Chinese and East Asian Philosophy

Chinese philosophy began in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, as the old order of the Zhou dynasty broke down into competing states, and teachers such as Confucius set out to explain how people and governments ought to live. The ferment of the following centuries, remembered as the Hundred Schools of Thought, produced Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism and Legalism, which framed Chinese thinking for the next two thousand years. Later, Buddhism arrived from India and was transformed into new Chinese schools, and from the eleventh century Neo-Confucian thinkers rebuilt the Confucian tradition into a full account of the cosmos and the mind.

Because the written classics, Chinese characters and the Confucian examination ideal spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam, the story is East Asian as well as Chinese. Korean scholars of the Joseon era and Japanese Zen masters and Tokugawa Confucians made distinctive contributions, and in the twentieth century the Kyoto School in Japan and New Confucians in China and Taiwan brought the tradition into dialogue with western philosophy. Compared with the Greek tradition, Chinese thought was less concerned with proving what exists and more with how to act well, how to govern and how to live in harmony with the patterns of nature, though it also produced logic, debate and metaphysics of its own.

From 770 BCE the Zhou kings lost real power, and during the Spring and Autumn and then the Warring States periods, from about 475 to 221 BCE, rival states such as Qi, Chu, Jin and Qin fought for supremacy. Rulers needed advisers, and a class of educated men, shi, travelled between courts offering policies. This competition for patronage, and academies such as the Jixia Academy in the Qi capital Linzi, encouraged argument between schools.

Confucius, or Kongzi, traditionally 551 to 479 BCE, was a minor official and teacher from the state of Lu. His sayings were collected by his disciples in the Analects. He looked back to the early Zhou as a golden age and taught that order could be restored through moral cultivation rather than force. The ideal person, the junzi or gentleman, practises ren, humaneness or benevolence, and li, the rituals and courtesies that give relationships their proper form, from ancestral sacrifice to the way a son serves his father. Government should rule by virtue and example, so that the people follow willingly. His followers became the Ru, the scholars, and the tradition of Confucianism.

The first great challenge came from Mozi, active in the fifth century BCE, perhaps from a craftsman background. He attacked Confucian ritual as wasteful, especially elaborate funerals and music, and argued for jian ai, impartial care: one should care for other people's families and states as for one's own, since partiality causes theft and war. Mohists judged doctrines by whether they benefited the people, opposed aggressive war, and were famous as experts in defending besieged cities. Later Mohists wrote some of the earliest Chinese works on logic, geometry, optics and mechanics. The movement vanished after the Qin unification and was rediscovered only in the nineteenth century.

Mencius, or Mengzi, in the fourth century BCE, defended Confucius against Mozi and others. He argued that human nature is good: everyone has the sprouts of virtue, as shown by the alarm anyone would feel seeing a child about to fall into a well, and education should nurture them as a farmer tends crops. He also taught that a ruler who oppresses the people loses the Mandate of Heaven and may rightly be overthrown. Xunzi, in the third century BCE, disagreed: human nature is bad, or at least selfish, and goodness must be produced by ritual, teaching and law, as a warped board is straightened by steam and pressure. He also read Heaven, tian, as the impersonal working of nature rather than a moral will.

Daoism developed alongside. The Daodejing, attributed to Laozi, a figure who may be legendary and whose text was probably compiled over the fourth and third centuries BCE, speaks of the Dao, the Way, the nameless source and pattern of all things. Its ideal is wu wei, non-action or effortless action, yielding like water, which overcomes the hard by being soft; the best ruler governs so lightly that the people hardly know he exists. The Zhuangzi, named after a thinker of the fourth century BCE, is more playful and sceptical. In stories such as the dream in which Zhuangzi cannot tell whether he is a man who dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man, it questions fixed distinctions, mocks Confucian moralism and celebrates spontaneous freedom.

The School of Names, whose best-known figures were Hui Shi and Gongsun Long, explored paradoxes of language and logic. Gongsun Long's claim that a white horse is not a horse turns on the difference between naming a kind and naming a coloured kind. The Yin-Yang school, associated with Zou Yan, explained change through the interplay of yin and yang, the dark, receptive and the bright, active, and through the cycle of five phases, wood, fire, earth, metal and water. The Yijing, the Book of Changes, an ancient divination manual, gathered commentaries in this spirit and became a classic of cosmology.

The Legalists took the harshest view of politics. Shang Yang reformed the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE by rewarding farmers and soldiers and imposing collective punishments, and Han Feizi, a student of Xunzi who died in 233 BCE, combined earlier ideas into a theory of power. Clear, public laws backed by heavy punishments and generous rewards, techniques for controlling officials, and the ruler's positional authority would make the state strong regardless of anyone's virtue. Military thinkers such as Sun Tzu, to whom The Art of War is attributed, applied similar calculation to war.

Legalist methods helped Qin defeat its rivals in Qin's wars of unification, and in 221 BCE its king became Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty. His minister Li Si, another student of Xunzi, standardised script and law, and in 213 BCE, according to later Han historians who may have exaggerated, the court ordered the burning of books of the rival schools. Qin collapsed in 206 BCE, and its brutality discredited Legalism by name, though not its institutions.

The Han dynasty first favoured Huang-Lao, a blend of Daoist and Legalist ideas about minimal government. Under Emperor Wu of Han, from 141 to 87 BCE, the scholar Dong Zhongshu persuaded the court to honour Confucian learning, and from 136 BCE official posts were established for the Five Classics, followed by an imperial academy. Dong's Confucianism absorbed yin-yang and five-phase cosmology: the emperor linked Heaven, Earth and humanity, and natural disasters were warnings against bad rule. Han thinkers also argued over the authentic texts of the classics, while the sceptic Wang Chong, in the first century CE, attacked omens and ghosts as superstition. After the fall of the Han in 220 CE, the so-called Dark Learning, xuanxue, of Wang Bi and Guo Xiang reread Laozi, Zhuangzi and the Yijing as philosophy, asking how the multitude of things relates to non-being.

Buddhism reached China along the Silk Road in the first century CE, carried by merchants and monks from Central Asia and the Kushan Empire. Early translators borrowed Daoist terms, so that nirvana and emptiness were first understood through Chinese ideas of non-being. Accuracy improved with Kumarajiva, a Central Asian monk brought to Chang'an in 401, whose translations of the Madhyamaka works of Nagarjuna and of Mahayana scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra became standard. In the seventh century Xuanzang travelled overland to India, studied Yogacara at Nalanda and returned to Chang'an in 645 with the backing of Emperor Taizong of Tang to translate the texts he had collected.

Under the Sui and the Tang dynasty, when Chang'an, the modern Xi'an, was the largest city in the world, Chinese monks built their own schools. Tiantai, founded by Zhiyi in the sixth century, ranked all Buddhist teachings in a single scheme culminating in the Lotus Sutra and taught that each moment of thought contains the whole universe. Huayan, systematised by Fazang, who lectured to Wu Zetian, described a cosmos of perfect interpenetration, illustrated by Indra's net, in which every jewel reflects all the others. Pure Land Buddhism promised rebirth in the paradise of the Buddha Amitabha through faith and recitation of his name.

The most influential was Chan, from the Sanskrit dhyana, meditation, better known by its Japanese name, Zen. It claimed descent from the Indian monk Bodhidharma, a partly legendary figure, and took its classic form in the story of the sixth patriarch, Huineng, who died in 713, as told in the Platform Sutra. Chan taught that Buddha-nature is already present in everyone and that awakening can be sudden. It distrusted reliance on scriptures and used paradoxical dialogues, gong'an or koans, shouts and blows to break habitual thinking. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755 weakened the Tang, and the persecution of 845 crippled the scholastic schools, but Chan, rooted in rural monasteries, survived and flourished under the Song.

Under the Song dynasty, from 960, an expanding class of scholar-officials chosen by examination sought to reclaim the intellectual ground lost to Buddhism and Daoism. Thinkers such as Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi developed what western scholars call Neo-Confucianism. They answered Buddhist claims that the world is empty with a metaphysics of li, principle, the pattern that makes each thing what it is and ought to be, and qi, the vital stuff of which all things are made.

Zhu Xi, from 1130 to 1200, combined these ideas into a comprehensive system. Principle is one, but each thing has its own share of it, as the moon is reflected in countless streams. Human nature is principle and is therefore good, but it is clouded by turbid qi, which causes selfish desires. The remedy is the investigation of things, studying the principle in affairs, texts and nature until understanding becomes complete, together with reverent self-discipline. Zhu Xi grouped the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean as the Four Books and wrote commentaries on them. In 1313 the Mongol Yuan dynasty made these the basis of the civil service examinations, which they remained until 1905, so his reading of Confucius became orthodoxy across the Ming dynasty and the Qing dynasty. His contemporary Lu Jiuyuan objected that principle is found directly in the mind.

Wang Yangming, from 1472 to 1529, a Ming official and general, developed that objection. As a young man he tried to follow Zhu Xi by contemplating bamboo for days to grasp its principle, and fell ill. In 1508, exiled to a remote post in Guizhou, he concluded that principle is not outside the mind. Everyone possesses liangzhi, innate knowledge of the good, and the task is to extend it in action. He taught the unity of knowledge and action: to know filial piety but not practise it is not really to know it. His school spread widely in the late Ming and, critics said, encouraged individualism. Qing scholars reacted against both schools with evidential research, kaozheng, a careful philological study of ancient texts, and Dai Zhen, in the eighteenth century, attacked Neo-Confucian principle as a tool used by the powerful to condemn ordinary desires.

Confucianism and Buddhism reached Korea from China in the period of the Three Kingdoms. In Silla, the monk Wonhyo, in the seventh century, wrote commentaries that sought to harmonise the disputes between Buddhist schools, and Seon, the Korean Chan, became dominant under Goryeo, where Jinul in the twelfth century combined sudden awakening with gradual cultivation. The Joseon dynasty, founded in 1392, made Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism its state ideology; the scholar-official Jeong Do-jeon wrote a sustained attack on Buddhism, and kings such as Sejong the Great ruled through Confucian institutions.

Joseon scholars debated Neo-Confucian psychology with unusual depth. Yi Hwang, known as Toegye, from 1501 to 1570, argued in an exchange of letters with the younger Gi Daeseung that began in 1559 that the four sprouts of virtue described by Mencius issue from principle, while the seven ordinary emotions, such as joy and anger, issue from qi. Yi I, known as Yulgok, from 1536 to 1584, replied that only qi actually moves, with principle riding on it, so all feelings arise in the same way. This Four-Seven Debate divided Korean Confucians into rival schools for centuries and is seen as a high point of East Asian moral psychology. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Silhak, or practical learning, movement, whose leading figure was Jeong Yak-yong, known as Dasan, turned to administration, economics and science and drew on Catholic writings that had come from China.

Buddhism entered Japan from Korea in the sixth century. Kūkai, from 774 to 835, founded the esoteric Shingon school and taught that one can become a Buddha in this very body, and Saichō established Tendai on Mount Hiei near Kyoto. In the Kamakura shogunate period, from the late twelfth century, new movements offered simpler paths: Hōnen and Shinran taught salvation through faith in Amida Buddha, Nichiren devotion to the Lotus Sutra, and Eisai and Dōgen brought Zen from Song China.

Dōgen, from 1200 to 1253, founder of the Sōtō school, is often regarded as Japan's most profound Buddhist philosopher. In his Shōbōgenzō, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, he taught that practice and enlightenment are one: sitting in meditation, zazen, is not a means to awakening but its expression. He argued that time is being itself, that each moment is complete, and that all beings are Buddha-nature rather than merely having it. The Rinzai school, by contrast, emphasised koan practice, and Zen shaped Japanese arts from ink painting to the tea ceremony.

After the Sengoku period of civil war, Tokugawa Ieyasu founded the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603, and Neo-Confucianism became the leading learning of the samurai class. Hayashi Razan taught Zhu Xi's school to the shoguns, while Nakae Tōju followed Wang Yangming. Itō Jinsai and Ogyū Sorai rejected Song metaphysics and called for a return to the ancient meaning of the classics, Sorai treating the Confucian Way as institutions invented by the ancient sages to order society. In reaction, scholars of National Learning, kokugaku, above all Motoori Norinaga, sought an authentic Japanese sensibility in ancient poetry and Shinto texts, free of Chinese influence.

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan imported western philosophy wholesale, coining the word tetsugaku for it. Nishida Kitarō, from 1870 to 1945, drawing on Zen practice and on William James, argued in An Inquiry into the Good, published in 1911, that pure experience, prior to the split between subject and object, is the basic reality. He later developed a logic of basho, place, culminating in a place of absolute nothingness in which all oppositions are held. Around him at Kyoto Imperial University formed the Kyoto School, including Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji, who studied with Martin Heidegger in Germany and used Buddhist emptiness to answer the problem of nihilism. Some of their wartime writings lent support to the Empire of Japan, and their political record remains contested. Watsuji Tetsurō developed an ethics of betweenness, arguing that a person exists only in relationships.

From the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842, defeat by western powers and Japan forced Chinese thinkers to ask what to keep and what to change. Kang Youwei reinterpreted Confucius as a reformer, and Yan Fu translated Huxley, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. After the 1911 revolution and the founding of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen set out his Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 in Beijing denounced Confucianism as the source of China's weakness and demanded science and democracy. Hu Shi championed John Dewey's pragmatism, Bertrand Russell lectured in China in 1920 and 1921, and Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao turned to Karl Marx and helped found the Chinese Communist Party.

Mao Zedong's essays On Practice and On Contradiction, from 1937, adapted Marxist dialectics to Chinese conditions, and after 1949 Marxism became official doctrine on the mainland, while Confucius was attacked during the Cultural Revolution. Others defended the tradition. Liang Shuming argued in the 1920s that Chinese culture offered a path distinct from the west's, and New Confucians such as Xiong Shili, and later Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi, working mostly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, rebuilt Neo-Confucian metaphysics in dialogue with Kant and Hegel. Since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, Confucianism has been rehabilitated in the People's Republic, both as a field of scholarship and as a resource for the state.

East Asian philosophy reached Europe in the seventeenth century through Jesuit missionaries, who translated the Confucian classics into Latin. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz saw his binary arithmetic in the hexagrams of the Yijing, and Voltaire praised China as a state governed by philosophers, part of the background to the Enlightenment. In the twentieth century Zen and Daoism attracted western writers and philosophers, and the Kyoto School became a bridge to continental philosophy. Today Confucian ethics, Daoist and Buddhist metaphysics and Neo-Confucian moral psychology are studied worldwide as living contributions to philosophy, not only as history, and remain part of the common culture of China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam.