Organizer: Kai wing Chow, University of Illinois
Chair: Kwang ching Liu, University of California, Davis
Discussant: Benjamin Elman, University of California, Los Angeles
Discursive and symbolic boundaries are constantly erected and shifted to mark Confucian values, ideas, and practices off from discursive elements claimed by other intellectual or religious systems such as Buddhism and Taoism. Why is filial piety a "Confucian" value and meditation a Buddhist or Taoist practice? How and why are values, ideas, and practices labeled Confucian at one time but rejected at another? To define is to exclude. Exclusion and inclusion require moving the discursive/imaginary boundaries of Confucianism. What the seven panelists are interested in is how Confucianism in its various aspects, is constantly being redefined in relation to other values, ideas, and practices.
The proposed panel has two parts. Part I, chaired by Kwang ching Liu, includes three papers dealing specifically with the strategies and methods for identifying and distinguishing Confucian ideas and texts from non Confucian ones. Henderson's paper draws attention to the fact that Ch'eng-Chu neo Confucians' effort in identifying and criticizing heretics is in fact a strategy for establishing their claim to orthodoxy. Chow's paper argues that identifying texts as Confucian or Buddhist involves hermeneutic principles of interpretation. His paper examines the methods and criteria used in rejecting and defending "Great Learning" as a Confucian text in the late Ming and early Ch'ing period. Ng's paper focuses on how the Ch'eng Chu neo Confucians attacked Wang Yang ming and his followers in the late Ming and early Ch'ing period. Ng's paper provides another example of how the imaginary boundaries with which Confucianism was marked off from "heterodox" ideas often were drawn in texts-the "Confucian Classics."
Part II, chaired by Ying shih Yu, has four papers, each dealing with one major thinker's effort in redefining Confucianism in discourse and practice. Hauf's paper on Wang Yang ming set the stage for the changing notion and practice of Confucian education in the Ming period. By examining his own educational experience and later his teaching career, Hauf shows that Wang's own education both in methods and in content had crossed into domains conventionally identified as Buddhist and Taoist. Cheng's paper examines how Lo Ju fang through his mass lectures redefined the methods and meaning of Confucian education. Lo made innovative use of music, songs, and drew ideas from different intellectual and religious traditions in order to address a mixed audience with examination candidates crowded among peasants, laborers, merchants, and shopkeepers. Ku's paper focuses on the role of the fall of the Ming dynasty in Ku Yen wu's effort in redefining Confucianism through reinventing the Confucian tradition and through attacking many late Ming thinkers such as Li Chih and many followers of Wang Yang-ming. Hsiung's paper takes up the question of how T'ang Chen understood Confucianism when he was on the margin of the Confucian world, where institutional controls and material support were lacking. Where and how did he draw the line between Confucianism and non Confucian ideas, especially in the case of government?
John Henderson, Louisiana State University
One of the ways by which scholars of the Ch'eng Chu persuasion established and preserved their claim to orthodoxy was through representing their Neo Confucian rivals as heretics. This representation was not, however, a matter of simple categorization or condemnation, but entailed the use of certain heresiographical strategies having close parallels in other orthodox traditions. These strategies include the presentation of heresies as incomplete or one sided versions of orthodoxy, the linking of diverse heresies through fictive genealogies, the representation of latter day heresies as combinations or summa of earlier ones, and more generally the schematization and reduction of heresy to orthodox terms. While adumbrations of some of these strategies appear in the classical Confucian writings of Mencius and Hsun tzu, they were developed and articulated by Ch'eng Chu Neo Confucian scholars, beginning with Ch'eng I and Chu Hsi and culminating in the late Ming and early Ch'ing in the polemical writings of such scholars as Ch'en Chien and Lu Lung ch'i. These strategies are not just an interesting artifact of Neo Confucian discourse, but are also cases of a more universal grammar of heresiography also used in other religious traditions, as well as modern ideologies, for dealing with a threatening internal other, a perceived enemy within. Ch'eng Chu scholars' sophisticated articulation of this grammar of heresiography, in marked contrast with their rivals' general neglect of heresiography, helps to explain how their school re established its position of intellectual orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. It may also partially account for the purist narrowing of Ch'eng Chu orthodoxy in early Ch'ing times.
Kai wing Chow, University of Illinois
How do we know that an idea such as filial piety is a Confucian, not a Taoist, or a Legalist teaching? Many assure us that the idea is Confucian because Confucius promotes it in the Analects and it figures prominently in the Confucian Classics which Confucius had edited. This method of identifying and verifying the intellectual identity of an idea in fact involves two commonly used criteria for erecting boundaries between intellectual traditions: textual source and its origin in the speaker. If an idea is found to be present and/or central in a text identified as Confucian, it is then a Confucian idea. If it is found to be uttered by Confucius or those identitied as his faithful followers such as Mencius and Hsun Tzu, then it is also a Confucian idea. To identify what is not Confucian is to reverse the criteria. To expose the false identity or misidentification of a text will serve to discredit a doctrine or idea, whose authenticity depends on the "authenticity" of the text. Likewise, to prove that an utterance or statement was attributed to Confucius will disqualify its status as a Confucian teaching. The methods and strategies for labeling and hence classifying ideas and texts are the major concerns of hermeneutics.
In this paper, I propose to explore some of the common strategies and methods for identifying Confucian ideas and values and for rejecting "heterodox" elements that are believed to have infiltrated in Confucianism. My analysis will focus on the debate over one of the Four Books, "The Great Learning" in the late Ming and early Ch'ing period. By examining the changing status of the chapter "The Great Learning" in the Ming Ch'ing period, we can see how the boundaries of Confucianism were erected, demolished and shifted in response to different intellectual and socio political conditions.
On cho Ng, Pennsylvania State University
In traditional China, the pursuit of normative truths was often undertaken within the context of hermeneutics, that is, the study of canonical texts. This cultural truism was amply demonstrated in the late Ming when many ChengZhu followers were repulsed by the ideas of the LuWang partisans, and were convinced that ethico moral flaccidity and socio political atrophy stemmed, in the first place, from the LuWang neglect of the Classics. Hence their call to hark back to the Classics. But how were the Classics to be read?
This paper, by focusing on Chen Jian (1491-1567), Gu Xiancheng (1550 1612) and Li Guangdi (1642-1718), shows that these MingQing ChengZhu thinkers' philosophic predispositions governed their interpretive engagement with the Classics, both substantively and strategically. Insofar as they responded to the LuWang idea of the ontological centrality mind heart (xin) as the essential substance (benti), they developed the countervailing motif of human nature (xing) as the philosophic underpinning of their hermeneutic endeavors, which would in turn furnish concrete guides to actions. The LuWang idea they branded as derivations of heterodox Buddhism leading to otherworldly fecklessness, whereas theirs they affirmed as faithful rendering of the teaching of the Classics leading to social practicality. How the Classics were read was very much a function of the interpreters' philosophic convictions.
This paper also seeks to shed some comparative light on the question of hermeneutics. It suggests that classical Chinese exegesis is similar to contemporary interpretive hermeneutics as the subjective interpenetration of the writerly (the text) and readerly (the interpreter), with the notable difference that in China, the authority of the Classics themselves furnished the bedrock of the hermeneutic order, even though individual authorial imprints and historico cultural conditions enabled interpretive latitude.
Furthermore, to the extent that Confucian hermeneutics saw understanding as integrally tied to action and commitment, it resembles Gadamer's philosophic hemeneutics, which affirms the reader's own biases in the hermeneutic enterprise and sees the fusing of her/his own historical horizon with that of the texts as the ontological basis of understanding, yielding in the end what he calls "effective history."
The MingQing ChengZhu Confucians, with their notion of human nature as the ontological center of reality, communicated with the Classics, within the bounds of which an interactive dialogue with the living past took place, producing for themselves "effective history" at a time when unsavory LuWang teachings predominated. Hermeneutics led not only to understanding of the words of the sages but also to their integration in the interpreters' philosophy and life.
In sum, this paper shows that the MingQing ChengZhu scholars, in their effort to remap the domain of Confucianism, resorted to hermeneutics, summoned the timeless Classics, and drew the line between Chan like LuWang heterodoxy and pristine ChengZhu orthodoxy. But such effort was no closed formal game that defied history. Their purposeful engagement with the Classics, this time around, would find expression in the late Ming and early Qing central philosophic problematique: human nature.
Would you like to return to the China & Inner Asia Table of Contents? Choose another area?