- Length
- 448 pagesChan, Reflections on Things at Hand, Columbia, 1967
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Reflections on Things at Hand
The book that made Neo-Confucianism teachable. Two philosophers met for ten days in 1175, went through the writings of four predecessors, and produced an anthology so well judged that it became the entry point to Chinese philosophy for seven hundred years and the target of every later reformer.
- Date
- 1175
- Attributed to
- Zhu Xi and Lü Zuqian
- Region
- Southern Song China
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1967 English, Wing-tsit Chan The first complete English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
The standard introduction to Neo-Confucian thought in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam for seven centuries, and the model for a whole genre of anthologies.
What the book says
An anthology of six hundred and twenty-two passages drawn from four eleventh-century thinkers and arranged into fourteen chapters, made by two philosophers who spent ten days together deciding what a beginner needed. It is not a treatise and it is the most influential Neo-Confucian book ever assembled. The chapters proceed from the most abstract to the most practical: the substance of the Way, learning, the investigation of things, self-cultivation, the regulation of the family, service in office, the governing of the state, education, dealing with others, and finally a chapter assessing the heterodox teachings and one on the sages. The philosophy carried by the selections is a synthesis. Everything that exists has a pattern or principle, and everything is also made of a material force which condenses and disperses; a thing is its pattern realised in that material. Human nature is that pattern in a person and is therefore good, while the coarseness or clarity of the material accounts for why people differ. The practical programme follows: investigate things one by one, extend knowledge, make the intention sincere, rectify the mind - and the title itself is a warning against starting anywhere else, since reflection on what is near at hand is where the Way is found.
What it argues
That the world is intelligible because everything has a pattern, that the same pattern constitutes human nature, and that moral cultivation is therefore continuous with the study of anything at all. The technical apparatus - pattern and material force, nature and feeling, the mind that unites them - is Zhu Xi's synthesis of his predecessors, and its point is to give Confucian ethics a metaphysics capable of answering Buddhism on its own ground. The practical instruction is the famous one: investigate things, and by investigating enough of them arrive at an understanding that suddenly opens out.
What it answered
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch c. 780attributed to Huineng
Chan Buddhism, and behind it the whole renunciant option. The Neo-Confucian complaint is that Buddhism gets the metaphysics wrong by treating the world as empty and gets the ethics wrong by leaving it. The anthology's answer is to insist that the pattern is real, that it is in things, and that the family and the office are where it is met - which is why a book of philosophy devotes chapters to how to conduct a household and how to serve a superior.
What answered it
Instructions for Practical Living 1518-1524Wang Yangming
Wang Yangming, four centuries later and from inside. His objection began as an experiment: he took the instruction to investigate things and applied it to a stand of bamboo, sat before it for seven days, learned nothing and became ill. The conclusion he drew - that the pattern is in the mind rather than in the bamboo - split Confucianism into two schools whose disagreement organised East Asian philosophy until the modern period. In Japan the challenge came differently, from Ogyu Sorai, who argued that the whole metaphysical apparatus was an invention of the Song and had nothing to do with the ancient sages.
How it argues
By selection and arrangement, which is a philosophical act performed with tools that look editorial. Nothing in the book is by its compilers; everything in it is chosen by them, ordered by them, and given force by where it stands. The fourteen chapters are an argument about what comes first, and the decision to put the investigation of things before the regulation of the family and both before government is the whole Neo-Confucian programme expressed as a table of contents.
The moment
The Southern Song, with the north lost to the Jin and the dynasty in reduced circumstances, and a movement of scholars trying to recover what they took to be the true Confucian transmission after a thousand years of interruption. Zhu Xi was its organiser as much as its philosopher: he edited, anthologised, wrote commentaries and built curricula, and this book is a piece of that programme rather than a treatise struck off in inspiration.
How it travelled
As a curriculum. The anthology became the standard first book of Neo-Confucian study and travelled with the examination system into Korea, where it was central to Joseon thought, into Vietnam, and into Tokugawa Japan, where the Zhu Xi school was for a time official orthodoxy. It generated imitations, abridgements and commentaries in all four countries. Wing-tsit Chan's complete English translation of 1967 was the first, and Western philosophy's engagement with Neo-Confucianism substantially postdates it.
The strongest objection
Wang Yangming's, and it is empirical in form. If investigating things yields moral understanding, then investigating a great many things should yield a great deal of it, and the bamboo experiment says otherwise. Zhu Xi's defenders answer that the investigation was never meant to be conducted like that - that it means study, reflection and the reading of texts, and that Wang misunderstood a method by taking it literally. That reply is probably right about Zhu Xi's intention and does not fully dispose of the difficulty, since it leaves unclear what the investigation of things adds to moral cultivation that reflection alone would not.
Why read it
As an anthology, which is what it is: open it anywhere. The chapter on the substance of the Way is the metaphysics in short compass, and the chapters on family and office show a philosophical tradition taking ordinary obligations seriously in a way European philosophy rarely does. Chan's translation includes enough commentary to make the compressed passages usable.
- First printed
- 1176
- First in English
- 1967
- Digitised
- Partial
The four sources are Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi. The anthology accumulated a large commentarial literature of its own and was imitated across East Asia.
Wing-tsit Chan's 1967 English is the first complete version and remains standard; it is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Neo-Confucian metaphysics is a serious subject in contemporary Chinese philosophy and in comparative work, and the questions it raises about whether moral knowledge is discovered or constituted have obvious counterparts elsewhere.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain; the only complete English version is in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much of the selection is Zhu Xi's and how much Lü Zuqian's is unclear, and the two differed philosophically. Whether the four sources form the coherent tradition the anthology presents, or were made coherent by being anthologised, is a real question. And the largest dispute is the one Wang Yangming opened and Ogyu Sorai widened: whether the metaphysics of pattern and material force is the recovery of ancient Confucianism, as the Song scholars claimed, or a Song invention read back into the classics - a charge modern scholarship has taken seriously.