Song Dynasty

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The Song Dynasty ruled China from 960 to 1279, a span historians divide at 1127: a Northern Song governed from Kaifeng until the Jurchen armies took the capital, and a Southern Song that withdrew below the Yangzi and held its court at Lin’an — modern Hangzhou — until the Mongol conquest. It opened with a soldier’s gamble. In 960 the general Zhao Kuangyin, commanding the armies of the short-lived Later Zhou, was acclaimed emperor by his own troops at Chenqiao north of the capital and took the throne without a battle, becoming the emperor posthumously titled Taizu. Mindful of the warlord chaos that had broken the Tang and produced the half-century of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms behind him, he set out to break the power of the regional commanders for good — pensioning off his generals, subordinating the military to a civil officialdom, and gathering fiscal and command authority to the center. The state he founded would be, for its three centuries, the most thoroughly bureaucratic and the most commercially dense polity the world had yet seen.

The peace it bought was incomplete. The Song never recovered the northern frontier from the steppe powers that ringed it — the Khitan Liao to the northeast, the Tangut Western Xia to the northwest — and bought quiet with annual tribute of silver and silk rather than conquest, a policy its critics found shameful and its treasury found cheaper than war. The arrangement held until a new power broke it. In 1125 the Jurchen, having overthrown the Liao, turned on their former Song allies; in the winter of 1126–1127 they besieged and sacked the capital. The catastrophe is remembered as the Jingkang incident: the Jurchen carried off the retired emperor Huizong — an aesthete and painter whose court had been a high season of the arts — together with the reigning Qinzong and much of the imperial clan into northern captivity. A surviving prince escaped south, reconstituted the dynasty as Emperor Gaozong, and after years of flight fixed the court at Lin’an. The Southern Song that resulted was smaller, richer, and more maritime, its center of gravity shifted to the rice and silk and seaborne trade of the lower Yangzi. It endured for another century and a half until the Mongols, having taken the north and broken the great Yangzi fortress of Xiangyang after a years-long siege, overran the south; the last stand came at the naval battle of Yamen in 1279, where, as the histories record, a loyal official leapt into the sea with the child-emperor on his back rather than surrender, ending the House of Zhao and delivering all of China to the Yuan.

It was, even so, a period of extraordinary material and intellectual density — on many measures the most advanced society then living. The Song issued the world’s first government-printed paper money, the jiaozi, out of the merchant economy of Sichuan; perfected movable type, recorded in the eleventh century by the polymath Shen Kuo in his Brush Talks from Dream Brook as the invention of the artisan Bi Sheng; turned the magnetic needle into an instrument of seafaring navigation, again first described in Shen Kuo’s pages; and ran a vast examination bureaucracy that recruited its officials, in principle, by written competence rather than birth. Printing made books cheap and learning broad, and the examinations turned that learning into a ladder of office that bound the literate class to the canon. Its cities were enormous — Kaifeng and later Lin’an among the largest the world had then seen — its presses prolific, its iron production, canal traffic, water-driven machinery, and book trade reaching volumes Europe would not match for centuries; gunpowder weapons appear in its campaigns. Its landscape painting, with masters like Fan Kuan and Guo Xi, and its lyric and regulated verse — the ci and shi of figures such as Su Shi and Li Qingzhao — were treated by later ages as a high-water mark of the Chinese arts. Two developments ran in parallel through those three centuries, and both drew their seriousness from the same crowded, syncretic air.

The first is the Neo-Confucian synthesis — in Chinese lixue, the “learning of principle.” A line of thinkers reworked the inherited Confucian texts into a full metaphysics: Zhou Dunyi, who paired a diagram of cosmic generation with a terse account of how the Supreme Polarity issues into yin and yang and the myriad things; the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, who made li — principle, pattern — the central term; and above all Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who drew the scattered insights of his predecessors into a single architecture. The Song thinkers built this on ground they felt had been ceded. For centuries Buddhism and religious Taoism had held the questions the classics largely left alone — the nature of mind, the ground of being, the discipline of the inner life — and the Confucians drew freely on that vocabulary even as they set themselves against both. They taught that the cosmos and the moral order were two faces of a single pattern: li, the principle running through all things, expressed in qi, the matter-energy that gives it body. The work of the person was the alignment of the self with that pattern, pursued through study and the “investigation of things” — gewu, the patient examination of the world and the texts until the principle in each became clear. Zhu Xi’s labor of canon-making was decisive: he lifted two short chapters from the ritual compendium, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, set them beside the Analects and the Mencius, and issued the four together with his own commentary as the Four Books, completed around 1190. In 1313 the Yuan court made his edition and his readings the orthodox basis of the civil-service examinations; they held that place until the examination system was abolished in 1905 — nearly six centuries in which an educated Chinese mind was formed, in large part, by Zhu Xi’s glosses. That institutional grip is much of why the synthesis carried the weight it did. What the system promised was not abstract knowledge but sagehood made attainable: every person carries the principle whole and uncorrupted as their nature, xing, clouded only by the turbidity of their qi and the pull of desire, so that to study the classics, examine the world, and watch the movements of one’s own mind was to polish that clouded nature back to brightness. The project gave Confucian ethics a metaphysical floor it had not had — an answer to Buddhism and Daoism on their own ground, where the questions of mind and being were decided. The fuller doctrine belongs to Neo-Confucianism proper and to the classical Confucianism it remade.

The second is the maturing of neidan, Taoist internal alchemy. Where an earlier waidan — external alchemy — had sought an elixir of immortality in furnace and mineral, compounding cinnabar and its mercury derivatives in graded heating cycles, the internal tradition relocated the whole operation inside the body. The pivot was as much a flight from disaster as a refinement of theory: standard historiography counts several Tang emperors among the dead of elixir poisoning, and by the late Tang the laboratory had lost its prestige among the literate. The alchemical lexicon survived the move intact. Lead and mercury, dragon and tiger, furnace and cauldron and firing-times were reread as a map of the practitioner’s own interior — the cauldron the body, the ingredients the “three treasures” of jing (essence), qi (breath), and shen (spirit), the fire the directed attention of the adept. The work ran the ordinary current of life in reverse: where the body spends essence and disperses spirit outward, the alchemist gathers and returns, refining essence into breath, breath into spirit, spirit back toward emptiness, and gestating within the body an “immortal embryo,” a deathless self grown in the inner chambers. The body it worked on was the body of Chinese medicine — the three “cinnabar fields” stacked from the lower abdomen to the crown, the vessels along the spine and the front of the trunk through which the refined breath was held to circulate — and the cosmological scaffolding was the same hexagram apparatus of the I Ching that had once organized the external furnace’s cycles. The trigrams Kan, water, and Li, fire, each carrying within itself the seed of its opposite, supplied the figures for the two ingredients the adept was to draw out and rejoin; the whole was a deliberate reversal of cosmogony, a return up the channel of generation toward the undivided state that, in Daoist cosmology, precedes the splitting of the one into the many.

This inner reading had its governing texts and its institutions. The eleventh-century Wuzhen pian — “Awakening to Reality,” in verse, its preface dated 1075 and attributed to Zhang Boduan — crystallized the Song synthesis and became one of the tradition’s anchoring works; Zhang was later named first patriarch of the Southern Lineage, a genealogy assembled after the fact. Later in the dynasty the Quanzhen (“Complete Perfection”) school, founded by Wang Chongyang, who began preaching in Shandong in 1167, gathered these practices into a monastic order that absorbed Buddhist and Confucian elements as readily as Taoist ones — folding the “three teachings” into a single discipline of self-cultivation and ascetic retreat. Quanzhen would carry the practice forward across the Mongol conquest; its patriarch Qiu Chuji met Genghis Khan in 1222 and won the order imperial favor and tax exemption, and it remains the dominant monastic form of Daoism today. Practitioners held that the discipline could refine a mortal body into something deathless; scholarship reads the corpus as one of the most sophisticated bodies of contemplative physiology the premodern world produced, and is cautious about sorting metaphor from procedure in texts that were often deliberately opaque. The architecture of that work — the three treasures, the reversal of the cosmogonic current, the embryo gestated within — belongs in detail to neidan itself.

These currents were not sealed off from one another. The same syncretic air that let Quanzhen fold three teachings into one practice also shaped Neo-Confucian cosmology, and the diagram of cosmic generation that opens Zhou Dunyi’s thought has roots tangled with Taoist alchemical charts: the Qing evidential scholar Hu Wei would later trace the Song cosmological diagrams to the Daoist adept Chen Tuan and through him to the alchemical Cantong qi, “borrowing the Yi to illuminate the way of the elixir.” Zhu Xi himself read that ancient alchemical treatise, and held that the I Ching was originally a divination manual whose meaning was apprehended through the ritual of consultation — the same text the inner alchemists read as a cosmological key. The Song did not invent these ideas, most of which reach back to the I Ching and to far older Taoist speculation that runs down from the Tao Te Ching. It is the period in which they were drawn together and given the forms in which later China, and later readers elsewhere, would receive them.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The dynasty’s two currents survive in a small set of governing texts and a much larger apparatus of modern critical work. On the Confucian side, the public-domain spine remains the nineteenth-century translation of the canon by the Scottish missionary James Legge (1815–1897), whose renderings of the classics and of the Taoist texts alike are out of copyright worldwide and hosted in the reading room as The Texts of Tâoism (Sacred Books of the East, volumes 39 and 40, 1891). Legge’s The Yî King (Sacred Books of the East volume 16, 1882; second edition 1899) is freely readable in the digitized Sacred Books of the East volume 39 collection. For the I Ching as a divination-cosmology tradition, Richard J. Smith’s Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing and Its Evolution in China (University of Virginia Press, 2008) is the standard recent synthesis of its commentarial history and its Song cosmological flowering.

The standard scholarly treatment of the inner-alchemical corpus is the work of Fabrizio Pregadio: his Awakening to Reality: The “Regulated Verses” of the Wuzhen pian (Golden Elixir Press, 2009), the reference translation of Zhang Boduan’s text, is introduced at goldenelixir.com, and his edited Encyclopedia of Taoism (Routledge, 2008) is the indispensable reference for the whole field. Isabelle Robinet’s Taoism: Growth of a Religion (Stanford University Press, 1997) and Taoist Meditation (SUNY Press, 1993) map the tradition’s development through and after the Song. For Quanzhen specifically, Louis Komjathy’s The Way of Complete Perfection: A Quanzhen Daoist Anthology (SUNY Press, 2013) and Cultivating Perfection (Brill, 2007) treat the order’s texts and monastic life; Stephen Eskildsen’s The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoist Masters (SUNY Press, 2004) covers its formative generation. On the Neo-Confucian side, Wing-tsit Chan’s A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963) remains the standard anthology, and Joseph Adler’s translations of Zhu Xi’s Yijing work — The Original Meaning of the Yijing (Columbia University Press, 2020) — recover the divinatory dimension of the late-imperial orthodoxy. The classical source texts themselves — the Wuzhen pian, the Cantong qi, Zhu Xi’s Original Meaning of the Zhou Changes, and the rest — are public-domain by age and gathered with the rest of the Daoist scriptural tradition in the Daoist Canon.

→ In the library: Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (SBE 39 & 40, 1891)

→ Related: I Ching · Divination · China · Neo Confucianism Song Lixue · Zhu Xi · Confucianism · Taoism · Buddhism · Quanzhen · Daoist Neidan · Daoist Canon Daozang · Immortality · Alchemy · Tao Te Ching