The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi (review)

For reflective people interested in the history of thought in China and East Asia, Chu Hsi (1130-1200) is an important figure to know; according to Wing-tsit Chan, he was "the most influential Chinese philosopher since the time of Confucius (551-479 B.C.) and Mencius (372-289 B.C.?). He was not only the crystallization of the Neo-Confucian movement that dominated China for 800 years but also the only thinker in the Christian era to influence many phases of Asian life throughout East Asia."¹ It was Chu Hsi who selected the Four Books (the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects, and the Mencius) and provided prefaces and commentaries for them, making them a primer of Chinese education. Because the imperial examination system, from 1313 until it was abolished in 1905, was based on competent exegeses of these key texts, they virtually became the established basic curriculum for all educated Chinese from childhood to adulthood.

From the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries C.E., Neo-Confucianism assumed the leading role in new social and cultural activities. Chu Hsi is credited with having systematized and institutionalized Neo-Confucian values in an ongoing process of both elite and popular education that assured their place in Chinese society for centuries to come. In the thirteenth century Neo-Confucianism spread to Korea, and from there to Japan in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). Therefore, in the wider context beyond China, Neo-Confucianism can be seen as the third in a five-stage dialogue in a syncretic process that took millennia to develop, providing different vital forms in different periods of East Asian history to meet new historical situations.²

In The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, Julia Ching shows how the Neo-Confucian tradition evolved, historically and philosophically. Over a period of more than a thousand years this almost imperceptible interactive process resulted in the Confucian tradition's accepting the metaphysical and cosmological challenge from the foreign Buddhism and from the native Taoism. Out of this interaction came a Neo-Confucianism that achieved greater philosophical depth and a broader context without departing from its primary commitment to human transformation and flourishing within the social and political matrixes of family, society, empire, and finally cosmos. From Chou Tun-yi (1017-1073), Chu Hsi developed his own understanding of the cosmos (the ambiguous T'ai-chi and Wu-chi, the dynamic interaction between the Great ultimate and the Non-ultimate) and the place of human beings within it in relationship and interaction. From Ch'eng Yi (1033-1107) and, to some extent, from his brother Ch'eng Hao (1032 - 1085), Chu appropriated the notion of li ("principle") and ch'i ("energy") in yin-yang interplay. Drawing from these thinkers Chu was able to build, according to Professor Ching, an "architectonic" structure of philosophy and "religion" with these thinkers as a foundation. From Ching we see again how Chu Hsi did not hesitate to learn and borrow from Ch'an Buddhism and philosophical Taoism, but he also differed from them in his firm Confucian purpose to bring about an ordering of society.

Ching's own view of religion is a comprehensive one, not limited by categories such as "theism" or "atheism" or by any sort of preoccupation with one-dimensional "transcendence" that would deny the unseparable continuum between heaven, nature, and human beings. On this score she has argued that "while China never produced a Western-type religion, one can find in the Chinese tradition what is functionally equivalent to religion or religions in the West and that such Chinese religions, much less distinct from the rest of Chinese culture, than Western religions from Western culture, have much to tell us about the uniqueness of the religious phenomenon itself."³

Further to support her view concerning the religious nature of Chinese thought, Ching cites the new fermentation under Confucian thinkers like Carsun Chang (Chang Chün-mai) (1886-1969), Hsü Fu-kuan...