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-36ON THE CHING-SHIH IDEAL IN NEOCONFUCIANISM Chang Ha o Department of History The Ohio State University In the literatures of Neo -Confucianism few ideas are more prominent and meanwhile more elusive than the concept of chmg shih . The elusiveness of the concept stems largely from the fact that it was used by people of almc_";t e^ cry intellectual ¿tripe m the Confucian tradition. It appeared in the thought of men with as different intellectual background from each other as Lu Hsiang-shan and Ku Yen-wu. In the nineteenth-century China it was an ideal as central to those 'tender -minded idealists' like T'ang Chien or Lo Tse-nan as to those 'tough -minded pragmatiste' like Wei Yuan or Fend Kuei-fen. Its elusiveness was further compounded bv the fact that its meaning was seldom, if ever, clearly defined m the context where it was used. This paper is an effort to carlify this om'nibus ideal in the context of Neo -Confucianism, hoping thereby to set bounds to its meanings and to bring some order to the sociopolitical thought that had been clustered around the ideal over the centuries. In its broadest sense the chmg -shih ideal may be seen as a defining characteristic of the Confucian humanism, reflecting a value -commitment to the this -worldly activism and participation -37- ìn society, which stands in sharp contrast with the other-worldly orientation of Buddhism and the Taoist ideal of social withdrawal. Within the framework of Neo-Confucianism, however, the ideal is also one of several interchangeable symbols, embodying a complex of concerns and ideas centered around the problem: How to set the society and the world in order? More specifically, the problem broke down into two further questions'. How to define the ideal order and how to implement that order in the outer world? Orer the centuries the Neo-Confucian answers to the twin problems of order and statecraft were shaped by the dual character Confucianism assumed in the Chinese society since Sung. On the one side the fundamental impulse of Confucianism as a religiomoral tradition is of course to create a moral order in accordance with the Sage's vision. Meanwhile, Confucianism is also a system of beliefs and ideas embraced especially by the social and political elite in traditional China. Inevitably as such Confucianism involves a secular-pragmatic concern with achieving order in state and society. In other words, Confucianism was a moral faith as well as a state ideology. This dual character of Confucianism goes far to account for the protean nature of its conceptions of order and statecraft, that lie at the core of the ching -shih ideal. From a host of concepts of the ching -shih ideal that accumulated over the centuries, two stood out which proved to have -38broad and enduring impart in íhr Neo -Con fue ia ? trad Lt ion. One oiinii^pl wlinli represents a kind ??? orllmdiix Neu -Confucun position is marked by a rnoraL idealism which conceives order in human societies largely p? the framework of tlie Confucian moral philosophy of seli-cult ivation (i -1 1 eh Lh hsuVh). At the root of lhi*- philosoph\ us .1 t oiH e rn .it once individual and social, that is, to become a sage and to bring about a moral community This basic concern was spelled oui i" a metaphysical wurld-vicw which postulates an essential unity of Heaven and man (t'ien-jen ho-i). According to this world-view, the existence of each human individual is made possible bv the combined presence of two fundamental forces in the universe: a moral-spiritual force that constitutes his essential nature or true self and a material force that constitutes his physical, empirical self. Since the essential natures of all hum in beings are seen as endowments from Heaven and therefore sharing a common source, a primordial spiritual unity is believed to inform the cosmos. However this primordial unity often has great difficulty in making itself manifest in the actual world because there is a general tendency for the Heaven-endowed true nature of the human self to get muddied and obscured by the presence of material force. Thus...

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