Religious Dimensions of Filial Piety as Developed in Late Ming Interpretations of the Xiaojing

Religious Dimensions of Filial Piety as Developed in Late Ming Interpretations of the Xiaojing

During the late Ming (from around 1580s onward) a wave of studying, publishing, and promoting the Xiaojing (The classic of filial piety) emerged in the Zhejiang area. Zhu Hong (b. 1510), Sun Ben, Shen Hui, and Yu Chunxi (1553–1621) are representative of this trend. Their extant works on the subject are collected in the Xiaojing zonglei (A compilation of the Xiaojing-related texts), compiled by Zhu Hong and published circa 1580–1590.¹ Among these scholars, Zhu Hong and Sun Ben interpreted the Xiaojing from a socio-political perspective, which emphasized governance of the state through filial piety, while Yu Chunxi expressed more religious and personal concerns, emphasizing that filial piety could offer the means to stimulate the moral universe. These two discourses about filial piety and the Xiaojing did not contradict each other, but had in fact co-existed for centuries. Moreover, Zhu Hong, Sun Ben, and Yu Chunxi had similar opinions regarding the authority and authenticity of the Xiaojing text, and they all shared an enthusiasm for promoting the study of the Xiaojing. They believed that contemporary neglect of the Xiaojing was a serious socio-political issue, and argued for the necessity to re-include it as a required text in the civil service examinations. Accordingly, even though their interpretations of the Xiaojing differed, they refrained from debate with each other, and rather treated each other as allies in the promotion of the Xiaojing.² These scholars' works were later re-compiled by Jiang Yuanzuo, also a Zhejiang scholar, into a text entitled Xiaojing daquan (A complete annotated edition of Xiaojing), published circa 1633, which not only continued to circulate in China but was also brought to Japan.³

The socio-political discourse on the Xiaojing during the late Ming vigorously defended the authenticity of the text by arguing against the doubts raised by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and emphasized the special position of the Xiaojing with respect to the Chunqiu (The Spring and Autumn Annals). Both texts were believed written by Confucius and hence carried the sage's teaching about political governance. I have discussed these in another article.⁴ Here, therefore, I will focus on another aspect of the late Ming discourse about the Xiaojing: its religious implications and the practice of daily self-cultivation. Before going into this discussion, two points require further explanation.

First, the term "religious dimensions" in the title refers to a loose definition of "religion" based on the Ming's own conceptions of what we can call the non-mundane. The concept of "religion" of course arose in the West as counterpoint to the notion of the "secular." In the milieu of postmodernism and poststructuralism, especially, the question "What is religion?" becomes deeply problematic because of its essentialist connotations. Jonathan Z. Smith even argues that "religion" is "a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define." Smith says: "It is a second-order, generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as 'language' plays in linguistics or 'culture' plays in anthropology."⁵ Smith's arguments may not convince everyone, but the little consensus about what "religion" is attests to the turmoil in contemporary religious studies. In order to appreciate the richness and complexity of religious life and also because of the lack of fixed comprehensive explanatory theory, contemporary religious studies clearly demonstrate a multidisciplinary approach and a multicultural characteristic.⁶

Western observers, using exclusive categories, long puzzled over whether Confucianism was a philosophy or a religion. More recently, however, multidisciplinary approaches have precisely led to a greater appreciation of Confucian religiosity. Julia Ching, Tu Wei-ming, Rodney Taylor, and Kirill Thompson have all analyzed Confucianism as a religious tradition.⁷ The notions of Heaven (tian), fate (ming), reverence (jing), the unity between the individual...