Zhu Xi

Zhu Xi (Zhūzǐ, “Master Zhu”) was the most influential Chinese philosopher after Confucius and Mencius, and the great systematiser of Neo-Confucianism (Neo-Confucianism). Drawing together the ideas of the eleventh-century masters Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and the Cheng brothers, he constructed a comprehensive philosophy of the universe and of human nature built on two concepts: principle (lǐ), the pattern or reason that makes each thing what it is and ought to be, and vital energy (qì), the material force of which all things are formed. He taught that human nature is principle and therefore good, as Mencius held, and that one becomes a sage by investigating things to understand their principle and by cultivating a reverent mind. His selection of the Four Books and his commentaries on them became, from 1313 until 1905, the official basis of the imperial examinations, shaping the minds of officials across China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

Life

Zhu Xi was born on 18 October 1130 at Youxi, in Fujian, in south-eastern China, where his father, a minor official, had moved after the Jurchen conquest of the north drove the Song court south. A precocious child, he is said to have asked at four what lay beyond Heaven. His father died when he was thirteen, and he studied with friends of his father, flirting for a time with Chan Buddhism and Daoism. He passed the highest civil service examination, the jìnshì, at eighteen — one of the youngest ever — and in his twenties became a disciple of the Confucian scholar Li Tong, who turned him decisively to the Cheng brothers’ teaching.

Zhu Xi held public office for only about nine years of his long life, serving as a district official and prefect, where he established granaries for famine relief, rebuilt schools and restored the White Deer Grotto Academy (1179), whose rules became a model for academies throughout East Asia. Most of his life he spent teaching, writing and corresponding in the hills of Fujian, especially at his “Wuyi Retreat” in the Wuyi Mountains, and debating with rivals such as Lu Xiangshan, with whom he held a famous meeting at the Goose Lake Temple (1175). At court, his outspoken memorials against corruption made enemies; in 1196 his teaching was proscribed as “false learning” and his followers purged. He died on 23 April 1200, still under the ban. Within a few decades he was posthumously honoured, and in 1241 his tablet was placed in the Confucian temple.

Principle and qì

Everything in the universe, Zhu Xi taught, is composed of qì — a dynamic, material energy that condenses into things and disperses at their dissolution, and whose varying degrees of clarity and turbidity account for the differences between stones, plants, animals and human beings. But qì is not chaotic: every thing has its lǐ — the principle by which it is what it is, the norm to which it ought to conform. The principle of a boat is to travel on water, of a cart on land; the principle of the relation of father and son is affection, of ruler and minister righteousness. Principle and qì are never found apart, but principle is logically prior: “There has never been any qì without principle, nor any principle without qì”; yet “before Heaven and Earth existed, there was only principle”.

The sum of all principle is the Supreme Ultimate (tàijí), which Zhu Xi took from Zhou Dunyi’s diagram. Each thing contains not merely a part of it but the whole: “Every person has the Supreme Ultimate; every thing has the Supreme Ultimate.” His image is the moon: “There is only one moon in the sky, but when its light is scattered upon rivers and lakes, it can be seen everywhere. It cannot be said that the moon has been split.”

Human nature

Human nature is principle as present in a person, and is therefore perfectly good — benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom. But each person’s endowment of qì differs: some are born with clear qì, which lets their nature shine, others with turbid qì, which obscures it, like a pearl in muddy water. Evil arises from this obscuration and from selfish desires (sīyù), which lead us away from principle. The task of moral life is to “preserve Heavenly principle and eliminate human desires” — not all desires, but those that are selfish and excessive.

The investigation of things

How can we clear away the obscuration? Zhu Xi found the answer in the Great Learning, a short chapter of the Book of Rites, whose sequence runs: investigate things, extend knowledge, make the will sincere, rectify the mind, cultivate the person, regulate the family, govern the state, and bring peace to the world. The first step, investigating things (gé wù), means studying the principle in each thing — in the classics, in history, in human affairs, in natural phenomena — “today investigate one thing, tomorrow another”, accumulating understanding until, “after exerting oneself for a long time, one day one will achieve a wide and far-reaching penetration”, in which “the qualities of all things, whether internal or external, refined or coarse, will all be apprehended, and the mind, in its total substance and great functioning, will be perfectly intelligent”. Because principle is one, knowing it in things is knowing one’s own nature.

Study must be joined to reverence (jìng): a collected, attentive, serious state of mind, both in quiet and in action, in which one is “master of oneself”. Zhu Xi recommended “half a day of quiet sitting and half a day of reading” — a practice that resembled Buddhist meditation, though he insisted its aim was to engage with the world, not to escape it.

The Four Books

Zhu Xi’s most enduring achievement was educational. He grouped the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and two chapters of the Book of Rites — the Great Learning (Dàxué) and the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhōngyōng) — as the Four Books, to be studied before the older Five Classics, and wrote commentaries on them. With Lü Zuqian he compiled Reflections on Things at Hand (1175), an anthology of the Song masters that became the standard introduction to Neo-Confucianism. His Family Rituals shaped weddings, funerals and ancestral rites in China and Korea for centuries.

Legacy

In 1313 the Yuan dynasty made Zhu Xi’s commentaries on the Four Books the official standard for the civil service examinations — a position they kept until the examinations were abolished in 1905. In Korea, Zhu Xi’s teaching became the ideology of the Joseon state; in Japan, of the Tokugawa shogunate. His critics — Lu Xiangshan, Wang Yangming, Dai Zhen, and twentieth-century reformers who blamed “Confucianism” for China’s backwardness — attacked his separation of principle from mind and his suspicion of desire. He has often been compared with Thomas Aquinas, the systematiser of another civilisation’s orthodoxy.

In conversation

• The moon in ten thousand streams — the Supreme Ultimate in every thing.
• Investigate things — one principle at a time, until all is clear.
• The Four Books — the curriculum of East Asia for six centuries.