Zhu Xi (1130 - 1200) was a Chinese philosopher, historian, poet and official of the Southern Song dynasty, and the principal systematiser of Neo-Confucianism. [1] His commentaries on the Confucian classics and his elevation of the Four Books defined the orthodox curriculum of Chinese education and the civil service examinations from the fourteenth century until 1905. [2] His influence extended across Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
Life and career
Zhu Xi was born on 18 October 1130 in Youxi County, in Fujian province, during the early years of the Southern Song. [1] He came from a scholar-official family, passed the imperial examinations while still young, and entered government service. Much of his official career was spent in relatively minor provincial posts, which he often preferred to appointments at court, leaving him time for study, teaching and writing. He served as a local administrator in Fujian and elsewhere, undertook famine relief work, and briefly held a position as lecturer to the emperor. [3]
He restored and revived the White Deer Grotto Academy in Jiangxi, which became a model for the private academies that spread across China in later centuries and a centre of philosophical instruction. Late in his life his teachings were condemned at court as false learning, and he died in 1200 under official censure; the ban was lifted soon afterwards and his reputation rose steadily thereafter. [1]
Philosophy
Zhu Xi drew together the strands of eleventh-century Confucian revival, particularly the work of the Cheng brothers, into a coherent metaphysical system often called the School of Principle. [2] He held that all things consist of li, principle or pattern, and qi, material force. Principle is one and universal, while material force accounts for the particularity and imperfection of individual things, including the obscuring of human moral nature.
From this followed a programme of self-cultivation centred on the "investigation of things", the disciplined study of the world and of texts through which the learner comes to apprehend principle and so recover an originally good nature. [4] His system offered Confucianism a metaphysics comparable in scope to that of Buddhism and Daoism, with which it had long competed.
The Four Books
Zhu Xi selected and annotated four texts — the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean — as the essential introduction to Confucian learning, ranking them ahead of the older Five Classics as a starting point for students. [2] His commentaries on these Four Books were adopted as the authoritative basis of the imperial examinations under the Yuan dynasty and remained so under the Ming and Qing, making his interpretation the standard reading of the Confucian tradition for generations of educated Chinese.
Legacy
Zhu Xi is generally ranked second only to Confucius himself in influence on Chinese thought. [3] His system, transmitted as Zhu Xi learning, became state orthodoxy in Korea under the Joseon dynasty and was widely studied in Tokugawa Japan and in Vietnam. Later thinkers, notably Wang Yangming, defined their own positions in opposition to his, and his framework remained the point of reference for East Asian philosophy until the modern era. He also wrote poetry and historical works, including a condensed edition of Sima Guang's chronicle of Chinese history. [1]
