Zhu Xi

Zhu Xi was a Chinese philosopher, teacher and official of the Southern Song dynasty and the leading figure of Neo-Confucianism, the revival of Confucianism that answered the challenge of Buddhism and Daoism with a complete account of the universe, human nature and moral life. His commentaries on the Four Books became the basis of the Chinese civil service examinations from 1313 until 1905, and his teaching became the official orthodoxy of China, Korea and, to a large degree, Japan. After Confucius himself, few thinkers have had a wider influence on East Asian society.

Zhu Xi was born on 18 October 1130 in Youxi, in Fujian province, where his father, a minor official from Wuyuan in Huizhou, was serving. These were troubled years. The Jurchen Jin dynasty had conquered northern China in 1127, and the Song court had retreated south, eventually settling at Hangzhou. Zhu's father lost his post in 1140 for opposing the court's policy of making peace with the Jin, and taught the boy at home. Anecdotes describe a precocious child who at five asked what lay beyond Heaven.

His father died in 1143, and Zhu Xi was taught by his father's friends, who introduced him to Buddhist and Daoist ideas as well as Confucian learning. In 1148, while still a teenager, he passed the highest level of the civil service examinations, earning the jinshi degree.

Zhu's first post was as a district registrar at Tong'an, in Fujian, from 1153 to 1156. In those years he began to study with Li Tong, a follower of the eleventh-century brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, whose ideas would become the foundation of his own system. Under Li Tong's guidance he turned away from Buddhism and committed himself fully to the Confucian way.

For most of his adult life Zhu avoided office, preferring to study, write and teach on modest temple sinecures. When he did serve, he was a conscientious and outspoken administrator. As prefect of Nankang, in Jiangxi, from 1179 he organised famine relief and restored the White Deer Grotto Academy, for which he wrote a set of rules that became a model for Confucian academies across East Asia. He later held posts in Zhejiang, Zhangzhou in Fujian and Hunan, and briefly in 1194 served as a lecturer to the young Emperor Ningzong at court.

His frank criticism of corrupt officials made him powerful enemies. In 1196, under the chief minister Han Tuozhou, his teaching was condemned as "false learning", his followers were barred from office, and a petition even demanded his execution. He died on 23 April 1200, in Fujian, still under the ban. Nearly a thousand people are said to have attended his funeral despite it.

Zhu Xi brought the ideas of earlier Song thinkers, above all the Cheng brothers, Zhou Dunyi and Zhang Zai, into a single system. Everything in the world, he taught, is made of qi, "vital force" or "material force", the stuff of which things are formed, and li, "principle", the pattern or reason that makes each thing what it is and what it ought to be. Principle is one, and yet each thing contains all of it, as the single moon is reflected whole in countless rivers and lakes. The sum of all principle is the taiji, the "Supreme Ultimate". Whether this makes Zhu Xi a dualist, with principle and force as two separate realities, or something subtler, is still debated, since he insisted that the two never exist apart.

This gave him an explanation of human nature. Following Mencius, he held that human nature, which is principle, is perfectly good; and he rejected the opposite view of Xunzi. People do wrong because the qi they are endowed with is more or less clouded, like a pearl lying in muddy water, and because selfish desires obscure their original goodness.

The way back to that goodness is learning. Zhu Xi's key method was gewu, the "investigation of things", taken from a short classic called the Great Learning. By studying the principle in things one by one, in books, in human affairs and in the natural world, and by extending one's knowledge step by step, a person eventually reaches a sudden comprehensive understanding of principle as a whole. This is joined to "reverent seriousness" (jing), a constant attentive composure, and to quiet sitting, a form of meditation he recommended in moderation.

This emphasis on patient study, not sudden inner enlightenment, separated his teaching both from Chan Buddhism and from the rival Confucian thinker Lu Jiuyuan, who argued that principle is found in the mind itself. The two men debated at the Goose Lake Temple in 1175 without reaching agreement, a disagreement later taken up by Wang Yangming.

Zhu Xi was immensely productive, writing, compiling or editing close to a hundred works. His most important act was to group four short texts, the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, as the Four Books, which he presented as the proper starting point of education, ahead of the older Five Classics. His commentaries on them, completed over decades and published in 1190, became the authoritative reading. With his friend Lü Zuqian he compiled Reflections on Things at Hand (1175), an anthology of the Song masters. He also wrote commentaries on the Book of Changes and the Book of Odes, a guide to family ritual that shaped weddings, funerals and ancestor worship for centuries, and directed a condensed moral history based on Sima Guang's great chronicle. His conversations with students were collected in 140 chapters.

The ban on his teaching was lifted soon after his death. In 1208 he was given the posthumous name Wen, "the Cultured", and in 1241 his tablet was placed in the Confucian temple. Under the Yuan dynasty, a decree of 1313 made the Four Books with his commentaries the core of the examinations, and the Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty kept this system until the examinations were abolished in 1905. For six centuries, every candidate for office in China studied Confucius through Zhu Xi's eyes.

His school, known as the Cheng-Zhu school or the "learning of principle", became the state ideology of Joseon Korea, where scholars such as Yi Hwang developed it further, and of Tokugawa Japan, where the Hayashi family promoted it, as well as shaping education in Vietnam. Critics, including Wang Yangming in the sixteenth century and scholars of evidential learning in the Qing, accused it of becoming rigid and bookish. In Europe, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz discussed Neo-Confucian principle in his writings on Chinese natural theology. Zhu Xi remains, with Confucius and Mencius, one of the central figures of Chinese philosophy.