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49 For many of his biographers, Hu Yuan was a forerunner of the Cheng-Zhu school of Daoxue, worthy to be called a “master of the early Northern Song.”¹ He is best known for being Cheng Yi’s teacher at the Imperial Academy in Kaifeng, showing his brilliant student how to pursue true Confucian learning.² Also, he is described as a man of action, who made significant contributions in reforming the school system and the court musical instruments.³ Despite these high honors, however, he is not considered to be a man of thought, having profound insights on matters that concerned the Northern Song educated elite. But if we pay closer attention to his classical commentary, we will have a different picture of him. There, we will find him a serious thinker—not the Daoxue moralist of the sort that Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming came to personify, but a self-motivated scholar who offered critical opinions on current affairs and insightful suggestions on governing.⁴ This image of Hu Yuan as a serious thinker is particularly clear in his commentary on the Yijing, the Zhouyi kouyi (The orally transmitted meanings of the Yi from the Zhou [Dynasty]). His longest piece of writing that has survived, the Zhouyi kouyi shows evidence of him as a sophisticated classicist who made the ancient classic speak to his eleventh-century readers.⁵ It reveals his skills in taking part in political and philosophical debates by offering a new interpretation of the 3 Mission of Civil Bureaucrats: The Yijing of Hu Yuan, Li Gou, and Ouyang Xiu [A superior man] begins with himself and extends his virtue to the people. Therefore, he never worries about himself, he worries about the world; he never rejoices for himself, he rejoices for the world. —Hu Yuan, Zhouyi kouyi 50 The Yijing and Chinese Politics Yijing. A prime example of his skills as an exegete was his decision to challenge the official Northern Song Yijing commentary, the Zhouyi zhengyi of Kong Yingda. In his attempt to expunge the militarism of late Tang and the Five Dynasties Period, he identified the Zhouyi zhengyi as the textual legitimization of what he considered erroneous practices during those two periods. By attempting to set the Yijing free from Tang influences, he expressed the desire of the first generation of the Northern Song educated elite to part ways with the past. In this chapter, we will examine Hu’s Zhouyi kouyi as a formulation of the civil bureaucrats’ mission to order the world. At the end of the chapter, we will contextualize his views by comparing his commentary with those of Li Gou and Ouyang Xiu. A Biography of Hu Yuan Hu Yuan was born into a poor scholar family in Taizhou (in present-day Jiangsu) in 993. Both Hu’s grandfather and father managed to secure only low-level administrative posts at local prefectures. As a child, Hu was known as a prodigy. He was proficient in writing by the age of seven and mastered the Five Classics by the age of thirteen.⁶ Despite his talents, however, he failed to pass the civil service examinations—a stigma that he had to carry throughout his life.⁷ Following a popular practice of the time, upon reaching adulthood Hu left his family for Mount Tai (present-day Shandong) for further learning. For ten years, he hid on the mountain like a recluse and studied the Confucian classics with his two friends Sun Fu and Shi Jie (005–045). According to one account, he was so absorbed in his study on Mount Tai that he even threw all of his family letters into a stream after spotting the words “peaceful and contented” (ping’an) on them.⁸ Hu’s behavior, usually considered un-Confucian under normal circumstances, is remembered as a sign of his dedication to Confucian learning, which was apparently in decline at that time. During these ten years, usually regarded as the pivotal period of Hu’s life, he developed his own understanding of the Confucian classics. Not only did he have confidence in Confucian learning, he also strongly believed that it needed to be applied in ordering the world. Hu worked for a while as a private teacher in the Zhejiang area before being invited in 035 by Fan Zhongyan to teach in the Suzhou Prefectural School. It was in Suzhou that he first earned fame as a strict teacher who enforced the school rules and demanded...

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