Organizer: Kai-wing Chow, University of Illinois
Chair: Ying-shih Yu, Princeton University
Discussant: Lynn Struve, Indiana University
Kandice Hauf, Babson College
This paper explores the purpose, content, and methods of education of the most influential Confucian thinker of the Ming Dynasty, Wang Yangming (1472-1529). Wang was an accomplished teacher, as well as statesman, soldier, and philosopher. His teachings attracted ardent followers and opponents in late imperial China (and in Japan and Korea). Wang Yangming developed an expansive notion of education in terms of audience and methods. Because he wanted to reach all people, Wang appropriated strategies from popular religion, Buddhism, and Daoism, as well as more spiritual, populist, and action oriented strands within Confucianism. Wang was not interested in definitions, but in results. Buddhism and Daoism were not as intellectually vital as in the Song, but were still cautioned against. Wang occasionally associated with Buddhists and Daoists and used certain ideas and techniques that have been associated with these two traditions including questioning the importance of texts, martial arts and mind body cultivation, discussions on human nature and mind, the academy setting, quiet sitting, use of gungan, ad the emphasis on a person to person transmission.
The content of education for Wang contracted to his major teaching, "innate moral knowledge" (liangzhi) which concerns the nature of wisdom as knowledge of the good and the absolute and the method of acquiring it. Wang taught that every person, including unlettered men and women, contained this often beclouded innate moral knowledge and should take personal responsibility to cultivate it. He put less emphasis on literacy and the authority of the Classics than did earlier Confucian thinkers. Though many of his students were examination candidates, Wang did not teach examination studies. In terms of audience, purpose and methods Wang aimed at "goodness unbound." There is a religious dimension to the teaching of awakening one's liangzhi which makes understandable Wang's reaching outside of Confucianism for methods to get across his ideas. Wang's teachings clearly contained radical implications, though Wang did not always carry them into practice and thought in terms of a hierarchically differentiated society. However, he intellectually prepared the ground for his late Ming followers to actualize his populist ideals, for example in education for women.
Through a study of Wang's writings, along with relevant primary and secondary materials, I will examine Wang's own education and development, then his educational ideas and activities within the social and political as well as intellectual contexts of the Ming. In studying content and methods I will consider the use of ritual, meditation, shrines, songs, martial arts, the lecture discussion method (jiangxue), proclamations, public lectures, and the community covenant. I will focus on practice, and secondarily on doctrine, as these are the richest areas for analyzing Wang Yangming using the concept of boundaries.
Yu yin Cheng, University of California, Davis
Sixteenth-century Ming China saw considerable social and economic change: commerce and urban economy were expanding; lineage was taking new forms; and social mobility was rising. During this dynamic age, the T'ai chou branch of the Wang Yang ming school brought new ideas and qualities to Ming Confucianism. The T'ai chou scholars were not only philosophers; they were also activists. Their activism aimed at awakening the moral instincts of their audience (including officials and scholars, artisans and peasants, Buddhists and Taoists, and indeed all walks of people), and at reinterpreting Confucian social ethics from a more egalitarian and intuitive perspective so as to reconcile the Three Teachings of the Chinese tradition. The T'ai chou scholar activists traveled to many provinces of China to spread the message through public "lecture meetings" (chiang hsüeh). The characteristics of this newly conceived Confucianism are especially well documented in the case of Lo Ju fang, a widely admired T'ai chou scholar of the middle and late sixteenth century.
Concerned with both the activities and the thought of Lo Ju fang (1515-88), this work demonstrates that a full and truthful portrait of the matured T'ai chou school cannot be drawn without studying him. Lo crisscrossed the map of Ming China to spread his message in private academies, Buddhist monasteries and Taoist temples, official yamen, guild halls (hui kuan), lineage temples, "community covenant" (hsiang-yüeh) gatherings, and even jails. To create a quasi religious atmosphere, Lo employed various techniques in his lecture meetings. Choir and music were provided; proverbs and poems were cited; popular Taoist and Buddhist concepts (such as retribution, cycle of rebirth, and the idea of kindness creating a debt [en]) were explained in the vernacular language; the audience's introspective reflection and emotions were eventually aroused. Lo sought to develop among his audience awareness of their own moral autonomy. They were expected to listen to the voice of their own conscience (liang chih or liang hsin) so that their daily conduct of human relations would be spontaneous (tzu jan) and based upon feeling (ch'ing)-a property of the sage (sheng jen) himself. To Lo, the greatest fulfillment of the great man (ta jen) lay in the attainment of sagehood, not just by one self but by all humanity. It was this ideal that Lo preached wherever he went and whomever he met. An evangelical style of Confucianism was developed. He claimed to have acted in accordance with spontaneous and authentic mind and heart; he aroused the people's conscience even as he himself sought sagehood. Lo thus undermined the power of Confucian hierarchical ritual propriety among his followers, in favor of a more compassionate and a more egalitarian ideal.
Wei ying Ku, National University of Taiwan
The fall of the Ming dynasty and the consequent establishment of the Manchu regime, the conquest of China by a non Han tribe, was a huge blow to a lot of conscientious Chinese thinkers of the time. "T'ien peng ti chieh" (heaven collapsed and the earth disintegrated) was a symbolic description of the time. Experiencing the turbulence, witnessing martyrdom of friends and suffering from guilt and humiliation, scholars of this transitional period had tried very hard to reflect on the causes of this tragedy and to deliberate on the best future course for them and the country to take. It is largely due to their efforts that Confucianism and the intellectual outlook in the next two hundred years were redefined and reshaped.
Ku Yen wu (1613-1682) was one of the most important thinkers of the early Ch'ing period. Owing to the vastness and profundity of his knowledge, Ku in many aspects was the founding father of Ch'ing Confucian scholarship. His life and thought has been the subject of many contemporary scholars. But with the recent emphasis on local study and "late imperial China," it is time to reexamine how boundaries shifted in Ku's conception of "Confucianism." Ku wanted to reinvent Confucianism through purifying the Confucian tradition and redefining its core values. The reinvention was undertaken through both his efforts to "restore" Confucian traditions and his attempt to exclude from the "Confucian camp" late Ming scholars such as Li Chih (1527-1602) and Wang Yang ming's followers.
This paper aims to trace the background of Ku's perception of "authentic" Confucianism. It seeks to explain why and how other thinkers were criticized by him as preaching heterodoxy, and more important, what criteria he used to distinguish the "orthodox" from the "heterodox" teachings, which he blamed for the downfall of the Ming dynasty. I also hope to show the change in Ku's thinking through several crucial stages of his life and, more important, his role in redrawing the boundaries of Confucianism in Ming Ch'ing Confucianism.
Ping chen Hsiung, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Confucianism as an intellectual tradition and as a set of social norms, like any comparable convictions, has gone through many phases of orientation and re orientation. The case of T'ang Chen, along with others of his time, revealed vividly how at a time of rapid historical change such orientation and reorientation may be most valuable in illuminating and perhaps amplifying the changing and creative nature both of Confucianism and of Ming ch'ing China.
This paper intends to use the particular case of T'ang Chen (1630-1704) to discuss the re orientation of Confucianism in the Ch'ing period. Being a provincial intellectual uprooted in many ways at a time of dynastic change, T'ang's personal experience and intellectual odyssey can shed much light on the inner existence of Confucian scholars. A crucial part of it is to try grappling with the Confucian tradition which he deeply cherished and yet was hardly clear to him. His life long struggle to fulfill his self image of a worthy disciple of Confucianism, therefore, serves as a good example to illustrate the very fluid nature of the intellectual heritage called Confucianism.
The paper will begin by giving an autographical sketch of the seventeenth century provincial intellectual T'ang Chen, focusing especially on his relative deprived education experience and his largely unsuccessful career occasioned, in many ways, by the Ming Ch'ing transition. As a poorly equipped disciple, T'ang found his efforts to try to grasp the Confucian tradition as well as to come to terms with his often frustrating life a lonely and bewildering experience. The orthodox way, to his mind, is both hard to discover (given a person with limited intellectual resources), and hard to recover (given the highly disruptive nature of the political and social reality). For T'ang Chen, the Confucian boundaries were not only changing, they were perhaps ambiguous to begin with. To illustrate this point, I shall thus T'ang's bold attacks of the Chinese monarchy, and his unconventional views on the gender issues as good examples to consider the objective as well as the subjective conditions required or reflected in an individual's appreciation of Confucianism. In this instance, it is particularly compelling to consider the very nature of Confucian boundaries as they appeared to different people often situated in quite disparate political, social, economic and cultural circumstances. How easy or how difficult was it, we may ask, for an intellectual or a commoner, each tied down by his or her often unenviable conditions, to understand or even to identify with orthodox Confucianism, if there ever was one.
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