## 1. Historical Context: Buddhism, Daoism, and Neo-Confucianism



Most of the leading Confucian thinkers in the Song, Yuan, and Ming
dynasties are now described in English as Neo-Confucians, using a term
of somewhat ambiguous scope and significance. In the broadest sense,
"Neo-Confucian" refers to a thinker and practitioner of
the Tang dynasty (618-907) or later who identified with and
worked to revive Confucian values, beliefs, and practices after the
rise of Buddhism in China. Construed more narrowly,
"Neo-Confucian" refers to a subset of the above thinkers
that belonged or traced much of their philosophical origins to an
important group of Confucians in the 11th century. This
group included Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073), Zhang Zai
(1020-1077), and on some accounts Shao Yong (1011-1077),
but the philosophers who loomed largest among them were the brothers
Cheng Hao (1032-1085) and Cheng Yi (1033-1107). The Cheng
brothers were most influential of this group, having explicated the
metaphysics and techniques of mental discipline that they took to be
implicit in Confucian texts and thereby positioning Confucianism as a
direct and more formidable rival to Buddhism. Many of the
Neo-Confucians who saw themselves as building on the tradition of the
Cheng brothers identified with a movement known in Chinese as
*Daoxue* Dao Xue , "The Learning of the
Way", whose goal at the movement's inception was to shift
the emphasis of formal education away from literary attainments and
refocus it on the moral Way (*Dao* Dao ) (Bol 2008). With a
few notable exceptions in the late Ming dynasty, nearly all of the
leading Confucian thinkers in the Song-Ming period were Neo-Confucians
in both the broader and narrower senses: they sought to reestablish
Confucianism after many generations of neglect; they saw learning the
moral Way as the central aim of a proper education; and they were
either in the 11th century group that included the Cheng
brothers or identified with the Chengs' lineage and
teachings.



Most (but not all) of these philosophers saw Confucianism as being in
competition with its popular rivals, Buddhism and Daoism. They thought
core Confucian doctrines and practices incompatible with Buddhism and
Daoism and regarded the latter two traditions as having an overall
detrimental effect on Chinese society, accounting to a great extent
for what they saw as a general decline in moral character and the
dissolution of family and other social bonds. Even as the prominent
Song-Ming Confucians sought to distinguish Confucianism from its
rivals, however, the conceptual schemes and much of the philosophical
vocabulary that they used were drawn from a broader philosophical and
religious discourse in which Buddhist and Daoist ideas and terms were
ubiquitous. Framing Confucian views in such terms helped to give them
widespread respectability and currency among learned people.
Furthermore, many of the influential Song-Ming Confucians dabbled in
Buddhism before coming to align themselves with Confucianism.
Consequently, the break from Buddhism and Daoism was not as clean as
many believed, and it is useful to look not just at what they rejected
but also at what they quietly and (mostly) inadvertently adopted from
their rivals. 



Although the Neo-Confucians took Buddhism and Daoism to be different
traditions calling for different critiques, they nevertheless tended
to see both as sharing some common defects. Perhaps the most
far-reaching defect was that, as most Song-Ming Neo-Confucians saw it,
Buddhists and Daoists thought personal liberation from suffering
should take precedence over other aims and values, and believed they
could only achieve this by extricating themselves from worldly
entanglements, especially from human relationships and attachments to
others (*JSL* 13.3-4, 13.14). They argued that putting
liberation from one's own suffering before other values is
selfish (*si* Si ), motivated by personal gain
(*li* Li ), and can be construed as endorsing a form of
normative egoism (*HNCSYS* 1:3; *JSL* 13.1, 13.4, 13.6).
Furthermore, by insisting on eliminating the desires and attachments
required for human relationships, Buddhists and Daoists sacrificed
important goods for the sake of transcendent ones, giving up their
more obvious, this-worldly interests for more speculative ones whose
attainment often depends on unsubstantiated theories of the afterlife
(as for Buddhist nirvana or Daoist theories of immortality)
(*JSL* 13.8, 13.10; *HNCSYS* 3:66, 22A:292; Graham 1992:
90-91).



To charge Buddhists with selfishness and egoism might appear to
overlook some well-known features of Buddhist thought. The Buddhist
Eightfold Path includes duties to help others and prohibitions against
harming others. The path of the bodhisattva in Mahayana
Buddhism includes a long, perhaps indefinite period in which the
bodhisattva embodies and practices great compassion (*daci*
Da Ci ) and commits to ending the suffering of all sentient
life before entering nirvana herself or himself. Neo-Confucians were
well aware of these aspects of Chinese Buddhism, so a charitable and
historically informed reading of their criticisms should be more
nuanced. One better way of understanding the charge of selfishness is
that it describes what motivates most ordinary Buddhist practitioners
in fact, not what motivates idealized practitioners in principle
(*HNCSYS* 1:3; *JSL* 13.6). This would be a natural
consequence of the fact that the Buddhist route to other-directed
concern is considerably more demanding than the Confucian one, as care
for others is more easily attained through ordinary interactions with
family and members of one's community than through radical
nonattachment (Lu 1980: 16-21; Tiwald & Van Norden 2014:
257-260). Another variant of the Neo-Confucian criticism is to
suggest that subordinating ethics to soteriology has problematic
implications. If all norms, including ethical ones, are justified to a
significant degree by their contribution to one's own quest to
end personal suffering, this will give a different shape to very
notion of goodness. Practices like donating to Buddhist shrines and
maintaining a Buddhist diet can potentially be conceived as
"good" (*shan* Shan ) without essential
reference to improving other people's lives or participating
ably in human relationships (*ZZYL* 126:3033, Tiwald 2018a:
134-37).



Some Song-Ming Neo-Confucians also objected to what they saw as
naive Buddhist and Daoist views about how best to gain control
over unruly intentions and feelings, leaning too heavily on meditative
practice to solve problems better addressed through a combination of
study, reflection, and the cultivation of respect or reverence
(*JSL* 13.6; *ZZYL* 126:3019; Tiwald 2018a:
141-147). Finally, there was relatively widespread agreement
among Confucians of this era that Buddhist metaphysics had gotten
something fundamentally wrong about the ultimate nature of things.
Buddhists in China often emphasized what they called the emptiness or
voidness (*kong* Kong ) of all phenomenal things, which
Neo-Confucians took to mean that such things are illusory and without
value. This in turn was supposed to explain why Buddhists aimed to
transcend the phenomenal world, for nothing of value could be gained
by rearranging illusions (Fu 1986; *JSL* 13.12). In point of
fact, this characterization elides many of the subtleties and variants
of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, which Buddhists saw as
consistent with caring about and acting to mitigate the phenomenal
suffering of phenomenal entities. The influential Song Neo-Confucian
Zhu Xi acknowledged as much, but seems to have believed that the
transparently problematic conception of emptiness was the operative
one in most Buddhist practices (*ZZYL* 126:3013; Cai 2009:
204-206; Fu 1986; Tiwald 2018a: 147-154).



Nevertheless and without question, there are prominent and fundamental
views in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism that bear the marks of Buddhist
and Daoist influence. One is the Neo-Confucian account of the goodness
of human nature. Many of the major Neo-Confucians of this period
endorsed the view that the ethical predispositions in human nature are
well-formed from birth, so that a great deal of the work of
cultivating virtue was primarily a matter of recovering and
eliminating the obstructions that prevent us from accessing that
nature, especially selfish or self-centered desires and the various
bad habits and biases that they present (Ivanhoe 2000). These
philosophers took themselves to be expounding a doctrine of human
nature found in the *Mencius*, but in fact Mencius seems to
have thought that "human nature is good"
(*xingshan* Xing Shan ) is true by virtue of the fact
that human beings have a natural capacity or potential to
*become* good, not that they are innately good or have
well-formed ethical predispositions right from the start
(*Mencius* 6A6, 6A8). A more likely source for the idea that we
have well-formed predispositions innately is Chinese Buddhism, which
had long held that humans (and all sentient beings) have at all times
a kind of buddha-nature (*foxing* Fo Xing ) or
buddha-womb (in Sanskrit, *tathagatagarbha;* in Chinese,
*rulai zang* Ru Lai Cang ) with fully-formed
propensities to respond perfectly to its circumstances. Here too the
well-formed nature is to be recovered or discovered by removing
obstacles, which for Buddhists were seen as false and adventitious
conceptualizations of things. Neo-Confucians even used or adapted many
of the metaphors that Buddhists had long used to describe the
circumstances in which our perfect nature becomes blocked, likening it
to a pearl suspended in muddy water or a mirror covered with dust
(Jorgensen 2018: 73-86; Z. Liu 2003).



*Daoxue* Confucians also adopted a technical term that had, by
their time, long been used in Buddhist metaphysics to account for the
ultimate nature and unity of things. This term was *li*
Li  (Pattern, Principle), which the Buddhists sometimes
characterized as emptiness and Neo-Confucians described as (or as a
source or ground of) ceaseless life-generativity (*sheng sheng bu
xi* Sheng Sheng Bu Xi ), understood as a system in
which birth, growth, and procreation work in harmony to maintain the
continuity of living things. Here again the Neo-Confucians took
themselves to be elucidating an idea that they found in classical
Confucian texts, but in fact there was very little mention of
*li* in the classical canon, and even less that could plausibly
be read as having the same metaphysical sense as the Neo-Confucians
proposed (Dai 2009: 265-286; Ivanhoe 2002: 46-58; Makeham
2003b: 193-195). Other notable influences from both Buddhism and
Daoism were a greater interest in meditation (Chan 1989:
255-270; Cai 2009: 195-197; Yang 2015) and a tendency to
see self-abnegation or the elimination of desires as a major aim of
self-cultivation. Some Neo-Confucians saw themselves as embracing a
wider array of desires than their Daoist and Buddhist counterparts,
but due in large part to the influence of Zhu Xi, many cut a
relatively sharp distinction between what they saw as permissible
desires consistent with the Pattern of ceaseless life-generativity and
the impermissible desires as selfish ones (Chan 1989: 197-211).
In so doing they ruled out a wider swath of desires than the classical
Confucians probably intended (Tiwald 2012: 30-33). Add to these
influences a wide array of shared conceptual frameworks, technical
terms, and philosophical problematics and Song-Ming articulations of
Confucianism become very difficult to disentangle from longstanding
Buddhist and Daoist ways of thinking (Angle 2018; Araki 2008; Ivanhoe,
2002; Makeham 2018a; Ziporyn 2018). 


## 2. Notable Figures



For much of the Song-Ming period, Confucian thought and textual
studies were a significant part of the lives of most adult males who
had a formal education. Those who wanted a career in government
service were required to memorize and produce learned essays on the
Confucian classics for their civil service exams, and scholarly
discourse was replete with discussions of and allusions to Confucian
thought. The Song-Ming period was thus a particularly vibrant one for
Confucian philosophy. Two of the earliest intellectual histories of
this period describe the lives and thought of more than two thousand
Confucians who played some significant role in shaping the tradition
(*SYXA*; *MRXA*). What follows is a brief description of
the philosophers who loom largest. In most cases these are the
thinkers who had the greatest influence on Neo-Confucianism, although
we will also see some who, while less influential historically, now
attract a great deal of scholarly interest for their originality or
sophistication.


### 2.1 Neo-Confucians in the Northern Song (960-1127)



The philosophers often treated as founding figures of Neo-Confucianism
are a group that lived in a period that came to be called the Northern
Song (960-1127). This includes Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073), who
produced a diagram and supplementary exposition that characterizes all
phenomena as being governed by *Taiji* Tai Ji 
(variously translated as the Great Ultimate, Supreme Polarity, or the
Supreme Pivot), a kind of ordering principle that explains the natural
fluctuations of *yin* and *yang* or stillness and
activity (Adler 2014). Another founding figure was Zhang Zai
(1020-1077). Zhang developed influential ways of thinking about
human nature and the cultivation of virtue, ones that account for
variations of character in terms of varying qualities of *qi*
Qi  (psychophysical energy, vital stuff). He also developed a
metaphysics that conceived of individuals as part of a cosmic whole,
related by nature to all other things as though members of a family or
parts of the same body, and thus having family-like obligations to
care for all others. One of his brief but stirring encapsulations of
this view became perhaps the most famous inspirational essay in the
Neo-Confucian tradition, called "The Western Inscription"
as it had been written on the western wall of his study (Tiwald &
Van Norden 2014: 134-136).



At the center of this Northern Song group were the brothers Cheng Hao
(1032-1085) and Cheng Yi (1033-1107), who studied with
both Zhou and Zhang but developed their own systems of thought that
came to be reflected in almost every area of Neo-Confucianism. The
Chengs offered different metaphysical frameworks to account for Zhang
Zai's conception of all things as parts of a family-like or
body-like whole, developed a sophisticated, multi-faceted moral
psychology of the major virtues, honed Confucian objections to
Buddhism and Daoism, and advanced distinctive theories of proper
governance and administration (Graham 1992; Ivanhoe 2016: 24-48;
Tiwald & Van Norden 2014: 140-167). Some scholars also add
to these four Northern Song Confucians a fifth founding figure, Shao
Yong (1011-1077), best known for developing mathematical and
numerological laws and maintaining that certain kinds of human
subjectivity are incompatible with knowledge of things (Birdwhistell
1989; Wyatt 1996). Shao was also personally acquainted and dialogued
with the Cheng brothers, although compared with the Chengs his
writings show little direct concern with developing theories about
virtue and personal cultivation. What became the most widely read
anthology of the founders of Song Confucianism, a kind of textbook
called *Reflections on Things at Hand*, omitted Shao in favor
of the other four Northern Song masters (*JSL*). Three of these
Northern Song thinkers--Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, and Cheng
Yi--were at times heavily involved in politics and became
associated with the opposition to the famous minister and reformer
Wang Anshi (1021-1086).


### 2.2 Zhu Xi (1130-1200)



By far the most influential Neo-Confucian philosopher is Zhu Xi
(1130-1200). Zhu came to Confucianism after a little more than a
decade of study of and experimentation with Daoism and Chan (Zen)
Buddhism. Like many other prominent Confucian thinkers of his era, he
was a great admirer of the Cheng brothers and took himself to be
building on the exegetical and theoretical foundations that they had
laid, although he occasionally registered disagreements with some of
their remarks. In his day Zhu was just one among many prominent
thinkers and teachers who claimed the mantle of the Cheng brothers,
but by the end of the Song he came to be seen as the most
authoritative spokesperson not just for the Chengs but for the entire
*Daoxue* (Learning of the Way) tradition. His interpretation of
the Confucian canon became the basis of the civil service examination
in 1313, so that over time it was closely read by many millions of
aspiring civil servants and students of Confucianism. Consequently,
Zhu's interpretation of the Confucian tradition has been treated
by countless Confucians as orthodoxy, and continues to be so regarded
by many adherents of Confucianism today.



There were few contemporary areas of inquiry that Zhu Xi did not
touch. He made more explicit than any predecesor a certain
metaphysical dualism of *qi* (vital stuff) and *li*
(Pattern), which he then used to explain everything from human nature
to the natural inclinations of plants to the acquisition of moral
knowledge. He thought carefully and wrote extensively about methods of
cultivating virtue, defending distinctive views both on big-picture
issues like the role of speculation and book learning and on
finer-grained matters such the purpose of doing chores and the proper
attitude to adopt when reading. He also wrote at length about
politics, history, and the art of administration and government
service (Zhu 2019).


### 2.3 Wang Yangming (1472-1529)



After Zhu Xi, the second most influential Neo-Confucian philosopher is
Wang Yangming (1472-1529). Wang spent his early years studying
Buddhism and Daoism but eventually became an articulate and
charismatic defender of Confucianism, one whose ideas and practices
were honed over the course of an extraordinary career as a civil
administrator and military general. By Wang's time Zhu
Xi's views had become deeply embedded in the customs and
institutions responsible for formal education, and Wang was trained in
and well acquainted with those views. But Wang broke with orthodoxy on
some fundamental issues, most notably on the role of personal
experience and intuition in ethical cultivation and an alternative
metaphysics that made the heartmind a constituent of the Patterns
(*li*) that are the source of order and virtue. A guiding
concern that ran through many of his objections had to do with the
nature of moral knowledge or knowing, which he believed to be
intrinsically related to the motivation to act, much as the desire to
avoid a foul odor is intrinsically related to the understanding that
the odor is foul. This had implications for the model of ethical
cultivation which he promoted, which was to build on the immediate
concerns and experiences of individuals rather than overly academic or
scholastic study on topics well removed from their daily lives
(Ivanhoe 2009: 99-184).



Wang also proposed that people have an innate faculty of moral
understanding that he called *liangzhi* Liang Zhi , most
literally translated as "pure knowledge" or "good
knowledge" but sometimes more loosely translated as
"innate knowledge" or "conscience". If people
fail to be virtuous, he proposed, this is because they are unable to
access or recognize the deliverances of good knowledge due to
interference by selfish desires, which arise from self-centered
attachments and ways of thinking. This teaching, combined with his
worries about forms of study that are too far removed from personal
experience, conferred a somewhat ambiguous status on the longstanding
Confucian practice of reading and reflecting on the Confucian
classics, for it is not entirely clear why grasping ideas and accounts
of events well removed from one's own life should help to access
or complement good knowledge (Ivanhoe 2002: 123-134). This and
other ambiguities in Wang's teachings left considerable room for
debate among the subsequent generations of his disciples and followers
(Peng 2003).



Later historians also noticed a number of striking resonances between
Wang's views and an earlier Neo-Confucian named Lu Xiangshan
(1139-1193), who also spoke and wrote about a faculty of good
knowledge and regarded the heartmind as a constituent of *li*
(Pattern) (Ivanhoe 2009: 29-97). Because of the similarities
between Lu and Wang, which in certain respect mirror similarities
between Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, it is customary among many scholars of
Chinese philosophy to refer to two schools of thought in the Song-Ming
period--the Cheng-Zhu school sometimes associated with the
"Learning of Pattern" (*Lixue* Li Xue )
and the Lu-Wang school often associated with the "Learning of
Heartmind" (*Xinxue* Xin Xue ). This way of
characterizing the two most influential poles of Neo-Confucian thought
provides an historical lens through which many 20th and
21st century Confucian thinkers understand their own
philosophical orientation and roots.


### 2.4 The Taizhou School (16th Century)



A group of thinkers that was frequently disparaged by many mainstream
Neo-Confucians was the "Taizhou school" of Confucianism,
named after the place in which its purported founder, Wang Gen
(1483-1541), lived and taught. Although the philosophers most
often identified with this school were an eclectic bunch, pedagogical
connections to Wang Gen and some similarities in ideology and
scholarly temperament make it convenient to group these thinkers
together. Wang Gen and many of his disciples were distinguished by
their commitment to the popularization of Confucianism. Wang Gen
himself had studied with Wang Yangming and took seriously the idea
that all people have innate capacities for moral knowledge and
sagehood, capacities which, on his interpretation, do not depend on
formal education and book learning to be accessed. Sagehood could be
realized through the "everyday practices of the common
people" (*baixing riyong*
Bai Xing Ri Yong ) and it was the mission of many
Taizhou thinkers to bring this about. Taizhou Confucians also brooked
more dramatic departures from Confucian orthodoxy and tended to see
greater consonance between Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism
(Peterson 1998: 723-732, 745-754; de Bary 1970:
157-171; *MRXA* 32.1a-7b).



In addition to Wang Gen, other notable philosophers associated with
this school were Luo Rufang (1515-1588) and Li Zhi
(1527-1602). Both thought the most authentic and reliably good
expressions of our innate moral capacities were to be found in
pre-socialized expressions of the heartmind, which Luo termed the
"infant heartmind" and Li called the "child
heartmind". Li also maintained that the expressions of the child
heartmind could be idiosyncratic, so that moral expectations and the
shape of moral virtues would resist generalization to a much greater
extent than most Confucians usually allowed (P. Lee 2012, 58-64;
*MRXA* 34.3a-b, 34.16b-17a; Tiwald & Van Norden
2014: 304-307). Luo and Li are now admired for defending
women's education, in part on the grounds of having equal
capacity for virtue and wisdom. Luo proposed that women were more
reliably virtuous than men and played the more fundamental and
consequential role in the cultivation of virtue (Angle & Tiwald
2017: 172-179; Cheng 2001: 103-117; Tiwald & Van
Norden 2014: 297-304).


### 2.5 Outliers in the Song and Ming



Other than the Northern Song Neo-Confucians described in
 section 2.1,
 every philosopher mentioned heretofore has been a Neo-Confucian in
the narrow sense associated with *Daoxue* (see
 section 1
 on the differences between the broad and narrow senses of
"Neo-Confucian"). That is, each has been someone who takes
most of his cues from the Cheng brothers, most notably by adopting
their robustly metaphysical accounts of human nature and the
fundamental unity or oneness of things. But philosophers of this sort
did not have a monopoly on Confucian discourse, and over the course of
the roughly seven centuries of Song, Yuan, and Ming thought there were
a number of talented and innovative Confucian philosophers at the
borders or outside of these mainstreams.



A once-influential but now somewhat neglected set of philosophers in
the Song dynasty are often associated with what is called the
"Yongjia school" of Confucianism, named after the county
in which some of its most prominent thinkers lived and taught at
various points in their lives. The Yongjia Confucians had roots in the
teachings of the Cheng brothers and *Daoxue*, but with the
passage of time some of the leading thinkers came to see themselves as
opponents of that tradition, in part because of their impatience with
speculative metaphysics and their more practical orientation toward
issues of governance and administration. Two of the most distinguished
Confucians aligned with Yongjia were Chen Liang (1143-1194) and
Ye Shi (1150-1223), both contemporaries and occasional
interlocutors of Zhu Xi. Chen and Ye tended to measure public policies
and moral practices in terms of their contributions to public welfare
or general social benefit (*li* Li ), a tendency that
eventually led some 20th and 21st century
historians to characterize Chen and Ye as "utilitarian"
thinkers (Qi 1982: 1178-1187; Tillman 1982; Xiao 1982: 539). For
both Chen and Ye, the rightness and desirability of a particular
practice was determined by its consequences and not (or at least not
directly) the agents' motives and character. Chen and Ye also
argued against accounts of the Way (*Dao*) that posited it as a
timeless, abstract entity independent of concrete affairs and
circumstances (Niu 1998; Tillman 1982).



Another maverick Confucian of this period was Wang Tingxiang
(1474-1544). In opposition to the metaphysical dualists of his
time, Wang proposed that the ordinary features and behaviors of
*qi* (vital stuff) could account for everything in the cosmos,
including the sources of order and creation that mainstream
Neo-Confucians tended to identify with irreducible *li*
(Patterns) (Ong 2006; Y. Liu 2000: 55-85). He also rejected the
fundamental unity and oneness of the universe and--still more
astonishingly--denied that a comprehensive unity was even
desirable (Kim 2008; Ong 2006). And Wang furthermore took the
decidedly unorthodox view that goodness and the predispositions for
virtue aren't necessary features of human nature, suggesting
instead that the moral emotions that people often cited as evidence of
natural goodness, such as moral shame, are primarily responsive to
social norms and expectations (Ong 2006: 474). In taking this position
he defied a centuries-old Confucian consensus about human nature that
was rarely contradicted in the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties.



Perhaps the most fertile period for those who worked at the periphery
of the main lines of Neo-Confucianism was five or six decades that
spanned the collapse of the Ming and the consolidation of the Qing
dynasty, roughly 1640 to 1700. Although this was a time of instability
in some parts of China, it nevertheless witnessed declining faith in
longstanding political customs as well as budding movements in
Confucian scholarship that paved the way for more dramatic departures
from orthodoxy. One such movement was the rise of "evidential
studies" (*kaozheng xue* Kao Zheng Xue ),
understood as approaches to scholarship that lean more heavily on
areas of study like astronomy, geography, mathematics, and especially
philology. A leading scholar of evidential studies was Gu Yanwu
(1613-1682), who established a reputation not just as a
precocious philologist but also as a creative political reformer
(Angle 2002: 89-93; Brown 2011; Gu 2017). Another remarkably
original and prolific philosopher was Wang Fuzhi (1619-1692),
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 2010, 2018: 157-179,
265-284; Cheng 1991). A third was Huang Zongxi
(1610-1695), 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
2011). 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.


## 3. Pattern (*li*)



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. Many *Daoxue*
Confucians believed that providing an adequate account of the world
required that we posit the existence of some things that are formless
(*xing er shang* Xing Er Shang ) and not readily
apparent, the existence of which poses philosophical challenges. Most
notably, these Confucians thought we needed something they called
Pattern (*li*, also translated as "principle") to
account for order, unity, and the nature and content of the virtues.
They also thought that Pattern is closely linked to human nature, and
they were interested in explaining how human cognitive and emotional
faculties--what they called the heartmind (*xin* Xin ,
sometimes translated more simply as "heart" or as
"mind")--can come to recognize and respond
appropriately to Pattern.


### 3.1 Pattern and Its Relationship to *Qi*



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*).



The Chinese character translated here as "Pattern" is
*li*, a term that appeared relatively rarely in classical
Confucian texts but became ubiquitous in philosophical discourse well
before the Song, by which time it was often used to refer to what
might be called the underlying reality or ultimate nature of things.
For many Buddhists, a thing's Pattern was its inherent
"emptiness", which is to say, roughly, its lack of any
intrinsic phenomenal qualities or essences. 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. And Pattern
also has normative implications, accounting not just for
children's tendency to love and serve their parents, but also
for the fact that it's proper and virtuous for them to do so.
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.g., Zhang Zai, Wang Tingxiang, and Wang Fuzhi)
aimed to show that the features and tendencies of *qi* could
fully explain some or all such facts (Kasoff 1984; Y. Liu 2000; Angle
& Tiwald 2017: 36-38). But most thought that Pattern has
some independent role in accounting for them, some explanatory power
not strictly reducible to that of *qi*. Zhu Xi's theories
about the relationship of Pattern to *qi* changed over the
course of his life, but on his mature and most influential view,
Pattern is independent of *qi* in at least two senses. First,
Zhu says that there is a sense in which Pattern is "prior"
to *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* 1:3). The specific implications of this are
a matter of some speculation (Angle & Tiwald 2017: 38-40;
Chen 1987: 3-29). A second sort of independence of Pattern is
that it functions as a kind of director or "master"
(*zhu* Zhu  or *zai* Zai ) of *qi.* Zhu
is careful to say that it does not intervene in affairs or directly
act on *qi*, but it establishes rules which *qi* then
follows of its own power (Angle & Tiwald 2017: 40-42).


### 3.2 Pattern and Nature



By the start of the Song dynasty, the Chinese character *xing*
Xing , which is usually translated as "nature" or
"the nature", had long been used to refer to important
features of people and things that play a major role in defining what
they are and determining how they ought to be. 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. 310-c. 221 BCE) contending that it is bad, and
others defending various moderate and hybrid views (Tiwald 2016:
437-440). By the end of the 11th 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). Cheng Yi and most of the notable Neo-Confucians
after him, however, thought we had well-formed dispositions and
sensitivities right from the start, that these are ineradicable
features of us, and that they are in fact universally shared, so that
the nature in us is essentially the same as the nature in all things
(Ivanhoe 2016: 36-48; Tiwald & Van Norden 2014: 159,
166).



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. Cheng's response in brief was to posit a
second sort of nature consisting of one's endowment of
*qi*, sometimes called the "material nature" or
"the nature of one's *qi-*constitution"
(*qizhi zhi xing* Qi Zhi Zhi Xing ). The nature
that he identified with Pattern he called by various names, including
"inherent nature" or "original nature"
(*benxing* Ben Xing ), referring to our nature as it is
when not distorted or altered by external stimuli, prior to the
arousal of occurrent emotions. Both moral failure and differences in
species or kind can be traced to differences in one's
*qi-*constitution. 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. The configuration and
quality of *qi* which constitutes a thing also determines the
particular type or species it is (Tiwald & Van Norden 2014: 166).
This was a view that Zhu Xi came to both refine and popularize in his
own writings and teachings (Ivanhoe 2000: 45-49; Tiwald &
Van Norden 2014: 170-178). But Zhu was reluctant to say that we
literally have two separate natures, recommending instead that we have
only one nature that can be described in different terms, as
"inherent nature" when considered in terms of its
intrinsic structure and as "material nature" when
considering in terms of its interactions with *qi* (Angle &
Tiwald 2017: 64-67).


### 3.3 Pattern and Heartmind



*Xin* "heartmind" is the locus of both thoughts and
emotions as well as the faculty responsible for directing them
properly. 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.g., whether a parent or a stranger),
arguing that the ideal was so far removed from our natural tendencies
as to be impossible (*JSL* 2.89, 13.2; *CXL* 93). Our
ethical norms, they suggested, should be ones that we have a certain
natural capacity to understand and embrace. A major reason for this is
what has been called the "wholeheartedness criterion" for
virtue: if someone has fully instantiated a particular virtue, it must
be the case that the person embraces it completely and without any
reluctance or countervailing desires (Tiwald 2018b: 179-183).
Someone who cares for others grudgingly or with some reluctance cannot
be fully humane or benevolent (*ren* Ren ), for example.
Many Confucians in the Song through Ming thought that the virtues
worthy of our esteem were only those that we could potentially embrace
in a wholehearted fashion, achieving a state sometimes called
"sincerity" (*cheng* Cheng ) by the Cheng
brothers and those who followed them (*JSL* 1.3;
*HNCSYS* 6:92). 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.g., filial
piety) is correct by virtue of being a manifestation or expression of
Pattern, and that practice or character trait is to be one that we
could embrace wholeheartedly and naturally, we can explain how Pattern
and our wholehearted potential converge by saying that Pattern shares
a common source with or is even constituted by our heartminds. Several
Confucian philosophers made this idea explicit. The most famous
advocates for seeing heartmind as constitutive of Pattern are Lu
Xiangshan and Wang Yangming, both of whom are often characterized as
belonging to a special lineage or school of thought known as
"Heartmind Learning" (*Xinxue*). 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
2009). Even more radical views were developed by the so-called Taizhou
Confucians like Wang Gen, Luo Rufang, and Li Zhi, who thought that the
Confucian way should be so accessible to ordinary heartminds as to be
intuitive even to people with little education or formal Confucian
training (Angle & Tiwald 2017: 86-87, 106-108). 



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. By the start of the Song, many of China's
laypeople adopted practices from Chan Buddhism (better known in the
West as Zen Buddhism) and much of the intelligentsia were interested
in Chan ideas. 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* 575c-579c). And some Chan Buddhists openly embraced a
way of life that seemed to countenance subjective whims or
inclinations (Gregory 2002). This, at least, was a worry about
Buddhism shared by Confucians in the Song-Ming period. Cheng Yi
succinctly described the difference between Buddhist and Confucian
ethics by suggesting that the former "based themselves on the
heartmind" whereas Confucians "based themselves on
Heaven" (*Tian*, the cosmos, the objective order)
(*HNCSYS* 21b:274). Accordingly, it become something of a
commonplace for some Confucians to accuse others of being too
Buddhist, by which they often meant that the latter (more Buddhist)
Confucians failed to establish standards of assessment sufficiently
independent of subjective whim (Angle & Tiwald 2017: 72-88).
This is a complaint that Zhu Xi often made about his contemporary Lu
Xiangshan (*ZZYL* 104:2619-20, 124:2975-76; Zhu
2019: 148-150). Zhu preferred ways of characterizing the
relation between heartmind and Pattern according to which the latter
was largely independent of the former, and was careful to distinguish
between phases or states of heartmind that appropriately tracked and
reflected Pattern (called "the heartmind of the Way",
*Daoxin* Dao Xin ) and phases or states in which the
heartmind imposed its own selfish or private desires and inclinations
(called "the human heartmind", *renxin*
Ren Xin ). In making this distinction he followed Cheng Yi and
took himself to be in direct opposition to Lu Xiangshan (Angle &
Tiwald 2017: 83-86).


## 4. Self-Cultivation



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 2016: 22-23).


### 4.1 Knowledge



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 2000). 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. On the other hand, some
Confucians of this era worried that knowledge acquired from books
couldn't be obtained and internalized in ways required for
wholehearted virtue (see
 section 3.3).
 Moreover, most agreed that we have well-formed ethical capacities by
nature
 (section 3.2).
 Accordingly, philosophers like Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming thought
we could rely more on our own intuitions or deeply-felt moral insights
that come from daily life, and that these were often preferable to the
more fragmentary and abstract types of study connected to book
learning (*CXL* 49; Ivanhoe 2002: 77-80; Ivanhoe 2009:
34-39; Tiwald & Van Norden 2014: 243-245). In
contrast, Zhu Xi worried that intuitions were too unreliable, that we
are too predisposed to rationalize or find clever ways of
countenancing self-serving inclinations and judgments, and thought
reading authoritative Confucian texts with an open mind and
reverential attention a good way to check our self-serving biases
(Angle & Tiwald 2017: 151-155; Chu 1990: 128-162;
*ZZYL* 10-11).



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.g., when
seeing a child about to fall into a well or when food is given with
contempt) that elicit reliably good or virtuous responses, but many
other cases which do not. As Mencius describes his goal there, the
goal is to "extend" (*tui* Tui ) or expand the
reliable ethical judgments and emotional responses from those paradigm
scenarios to the new ones (*Mencius* 2A6, 6A10). 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 2007: 234-246).
Confucians in the Song through Ming tend to characterize the
acquisition of new moral knowledge similarly, often invoking the
Mencian notion of "extension". 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). This is part of what he
describes as discerning the "reasons why it is so"
(*suoyi ran zhi gu* Suo Yi Ran Zhi Gu ),
and is necessary for a deeper understanding of rules or norms that we
otherwise take on faith or confidence in the tradition (*ZZYL*
18:625; Angle & Tiwald 2017: 122-129).



Song-Ming Confucians were also interested in different kinds or types
of knowledge. One oft-discussed distinction was between mere
"ordinary knowledge" (*changzhi* Chang Zhi )
and "genuine" or "true knowledge"
(*zhenzhi* Zhen Zhi ). 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. Cheng suggests that ethical
knowledge should have the same character as the survivor's fear
(*HNCSYS* 2a:16, 15:147; Graham 1992: 80). Wang Yangming later
used this rough framework to argue for his famous thesis that
knowledge and action are united (Chen 1991: 93-98; Ivanhoe 2000:
62-66; Tiwald & Van Norden 2014: 266-268).



Many Confucians in the *Daoxue* ("Learning of the
Way") tradition also distinguished between "sensory
knowledge" (*wenjian zhi zhi*
Wen Jian Zhi Zhi ) and the sort of knowledge that
concerns or can be attributed to our virtuous nature (*dexing zhi
zhi* De Xing Zhi Zhi ). 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. Zhang believed that sensory knowledge was both fallible and
insufficient for many purposes (especially ethical purposes) but
allowed that sensory knowledge is necessary as a means of acquiring
knowledge of the virtuous nature, and perhaps also as providing
warrants or justifications for the latter sort of knowledge
(*ZM* 7:24-25; Angle & Tiwald 2017: 112-114;
Zuo 2019). The Cheng brothers adamantly opposed the view that
knowledge of the virtuous nature "depends on" sensory
knowledge (*HNCSYS* 25:317). But they seemed to think that this
pertained to certain kinds of dependence and not others, because they
continued to recommend that people read texts and undertake
investigations of external things and affairs (Angle & Tiwald
2017: 115-116). Some of the Cheng brothers' immediate
disciples entertained more explicitly innatist views of proper
knowledge of the virtuous nature, suggesting that we find it solely
through inward reflection and meditation (Angle & Tiwald 2017:
216-217). But Zhu Xi thought innate intuitions were unreliable
and thus politely declined to make any hard-and-fast distinctions
between the two kinds of knowledge (Angle & Tiwald 2017:
117-119). 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* 10:161; Zhu 2019: 29).


### 4.2 Mental Discipline



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. Some thought that
most or all instances of moral failure could be credited to an
inflated sense of one's own importance or self-centeredness
(*si*), which manifests in selfish inclinations or desires that
then lead us astray (Shun 2010: 185-187). Confucians in this era
thus developed and argued about various techniques meant to help us
detect and undercut selfish inclinations and desires, and other
techniques which (much like Buddhist meditation) help quiet the mind
so that it can respond to the world with more evenhandedness and
equanimity.



The first set of techniques were concerned with detecting and
eradicating selfish thoughts or inclinations, a task they sometimes
characterized as (or as part of) "overcoming the self"
(*keji* Ke Ji ). Many emphasized that it was most
advantageous to look for these thoughts and inclinations in liminal
moments of emotional incipience (*ji* Ji ), just as
emotions are starting to enter consciousness but before they start to
reshape other mental processes and dispositions (Smith et al. 1990:
190-199; Tiwald & Van Norden 2014: 282). Most Confucians in
the Song-Ming period endorsed this sort of self-monitoring, although
some seemed to think that it played a more important role in
self-cultivation than others. Wang Yangming was among those who
thought it central and indispensable for the work of improving
one's character and state of heartmind, sometimes saying that
our selfish inclinations needed to be pursued like robbers and
thoroughly eradicated (*CXL* 39, 60, 279). In contrast, Zhu Xi
saw self-monitoring as important but as somewhat less pervasively
demanding than Wang. On his view, much of the work of self-monitoring
becomes unnecessary if we fully realize or embody reverential
attention (*jing* Jing ). Zhu likened the work of overcoming
the self to taking medicine for an illness: when one is in good health
(instantiating proper reverential attention in all that one thinks
about) then taking medicine (self-monitoring) is unnecessary
(*ZZYL* 9:151-52; Angle & Tiwald 2017: 146).



Some Confucian debate in the Song-Ming period concerned the role of
meditation in achieving mental stability and insight. The most popular
form for Confucians was known as "quiet sitting"
(*jingzuo* Jing Zuo ), which many recommended as a way
to achieve a state of quietude or tranquility (*jing*
Jing ). Some *Daoxue* Confucians thought that we discover
our virtuous inherent nature when the heartmind is in this state of
tranquility, a view most notably held by Yang Shi (1053-1135), a
student of the Cheng brothers. Zhu Xi rejected this conception of
meditation's role in self-cultivation, maintaining that we
cannot experience or perceive our virtuous nature directly but only
indirectly through its responses to worldly events, requiring a state
of activity and responsiveness which isn't meditative (Angle
& Tiwald 2017: 147-149). Nevertheless, Zhu thought quiet
sitting played important supporting roles in developing one's
capacities of mental discipline. He believed it an important
complement to study and reflection and suggested that for some people
with particularly unruly heartminds it could be the most productive
path to self-improvement (Chan 1989: 255-270).



Another objection to over-reliance on meditation was that it would
leave its practitioners ill-equipped to handle the demands of active
life, which (unlike quiet sitting) regularly tests our ability to
maintain control of our feelings in the face of provocations. Feelings
on the Confucian view should be both proportionate and responsive to
the correct events (for example, we should react with moderate anger
toward the moderate mistreatment of a friend and not react with fury
to a minor, personal slight). For these purposes, Confucians suggested
that reverential attention (*jing* Jing ) is better suited
to instill the right sort of self-control, one that they thought we
could use in both passive and active states. Zhu Xi described
reverential attention both as a kind of concentration or focus and as
an attitude showing respect and humility, and thus capable of putting
private concerns in proper perspective and keeping selfish desires in
check. He also recommended using reverential attention when reading
texts for ethical and philosophical insight (*ZZYL* 12; Chu
1990: 170-179; Zhu 2019: 28-32 and 49).


## 5. Virtue



In the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, Confucians were interested in
the nature and psychological structure of virtues, particularly the
virtues concerned with fostering and upholding good human
relationships. They saw their emphasis on the virtues of human
relationships as distinguishing them from Daoists and Buddhists,
insofar as the latter two groups tended to promote a concern with
personal salvation (which struck some Confucians as slighting moral
virtue) and with non-attachment (which many saw as incompatible with
having meaningful human relationships).



There is a relatively strong consensus in this period that five
virtues are most important, both in terms of the scope of human
activity that they should regulate and in terms of their contribution
to the virtuous person's moral quality. The "Five Constant
Virtues" or "Five Constants" (*Wuchang*
Wu Chang ) were humaneness (*ren* Ren , sometimes
translated as "benevolence" or "Goodness"),
righteousness (*yi* Yi ), ritual propriety (*li*
Li , sometimes simply "propriety"), wisdom
(*zhi* Zhi ), and faithfulness (*xin* Xin ). The
Confucians of this period often called attention to ways in which
these particular virtues overlap, such that a person could not
instantiate one without instantiating another (Angle & Tiwald
2017: 164-165). But they still tended to think of four of those
virtues as having certain paradigmatic domains or situations where
they were most manifest. Paradigm cases of humaneness are those in
which one acts out of love or care to promote the interests of others,
as when one helps or looks after a family member. Many *Daoxue*
Confucians also describe this virtue movingly as one of "forming
one body" with other people or with the cosmos more generally,
which in turn requires that we see ourselves as extensions of others
and vice-versa (Ivanhoe 2018: 58-73; Tiwald & Van Norden
2014: 140-141). Paradigm cases of righteousness are those in
which someone refuses to violate prohibitions that would rightly be
regarded as degrading or shameful, as when refusing an otherwise
tempting bribe. Sometimes righteousness just has to do with ensuring a
just distribution of goods according to merit or position. Clear cases
of ritual propriety are those in which one performs a ritual with
reverence. The Chinese character for "ritual" (*li*
Li ), however, is of much broader scope than its English
equivalent, covering nearly every social protocol which should be
performed with a sense of respect, from weddings and funerals to
greetings (e.g., bowing) and serving food and drink. Paradigm cases of
wisdom include such things as understanding the other virtues (their
characteristic motives and feelings), correctly assessing the quality
of a person's character (when choosing someone for an important
post, for example), and knowing the best means by which to achieve
virtuous ends. The fifth virtue, faithfulness, is best understood as
the virtue of being committed to and guided by reality in a consistent
and reliable way. Some Confucians were careful to say that the virtue
in this fundamental sense does not have its own paradigmatic domain of
activity--it regulates and supports all of the virtues, insofar
they all require us to being attentive to what's real and
avoiding self-serving illusions that would otherwise get us off the
hook (*BXZY* 47-82; Angle & Tiwald 2017:
160-163; Fuji 2011: 28-31).



A potential source of confusion arises from the fact that humaneness
is sometimes used in a more fundamental and all-encompassing sense,
where it refers not to the virtue of loving or caring about the
welfare of others, but to the virtue of harmonizing with or fitting
into a larger system of mutual life-generativity, understood as
correctly participating in a system in which each person's life
contributes appropriately to the life of others (*BXZY* 70;
Angle & Tiwald 2017: 162-163). Humaneness in this more
fundamental sense does not necessarily need to be motivated by love or
care--one can exhibit the virtue of harmonizing with the larger
whole even while acting out of a sense of shame (as righteousness
requires), or reverence (as ritual propriety requires). But there is a
sense in which we exhibit the virtue of mutual life-generativity even
when acting righteously or ritually proper. On an interpretation
suggested by Zhu Xi, this is because all of the other virtues can be
seen as getting their purpose and value from their part in
contributing to mutual life-generativity, much as the life-production
of the springtime gives purpose and value to the summer, autumn, and
winter (*ZZYL* 20:694; Angle & Tiwald 2017:
166-167).


## 6. Governance



Throughout the Song-Ming period, mastery of Confucian texts was
required for the civil service exams and thus for most appointments to
state office. Confucianism had also long enjoyed a special prestige
among bureaucrats and state officials, being seen by many as offering
the best training for the skills and ethical demands of governance.
Accordingly, many of the major Confucian philosophers and their
interlocutors had experience with and were keenly interested in
administration and state affairs. Most Confucians conceived of their
obligations to the state as pulling in two directions: they saw
loyalty to the hereditary monarchy as mandatory in most major
respects, but they also regarded it as their duty to share the benefit
of their ethical guidance and sound judgment with the emperor and
authorities at every level. On one relatively prevalent understanding
of that role, to both serve the emperor and provide him with ethical
moorings was the highest form of loyalty, for it helped to sustain the
rule and further consolidate its legitimacy as a successor regime to
the Confucian sage-kings of old. At times, however, many Song-Ming
Confucians lost confidence in the emperor and his court and sought to
promote more decentralized forms of government with local and
non-state institutions taking on a larger role (Angle & Tiwald
2017: 181-189).


### 6.1 Commanderies vs. Fiefdoms



One of the oft-revisited debates in the Song-Ming period had to do
with the difficult matter of regional governance. By the start of the
Song, regions outside the capital had been governed for many centuries
by a relatively centralized and meritocratic system known as the
"commandery system" (*junxian* Jun Xian ).
According to the rules of this system, regional governors were to be
selected from among those who had performed very well on the civil
service exams, and they were appointed at the discretion of the
emperor or his court. There were also restrictions that were meant to
prevent governors from developing stronger loyalties to their local
communities than the emperor. For example, governors were required to
switch posts on a regular basis and were not appointed to districts
that included their home towns.



Many Song-Ming Confucians recognized that the commandery system was
too well entrenched to jettison without major conflict or upheaval.
Still, this did not prevent some political thinkers from advocating
for a putatively older and better system known as enfeoffment
(*fengjian* Feng Jian ). Official Confucian histories
suggested that this system had been in place at the time of the
sage-kings, which suggested that it had succeeded in creating the high
degree of social harmony and virtue that characterized that golden
age. The most notable feature of the enfeoffment system was that
regional governorships were inherited titles and thus treated as the
hereditary rights and responsibilities of certain families (with some
allowances to forcibly remove vicious or incompetent governors). But
Confucian proponents of enfeoffment such as Zhang Zai and Hu Hong
(1106-1161) saw a great deal to recommend it. By creating
regional power bases, they suggested, the Chinese state would be more
resilient and better able to survive when the emperor or his court
were in disarray. They also thought that by having lasting,
multi-generational relationships between local governors and their
subjects they would help bring about more intimate and family-like
relationships between governor and subject, thereby creating
circumstances more conducive to social harmony and the cultivation of
virtue. Finally, advocates like Zhang and Hu thought that the
enfeoffment system could be paired with a legendary system of land
distribution known as the well-field system, which guaranteed farming
families relatively equal plots of land with relatively incontestable
boundaries, all of which was meant to ensure greater equality for
commoners and greater peace and accord in general (Angle & Tiwald
2017: 201-206).


### 6.2 Institutional vs. Character-Centered Theories of Governance



Confucian political thinkers in the Song-Ming period were preoccupied
with many other contentious issues in the affairs of state and often
argued vehemently over the powers and responsibilities of specific
offices, famine relief policies, state rituals, laws and punishments,
tax and lending policies, and military and foreign affairs
(*JSL* 8-10; *MYDFL*; *ZZYL* 108-14;
Zhu 2019: 56-71). Still, sometimes their disagreements about
these issues stemmed from deeper disagreements about the role of
virtue, talent, and institutional rules and incentives in effecting
good governance. When the Confucians turned to consider these issues
explicitly they often presented them as part of a debate about the
relative importance of "institutional rules" (*fa*
Fa ) as compared with "people" (*ren*
Ren ) in good governance. In a well-known essay attributed to the
classical Confucian Xunzi, the author framed this question in exactly
those terms, arguing that good governance depends largely and more
fundamentally on getting the right people, by which he meant people of
talent and virtue. The chapter sums up this position in the succinct
and memorable claim that "there are people who create order but
no rules that create order" (*Xunzi* 12/57/3 [117]).



Most of the explicit debate about this issue was taken up after a
series of attempts at dramatic reform at the tail end of the Northern
Song associated with Wang Anshi and his successors. However
well-conceived those reforms may have been in their own right, they
coincided with a disastrous famine resulting in widespread debt and
dislocation, and the last round of major reforms took place shortly
before the Northern Song fell to Jurchen invaders. With that national
anguish and humiliation serving as historical background for a great
deal of political thought in the subsequent Southern Song, many
political thinkers blamed the very attempt to improve governance
through mere reform (rather than concomitant improvements in
character) for the Northern Song's downfall. Accordingly, most
political thinkers were attracted to Xunzi's position on the
question of the relative importance of people (of good character)
versus institutional rules. Zhu Xi articulates a version of this
consensus position in some recorded remarks to his students:



> 
> 
> This age suffers from two defects: defects in its institutional rules
> (*fa*) and defects in the current political situation. The
> defects in the rules can all be altered at once quite easily, but the
> defects in the current political situation all reside in people. How
> can they be changed when people go about their business with a selfish
> heartmind! The rules of the last eight years of Emperor
> Renzong's reign can be considered defective. Wang Anshi changed
> them all soon after [becoming the emperor's prime minister], but
> this only gave rise to numerous new defects. This is because people
> are hard to change. (*ZZYL* 108:2688; translation slightly
> modified from Zhu 2019: 62)
> 
> 
> 



The view propounded by Zhu Xi and other character-centered theorists
like Hu Hong seemed to allow that both decent institutional rules and
virtuous state officials were required for good governance. But once
the rules were decent, Zhu suggested, one could not expect to make
further progress without improvements in character to ensure better
implementation. Both Zhu Xi and Hu Hong also seemed to be struck by
the idea that institutional rules have little causal responsibility in
their own right and that it is much more to the credit and good
judgment of virtuous people that they are used to good effect (Tiwald
2019).



Although the more character-centered view was generally more widely
accepted by the most influential Song-Ming Confucians, there were some
notable defenders of the position that institutional reforms alone
could make improvements in governance. Two of these were the famous
Yongjia Confucians noted in
 section 2.5,
 Chen Liang and Ye Shi. These two sought ways of improving the
outcomes of policy and institutional changes without requiring more
altruistic motives of people, and to some extent sought to redefine
traditional virtues so that they could be more compatible with
self-interest (Niu 1998; Tillman 1982). Another was the daring
political reformer Huang Zongxi, who argued for institutional
practices that continued to call for relatively good leaders but also
created incentives to do some of the work that otherwise depended on
the exceptional good will and conscientiousness of the emperor or
state officials (Tiwald 2019: 86-92). Among other things, he
proposed a stronger and more independent office of the prime minister
or grand councilor, a rotational draft system for lower-level
officials, and a requirement that the emperor attend academy debates
in which local representatives could express their opinions relatively
freely (*MYDFL*).


## 7. Influence



The Confucian thinkers of the Song-Ming period came in for a great
deal of criticism in the centuries following the collapse of the Ming
dynasty in 1644. Much of the innovative scholarship in the subsequent
Qing dynasty (1644-1911) was conducted by Confucian scholars
closely affiliated with "evidential studies", who tended
to see philosophers like Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming as too reliant on
abstract speculation and personal introspection. As Chinese
intellectuals began to take more interest in Western philosophy in the
19th and 20th centuries, some saw themselves as
belonging to a tradition continuous with philosophers like Zhu and
Wang, but others rejected Confucianism outright and Song-Ming
Confucianism with it. Still, Zhu Xi stayed squarely at the center of
the formal education system and the civil service exams right up to
the early 20th century. And there is little question that
Song-Ming Confucianism--especially the works of Zhu and
Wang--continue to be tremendously influential in the late
20th and early 21st centuries. To this day, many
people in East Asia who take a more scholarly approach to Confucianism
regard Zhu's interpretations as authoritative. Standard
Chinese-language "readers" (*duben*
Du Ben ) of the Confucian canon follow Zhu Xi's
interpretations closely (e.g., Xie 2003). Consequently, some of the
popular treatments of classical Confucianism continue to adopt the
terminology, conceptual frameworks, and philosophical vision of Zhu Xi
even as they purport to provide interpretations of the
tradition's founding figures and texts. In the West it is not
uncommon to find specialists in Confucian philosophy who work
primarily or exclusively on classical texts such as the
*Analects* or the *Mencius*, but for scholars of
Confucianism in Chinese-speaking countries, many of the philosophical
disputes are extensions of those found in the Song and Ming. The
Chinese-speaking world's most celebrated present-day
philosophers are "New Confucians" (*Xin*
*rujia* Xin Ru Jia ), thinkers that take
themselves to be continuing the work of the Song-Ming Confucians (M.
Lee 2017; Makeham 2003a). The same is true for scholars of
Confucianism throughout East Asia, due in part to the tremendous
influence of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. A
great deal of current Confucian discourse in East Asia is framed as a
matter of taking sides between competing lineages or factions of the
Song and Ming, especially the Learning of Pattern (*Lixue*)
school associated with Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi and the Learning of the
Heartmind (*Xinxue*) school associated with Lu Xiangshan and
Wang Yangming (Chen 2010).



In certain respects it is unsurprising that Song-Ming Confucianism has
loomed so large in East Asian philosophy in the present day. The
thinkers of the Song-Ming period did so much to add philosophical
depth and systematicity to the more laconic and fragmentary Confucian
canon, it thus understandable that the scholars who are themselves
philosophers or looking for philosophy in the historical Confucian
tradition would be drawn to its greatest systematizers.