Neo-Confucianism flourished in all of these East Asian countries and since the 16th Century some of most creative philosophical work was achieved in Korea and Japan. In the 20th Century, even amidst the tremendous political and military upheavals throughout the East Asian region, there was yet another revival movement based on Neo-Confucianism now known as New Confucianism.
While the New Confucian movement is clearly an heir of its Neo-Confucian past, it is also deeply engaged in dialogue with Western philosophy and is emerging as fascinating form of global philosophy at the beginning of the 21st Century. Before we explore the revival of Confucian learning throughout East Asia, we need to reflect on just what was being revived. Some have suggested that Confucianism should be renamed, they have suggested Ruism or the Ruist tradition; they point out that this would match more closely what Master Kong thought he was doing in teaching about the glories of Zhou culture.
The problem is that ru originally meant a scholar of ritual tradition and not just followers of Master Kong. By Song times, there are some perfectly good Chinese terms that can be used to define the work of these later Confucian masters. There are a number of terms in use after the Song such as ru or classical scholar, daoxue or learning of the way, lixue or the teaching of principle, xingxue or teaching of the mind-heart, or hanxue or Han learning just to name a few.
All of these schools fit into the Western definition of Confucianism, but the use of a single name for all of them obscures the critical differences that East Asian scholars believe are stipulated by the diverse Chinese nomenclature.
While Confucians did almost always recognize each other across sectarian divides, they were passionately concerned to differentiate between good and bad versions of the Confucian Way. Is it possible to provide a perfect and succinct definition of the Confucian Way? Modern critical scholars are extremely wary of any hegemonic set of essential criteria to define something as vast and diverse as the Confucian Way in all its diverse East Asian forms.
Or is the Confucian Way something entirely different from what would be included or excluded by the criteria of the Western concepts of philosophy or religion? Notwithstanding such proper scholarly reticence, two contemporary Confucian philosophers, Xu Fuguan and Mou Zongsan, have offered a suggestion about at least one sustaining and comprehensive motif that suffuses Confucian thought from the classical age to its modern revivals.
First, Xu and Mou argue that Confucianism has always generated and sustained a profound social and ethical dimension to its philosophical and social praxis. This kind of commitment has lead many western scholars to define Confucianism as an axiological philosophical sensibility, a worldview ranging from social ethics to an inspired aesthetics. Secondly, concern consciousness is always set within a social context. For instance, Confucian teachers have often taught that the folk etymology of ren or humaneness makes the point of social nature of all proper Confucian action: humaneness is at least two people treating each other as they ought to in order to sustain human flourishing.
An unconcerned Confucian is an oxymoron. The content and context of their concern for the world and the Dao will vary dramatically, yet the sense of concern, of having a care as the Quakers taught on the other side of Eurasia, remains a hallmark of Confucian philosophical sensibilities. The historical development of the Confucian Way or movement has been variously analyzed in terms of distinct periods. The simplest version is that there was a great classical tradition that arose in the Xia, Shang and Zhou kingdoms that was perfected in the works and records of the legendary sage kings and ministers and was then continued and refined by their later followers such as Kongzi, Mengzi Mencius and Xunzi.
On the one hand, although later Chinese thinkers decried the ceaseless interstate warfare that characterized the era, on the other hand the Warring States period is remembered as the most creative philosophical epoch in Chinese history.
All of the great indigenous schools of Chinese philosophy find their origin in this period from to BCE when the Qin state finally unified the empire under the rule of the First Emperor of the Qin.
After the incredible cultural efflorescence of the Warring States intellectuals, all future philosophical achievements were deemed to be commentary on the depositions of the classical masters. Later scholars have suggested that this binary division of Chinese philosophical history is too simple and that there are three or more clear divisions for the Confucian movement because it has demonstrated a longevity and continuity of maturation for more than two thousand five hundred years.
For instance, some modern scholars suggest that, based on creativity and transformation of the tradition, there was a three-fold division of the classical period, the Neo-Confucian movements of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties and most recently the era defined by the impact of the modern West on the East Asian philosophical and religious Confucian worlds. The most complex periodization differentiates the achievement of Confucian thinkers over the centuries more subtly than either the binary or triadic divisions allow.
A strong case can be made for defining six discrete eras in the historical development of the Confucian tradition in East Asia:. In order to give a capsule outline of the development of Confucianism down to the rise of the great Neo-Confucian thinkers in the Song, what follows is a very short set of outlines of the first three of these six periods, which preceded the rise of Neo-Confucian movements.
It is important to remember that although Confucianism began as a Chinese tradition it became an international movement throughout East Asia. A full understanding of Neo-Confucianism requires that attention be paid to its advancement in Korea, Japan and Vietnam along with the continuing unfolding of the tradition in China.
According to Master Kong, there was a long and distinguished tradition of sage wisdom that stretched back even before the Xia and Shang dynasties. Master Kong sought to collect, edit and transmit these precious texts to his students in the hope that such an education project would lead to the renewed flourishing of the culture of humaneness based on the teachings of the sage kings and their ministers.
Master Kong was followed by a stellar set of Confucian masters, the most important being Mengzi and Xunzi. These great Confucian masters not only argued among themselves about the nature of the Confucian way, they confronted the attacks of the other great schools and thinkers of the Warring States period.
The texts attached to the names of these great scholars have served, along with the other early canonical material, to define the contours of the Confucian Way ever since the Warring States period.
While Master Kong would have rejected the notion that he founded or created a new tradition, it is to his Analects that countless generations of Confucians return to discover wisdom and insight into the nature of Confucian culture. Further, great teachers such as Master Meng and Master Xun continue to defend and refine the teachings of Master Kong in robust debate with the other schools of the Warring States period.
Although there has always been skepticism about the claim for such authorship, traditional Confucian scholars held that Master Kong himself had an editorial role in the compilation of many of the canonical texts that became ultimately the Thirteen Confucian Classics.
The Han dynasty contribution to the growth of the Confucian Way is often overshadowed by the grand achievements of the classical period. Yet the Han scholars edited almost all of the texts that survived and began to add their own critical commentaries and interpretations to the canonical texts. In many cases these Han commentaries are now recognized as classics in their own right. One of the features of the Confucian tradition is the use of various forms of commentaries as a vital philosophical genre.
It is a period that reveres historical traditions and hence the commentary is viewed as a proper way to transmit the traditional learning. After the fall of the Han dynasty, there was a marked revival of various facets of the earlier Daoist traditions.
The movement was called xuanxue or arcane or abstruse profound learning. Xuanxue thinkers were highly eclectic; sometimes they praised and used the great Warring States Daoist texts such as the Daodejing or the Zhuangzi to frame their complicated philosophical and religious visions, and sometimes they reframed materials drawn from the Confucian tradition as well.
It is universally recognized that the great xuanxue scholars brought a new level of philosophical sophistication to their analysis of the classical and Han texts. Moreover, this was also the epoch of the emergence of the great Daoist religious traditions that mark the Chinese and East Asian landscape from this era down to the present day. The Daoist religious founders and reformers also claimed the early texts such as the Daodejing , Zhuangzi and the Yijing [The Book of Changes] as their patrimony.
The xuanxue revival was ultimately eclipsed by the arrival of Buddhism in China. The era stretching roughly from to marks the height of the influence of Buddhism on Chinese culture. Along with the translation of the immense Buddhist canon into Chinese, the scholar monks of this era also created the unique Chinese Buddhist schools that went on to dominate the religious life of East Asia.
The Buddhists also introduced novel social institutions such as monastic communities for both men and women. In short, the impact on Chinese society and intellectual life was immense and shaped the future of Confucian philosophy.
It is very important to remember that Confucianism continued to play a vital and even creative role in the history of Chinese philosophy while Buddhism was ascendant. Confucianism remained the preferred approach to political and social thought and much personal and communal ethical reflection was concurrent with the powerful contributions of Daoist and Buddhist thinkers.
Both traditional and modern historians of China mark the year CE as the great divide within the Tang dynasty. This was the year of the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion and although the Tang dynasty formally lasted until its final demise in , it never recovered its full glory. And glorious the Tang was; it is the dynasty always remembered as one of the high points of Chinese imperial history in terms of political, military, artistic, philosophical and religious creativity.
For instance, it was the flourishing and cosmopolitan culture of the Tang world—with everything from metaphysics to painting, calligraphy, poetry, food and clothes—that spread throughout East Asia into the emerging societies of Korea and Japan. Moreover, while the Tang is noted as the golden age of Buddhist philosophical originality in terms of the formation of important Chinese schools such as the Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land and Chan [Zen in Japanese pronunciation], a number of important Confucian thinkers began to challenge the intellectual and philosophical supremacy of Buddhism.
All three scholars launched a double-pronged attack on Buddhism and a concomitant appeal for the restoration and revival of the Confucian Way. Just after the deaths of this trio of Confucian scholars, a late Tang emperor began a major persecution of Buddhism. Although not a bloody event as persecutions of religions go, many major schools failed to revive fully after and this date, along with the earlier rebellion of An Lushan, marks dramatic changes in the philosophical landscape of China.
Liu is perhaps more of a bridging figure between the early and later Tang intellectual worlds, but he still expressed a number of highly consistent Neo-Confucian themes and did so with a style that links him forward to the Song masters.
For instance, Liu, unlike many earlier Tang Confucians, was interested in finding what he thought to be the principles expounded in the classic texts rather than a convoluted, arcane if compendious commentarial exegesis.
He searched for the true meaning of the sages in the texts and not merely to study the philological subtlety of traditional commentarial lore. Further, Liu passionately believed that the authentic Dao was to be found in antiquity, by which he meant the true ideals of the Confucian teachings of the early sages. Along with this commitment to finding the confirmed teachings of the sages in the historical records, Liu was committed to political engagement based on these sage teachings.
Like all the later Neo-Confucians, Liu asserted the need to apply Confucian ethical norms and insights to political and social life. Han Yu is considered to be the most important and innovative of the Tang Confucian reformers.
He was a true renaissance man; he was an important political figure, brilliant essayist, Confucian philosopher and anti-Buddhist polemicist. What gives his work such power is that he carried out his various roles with a unified vision in mind: the defense and restoration of the Confucian Way.
In order to restore the Confucian Way, Han Yu developed a program of reform and renewal manifested in a literary movement called guwen or the ancient prose movement. But Han was doing much more than simply calling for a return to a more elegant prose style. He was urging this reform in order to clarify the presentation of the ideas of the Confucian tradition that was needlessly obscured by the arcane writing styles of the current age.
He wanted to write clearly in order to express the plain truth of the Confucian Way. Moreover, Han stressed a profound self-cultivation of the Dao. In order to do so, Han accentuated the image of the sage as the proper role model for humane self-cultivation.
And last, but certainly not least, Han and his colleagues proposed a Confucian canon-within-the-canon of a select set of texts that especially facilitate such a quest, namely such works as The Doctrine of the Mean , The Great Learning , the Analects and the Mengzi.
Along with his reform of the style and canon of the teaching of the Confucian Way, Han also explained his philosophical program in terms of the vocabulary and sensibility of the later Song Neo-Confucian revival.
Han himself wrote in an exegesis of a passage in the Analects in the examinations of Another remarkably original and prolific philosopher was Wang Fuzhi — , who reconceived all of Neo-Confucian metaphysics and moral psychology, working against the prevailing dualism of li and qi and developing an account of the virtues that made considerably more room for human desires and emotions J.
Liu , —, —; Cheng A third was Huang Zongxi — , who wrote comprehensive intellectual histories of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties and offered some of the most radical political reforms ever put forward by a traditional Confucian thinker, contending that scholars and ministers be permitted to criticize their ruler openly and proposing that a variety of procedural requirements be imposed on the deliberation and decision-making of the emperor SYXA; MRXA; MYDFL; de Bary All of these philosophers and especially Huang completed significant portions of their work in the early years of the Qing dynasty, but they were products of the distinctive intellectual and social circumstances witnessed at the end of the Ming, when Confucian thinkers started to consider political reforms in earnest and began to doubt a great deal of what had, for centuries, passed for obvious truths about the Confucian canon.
One of the most notable differences between classical Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism in the Song-Ming period is the prominence of metaphysical speculation in the latter. Most Confucians in the Song-Ming period believed that all phenomenal things and events are constituted of qi , a kind of vital, energetic material. But many doubted that qi alone could account for everything of significance about the phenomenal world.
The world has a certain unity and order that they saw as highly valuable, evident in things such as the natural behaviors of plants and animals, and the way that seasons work cooperatively with living things and with one another to sustain and reproduce life. And human beings have certain capacities to understand and contribute to the order and unity of things, capacities that seem to be part of our natural endowment.
Many Neo-Confucians thought that some further explanatory principle or ground was needed to account for this order, unity, and the natural capacities that help us make sense of them, and for this they appealed to the notion of Pattern li. For Buddhists this helped to justify the view that phenomenal qualities or essences are illusory, merely conventional, or conferred by the larger whole. Most Song-Ming Neo-Confucians rejected this view. They agreed that all things have an underlying Pattern, but this Pattern is what they called ceaseless life-production or ceaseless life-generativity, not emptiness.
And furthermore, this is a Pattern that all things share, so that they belong to a unified system of ceaseless life-generativity. So it is in the ultimate nature of things to participate in and contribute to these systems, which are characterized by birth, growth, and reproduction.
Paradigmatic models of Pattern can be found in the cycles of birth, growth, and reproduction evident in the change of seasons, or the way that birth, growth, and reproduction serve as the central aims or the organizing principles of families. Many Daoxue Confucians thought that Pattern can do certain explanatory work that qi cannot.
Pattern explains why boats can only travel by water and carts only by land. Pattern explains why children are naturally inclined to love and serve their parents, and why things made of qi alternate between yin passive and yang active phases or states.
Most recognized that these sorts of facts had much to do with the constituent qi in things as well, and a minority among the Song-Ming Confucians e. But most thought that Pattern has some independent role in accounting for them, some explanatory power not strictly reducible to that of qi. He makes clear that this is not a sort of temporal priority—it is not that Pattern exists first and then qi arises subsequently—but when we try to infer back to the origin or basis of things we should treat Pattern as prior or more fundamental ZZYL For much of the history of Confucian thought before the Song there had been a wide-ranging and generally unresolved debate about the moral character of human nature in particular, with Mencius famously arguing that human nature is good, Xunzi c.
By the end of the 11 th century, however, a consensus formed around a strong interpretation of the doctrine that people are good by nature, according to which people have well-formed moral dispositions and sensitivities innately and permanently. Cheng Yi developed the most influential formulation of this view. According to Cheng, humans necessarily have a good nature because humans necessarily have Pattern li , which includes the tendencies toward life-generativity that all things share, and this Pattern is an essential and important feature of ourselves, determinative of what we are and how we ought to be.
Cheng and later Neo-Confucians took his interpretation to be implicit in the works of the authoritative classical Confucians, especially Mencius, but it is evident that their interpretation was more radical than what Mencius in fact thought. Mencius is most plausibly read as endorsing the view that we are born with strong proclivities or sprouts of goodness which, if we are provided with a healthy upbringing, will naturally develop into virtues, and his primary concern was with the nature of humans in particular, not the nature of all living things Mencius 2A6, 6A1—6, 6A8.
By locating our good nature in Pattern, however, Cheng Yi introduced new philosophical challenges. His view assumes that all human beings have Pattern at all times, and yet it is obvious that few if any human beings are good at all times, so there must be some way of explaining the pervasiveness of human moral failure.
Furthermore, Pattern is shared by all beings, human or otherwise, so the nature that we identify with Pattern cannot by itself suffice to distinguish us from non-human things. If human beings sometimes fail to be good and virtuous it is because of dark or turbid qi which prevents Pattern from expressing itself or responding correctly, and dark and turbid qi is ubiquitous. Confucians in the Song-Ming period took a great deal of philosophical interest in the nature, characteristics, and function of the heartmind, explications of which could help to identify and specify features of moral and epistemic virtues.
One of the most contentious issues, however, had to do with the relation between heartmind and Pattern. In broad brushstrokes, we could say that there are two clusters of philosophical concerns at work in much Confucian discussion of the relation between heartmind and Pattern in this era.
First, many Confucians worried about developing systems of ethical norms too far removed from our actual psychological dispositions. So, for example, they criticized Mohists for their view that one should treat the welfare of all people as having an equal claim on them, no matter their relationship to oneself e.
Our ethical norms, they suggested, should be ones that we have a certain natural capacity to understand and embrace. By making the possibility of wholeheartedness a condition for esteeming something as a virtue, they tied their ethics even more closely to the heartmind that we happen to have.
It is difficult enough to adopt practices that go against the grain of our natural dispositions. It is even more difficult to embrace them and enact them without reservation or regret. Given the strong emphasis on wholeheartedness and the need to fully embrace the ethical norms that many Song-Ming Confucians promoted, some saw advantages in views that closely identified heartmind with Pattern.
If a particular practice or character trait e. Several Confucian philosophers made this idea explicit. Lu and Wang adopted this understanding of Pattern in part because they saw it as putting Confucian ethical norms within reach of people in their ordinary lives, and criticized more scholarly or bookish methods of grasping the Confucian Way, which they worried would never become sufficiently intuitive to embrace wholeheartedly or sincerely Ivanhoe But there was a second set of concerns that tended to push against the temptation to say that heartmind is a constituent of Pattern.
This had to do with the pernicious implications of subjectivist accounts of ethical norms. Chinese Buddhists in general took an interest in the ways that features of the seemingly objective world were actually dependent on and constituted by the minds or heartminds of subjects DSQXL cc.
And some Chan Buddhists openly embraced a way of life that seemed to countenance subjective whims or inclinations Gregory This, at least, was a worry about Buddhism shared by Confucians in the Song-Ming period.
For many of the Confucians who wrote in the Song-Ming period, the most important test of a philosophical system was whether it could provide or justify a good account of self-cultivation.
It was widely accepted that most people were lacking in virtue. Debates about Pattern, qi , heartmind, and the foundations of ethics were often treated as being important insofar as they had implications for how we ought to improve ourselves Ivanhoe 22— Most Confucians took the Confucian canon to be authoritative and true.
Texts like the Analects , the Mencius , and the Rites were required reading for any aspiring scholar and Confucians often appealed to these texts to substantiate their claims. But modern readers are sometimes surprised to learn that there was some debate about whether and to what extent reading the Confucian classics was required for proper self-development Ivanhoe On the one hand, it seemed obvious to many Confucians that many people had the wrong views and the authoritative Confucian texts seemed the most obvious way to correct those views.
Moreover, most agreed that we have well-formed ethical capacities by nature section 3. Confucians in the Song-Ming period adopted from the Mencius a general framework for the acquisition of ethical knowledge, according to which there are certain paradigm scenarios or cases e. In the Mencius that is done in part by noticing relevant similarities between cases, as when one sees that accepting a bribe for a special favor is self-debasing and shameful in ways similar to accepting food given with contempt, or the treatment due to seniors in general is similar to the respect we already give to our own elders Mencius 1A7, 6A10; Van Norden — Zhu Xi adds that we acquire new moral knowledge in part by seeing how a rule or norm to which we should conform fits into a larger system of norms that sustain a system of mutual life-generativity a system in which life, growth, and reproduction are ongoing and reciprocal.
Song-Ming Confucians were also interested in different kinds or types of knowledge. Ordinary knowledge is often portrayed as merely a correct and reliably informed affirmation that something is true or right, while genuine knowledge often requires some personal acquaintance with the matter, and necessarily issues in or is constituted by some appropriate feeling and motivation. In one influential discussion, Cheng Yi illustrates the distinction by describing two different sorts of reactions to news that a tiger was attacking people in the vicinity.
Some villagers were startled but did not have the powerful, almost involuntary fear of the one farmer who had been wounded by a tiger in the past. These were distinguished in various ways by influential Daoxue Confucians. Zhang Zai thought that in the case of sensory knowledge, knowers always conceive the object of knowledge as external and separate from themselves, whereas in the latter sort of knowledge the knower and known are united. Zhu did, however, continue to think that the most transformative and motivational knowledge is in some sense knowledge of our own virtuous nature, whatever external means we may use to acquire it ZZYL ; Zhu Due in part to the influence of Buddhism, Confucians in the Song-Ming period were interested in the many ways in which subtle or hard-to-detect psychological dispositions and phenomena can hamper our ability to apprehend things clearly and correctly.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Section 5: Confucianism. Search for:. Neo-Confucianism Neo-Confucianism The intellectual activities of the Song Sung dynasty gave rise to a new system of Confucian thought based on a mixture of Buddhist and Taoist elements; the new school of Confucianism was known as Neo-Confucianism. Licenses and Attributions. CC licensed content, Specific attribution. The Song is often seen as a time when the status of women declined.
Compared to Tang times, women were less active in politics and less commonly seen on the streets. Song Confucian teachers argued against widows remarrying, and footbinding began in Song times. Li Qingzhao ca. She wrote poetry in a new form that had become popular at the time, with irregular lines that were inspired by musical lyrics. Children Children were highly valued in the Chinese family system.
They were what made possible the continuation of the family. Although they were expected to learn to be filial, they were also indulged. Toy peddlers like the one in the scroll were sometimes depicted by painters surrounded by excited children.
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