Neo-Confucianism

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Neo-Confucianism is the modern name for the philosophical movement that remade Confucian thought in China during the Song dynasty (960–1279) and governed Chinese, Korean, and Japanese intellectual life for the better part of the next eight centuries. Its Chinese name, lixue — the “learning of principle” — points to what was new: where classical Confucianism had been a teaching about conduct, ritual, and the well-ordered state, the Song thinkers built beneath it a full account of what reality is and how the mind comes to know it.

The movement answered a pressure. For centuries Buddhism and religious Daoism had held the questions that the Confucian classics largely left alone — the nature of mind, the ground of being, the discipline of inner life — and Confucian scholars increasingly felt the old texts outmatched on that terrain. The eleventh-century thinkers now counted as founders, among them the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, set out to recover from the classics a metaphysics that could meet those rivals while rejecting their conclusions. The synthesis was completed by Zhu Xi (1130–1200), whose commentaries and selection of the “Four Books” became, after his death, the basis of the imperial examinations and so the frame within which educated China thought.

At the center stands a pair of terms. Li, principle, is the pattern or inner order that makes a thing the kind of thing it is and that it ought to realize; qi, the psychophysical stuff, is what gives it concrete existence. Every thing is principle lodged in matter-energy, and behind the whole stands the taiji, the Supreme Ultimate — principle in its totality. From this follows the program that mattered most to its practitioners: self-cultivation as the clearing-away of the distortions of qi so that the principle already present in the mind can shine through. Zhu Xi located the discipline in the “investigation of things,” a patient study of the world’s particulars by which moral understanding deepens; a rival current, the school of mind associated with Lu Jiuyuan and later Wang Yangming, held that principle is found by turning directly inward, since mind and principle are one. The disagreement ran for centuries and was never settled.

Scholarship has long debated how much the movement owed to the traditions it opposed. Its vocabulary of mind and stillness, its meditative practice of “quiet-sitting,” its concern with a ground beneath appearances all echo the Buddhism and Daoism the Song masters were at pains to refute — and they were sometimes accused, in their own day, of smuggling in what they claimed to expel. The Neo-Confucians answered that they had reclaimed for the moral order of family and state a depth that those traditions had carried off into withdrawal. Both readings have their evidence. Either way, the system carried far: through Zhu Xi’s orthodoxy it shaped the conscience and the governing class of half of East Asia, and held that place until the modern era dismantled the examinations that carried it.

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