Every educated Chinese person has heard of Zhu Xi. However, besides the fact that he was a philosopher in the Song dynasty, how much do we really know about this man who profoundly influenced East Asian culture and who was recently listed by America's Life magazine as one of the most important persons of the millennium?
Zhu Xi's clan came from Wuyuan, in Anhui Province. He was born in 1130, the fourth year of the reign of the Emperor Gaozong of the Southern Song dynasty. Zhu came from a family of officials, and in fact first entered the world in Fujian province, in the town of Youxi, where his father was posted. This was also the ancestral town of many people who, centuries later, emigrated to Taiwan.
Zhu passed the initial level of the imperial exams when he was 19. At the age of 22, he became the chief registrar of Tongan County in the Quanzhou region of Fujian. During a brief period as an instructor in the imperial palace, he taught the Confucian classic The Great Learning to the emperor. At age 33 he became a doctor of letters and wrote to the Emperor Xiaozong encouraging him to emulate the great sages. He also opposed the policy of appeasing the Song's enemies, the Jin. Because he was out of step with mainstream opinion at that time, and had no specific position, he asked to be allowed to return home to study and write.
Male chauvinist?
Zhu Xi carried on the school of thought advocated by the Northern Song philosopher Cheng Yi. Perhaps Zhu's most quoted aphorism is "it is better to die of hunger than to lose one's virtue." This platitude, which refers to a woman's virginity, was actually articulated by Cheng Yi, and became part of a collection of Northern Song philosophy edited by Zhu (entitled A Record of Recent Thought). It was included in the chapter entitled "Family Ethics" and has earned Zhu Xi the reputation of being "anti-feminist." He also declared that a widowed woman should never remarry, and as a result has been misunderstood to be one of the founders of the rigid rules of female chastity promoted by Chinese officialdom ever since the Ming dynasty.
In fact, neither Cheng nor Zhu were especially concerned about whether widows should remarry. Zhu admitted, "In the common outlook, the idea that it is better to die of hunger than to lose one's virtue is seen as pretentious and overly rigid." But, to Cheng and Zhu, given the social trends that had prevailed in China since the late Tang and Five Dynasties period, it was important to reassert the moral standards they thought people should aspire to.
The late Wing-tsit Chan, a renowned scholar associated with, among others, Columbia University and the Academia Sinica, wrote: "If a wife compromises her virtue, this also means the husband has failed in his own behavior. From this, we can see that the main concern of that school of thought is not so much chastity per se as overall social virtue."
In his essay "Zhu Xi on Women," Chan records numerous comments Zhu made with regard to women. Once Zhu was discussing a legal case with his student Zhao Shixia. There was a woman whose husband's family was incapable of providing support for her, so the county magistrate allowed her own family to take her back. Zhao wondered how the court could agree to break the bond tying wife to husband just because of poverty.
But Zhu Xi, who in many people's eyes was a prudish old stick-in-the-mud, argued that you could not look at this matter only from that one angle. "If the husband is incompetent, and cannot support his wife or himself, what else can be done? This isn't a question of philosophical system. I only worry that there are many reasons why a wife would want to leave her husband, so it is important to understand the situation thoroughly." In that era, when the question of "equal rights" for men and women was not even discussed, Zhu's comments look reasonable.
In fact, Zhu paid more attention to the education of women than pedagogues before him had. He encouraged the printing of Nu Jie (Admonitions for Women) written by Ban Zhao of the Han dynasty, and of the Family Regulations of Sima Guang of the Northern Song dynasty, to be used as teaching materials for women. But his opinion of Nu Jie was that it was shallow and incomplete. Thus he planned to write his own book for women to compensate for its deficiencies. Besides the usual moral injunctions on the subjects of filial love, harmony, and so on, he also proposed a special chapter on "learning." As Wing-tsit Chan commented: "No previous book for the education of women included such a chapter. Who knows? Perhaps Zhu aspired to change the climate a little."
Question authority!
Though it is true that Zhu advised women to "follow only one man all your life," he demanded even more of himself and of the scholars of his time.
In the May Fourth era, Hu Shi, a leader of the New Literature Movement, criticized Zhu Xi, but later his attitude showed a dramatic turnaround. He even did a calligraphy of Zhu's 16-character admonition on scholarship-"It is best to be meticulous, best to be modest; It is best not to overreach yourself, best not to assume that you already know the answers"-and often took inspiration from it.
The book Zhuzi Leiyu records how Zhu Xi discovered fossils. "One often notices snail shells in the mountains, or in freshly quarried rock. The rock was formerly mud, and snails are water-dwelling. That below must have moved to a higher point, that which is soft must have become solidified. If you think carefully about something you see many levels below the surface phenomenon." Based on this passage, Hu Shi extolled the way Zhu put into practice the spirit of getting past appearances to the fundamental underlying causes. Hu declared that Zhu had discovered fossils a full three centuries prior to their identification in Europe, and concluded: "One cannot but admire his powers of observation."
"Those who read without questioning must be taught to question. Those who doubt, in turn, must achieve certainty. Only then can we say there is progress." Hu Shi, a great exponent of questioning ideas and of seeking proof for everything, often cited this famous maxim of Zhu Xi to support his argument that Zhu well understood the spirit of "hypotheses and confirmation." It was this spirit that drove Zhu to reinterpret the Chinese classics, and later generations have recognized him as a forerunner of the school of textual criticism of the Qing dynasty.
Wang Chen-hua of the Teh-Chien Academy, commenting on Zhu Xi's intellectual honesty, agrees with the conclusion of the Ming dynasty thinker Wang Yangming, who wrote that Zhu had the character to see where his own thinking was wrong and admit his errors. In his later years, Zhu never ceased reassessing his own ideas, and, as he engaged in debates with other Confucian interpreters, he regretted that many of the works he wrote in his younger days had led himself and others astray.
Zhu Xi always spoke responsibly and with good intentions. Through the reigns of Gaozong, Xiaozong, Guangzong, and Ningzong, he addressed emperors as he would errant schoolboys. Wang wrote that Zhu's learning penetrated to his very marrow, guiding his thought and behavior in every respect. Zhu Xi represents the highest standard of behavior for Chinese intellectuals.
From "false" to "orthodox"
Zhu's good friend Xing Qiyi, a writer of Song style verse, said of Zhu: "Though a thousand generations have passed since [the legendary emperor] Yao, there have only been two or three others of his [Zhu's] caliber." Alas, not everyone was as good a judge of character as Xing. People did not always find Zhu's outspoken manner to their liking, and in his lifetime his thought was condemned as "false learning." It was only in the late Southern Song that there was a "reversal of verdicts" and he was "rehabilitated."
It would certainly have come as a great surprise to Zhu-and not a pleasant one!-to learn that, under the system of imperial examinations, his Four Books became an essential key to success for future generations of exam-takers. For Zhu, the wisdom contained in the Four Books took a lifetime to master, in both an academic sense and in applying them to daily life. Zhu had always opposed the exam system, arguing that it misled men of learning. He preferred to dig into his own purse and to raise funds to set up an academy and publish books independently.
Zhu, who was cautious and prudent his whole life, looks in retrospect like a very serious character lacking in romance or humor. But he had his "cute" side, and could move readers with his poetry.
"Last night by the river, spring waters flowed/ I saw an enormous boat bouncing effortlessly along/ When the season is wrong, how arduous the task of moving such a boat/ But in the right season, it is carried with ease by the current." Last year, Minister of the Interior Huang Chu-wen quoted these words of Zhu Xi to describe how the law to streamline the provincial government had finally, after much controversy, smoothly passed.
Zhu's poetry is noteworthy for both its quantity and its quality. In the book Collected Writings of Zhu Xi alone there are more than 1,200 poems. His "Poem for a Spring Day" is even today one of the most beloved of Lunar New Year couplets.
Kung Peng-cheng, president of Fokuang University, says that Zhu Xi was a multifaceted character, and a rather complex man. It would not be entirely accurate to say that he was a Confucianist, and in fact he wrote Taoist tracts under the assumed names Zou Ling and The Daoist from Kungtung Mountain.
Taiwanese dialect works for him!
This November, Taiwan will play host to the third in a series of conferences on Zhu Xi to be held in Asia. National Taiwan University professor Huang Chun-chieh notes that it will include scholars from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Papers will be presented on the study of Zhu's works in these "peripheral areas" as well as on works of Zhu's that have been considered "peripheral" and have been largely neglected in the past. In both Japan and Korea, Zhu has gotten considerable academic attention because of the far-reaching impact on East Asia of both his philosophy and his norms governing family life.
Zhu Xi served as a local official for only six years. For most of his life, he taught and traveled among Fujian, Hunan, and Jiangxi. He especially loved the Wuyi Mountains, a scenic location in Fujian, where he even constructed a spiritual retreat and an academy, and he traveled back and forth there for 40 years. For modern Taiwanese wanting to meet up with Zhu Xi, then, it seems like the Southern Fujianese dialect (spoken in Taiwan as well) will do just fine.
Zhu Xi died of illness in 1200, the sixth year of the Qingyuan reign of the Emperor Ningzong of the Song dynasty.
