Cheng-Zhu School
from 1070
Everything has a principle and everything is made of energy, and cultivation means investigating principle until you recognise it in yourself.
- Active
- from 1070
- Where
- Song China, then Korea, Japan and Vietnam
- Also
- 程朱理學 Chéng-Zhū Lǐxué
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Chinese
The claim
Li is pattern or principle, qi is the energy-matter that instantiates it. Every thing has its own li, and all li are one li — which is why investigating anything at all can lead, eventually, to understanding everything.
What it held
Neo-Confucianism was built to answer Buddhism. It had to explain why the world is real and worth engaging with, having watched Buddhism argue for six centuries that it is neither, and it had to do so using Confucian materials that had never carried a metaphysics.
Zhu Xi's solution pairs li and qi. Principle accounts for what a thing is and for the fact that it ought to be that way; qi accounts for its existing at all and for why it falls short. Human nature is li and therefore good; the variability of qi explains why people differ.
The practice is gewu — the investigation of things. Zhu Xi reads it as sustained study, of texts, of history and of the natural world, until principle becomes apparent. Wang Yangming later objected on the basis of experience: he stared at bamboo for a week trying to investigate its principle, got nothing, and fell ill.
Zhu Xi also selected the Four Books and wrote the commentaries on them, and from 1313 those commentaries were the examination syllabus. For six centuries, entering the Chinese civil service meant knowing what Zhu Xi thought a sentence meant.
How it argued
Commentary, curriculum design, and the systematic reading of the classics through a metaphysical framework the classics do not themselves contain.
What it was arguing against
Buddhism and Daoism, on whether the world and social obligations are real; and within Confucianism, the readings the framework displaced.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether li exists prior to qi or only in it. Whether investigation of external things can produce moral knowledge, which is where Lu-Wang breaks away.
Common misconceptions
That Neo-Confucianism is a conservative reaction. It is a philosophical construction of enormous originality that gave Confucianism a metaphysics it had never had — and its orthodoxy came later, and partly against its own spirit.
How it began
The Song, when printing made texts widely available, Buddhism dominated intellectual life, and Confucians needed an answer at the level of first principles.
What became of it
Became the state orthodoxy and the examination syllabus across East Asia, which preserved and ossified it simultaneously.
Lasting influence
The intellectual formation of the entire East Asian scholarly class for six hundred years. Korean Neo-Confucianism produced the Toegye school; Japanese versions shaped Tokugawa thought.
Why it still matters
The li-qi pairing is a serious attempt at the relation between structure and matter, and it is being read again by philosophers rather than only by historians.
Put another way
The same moon reflected in ten thousand rivers — Zhu Xi's own image for one principle in many things.
Where to start
Reflections on Things at Hand. It was designed as the way in.
The surprising bit
His teaching was banned as false learning in his last years and his funeral was attended under official disapproval. Within a century he was the state orthodoxy.
In their own words
There is no principle without energy, and no energy without principle.
The principle is one, its manifestations are many.
Connections
- Answers
- Confucianism (classical)
The verdict
A metaphysics built to defeat Buddhism that became the most examined body of thought in human history.