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45 C H A P T E R T H R E E The Heart-Mind (心) Reading “On the Child-like Heart-Mind” In the concluding remarks to his preface to the Western Chamber, the Farmer of the Dragon Ravine stated, “Those who understand me shall not say I still possess the child-like heart-mind (tong xin 童心).” —Introduction to Li Zhi’s “On the Child-like Heart-Mind” Oh! Where can I find a genuine great sage who has not lost his childlike heart-mind and have a word with him about culture? —Conclusion to “On the Child-like Heart-Mind”1 I. INTRODUCTION Upon reading the title of Li Zhi’s famous essay “On the Child-like HeartMind ,”2 surely any literatus in his time would immediately have recalled earlier references to the term of art at the heart of Li’s philosophy.3 Its locus classicus is the canonical historical text the Commentary of Zuo (Zuo zhuan 左傳).4 Commenting on year 31 of the reign of the Duke of Xian, the narrator laments about the then 19-year-old5 Zhao who would later take the throne after Xian: “He still had a child-like heart-mind, and from this the gentleman knew he would not come to a good end.”6 In this early source, the term tong xin is used in a derogatory sense; one who possesses a child-like heart-mind is naïve, immature, and inexperienced in the ways of the world. As a result, such a person is bound to come to a bad end. In the first words and line of Li’s essay the reader is led to yet another—though distinctly less obvious and certainly non-canonical— reference to the term. Li chooses a different kind of literary source: 46 Li Zhi, Confucianism and the Virtue Of Desire fiction rather than history and romance rather than politics, and quotes from one of countless commentaries on the 13th century play the Western Chamber (Xixiang ji 西廂記).7 Widely performed and read in Li’s time, the play celebrates the powerful passion and true love between a brilliant scholar and a beautiful maiden. The story begins as the two fall in love and consummate their illicit passion, unfolds as they overcome traditional barriers to their great romance, and concludes as at last the two joyfully join in marriage. This storybook version of the lovers’ union finds its original telling in the Tang period with a markedly different ending in a way demanding to be read as a cautionary—rather than celebratory —tale, entitled Yingying’s Story (Yingying zhuan 鶯鶯傳).8 In this telling, freely acting upon one’s spontaneous passions and desires leads to grief and tragedy. The brilliant scholar falls with mad desire for the heroine, she no less so for him; and for a brief moment in time they blissfully delight in each other’s arms. But later he chooses to turn away from this deep love, desire, and passion, and thereby abandons her. Both later marry: presumably in neither case for passionate ardor or true love. In carefully choosing and explicitly referring to the Western Chamber, we can all but assume Li was deeply aware that upon reading the first lines of “On the Child-like Heart-Mind” the attentive reader would at once consider the story in its earlier (cautionary) version. In the first section of this chapter I will show that attending to and examining what is prominently absent in Li’s writings is at many points no less critical to understanding Li’s argument and his philosophical vision than attention to and analysis of what he explicitly writes, cites, and claims. In the course of his essay Li insistently argues against and jettisons what in the end the scholar in Yingying’s Story chooses to live out: rigid, pedantic, homogenized thinking with its symbol that of the stifling and unimaginative scholar of the—however unfairly attributed—Zhu Xi school of Confucian thought. Instead, Li gestures towards, celebrates, and argues for ideals pursued and cherished in the Western Chamber: spontaneity, genuineness, abundance in feeling, and passionate desire. Li Zhi quotes not from the Western Chamber itself, but from a commentary and amongst them, Li chooses a 1582 edition. The commentator is anonymous—identified in his work only as “The Farmer of the Dragon Ravine”—and concludes his preface with an explicit reference to the “child-like heart-mind”: Having leisure in my humble home, I casually punctuate...

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