Cosmology, Ontology, and Human Efficacy: Essays in Chinese Thought (review)

258 China Review International: Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1994 shock and Aie problem of rats in Changsha. A substantial portion of Mao's writing at this time deals with the movement to expel Zhang Jingyao. The institution ofmarriage and relations between the sexes are major themes of his writing in late 1919. Yet, among all of these entries, one of the most important is "The Great Union ofthe Popular Masses," an article written during the May Fourth period. In the section on the writings of 1920, there are sixty-six entries, which include fourteen letters and thirty-one articles by Mao concerning the opposition to Zhang Jingyao and the movement in favor of self-rule in Hunan. The rest include an obituary notice mourning his teacher Yang Changji and writings reflecting his activities involving the Xiangtan Society for the Promotion of Education, the Cultural Book Society, the Russia Studies Society, the publication of the Collected Correspondence ofMembers ofthe New People's Study Society, and die establishment of the Socialist Youth League. Chenshan Tian University of Hawai'i» Richard J. Smith and D.W.Y. Kwok, editors. Cosmology, Ontology, and Human Efficacy: Essays in Chinese Thought. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1993. xiii, 258 pp. Hardcover $32. Several of the papers in this volume were originally written for a two-part panel at the 1986 meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association . Other papers were subsequently added. The resulting ten essays provide a particularly rich and multifaceted picture of intellectual developments during the Ch'ing period. The ten essays are: Daniel Kwok's "Ho and T'ung in Chinese Intellectual History"; Hao Chang's "Confucian Cosmological Myth and Neo-Confucian Transcendence"; On-cho Ng's "Toward an Interpretation of Ch'ing Ontology "; Benjamin A. Elman's "The Revaluation of Benevolence (Jen) in Ch'ing Dynasty Evidential Research"; Richard Shek's "Testimony to the Resilience of the Mind: The Life and Thought of P'eng Shao-sheng (1740-1796)"; San-pao Li's "Ch'ing Cosmology and Popular Precepts"; Richard ]. Smith's "Divination in Ch'ing Dynasty China"; Kai-wing Chow's "Purist Hermeneutics and Ritualist Ethics in Mid-Ch'ing Thought"; Erh-min Wang's "The 'Turn of Fortune' (Yen-hut): Inherited Concepts and China's Response to fhe West"; and Don C. Price's "Escape from Disillusionment: Personality and Value Change in the Case of Sung Chiao-jen." Reviews 259 The special emphasis of the volume is certain concepts that had particular significance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These concepts revolve around the interaction between metaphysical issues and human action. Some contemporary American scholars are inclined to regard Han notions of the resonance or unity of Heaven and humanity as having been superseded and replaced by a Sung metaphysics ofprinciple or pattern (Ii). The authors in this present volume , however, see most Ch'ing thinkers as drawing on concepts from both paradigms . The papers seek to show that what Ch'ing thinkers assumed about cosmology and ontology "invariably affected" their actions through their sense ofwhat was possible in particular situations (p. viii). Chinese from diverse social backgrounds were continually faced with situations which required them to negotiate (and renegotiate) the boundaries between the metaphysical and die concrete to find what was fated (ming) and what was responsive to human effort. Negotiating these boundaries was usually complex in the seventeenth century because of changes in the political, cultural, and economic context. Seventeenthcentury Confucians associated fhe Ming dynasty's collapse with syncretic linkages to Buddhism and Taoism in general, and with Wang Yang-ming's version of Confucianism in particular. Besides being exceptionally sensitive to political and cultural criticism, the Ch'ing dynasty embraced and enhanced the sociopolitical orthodoxy rooted in Chu Hsi's philosophy. Rising urbanization, Aourishing economic developments, increasing popular literacy, and so on also enhanced potentialities for new iconoclastic trends in the thought of intellectuals and in their relation to popular culture. The school of evidential research (k'ao-cheng hsüeh) is the new iconoclastic group that captures most of the attention in the volume. But the authors often offer quite different answers to such questions as how objective k'ao...