an era of subjugation by the Mongols, represents a further stage in this continuing exploration of neglected aspects of Chinese thought and religion in the imperial era.
The papers presented here deal with areas of thought and religion that reaffirmed the classical heritage from the T’ang and Sung in response to alien rule, and provided the basis for further intellectual growth in the Ming and Ch’ing periods. They discuss the unique importance of this period for the testing of Chinese tradition when its survival was seriously threatened, as well as the continuing vitality and variety of Chinese thought in such difficult circumstances.
The conference organizer and participants wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Subcommittee on Chinese Thought and Religion of the American Council of Learned Societies for its support of conference expenses from funds of the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are grateful to Professor Donald J. Munro, University of Michigan, for advice on the planning of the conference, to Professors Julia Ching of Toronto and Yan-shuan Lao of Ohio State for their contributions to the meeting itself, and to Professor James T. C. Liu of Princeton tor his valued service as conterence discussant. We would also like to thank Professor Judith Berling of Indiana University and Ms. Ruth Dunnell of Princeton for their indispensable service as conference rapporteurs, and also to Mr. Timothy Phelan of the University of Wash-
ington for help in typing the conference records as well as some of the papers for publication.
Contributors
JUDITH A. BERLING is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia and has taught at Stanford University. She is the author of The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en (1980) and is currently working on the popularization of elite traditions and the interaction among religions in traditional China.
HOK-LAM CHAN is Professor of Chinese History at the University of Washington, Seattle, specializing in the later imperial dynasties. His recent publications include Li Chih in Contemporary Chinese Historiography (1980) and Theories of Legitimacy in Imperial China (1982). He is a principal contributor to the Dictionary of Ming Biography (1976), and is coeditor and contributor, with Igor de Rachewiltz, of Ytian Personalities, vol. 1, under preparation. He graduated from the University of Hong Kong and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
WING-TSIT CHAN is Professor of Chinese Philosophy and Culture Emeritus, Dartmouth College; Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Dartmouth College; Anna Gillespie Professor of Philosophy, Chatham College, and Adjunct Professor of Chinese Thought, Columbia University. He is also a member of Academia Sinica and president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. Among his major works are A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), his translation, Instruction for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming (1963), his translation of Chu Hsi’s Reflections on Things at Hand (1967), and Neo-Confucianism, etc.: Essays by Wing-tsit Chan (1969).
JOHN W. DARDESS received his doctorate in Chinese from Columbia University in 1968 and is now Professor of History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Ytian China (1973) and several articles on Yiian and Ming history, and has completed a book manuscript on the founding of the Ming dynasty.
WM. THEODORE DE Bary is John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University at Columbia University, and author and editor of a number of books on Asian philosophy. He was Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Columbia from 1971 to 1978. A former president of the Association for Asian Studies and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is also the editor and coauthor of Self and Society in Ming Thought (1970), The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (1975), and Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning (1979). His most recent work is Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (1981).
HERBERT FRANKE is Professor Emeritus of Far Eastern Studies at the University of Miinchen, Germany, and President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. His field of special interest is the history of China under dynasties of conquest, and his publications include Geld und Wirtschaft in China unter der Mongolenherrschaft (1949), Forschungsbericht Sinologie (1953), with Wolfgang Bauer, The Golden Casket (1964), and with Rolf Trauzettel, Das chinesische Kaiserreich (1968). He is editor of Sung Biographies (1976), and coeditor and contributor of vol. 6 of the Cambridge History of China: The Dynasties of Conquest (forthcoming). DAVID GEDALECIA is Associate Professor of History at the College of Wooster in Ohio. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in Chinese intellectual history and has published a biographical study of Wu Ch’eng and articles on Neo-Confucianism. He is currently pursuing his interests in Sung and Yiian thought.
JAN YUN-HUA is Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. He was educated in China and India, receiving his Ph.D. from Viswa-Bharati University, Santiniketan. He has published widely on Sino-Indian religious relations, Chinese Buddhism, and Taoist thought, including a book, A Chronicle of Buddhism in China (1966), and numerous articles in professional journals. His current research interests are on the T’ang monk Tsung-mi and the Huang-Lao tradition of Taoism.
JOHN D. LANGLOIS, jR., is Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College with an M.A. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is the editor of China under Mongol Rule (1981), and the author of articles on the intellectual history of the Sung, Yiian, and early Ming periods. He is now working on a study of Ming legal history.
LIU TS’UN-YAN is Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, Canberra, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, Hawaii, Malaya, Hong Kong, and Paris. With a Ph.D. and a D. Lit. from the University of London, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Among his many writings are Buddhist and Taoist Influences in Chinese Novels (1962); Chinese Popular Fiction in Two London Libraries (1967), and Selected Papers from the Hall of Harmonious Wind (1976).
TU WEI-MING is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at Tunghai University and Harvard University where he received his Ph.D. in 1968. His fields of interest include Confucianism, Chinese intellectual history, and religious philosophies of Asia. Among his publications are Neo-Confucian Thought in Action (1976), Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on the Chung-yung (1976), and Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (1980). Currently he is working on Chu Hsi and Neo-Confucian humanism. CHUN-FANG YU is Associate Professor of Religion at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, specializing in the history of Chinese Buddhism since the Tang dynasty. She was trained at Tunghai University and Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. Her publications include The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis (1981), and several articles on Sung and Ming Buddhism. She is currently working on a study of Buddhism in Neo-Confucian China and a chapter on Ming Buddhism for the Cambridge History of China. vol. 8.
Introduction
THE YUAN or Mongol era in Chinese history is in many ways its least typical period. Never before had the country been so totally subdued by an alien conqueror far removed in his nomadic ways and tribal customs from the conventional picture of the stately Chinese dynasty. Shaken to its institutional foundations and exposed to foreign ideas and influences from the larger world which the Mongols had overrun, China somehow managed to survive all this intact. No earlier age, and perhaps no other civilization of comparable maturity and refinement, had undergone such violent displacement and yet emerged in such secure possession of itself.
In the domain of Chinese thought, as it might appear in hindsight, a similar outcome was predictable. The survival of Buddhism, for one thing, was not much in doubt, since many Mongols and much of the leadership already professed that faith. The Taoist religion too, in certain of its manifestations, appealed to the Mongol appetite for the magical and supernatural, and in others to the conqueror’s interest in a teaching of acquiescence and passivity among his subjects. Confucianism, for its part, though early an object of contempt, probably invited no more animosity or repression than any other of the teachings tolerated or ignored in the far-flung Mongol empire. As conquerors with ambitions to universal rule, the Mongols shared at least this much with traditional Chinese dynasties: they easily assumed an air of lofty impartiality in the dispensing of favors or imposing of disabilities, intent on keeping the peace and avoiding sectarian conflict which might upset their control.
In these circumstances it would seem only a matter of time before Chinese tradition reasserted itself. If this is so, however, the nature of the outcome was still far from certain, and indeed what emerges as most significant about this extraordinary epoch in Chinese life is the striking adaptability of tradition to new circumstances, rather than simply its dogged persistence. The vastly superior numbers of the Chinese no doubt insured the massive survival of Chinese values and ethnic traits against all outside influences, yet the actual story of these times is most tellingly revealed in the opportunities which alien intrusion and improvisation provided for new ideas and institutions to get established. Of this the best example is the superseding of an earlier Confucian tradition by a new one, which fairly succeeded in coopting the conqueror himself. In this process Neo-Confucianism became for the first time a full-fledged state orthodoxy, an “orthodoxy” destined to affect the intellectual life and political culture not only of China but of all East Asia.
It would be misleading to cast the Mongols in the role of conscious innovators or bold planners of a new order in East Asia. Nevertheless their own ambitions drove them to take up new challenges and their essential pragmatism led them to accept new realities. On the one hand, within their vast empire they could promote the diffusion across Asia of new cultural elements such as Arab astronomy; on the other hand, given their overextended reach and the actual limits of their effective control, they allowed a large measure of autonomy in many areas, which left room for new cultural activities, including movements in popular literature, art, and religion, to spring forth from soil that had been well broken up by foreign disruptions.
Against this background it was not far-fetched for one knowledgeable non-Chinese observer, the late Yoshikawa K@jird to suggest that the role of the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khaghan in thirteenth-century China compared to that of Tokugawa leyasu in early seventeenth-century Japan. Each of them, though no doubt conservative of his own interest in consolidating new-won power, proved adaptable with regard to means and ready to accept certain innovations, like Neo-Confucian education, which might serve that interest.!
In these circumstances even the most likely candidates for survival among Chinese institutions had to win out in the general competition with newer ways of doing things. Sometimes indeed it was the latter, or perhaps some hybrid, which won. The dyarchy which superimposed a Mongol pattern of military organization upon a native system of civil administration produced noteworthy adaptations in certain areas, as for instance in the new Mongol systems of provincial administration and military garrisons, which were to be perpetuated by the Ming and Manchu dynasties.” This fact has indeed attracted the attention of institutional historians, who are not unaware of Yaan contributions to the Chinese system, yet little study has been given to an even more significant product of Mongol-Chinese interaction, the new civil service examnination sys-tem which officially signaled the establishment of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy for ages to come. Perhaps just because this new system became such a monumental fact of Chinese life in later centuries, it has come to be taken for granted—another “inevitable” feature of the Chinese resurgence under the Ming. And yet this view of it overlooks not only the change in content of the examinations in the Yéan but also crucial adaptations in form which were significantly affected by the Mongol-Chinese encounter, with its interplay between radically different cultural and social systems.
In short, in the relatively open historical situation created by the Mongol disturbance of Chinese institutions, it was possible for new elements to come to the fore and gain a place for themselves before things closed in again under the Ming. In the early years of the conquest Chinese culture lay exposed and, deprived of its usual dynastic connections and supports, had to rely on its own inner resources. It cannot be supposed that tradition simply held fast. Both what managed to endure from the past and what sprang anew from the native soil—as for instance the remarkable flowering in the Yiian period of popular literature in the form of drama, poetry and fiction—had to satisfy the needs or tastes of a larger, more heterogeneous public, and had to seek out the common human denominator in a multicultural society.
Nevertheless the traditional order won a crucial first victory over the newcomers when the Mongols were forced to recognize the need for ruling agrarian China through the civil bureaucratic administration which had been developed as part of the dynastic system. The initial acceptance of this fact of life in China came with the Mongol Khan Ogédei’s entrusting of the internal administration to the sinicized Khitan statesman Yeh-lii Ch’u-ts’ai® (1189-1243), who proceeded to reconstitute a fiscal administration of the familiar Chinese type.? Perhaps the second phase could be seen as inaugurated in 1260 by the formal adoption of a new Chinese-style reign name, signifying the resumption of Chinese dynastic tule under the leadership of Khubilai. As the conclusive step in this development one may cite the institution of the new examination system in 1313-1315 under Emperor Ayurbarwada (Jen-tsung®, r. 1311-1320), which confirmed the system of bureaucratic recruitment most characteristic of the great Chinese dynasties.
If this sequence of developments in the Yiian seems to underscore the continuing importance of the dynastic system, the first of the papers in this volume reminds us that the strength of traditional institutions is not to be judged from the tenure of dynastic regimes alone. Hok-lam Chan’s study presents for us the historical thought of Ma Tuan-lin® (1254— 1324/5), a survivor of the Southern Sung dynasty whose life and work carried over into the Mongol period. Ma’s scholarship was pursued largely in isolation from the main political events of the time, and he can hardly be reckoned as one of the influential thinkers of the Ytian period. Nevertheless his institutional history of China, completed in 1307, sums up both the scholarly legacy of the Sung school and the lessons derived from its critical study of Chinese history. In form and in substance it stands as the culmination of China’s social and cultural evolution up to that point.
Ma Tuan-lin exemplifies the type of broad learning and empirical investigation which had become a hallmark of Neo-Confucian scholarship as advocated by the leader of that movement, Chu Hsi® (11301200). He also offers a perspective on history which reflects the latter philosopher’s rather ambivalent view of the tension which exists between ancient ideals and historical realities. Thus Ma presents a picture of the model institutions of the ancient sage-kings as embodying the highest standards against which to measure the strengths and weaknesses of the historical dynasties. The latter, for him, fall far short of measuring up to those ideals, and yet in contrast to many reformers of the Northern Sung period who called for wholesale change and a “restoration of the ancient order,” Ma, like Chu Hsi, questions whether this can, or even should, be attempted. Indeed, his doubts go beyond mere feasibility and extend to the suitability of such reforms in the changed conditions of more recent times. What exists exists for some reason. History, and the consequences of the past, cannot simply be overruled. But what can reasonably be done only becomes clear if one follows the long-term development of institutions in the course of many dynasties, and observes the cumulative effects of that process. Hence the need for general histories, comprehensive in time and extensive in their coverage of social and cultural institutions, to replace the standard histories of single dynasties. Only through this kind of comprehensive investigation and “broad learning” can one hope to arrive at a sound judgment as to what is in the long-range, general interest of mankind, rather than what serves simply the immediate interests of a given dynasty.
Chief among the long-term trends seen by Ma is the steady centralization of power in the imperial dynastic system. This is regrettable but only reflects the historical process by which the ancient system of public morality, stressing the common good, had yielded to a widespread preoccupation with personal gain and the pursuit of private interests, including the dynastic interest. If one could accomplish a moral reformation and the restoration of Confucian public morality, said Ma, it might be feasible to reestablish the ancient “feudal” pattern of government and do away with centralized despotism. Until such a moral transformation was accomplished, however, it would be unrealistic not to accept centralized bureaucratic administration as a fact of life, making such improvements or modifications in it as one could through constructive reformism. Better to improve the exercise of established power than dream of reversing history and returning to a primitive ideal.
In their own way Yuan rulers had to accept the same facts of history as Ma. They had to work through the same system rather than attempt to convert China to the Mongols’ pastoral way of life. Nevertheless at the outset they were ill-adapted to the Chinese bureaucratic scene, and it took a major effort of Chinese scholar-statesmen to persuade the Mongols to accept the rule of law which was so much a part of the dynastic system. “Law” had more than one meaning for the Chinese. To some it represented “systems” characterized by rational procedures and regular routines. Under Khubilai an able corps of Chinese advisors devoted much of their time and many lengthy memorials to explaining the need for such a system of administrative law, which, to a considerable degree, Khubilai accepted.
In the matter of legal codes, however, as John Langlois points out in his study, there was greater ambivalence on the part of both the Mongols and the Chinese. Khubilai set aside the preexisting Jurchen-Chin dynasty code, ostensibly as “too harsh.” The meaning of this is unclear and a combination of reasons, both realistic and idealistic, may explain why Khubilai and his successors never got around to filling the legal void, with the result that the Yiian, alone among major dynasties, bore the stigma of being “law-less”: of lacking a permanent code. Professor Langlois suggests that in an ethnically plural and multicultural society, a supposedly uniform code would have been strangely incongruous and inoperable. Moreover, as a conquest group in the numerical minority, the Mongols would find any legal limitation on the exercise of their own power a decided disadvantage. Chinese advocates of a legal code argued that the intent was to curb the abuses of subordinate officials. Thus they found themselves advocating, in effect, the centralization of authority which Ma Tuan-lin had deplored. Yet the Mongols as the principal powerholders could not fail to see that any legal restraint on the exercise of authority would fall most heavily on them.
For the Chinese’ part, the need to accept these controlling power factors may have been seen, by the more Confucian-minded among them, as good reason to make virtue a necessity in the absence of law. Although scholars like Ma Tuan-lin had long since reconciled themselves to the need for law in the dynastic context, others with a more moralistic approach to history and politics, according to Professor Langlois, saw the
- judgments rendered by Confucius in the Spring and Autumn Annals as a surer guide to the administration of justice than any law code. In this view the Annals illustrated the constant norms of justice, as applied by Confucians in given historical situations, with a sensitivity to human needs, a flexibility and finesse beyond anything that rigid adherence to a legal code could allow. From study of the Annals, then, the ruler and his surrogates could take Confucius as their model and approximate the justice of the sage-king, administering personalized rule rather than the inflexible and impersonal legal system inherited from the great dynasties. The ethical code of the Confucian gentleman was appealed to, then, as a higher law, more civilized than the legal codes of even benevolent despots.
How widespread this attitude was in the Ytian period remains a matter of speculation. One may well doubt that it sufficed to explain the absence of a formal code in the Yiian or the feeling that such was dispensable. Yet a significant number of the Yiian scholar-officials holding this view of the Annals as a sure guide to justice were also identified with the Chu Hsi school, whose influence was spreading at this time. True, one need not have been a member of that school to hold such views; quite possibly, however, the moral enthusiasm generated by the new movement reinforced the idealism expressed in this interpretation of the Spring and Autumn Annals.
A rather different, though still Confucian, view of the essentials of rule and rulership is found in Professor Franke’s study of Wang Yin (1227-1304). As a member of the Hanlin Academy and court historian, Wang Yiin bespoke a traditional Confucian statecraft largely unaffected by the new developments in Neo-Confucianism. He represented the political culture surviving from the Chin dynasty, which had preceded the Mongols in the occupation of North China and long been at odds with the Southern Sung. Wang personified the type of official whose bureaucratic credentials were attested by the old-style civil service examinations, putting primary emphasis on literary skills and bureaucratic know-how, rather than on ideological fitness. Theirs were the skills useful in the drafting of government documents and keeping of records. Scholars possessing them became solidly entrenched in the Hanlin Academy, which handled much of the government’s paperwork. Though Wang Yiin was not a major thinker, he possessed a scholarship and bureaucratic competence of no mean order, representing a style of Chinese learning which had flourished under foreign rule in the Tung-p’ing region of what is now Shantung province, with a high level of literary sophistication and political savoir faire. Where, however, the Sung school had deprecated the Han and T’ang dynasties as political models—an attitude seen also in the critique of dynastic codes—the political wisdom of this tradition drew heavily on the conventional lore associated with successful rulers of those great dynasties.
Wang Yiin, from a Chinese family which got its political start under Jurchen rule, had had a long and distinguished career at court and in the provinces before he presented to the throne the two short guides to rulership which form the centerpiece of Professor Franke’s study. In these works Wang distilled the essence of his accumulated learning and experience, presenting models of conduct and lessons of history for the edification of the ruler or heir apparent. For this he drew mainly on the classics and histories, but with special emphasis on the exemplary actions of the Han and T’ang monarchs.
Professor Franke underscores the very simple and practical nature of these lessons, their down-to-earth, nonmetaphysical character. Here, in effect, we have the hard core of the working Confucian tradition, absent the high-flown theories of the Sung philosophers. From this one can easily surmise that Wang pitched his message at the level of the common denominator between Chinese, Mongol, and Central Asian experience, not at the level of Chinese high culture. As texts thought worthy of translation into Mongol, they conveyed the essential message capable of penetrating the language barrier and breaking through cultural bounds.
Further significance is lent to this conclusion by comparison to earlier works in the same genre of imperial instruction. In form and in spirit Wang’s writings come closest to the T’ang works, the Examples of the Emperor (Ti fan)* attributed to T’ang T’ai-tsung" (r. 627-649), and The Essence of Government in the Chen-kuan Era (Chen-kuan chengyao)),! compiled by Wu Ching! (670-749) to record the essential spirit and substance of T’ai-tsung’s rule. Wang’s use of historical examples is also reminiscent of the work of Fan Tsu-yii* (1041-1098) in the Northern Sung and of Chen Te-hsiu! (1178-1235) at the end of the Southern Sung.’ This latter resemblance, however, renders all the more strange and striking Wang’s avoidance of any reference to these Sung models, or to the text of the Great Learning, which had become the main text for citation and discussion in the imperial instruction offered by members of the Ch’eng-Chu school. The most celebrated work of this type was Chen’s Extended Meaning of the Great Learning (Ta-hsiieh yen-i)," which had been presented to Khubilai before he formally ascended to power in China in 1260.6 The Extended Meaning shared with Wang’s work the honor of translation into Mongol—not just once, but several times. For Wang not to mention it, or the Great Learning itself, or Chu Hsi’s views on the latter as the basic text for the ruler’s self-cultivation, suggests that we have here a case of separate, if not competing, political traditions—the old line represented by Wang Yiin and the Chin culture of the Tung-p’ing region, on one side, and on the other the Neo-Confucian movement which, just at this moment in history, was overtaking, though not fully displacing, the preexisting tradition. Elsewhere and on other occasions Wang Yiin had paid tribute to Chu Hsi’s outstanding contributions to the advancement of the Confucian Way. No doubt this reflected the rapid rise in prestige of Neo-Confucianism in his time. Nevertheless, Wang’s own intellectual formation had been in the earlier culture, and his most authentic voice was not that of the Ch’eng-Chu school.
Since Neo-Confucianism is a form of Confucianism, and claims to preserve all that is essential in the latter, no clear line of demarcation can be drawn between them. At this juncture in Chinese history, however, and in Wang’s rather unusual “typical case,” we may see how things stood in the mind of an authentic Confucian, experienced in the ways of the Chinese political world, on the eve of Neo-Confucianism’s penetration of the imperial citadel. Through his eyes, and through the writings of others like Ma Tuan-lin, we get a view of the most persistent realities of the Chinese dynastic tradition.
The Neo-Confucian’s qualified acceptance of those same realities, but insistence also on a higher order of values which men might attain, is the subject of the next group of papers to be considered. Included among them are studies of four of the most influential Neo-Confucian teachers of the Yiian period, namely, Chao Fu,” Hsii Heng,° Liu Yin,? and Wu Ch’eng.* They represent the wave of the future, breaking over the rock of China’s entrenched institutions and age-old problems, and then spreading beyond to other lands and people.
In the early decades of the thirteenth century Chu Hsi’s teaching had become a vital force in the educational life of South China, but, given the hostility between the alien regimes in the North and the Southern Sung dynasty, communication was difficult and Chu Hsi had almost no following in north China, With the Mongol conquest of the South, however, and with China reunited, though under foreign rule, the relative isolation of the North ended. Meanwhile the high level of Confucian culture sustained under the Chin, and the familiarity with earlier philosophical developments of the Northern Sung, yielded a well-prepared and receptive audience for the new teaching. Wing-tsit Chan’s study of “Chu Hsi and Ytian Neo-Confucianism” tells the dramatic story of how the highest expression of Sung culture, its “learning” or philosophy, survived the defeat of the dynasty itself and turned military subjection into cultural victory.
Professor Chan has already made impressive contributions to the study of the Chu Hsi school in the Southern Sung, Ming, and Ch’ing periods. Here, in tracing the transmission of the teaching through this stormy epoch, he identifies those characteristics of the movement which marked this initial phase in its growth, thus delineating the elements of continuity and discontinuity which are fused in the history of any great tradition. Against the background of earlier symposia which have highlighted different features of the movement, we may note the following significant observations by Professor Chan:
First is the predominance of the Chu Hsi school in the Yiian period and the failure of other Sung schools, notably that of Lu Hsiang-shan," to perpetuate themselves. This dominance was largely achieved without the benefit of official endorsement or support, though the latter eventually confirmed Chu Hsi’s teaching as the approved one. The reasons for this extraordinary survival power and inherent strength of the Chu Hsi school remain to be explained, but the fact itself is undoubted, given the evidence adduced by Professor Chan. Though Lu Hsiang-shan in the Sung, and Wang Yang-ming’ in the Ming, are often referred to as leaders of the so-called “Lu-Wangt school,” there was in fact no such school historically in the sense of a lineal succession or ongoing academy from the Sung into the Yiian and Ming.
Second, Chu Hsi’s concept of the orthodox tradition (fao-t'ung)" was widely accepted by leading thinkers of the time, and helped give a sense of unity and common purpose to the members of the school.
Third, Chou Tun-i’ and his concept of the Supreme Ultimate had importance for Ytian Neo-Confucians far beyond what was generally accorded to it in the later tradition.
Fourth, the Elementary Learning (Hsiao-hsiieh)* compiled under the direction of Chu Hsi was a major Neo-Confucian text along with Chu’s version of the Four Books. By contrast, the Reflections on Things at Hand (Chin-ssu Iu)* by Chu Hsi and Li Tsu-ch’ien,® a basic anthology of the Ch’eng-Chu school much used in other periods, was little spoken of. This would seem to indicate that Yiian Neo-Confucians stressed basic ethical teachings, expressed in the simplest form and addressed to the layman as well as the scholar.
Fifth, a similar tendency may perhaps be seen in the relative weight given to the paired values of “abiding in reverence and the exhaustive investigation of principle (chti-ching ch’iung-li).”* Major Yiian thinkers showed a strong preference for the practice of reverence, and deemphasized the investigation of principle. Thus again the moral and religious aspect seems to have dominated over the intellectual and speculative. Not until the early Ming was an effort made to redress the balance.
In Professor Chan’s study Hsii Heng (1209-1281) emerges as the leading intellectual figure of the age, an activist at court and the most influential teacher of the time, whose followers were to dominate the Yiian educational system. By contrast Wei-ming Tu has chosen as his subject a figure known primarily for his abstention from official service. This is Liu Yin (1249-1293), whose “eremitism” had earlier been cited by Frederick Mote as a form of subtle but unmistakable protest against Mongol rule. Hsii and Liu had long been cast as alternative models of Confucian commitment, since the story (almost certainly apocryphal but nonetheless celebrated) had been told of Liu’s having chided Hsii for his teadiness to serve the Mongols. Hsii replied that commitment to the Tao obliged one to respond to the call for public service in its behalf. Later, it is said, Liu gave as his reason for declining office that it was respect for the integrity of the Tao that obliged him to refrain from serving an unworthy regime.7
Professor Mote had already distinguished Liu Yin from the typical Taoist recluse, whose withdrawal from the public arena reflected a selfcentered individualism and disassociation from politics, as well as from the typical Neo-Confucian loyalist, whose refusal to serve was grounded in a prior, and exclusive, loyalty to another dynasty. Instead of this, according to Mote, Liu’s “eremetism” was a veiled protest by one whose political commitments were made clear in his polite refusal to be associated with a corrupt government.
Tu, by contrast, sees Liu’s reluctance to serve, not primarily as a form of political protest but as fulfilling a commitment to a Neo-Confucian ideal of sagehood which went beyond politics. In this view Liu had been converted to Neo-Confucianism as an ethicoreligious calling which placed a supreme value on the achievement of individual integrity in conformity with the Way. Liu’s decision not to serve in government was made on grounds that “were not exclusively political, for. . . the Confucian demand that a man serve society is primarily an ethicoreligious one. Moreover the basic Confucian commitment is to morality and culture rather than to any particular structure of power... .” Thus Liu was “impelled to choose morality and culture over politics by a profound sense of mission, and ultimate concern for personal purity and dignity as respect for the Confucian Tao.” 8
This deep sense of mission appears as a common characteristic of converts to Neo-Confucianism in the thirteenth century, about whom we have many accounts of a conversion-experience akin to being “born again.” In some sense, of course, they had been Confucian scholars all along, yet when Chu Hsi’s works became available, it was for them much like a revelation or new testament. Until then the classics had been just so much antiquarian learning; now these texts came to have a much heightened significance and personal meaning in their lives. This was especially true of Chu’s explication of the Four Books and his exposition of the Elementary Learning as a basic manual and guide to the moral life. Suddenly the light of reason shone over all things and the inspirational call to the personal achievement of sagehood had a catalytic and dynamizing effect on many individuals.
No less of a sense of mission than Liu Yin’s was felt by the great southern scholar Wu Ch’eng (1249-1333), the central figure in David Gedalecia’s paper. Gedalecia approaches his subject from a somewhat different angle, however. For him Wu’s significance is less as someone who played a key role in Yiian developments than as a pivotal figure in the long-term development of Neo-Confucian ideas. In his own time, even though Wu had a reputation as perhaps the greatest classicist and philosopher of the day, he was not the subject of such great controversy as he became in the Ming period, when his role as an interpreter of orthodox Neo-Confucianism became a major issue.
This is not to say that Wu was uninvolved in the great issues of his time. He was in fact one of the most prominent of Neo-Confucians to express opposition to the resumption of the civil service examinations on the ground that they were too impersonal, mechanical, and competitive.!° The learning they required was minimal and routinized, in contrast to the fullness of scholarship and virtue which had been associated with the Neo-Confucian sage as the model of self-cultivation and education. Wu stood as one of the last hold-outs against the new system, invoking the unchallengeable authority of Chu Hsi in behalf of his position. Thus the basic issue of principle over which he broke with the government was not one which put him into theoretical opposition to Chu Hsi, even though Chu was to become prominently identified with the new system through the use in the examinations of his versions of the Four Books.
The issue Gedalecia focuses on is the dual aim of “honoring the virtuous nature and maintaining constant inquiry and study” (sun tehsing, tao wen-hsiieh),## a time-honored formulation of the balance to be maintained by Confucians between moral cultivation and scholarly inquiry. For Wu to be deeply concerned over maintaining this balance was not out of keeping with his position on the examination issue, since, in his view, the evil of the new system was precisely its neglect of moral cultivation and abandonment of the ideal of integrated learning. Nor was his stress on honoring the moral nature counter to the prevailing trend of thought in the Chu Hsi school. In Wing-tsit Chan’s study of the Chu Hsi school in the Yiian it is his conclusion, too, that such an emphasis on the moral and religious aspect of self-cultivation had been a general tendency, with little said in the school about the “exhaustive investigation of principle.”
It is true that the relative weight of moral and intellectual concerns had already been an issue in the encounter between Chu Hsi and Lu Hsiang-shan, as Wu Ch’eng himself pointed out. Thus the issue was certainly there for anyone who wished to stir up controversy over it. Chu Hsi himself, however, had belittled the difference between them and sought to avoid contention with Lu. The same may be said for a significant number of Chu’s immediate followers, like Huang Kan® (11521221), Wei Liao-weng®* (1178-1237) and Chen Te-hsiu.!! They were inclined toward reconciliation, rather than partisan polemics. Indeed it may be said that Ytian thought in general inclined toward harmony and accommodation, so that in taking a generous view of Lu Hsiang-shan, Wu Ch’eng was quite in keeping with the spirit of the age and not, in most eyes, disqualified by this from being accepted as an authentic transmitter of the Ch’eng-Chu teaching.
As Professor Gedalecia reviews the growing controversy which later arose over Wu’s orthodoxy, it becomes clear that the polarization of thought around the figures of Chu Hsi and Lu Hsiang-shan is more a product of the Ming than of the Sung and Yiian. Stresses then developed among divergent strains in the original teaching, as one tendency or another was pursued at the expense of the all-round balance Chu Hsi had sought to maintain among them—a balance which social and cultural change would in any case have rendered unstable. One benefit of this study, then, is that it helps us to see how we make problems for ourselves—how prone any age is to read its own problems into its past, and how not only our own conflicts but even the refinement of our methods of thought and analysis may easily contaminate the historical evidence we are dealing with.
In his study of “Confucianism, Local Reform, and Centralization in late Ytian China,” John Dardess shifts the focus away from the leading thinkers and scholars of the age and directs it at the Confucian elite on the local level—in this case, activists who tried to put their principles to work in reform of the fiscal administration and military defense. Here Professor Dardess labels their reformist thought and activity as “Confucian” because the values invoked and the practices employed may be considered the stock in trade of the perennial tradition, rather than distinctive Neo-Confucian creations. The working ingredients in this historical situation are nonetheless a compound of old and new. Eastern Chekiang, the hotbed of reform, was also a seedbed of Neo-Confucian teaching. Shao-hsing,®* Yii-yao,#® Chin-hua,*f etc., the cities and towns in which activists started their Confucian reform programs, were also active centers of Neo-Confucian thought and scholarship. The reformers themselves drew inspiration from typical Neo-Confucian texts like the Elementary Learning, and when they sought to improve local education they did so by stressing the basic moral relations expounded in that text, and by building halls for “Clarifying (or Manifesting) Moral Relations” (Minglun t’ang)* such as are found in Neo-Confucian academies throughout East Asia, We have reason to believe then that their sense of mission and their dedication to the cause of reform was not unconnected with the renewed sense of commitment to the Way which Neo-Confucianism engendered in the Yiian statesmen who served Khubilai or even in the philosophers and scholars who refused to serve the Mongol ruler. Indeed the reformers themselves paid specific tribute to the Sung masters, as much for their personal example as martyrs in the service of the Way, as for their inspiring ideas.
Three things impress us as significant in this valiant, but in the end unsuccessful, struggle for reform on the local level. First is the fact that the reform leaders among the local elite were not limited to one ethnic group, economic class or social function. There were significant numbers of Mongols and Central Asians, along with Chinese, working together in a common cause. Some had means, others had none. Some had official status or civil service degrees, others lacked these. What brought them together was their common education in Neo-Confucianism and their shared sense of commitment to make the Way prevail in the world. This moral activism and esprit de corps Dardess identifies as “Confucian professionalism,” using the latter term less in its modern connotation of specialized function than in its original sense of a body of values which one actively professes and works to uphold. From Dardess’ evidence it is clear that the spread of Neo-Confucian education in the Yiian era created a distinct professional class, a moral and intellectual elite with a common bond transcending race, social status or worldly means.
Second, struggling against corruption and maladministration in their home regions, these grass-roots activists had a strong sense of the need to mobilize support among the local populace and to achieve this by building a new spirit of moral and social solidarity among them. To this end they tried to “restore” authentic Confucian rituals that celebrated the common values of the community and structured human activities in pursuit of shared goals. Much of this effort was based on classical models, but the “neoclassical” inspiration for it came in significant measure from the Sung experience with reform and Chu Hsi’s own sense, in an age characterized by corruption and incompetence at court, that educational, social, and economic reform must start at the local level.
Nevertheless, and this third point goes hand-in-hand with the second, according to Dardess reform on the local level required centralization of authority against divisive forces; it could not be completely selfcontained but depended on a correlative effort by the central government. The problem of reform, to be manageable, had to be defined in terms of local needs and capabilities, yet autonomy on the regional level, if particularistic and self-serving, could intervene and come into conflict with any polity, local or national, grounded in an ethos of genuine commonalty (kung)® and public service. Chu Hsi’s whole educational approach, in his interpretation of the Great Learning as the key text and classical basis of public morality, was built on the idea of individual self-discipline in fulfillment of the highest good (which also served the common good) for man in society. Thus the ideology of reform was predicated on a universalistic ethic and a conception of the structured society as culminating in a true center, uniting power and justice.
Unfortunately for the noble men who sought to “rescue the times” in the mid-fourteenth century, the forces of fractious regionalism proved too strong, and the leadership of the Yiian court too weak, for the local reform to be sustained. It is Dardess’ contention nonetheless that even this experience of frustrated reform served as a useful lesson for some of its leaders like Liu Chi® (1311-1375) who, abandoning the Yiian as hopeless and unworthy, contributed their efforts to building the new Ming regime of Chu Yiian-chang.®
The inclination to look to the center for direction has long been a fact of Chinese life, and this has been so irrespective of the differences among dynasties, conquerors, the type of governmental structure, and whether or not there was strong ideological guidance or dictation from above. Thus it is not surprising, when we turn to teachings or traditions other than Confucianism (which everyone assumes to be state-oriented or concerned with politics), that Professor Jan Yiin-hua should consider the relations of Buddhism to the state, and the situation of Buddhists at the capital Ta-tu®* (modern Peking), to have prime significance for understanding the condition of even this relatively apolitical religion. One way or another, by favor or neglect, protection or persecution, the atti- tude of the ruling power was bound to have its effect on the organization of religion. Even in the studies of Professors Yii and Liu, though they deal with other topics, the omnipresence of the ruling power is evident.
Predisposed though the Mongols were from before the conquest to favor Buddhism, this gave no guarantee that Chinese Buddhists would have an easy time of it. In the early days of conquest military and political affairs preoccupied the new tulers, and patronage, when it came in more settled circumstances, tended to be dispensed with a view to maintaining peace and a balance among religious forces. Even influential Buddhist laymen at court, such as Yeh-lii Ch’u-ts‘ai and Liu Ping-chung™ (1216-1274), had to accept these ground rules and try to eschew partisanship. Under such conditions the Chinese Buddhist community in the capital region considered it an accomplishment, in the midst of the general devastation, that they could simply survive and transmit their teachings to the next generation. Hence in Professor Jan’s judgment the most that Chinese Buddhists could aspire to was continuity, not creativity.
Still, these circumstances alone do not account for the lack of dynamism within the Buddhist community at this time. Under the surface veneer of religious toleration and ecumenical harmony, enough infighting was going on to stimulate the competitive drive of any movement. Among the Chinese and Tibetan Buddhists there was intense rivalry for the favor of the khans or the attention of the people. The various sects subordinated their differences only when faced by a common threat from encroachments of the Taoist clergy on their religious properties, or were challenged by spurious Taoist “scriptures” depicting Buddhism as a minor offshoot and deviation from Taoism. As of this time Chinese Buddhism was largely dominated by the Ch’an or Meditation sect, a movement which by its very nature lacked any principle of organization or cohesion. Its own “leaders,” as Professor Yii’s study of Chung-feng Mingpen®™ (1263-1323) illustrates, felt a responsibility mainly for the transmission of the lamp of enlightenment from mind to mind, and very little for the functioning or administration of institutions, be they political, social, or even ecclesiastical. Thus, even within the Ch’an school the real question was whether or not a given transmission of teaching and practice could maintain itself.
In this respect Professor Jan points out the paradoxical situation of a teaching so noncommittal and so insistent on “wordless transmission” that it found itself on the verge of extinction unless something were done to record its essential teachings. Thus it had to be counted an achievement that the Ch’an schools succeeded at this time in putting into writing what had previously been left unsaid. As Professor Jan has it, when the Ch’an Master Ts’ung-lun™ wrote that he tried to express in language the truth of the inexpressible, someone commented that “It is not that the Honorable Lun was so given to speech, but only that the Tao needed to be discussed. He therefore had no choice but to speak.” !2
There was another ironical moment in the history of Ch’an Buddhism when the Yuian regime decided that it was time to limit the number of tax- and draft-exempt monks by giving them examinations to determine their credentials as learned in Buddhist scripture. In a dramatic encounter with the Chancellor of State, the Ch’an master Hai-yiin®° (1202-1257) averted this threat by disclaiming any competence in the reading of Buddhist scripture himself. Expressing incredulity that so eminent a monk could profess virtual illiteracy, the Chancellor asked “If you cannot read, how could you become a senior monk?” To which Haiytin replied, shocking the court by his seeming temerity, “Is the honorable Great Official able to read [the scriptures]?” 3
With his back against the wall, defending the essential faith, Haiytin was willing to make an issue of whether or not genuine religious understanding could be put to a literacy test. Among his own coreligionists, however, he acknowledged the low estate to which the Buddhist clergy had fallen by their lack of study and discipline. This was indeed one of the reasons why he felt compelled to insure the continuity of instruction by compiling a record of the koans of the Ts’ao-tung®? school. Ch’an’s radical denial of culture and insistence on the sole authority of the Ch’an master had to be abandoned if the authentic transmission itself could only be assured by cultural means. Ming-pen, too, felt this pressure when he conceded the practical need for the hua-t’ou,?* or kungan** (kéan), as a formula to put a stop to all conceptual formulations. He was as aware as Hai-yiin of the deterioration of training and discipline, and the lack of true dedication among the monks. Hence the need for him to struggle with the problem of how one introduces some order and system into even a religion like Ch’an that forswears intellection and verbalization.
Leaders like Hai-yiin and Ming-pen were successful enough in these efforts to insure at least the continuance of their own religious traditions, though in an uneasy, jostling coexistence with others. They knew well the tendency of the ruling power to bestow its ostentatious favors indiscriminately among the major faiths, and they accepted the polite conventions by which religions showed respect for one another as all members of the same spiritual family, each serving its respective function. Thus the studies of formal religion in this symposium are replete with instances of the silky syncretism which smoothed over the relations among religious groups in this time. Yet it was also typical of this Oriental “ecumenism” that in their seeming deference to one another each religion stil] managed to slip in a claim that it was somehow more equal than others or more lofty in its condescension.
A typical example is found in Yeh-lii Ch’u-ts’ai’s formulation that “the Way of Confucius is for governing the world, the Way of Lao Tzu is for nourishing the nature, and the Way of Buddha is for cultivating the mind”—a view which he spoke of as “universally accepted in the past and present.” When chided by his own Ch’an master for seeming to concede parity with Buddhism to Confucianism and Taoism, Yeh-lii disclosed a hidden reservation and an intentional ambiguity in this characterization. In his reading of it, Buddhism retained paramountcy through its control of the mind, while Confucianism, having to cede this crucial role to Buddhism, amounted in the end to no more than “the dregs of the Way.” !4
Given this attitude of outward deference and inward rejection of the three religions toward each other, little in the way of genuine interreligious dialogue actually took place. When, rarely, a serious debate was held, it was usually on the initiative of the ruler. Khubilai, on his part, was extraordinary for the eagerness with which he promoted open religious encounters at court and for the seriousness with which he appeared to follow the issues himself. In this role he seems to have prefigured the great Mogul Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) in India, who held similar debates at court and took an active part in the religious encounters among Muslims, Hindus, and Christians. Indeed one may wonder if the rulers of these great conquest dynasties, presiding over such cultural diversity and yet endeavoring to construct some new polity in its midst, did not take a broader view and deeper interest in religion than was typical of either professional clergy or the more established dynasties.
With the plurality of cultures represented in the Mongol empire, with the presence in China of Muslims, Tibetan lamas, Nestorians, Roman Catholics, Jews and crypto-Manicheans, and with the extensive ex-change among them on other levels of culture (especially material culture), it may seem striking that there was so little to show for the interaction in religion and philosophy. Striking, that is, if one can assume that a culturally open situation and tolerant rule are enough to foster philosophical or theological discussion. Yet one may well ask whether, in the given circumstances, it is on this level that one could expect to find evidence of cultural interchange, or whether it is under these conditions that significant religious or philosophical dialogue takes place. Up to this time the most fruitful discussions had been held, and the most impressive syntheses produced, in twelfth-century Sung China, though it was politically weak, militarily beleaguered, and culturally somewhat isolated. To judge from this a certain degree of cultural continuity and maturity, and an intense cultivation of intellectual and philosophical concerns, may rather be the precondition for erecting new and more complex structures of thought, even though it be at the cost of effectiveness in more practical matters.
In the Yiian conditions were perhaps too unsettled for this. With no established cultural direction, there was instead a groping for some consensus in values to serve as a common basis for action. And, it must be said, this was not to be found in the facile syncretisms then available. These were, in effect, agreements not to agree. Let everyone do his own thing: let the Confucians talk, let the Buddhists meditate, let the Taoists cultivate immortality. As Ming-pen, trying to sort things out, put it:
The Confucian Way is to govern the mind (chih-hsin)** and cultivate the mind (hsiu-hsin),?' whereas the Buddhist Way is to brighten the mind (ming-hsin)?# and awaken the mind (wu-hsin).?” Governing and cultivation imply gradualness whereas brightening and awakening imply suddenness. The mind is, of course, the same. But the sudden approach is surely different from the gradual approach. This is because the worldly and the otherworldly are different. If our Buddha should decide to talk about the worldly Way, he would surely not forget to mention the theory of “rectifying the mind” and “making the will sincere.” Suppose Confucius should decide to talk about the otherworldly Way, how can one be sure that he would not mention “emptiness of Mind” or “perfection of enlightenment”? When a person does not understand the great skill-in-means a sage employs in establishing his teaching, he will argue senselessly and merely add confusion. 5
There can be no doubt that Ming-pen speaks for the Ch’an community when he refuses thus “to talk” or to “argue senselessly.” Their “one great thing” was not to be done on the philosophical level, as the hua-t’ou pointedly asserted if it asserted anything. And under these circumstances, of course, there could be no significant dialogue, unless it be on Confucian—and now Neo-Confucian—terms. An indication of this is found in the further explanation which Yeh-lii Ch’u-ts’ai gave his master on the real meaning of his characterization of the Three Teachings. He quoted from the classic formulation in the Great Learning: “According to Tai’s classic text one who wished to bring order to his state
. . would first rectify his mind. There has never been a case in which, one’s mind being rectified, the state remained in disorder.” From this Yeh-lu concluded that “the governing of the world is a byproduct of the controlling of the mind.” 6 In his view, then, Buddhism, having claimed the mind as its special field of jurisdiction, automatically established its implicit authority over all else, and Confucianism’s political function was likewise subject to this control.
Nor were the Neo-Confucians, for their part, unaware of these implications. Precisely for this reason they had disputed in the Sung whether the Buddhist mind was one which could be entrusted with such large responsibilities for the welfare of mankind. If Ming-pen could say, as Professor Yii reports, that the mind must be concentrated solely on the hua-t’ou of life-and-death, and should exclude al! other concerns, the Neo-Confucians had to reject this as too self-centered an approach and too unpredictable a course on which to chart the way for human society. Hence they presented an alternative, a mind-and-heart of their own, more rational, moral, and socially concerned.
This had already been their problem in the twelfth century and if the dialogue now, such as we find it in Yeh-lti Ch’u-ts’ai and Ming-pen, is couched in the language of the Great Learning, this is because its linking of the “rectification of the mind-and-heart” with the concern for the “governance of men through self-discipline,” as the Ch’eng brothers and Chu Hsi had so emphasized it, was already the focus of the dialogue in the Sung.?7
To this dialogue, in fact, the great Ch’an master of the Sung, Tahui Tsung-kao®’ (1089-1163) had himself contributed. Ta-hui, of course, had his own understanding of this “mind,” but he acknowledged the centrality of the issue and of mind-rectification as the common ground among the Three Teachings. According to him, “The Dharmas of the sages of the Three Teachings—there isn’t one that does not urge the good and forbid the bad, and rectify men’s minds. If one’s mind is not recti- fied, then one will be licentious and immoral, and profit will be one’s only object. If one’s mind is rectified, then one will be loyal and righteous and follow only principle. . . . You must know that in Confucian teaching, the first and most important thing is to rectify one’s mind. When one’s mind is rectified, then ‘even in moments of haste and confusion’ one does nothing that does not fit perfectly with this Tao.” !8
By the time of Ming-pen, a century and a half later, the leaders of the Neo-Confucian movement in the Yiian had made the doctrine of the Great Learning, as interpreted by Chu Hsi, the main focus of public discourse and the essence of the teaching which Hsii Heng and his disciples disseminated widely through the system of public instruction.'9 It is hardly surprising, then, that Buddhists who “decided to talk” about such matters, as Ming-pen puts it, would have recourse to the language of the Great Learning and the School of the Way. This had indeed become the consensus teaching, both in the schools and in the new system of civil service examinations. For Ming-pen this was not an article of faith or dogma but an option open to him, and one which, in the existing historical circumstances, it was natural for him to exercise in the way that he did. He spoke in the language of the Ch’eng-Chu school, tacitly recognizing Neo-Confucianism’s increasing influence in the social and cultural arena. For in this arena it was giving new meaning and coherence to human life, encouraging men to believe in the possibility that some kind of rational and moral order could be brought out of the chaos around them.
What then about the other side of Ming-pen’s equation: “should Confucius decide to talk about the otherworldly Way, how can one be sure that he would not mention ‘emptiness of Mind’ or ‘perfection of enlightenment?” Indeed one could not be sure. While Neo-Confucians resisted any tendency to “talk about an otherworldly Way,” they certainly did discuss “enlightenment” and “emptiness of Mind.” Instead of viewing it as another realm of “unworldly” truth, however, they saw it as a spiritual dimension of the human mind going beyond the purely rational and moral, which kept it open to new experience.?° For them this realm of the spirit, as Chu Hsi affirmed it in his commentary on the Great Learning, offered the prospect of man’s highest fulfillment by participation in the wondrous creative power of Heaven itself.21 Chu recognized this human capability as something that could not be fixed, quantified, or wholly defined. Many of his followers in the Ch’eng-Chu school, too, including Huang Kan, Wei Liao-weng, Chen Te-hsiu, and Wu Ch’eng so understood it, and for this reason they were loathe in their own time to shut the door tight on either Lu Hsiang-shan or the Buddhists and Taoists.
This accounts, I believe, for the dominant spirit of reconciliation in the Ch’eng-Chu School and its Learning of the Heart-and-mind in the Yiian period. Later critics might tax them for being less than strictly orthodox, or more recently for being syncretists somewhat lacking in philosophical rigor, but one underestimates Chu Hsi, it seems to me, if one fails to appreciate his remarkable combination of toughness of mind, largeness of heart, and openness of spirit. It was these qualities in him which made him a worthy teacher for the Yiian, and in his followers too during this period, which rendered them something more than blind conformists repeating a dull routine. It is also these qualities of mind and spirit which contributed to a new phase in the growth of a rich and vital tradition, one that we, in this volume, have only begun to open up and explore.
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