Making Moral Decisions: Zhu Xi’s ‘Outline and Details of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government’

After its first publication in 1219, the Zizhi tongjian gangmu 資治通鑑 綱目 [Outline and Details of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government; henceforth Outline and Details], a collaborative historical compilation by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) and his students, became one of the most popular and influential works in Chinese history. Its influence extended beyond China to both Japan and Korea.¹ Even in Europe, thanks to J. A. M. de Moyriac de Maille’s translation of the work under the title Histoire Generale de la Chine, ou Annales de cet Empire, the Outline and Details was also enormously influential in shaping European understanding of Chinese history, until Otto Franke demonstrated its shortcomings in his “Das Tsě tschi t’ung kien und das T’ung kien kang mu ihr Wesen, ihr Verhältnis zueinander und ihr Quellenwert” in 1930.²

Although not without some earlier critics, the book’s reputation suffered a drastic reversal in the twentieth century, as its many factual errors and strong Daoxue ideology caused modern historians generally to under-rate and neglect it. For example, in twentieth-century English language scholarship, the work is generally characterized as “a third-rate history book or even a book of morality but not history,” and its “arguments are like ‘the application of a rubber stamp’.”³ Nevertheless, modern scholars have yet to account for the work’s enormous popularity and influence from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries.⁴

This article argues that the Outline and Details was significant for two reasons. First, it redirected historical knowledge and represented a turning point in Chinese historiography. Second, it held important implications that contributed to literati rethinking of the relationship between the state and local society. To be more precise, the Outline and Details transformed historical knowledge from that used to maintain a proper hierarchical political power structure within the government (represented by Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑 [Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government] to one for training literati to make moral decisions in historical contexts. This implied that only morally cultivated literati had the ability to make proper decisions and the authority to establish a proper world order. It also implied that literati, responding to the rise of local society in the Southern Song, should rethink their own relationship to the state. As Zhu Xi’s student Li Fangzi 李方子 recognized:

. . . In his late years, [Zhu Xi] probably wanted to revise it [i.e., the Outline and Details] slightly to make it be more thorough and elaborate, but did not have the energy to do so. However, as for the grand principles and rules it has preserved, was there any scholar who wrote and studied after the Qin and Han who could have passed through its courtyard and ascended the steps [i.e., to grasp its subtlety and profundity]?⁵

This new model for historical study, whether we might agree with it or not, profoundly influenced the development of subsequent Chinese historiography and history. Moreover, it goes without saying that the popularity and influence of the Outline and Details over such a long time span was also subject to interactions among different historical forces in different historical contexts. This article will only discuss this work in the historical context of the Southern Song, the formative stage of its long-lasting popularity.

This article will first analyze the Outline and Details by conducting an in-depth study of its narrative structure and then discuss how it responded to the needs of the Southern Song literati. I will argue that the three components of the Outline and Details (the “Outline,” the “Details,” and the “Comments.”) are interrelated and guide the reader to understand history in a specific way: to train the reader to make decisions morally by situating him in historical contexts. The “Outline” was intentionally constructed as a set of individual statements that were not linked to each other to form a grand narrative; the Outline” directed the reader’s attention to the relations between historical figures and their deeds in order to evaluate the latter based on...