School of thought
Neo-Confucianism
Tradition
Classification
- Period
- c. 1050-1644 CE
- Regions
- East Asia (origin)
- Domains
- Ethics, Metaphysics
Overview
Neo-Confucianism revitalized Confucian thought by integrating metaphysical and cosmological dimensions into it. Zhu Xi's rationalist school emphasized the investigation of things to grasp principle (li 理), while Wang Yangming's idealist school taught that principle resides in the mind itself and that true knowledge is inseparable from action.
Key ideas
- Li and Qi: Zhu Xi's framework: li 理 (principle, pattern; a different word from the li 禮 of ritual propriety in classical Confucianism) gives things their nature and structure; qi (material force) gives them their physical existence. Together they constitute all reality.
- Investigation of Things: Zhu Xi's Investigation of Things extends knowledge through careful study of patterns in things, events, and classics. Wang Yangming later rejected Zhu's version of this inquiry.
- Unity of Knowledge and Action: Wang Yangming argued that knowing the good and doing the good are one and the same — if you truly know something is right, you act on it. Inaction reveals incomplete knowledge.
Key figures
Zhu Xi · Wang Yangming · Zhou Dunyi · Cheng Yi · Cheng Hao
Methods used
Influenced by
- Buddhism
Zhu Xi studied Chan Buddhism in his youth, and traces of Huayan Buddhism's holistic thought can be discerned in the way he built his synthesis.
- Confucianism
Zhu Xi fixed the canon on four texts — the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean — and wrote the commentaries read alongside them; the programme of investigating things is drawn from a line in the Great Learning.
- Taoism
Zhou Dunyi's Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate adapts a diagram of Taoist origin, and the Neo-Confucian cosmology of the Supreme Ultimate and qi draws on Taoist cosmological thought.
Later connections
- New Confucianism Influenced by this tradition
The New Confucians understood themselves as the third era of Confucian thought after the Song–Ming Neo-Confucians, and took their bearings from Wang Yangming's learning of the heart-mind while demoting Zhu Xi.
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zhu Xi
- Wing-tsit Chan (trans.), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), ch. 28 — Zhou Dunyi's Taijitu shuo and Tongshu and the Cheng brothers' teaching from the 1050s mark Neo-Confucianism's formative phase, and the start date used here
- Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), ch. 28; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zhu Xi, §1 — Formation: the teaching of Zhou Dunyi and the Cheng brothers in Northern Song China.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zhu Xi, introduction (his holistic synthetic approach possibly inspired in part by Huayan Buddhism) and §1 'Life and Works' (his study of Chan with the monk Dao Qian, and traces of Huayan's holistic thought in the formation of his system)
- Wing-tsit Chan (trans.), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), ch. 28 (Zhou Dunyi's diagram and its Taoist antecedents)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Zhu Xi, §§3.1 and 4.1
- Reflections on Things at Hand — Zhu Xi & Lu Zuqian (trans. Wing-tsit Chan)
- Instructions for Practical Living — Wang Yangming (trans. Wing-tsit Chan)