Considering the number of scholars who contributed to these researches (though not as a formal group), there can be no doubt that the Han Learning represented a truly broad movement in Qing thought toward a kind of critical scholarship that anticipated modern Western methods and produced a body of systematic, empirically verified knowledge. Nevertheless, it was also marked by a kind of fundamentalist urge to recover an original Confucian teaching purified of any later additions, which was bound to be less productive of new philosophical speculations.
Of these limitations in the Han school’s work, other thinkers, less representative of the mainstream, were partly aware. There was, for instance, the so-called Eastern Zhejiang historical school stemming from Huang Zongxi, which stressed the value of studying recent history as well as ancient. Its leading representatives, such as Wan Sitong (1638–1702), Quan Zuwang (1705–1755), and Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801), kept alive the Confucian view of historical studies as having a practical bearing on the conduct of government, but as they had little status or influence in the ruling regime, their efforts were devoted largely to upholding the value of private, unofficial historical writing as compared to state-sponsored projects. In this way they sought to preserve records of the Ming dynasty that might supplement or correct the Manchu version of recent events, and they drew attention to the value of local histories or gazetteers and many other types of records that might contribute to a fuller, deeper understanding of history than official accounts provided.
Another movement that stressed practicality of thought is identified with Yan Yuan (1635–1704) and Li Gong (1659–1733), who were critical of the Neo-Confucian metaphysics of the Cheng-Zhu school but equally so of their own contemporaries pursuing the Han Learning. Toward the latter their attitude was reminiscent of Wang Yangming’s condemnation of book learning and classical scholarship as a distraction from the real business of life. Toward the former they had specific objections on philosophical grounds, in that they considered the Cheng-Zhu system to have been deeply influenced by Buddhist and Daoist quietism. The distinction that it had made between the physical nature of man and his Heaven-bestowed moral nature, Yan Yuan argued, had fostered the belief that one’s physical desires had to be repressed so that one’s ideal nature might be recovered or restored through the meditative discipline of quiet-sitting. Yan contended that this erroneous view derived from the Cheng-Zhu school’s dualism between principle (li) and material-force (qi), according to which the moral nature was constant despite differences in its physical embodiment. Like Huang Zongxi and Wang Fuzhi, Yan Yuan insisted that there were no principles apart from their physical embodiment and that moral perfection could not be achieved except through the full development of the actual nature in the conduct of everyday life. True to the fundamentalist urge, however, “practicality” for him meant training in the classical arts like rites, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and arithmetic.
Dai Zhen (1724–1777), possibly the most representative thinker and scholar of the Qing dynasty, pursued Yan’s line of thought further. He was especially concerned with the problem of how the truth or principles of things may be ascertained. The Neo-Confucians, by asserting that the principles of things were also contained in the mind and attainable by self-reflection, had, according to this view, led people away from the study of things into introspection and mysticism. What they called “principle” might be purely subjective, whereas in fact principle could only be found in things and studied objectively. This required careful observation and analysis, followed by submission of the results to some kind of public test in order to determine whether or not the results were confirmed by the observations of others. In practice, however, the “things” studied by Dai Zhen were for the most part the “affairs” of men with which the Confucian classics were concerned. In this respect Dai represented also the best traditions of the school of Han Learning, for he distinguished himself in the same type of classical scholarship: philology, phonology, historical geography, and mathematical history.
In the end, the very attempts of Qing Confucians to disinherit themselves from Song and Ming metaphysics demonstrated how much, after all, they were children in spirit of the Neo-Confucians. Theirs was not a movement to break the bounds of Confucian tradition and establish themselves on new intellectual ground. Their fundamental impulse was instead to return, to recover, to restore the ancient Way in its original purity. Whereas the early Neo-Confucians of the Song had thought of themselves as reviving and reconstituting the old order in its fullness, after centuries of disintegration and perversion under the Han and Tang dynasties, the critical spirit of the Han Learning became an instrument for redefining, with greater precision perhaps, the authentic tradition deriving from the Master of old. This was a slimming, paring-down process, to rediscover the Way in its irreducible, original form, stripped of all the questionable elements that the expansive Cheng-Zhu school had tried to incorporate in its new synthesis. Of even the rarest, most critical, most independent of scholars, such as Cui Shu (1740–1816), was this true. Though Cui dug deeper and deeper into the past and rejected even Han scholarship in his search for the authentic roots of Confucianism, his achievements in historical study and textual criticism only served as a testimonial of his undiminished faith in Confucius’s original teaching as the source of what was worth learning.
DAI ZHEN AND ZHANG XUECHENG
Probably in every age certain intellectuals feel frustrated or unappreciated because their best talents, most compelling interests, or deepest concerns are not in accord with the high-cultural paradigms of their day. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) and Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801) were such figures. They often are paired in present-day discussions of Chinese scholarship because, in different ways, they exhibit a capacity for theoretical exploration and insightful generalization that has become more valued in the modern period than it was by their contemporaries of the mid-eighteenth century in China—the so-called High Qing period during which “evidential” (kaozheng) research on the concrete meanings of words and phrases in ancient texts reigned supreme.
DAI ZHEN’S TEXT-CRITICAL MORAL PHILOSOPHY
Dai Zhen, like Zhang Xuecheng, came from an undistinguished family background and, being largely self-taught, lacked facility in writing the sorts of essays necessary to qualify for bureaucratic office through the civil service examinations. Unlike Zhang, however, he eventually attained great renown, both at court and in learned society at large, as consummate in applying knowledge of such fields as phonology, etymology, geography, mathematics, and astronomy in the comparative elucidation of classical texts. Though a paragon in this respect, Dai parted ways with contemporaneous arbiters of scholarly value in his profound realization that, having determined the authentic contents of, and lexical meanings in, those ancient canons, one still needed to theorize—albeit from a firm basis in precise, factual knowledge—in order to grasp the primordially unwritten Way of the Sages. That is, he came to feel ever more strongly that the study of archaic language in pursuit of a lost, lived reality had to proceed in tandem with deliberate moral-philosophical interpretation.
It was Dai’s commitment to the latter that elicited dismay and disapproval among his peers and that inhibited the circulation of his major, philologically well-grounded but unmistakably philosophical treatises, the Inquiry Into Goodness (Yuan shan) completed in 1766, and the Evidential Study of the Meaning of Terms in the Mencius (Mengzi ziyi shuzheng), completed early in 1777. It also was Dai’s commitment to the latter that further disquieted even those who still held some interest in speculative philosophy, because it entailed not just the fashionable dismissal, so far as solid scholarship was concerned, of metaphysically oriented “Song Learning.” It led Dai into serious, penetrating criticisms of key concepts in Neo-Confucianism, especially those introduced by the core Song Learning figures, Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), which the Qing government (like the Yuan and Ming governments before it) maintained as its official orthodoxy but whi
ch Dai felt had widely misrepresented the outlook of the ancient sages for hundreds of years. In this, Dai resurrected, brought into sharper focus, and further developed critiques that otherwise seemed to have been left behind in the works of certain seventeenth-century thinkers.
In the first of the selections excerpted below, we find an exposition of the methods and principles of Evidential Inquiry that earned Dai such great esteem among classicists in his own time. The second encapsulates the main ideas in the endeavor that mattered most to him, his text-critical moral philosophy. Through Dai’s highly allusive prose we can discern several points that were integral to his re-vision:
First, he objects that, under Buddho-Daoist influence, Confucians since the Song period have regarded Heaven (tian) as a vacuous, void, insubstantial state unto itself; thus, in positing principle (li) as that which accounts for the regularity in Heaven’s Way, they have rendered both the Way and principle abstract, reified, and remote from the ordinary, corporeal lives of human beings. Especially insidious is that, as Chan Buddhism has been clothed in Confucian terms, the Way has been suspended in a state “beyond good and evil,” that is, beyond valuation itself. As a consequence, Neo-Confucian urgings that the Way and principle be accessed by cultivating the mind amount to urgings that we make our minds as vacuous as their conception of Heaven.
Again succumbing to Buddho-Daoist influence, Dai Zhen charges, Neo-Confucians from the Song onward have regarded ordinary human desires, emotions, and strivings as obstructions to the union of Mind and Void and thus have disparaged them, creating a dichotomous separation between lofty li and the material- or vital force (qi) that constitutes, in their view, a spiritually impeding physical reality. Moreover, principle having been so idealized, so removed from what people can verify with their sense faculties, it had become identifiable only subjectively and thus amenable to manipulation in the self-service of any who might facilely claim the privileged insights of “learning.”
Dai did not object to distinguishing intangible Heaven from the tangible world, but he thought it was fatal to true Confucianism if the two were seen as separate orders of being, rather than as two dimensions of a continuous process of transformation within a single reality, composed wholly of valid qi. For Dai, the unfailing process whereby formed, determinate things, such as human beings, are generated from the unformed dimension of reality is the ultimate good, and the regular patterns within that process are principle, fully present and discernible in all phenomena, from affairs to concrete things. Moreover, principle most assuredly is present in even the most commonplace desires, feelings, and strivings that serve—in appropriate measure—to fulfill life, which is the greatest goodness in the transformative circulation between Heaven and the phenomenal realm. Principle being objectively perceptible pattern, not subjectively assertable idea, Dai holds, it should be determined through careful, convergent study and observation by many conscientious inquirers, not through quiet contemplation or autocratic declaration by an unlearned few.
The degree to which such monistic, “materialist,” anti-authoritarian views, positive valuation of the lives of ordinary people, and quasi-scientific conceptions of inquiry were regarded as radically heterodox in eighteenth-century China has perhaps been exaggerated by Dai’s admirers in modern times. One can say, however, that Dai’s persistence in a mode of scholarship that he knew would not please contemporaries is testimony to the enduring vitality of Confucian moral philosophy under adverse cultural conditions.
LETTER TO SHI ZHONGMING CONCERNING SCHOLARSHIP
The recipient of this letter, Shi Jing (Zhongming) (1673–1769), was a respected Confucian scholar who had asked to see Dai Zhen’s recent commentarial work on the Classic of Odes. Dai respectfully defers sending that unfinished exegesis but offers Shi, for the time being (1749–1750), some thoughts on why such studies cannot be rushed.
When I was young my family was poor and could not provide me with a private tutor. I heard that among the sages there had been Confucius, who set in order the Six Classics for men of later ages. Having sought out one of those classics, I opened it to read, only to find myself completely at a loss. I pondered that [experience] for a long time before making this mental note: “What the classics ultimately reach to is the Way. Their phrases are that by which the Way is made clear, and those phrases are composed of written characters. To comprehend the phrases from the [individual] characters, and then to comprehend the Way from the [discrete] phrases, must be a gradual process.” In seeking the origins of what we now call “characters,” I examined archaic seal-script writing and to that end obtained a copy of [the etymological dictionary] Explanations of Writing and Characters, by Xu Shen [ca. 100 C.E.]. For three years I studied its entries and gradually gained some insight into the beginnings and fundamentals of the ancient sages’ compositions. Yet I doubted whether Mr. Xu’s glosses were exhaustive, so I borrowed from a friend a set of the [ca. twelfth century] Compendium of Commentaries to the Thirteen Classics and read it also. Then I realized that the meaning of a character must be threaded through all the classics and grounded in the six graphic modes before it can definitely be established.
As for why, it seems, the classics are hard to understand, there are a number of matters involved. In reading aloud just a few lines into the “Canon of Yao” in the Classic of Documents, one comes to the phrase, “then ordered Xi and He.” If one does not understand how the movements of the constellations and planets were thought to be regulated [by those two ancient astronomers], one will have to close the book without finishing. If one tries to intone even the first sections of the Classic of Odes, then from the first subsection onward, if one does not know the ancient rhymes and simply tries to force them, the result will be discordant, and the proper reading will be lost. Reciting from the [Classic of] Etiquette and Ceremonies, right at the beginning with the capping ceremony, if one does not know about ancient regulations concerning palace rooms and ritual garments mentioned therein, one will be disoriented and unable to distinguish their functions. If one does not know the evolution of place-names from ancient to present times, then the jurisdictions recorded in the “Tributes of Yu” in the Documents will lose their geographical referents. If one does not know the ancients’ methods of geometric measurement, one cannot infer from the text of the “Technology” section of the Rites of Zhou the actual use of the implements described. And if one does not know the general characteristics and common names of birds and beasts, insects and fish, grasses and trees, then the metaphors and similes that feature them in the Odes will seem strange. Moreover, etymology and philology are inseparable from phonology, in which tones and sounds should be as clearly distinguishable as the vertical and horizontal of warp and weft. . . .
I have heard that in the pursuit of classical studies, generally three [things are] difficult [to attain]: broad erudition, sound judgment, and critical discernment. I certainly cannot lay claim to any of these, but I hold that the criteria of good scholarship should be rooted in them. Some of our forebears who were broadly learned and had good memories . . . wrote housefuls of books. They possessed erudition but lacked discernment. Then there have been others who slighted those qualities, saying that the Great Way can be reached by shortcuts. . . . They abandoned the practice of learned discussion and took advantage of the words “honor the moral nature” to embellish their reputations. But having discontinued the “pursuit of studies” [as really intended by these phrases in the Mean], they failed to reach the proper “Mean,” as is well known.
Lack of attainment in the various classics and in the ancient Six Arts is cause for shame in a Confucian scholar, and I use awareness of this to guard against sloth. Fearful of forgetting what I have learned from experience in study, I have written it out in this letter. When my insight matures, I will present my Odes commentary to you without further delay.
[From Dai Dongyuan ji 9: 4a–5a—JWE, LAS]
LETTER IN REPLY TO ADVANCED SCHOLAR PENG YUNCHU
The re
cipient of this letter, Peng Shaosheng (Yunchu) (1740–1796), was a well-known scholar who, unlike Dai Zhen, had attained the coveted jinshi degree in the metropolitan examinations. Somewhat unusually for a man of his position in that day, Peng took a strong, ecumenical interest in both the Song and the Ming schools of Neo-Confucianism, as well as in Buddhist and Daoist teachings. Thus, his viewpoint was the perfect foil to that of Dai’s mature philosophy. Perhaps for this reason, Dai allowed Peng, who had already seen the Inquiry Into Goodness (Yuan Shan), to read the Evidential Study of the Meaning of Terms in the Mencius (Mengzi ziyi shuzheng) shortly after its completion. To points about which Peng expressed “uneasiness,” Dai then responded at energetic length just one month before his death in 1777.
Before the Song, Confucius and Mencius were Confucius and Mencius, and Daoists and Buddhists were Daoists and Buddhists. Those who discoursed on Daoism and Buddhism made their words lofty and abstruse and did not attach themselves to Confucius or Mencius. Since the Song, however, the books that record the thought of Confucius and Mencius have been completely misunderstood because Confucians have randomly appropriated the theories of Daoists and Buddhists to explain them. Thus, there are those who, by reading Confucian books, slip into Daoism and Buddhism. And there are those who, lovingly immersed in Daoism and Buddhism, encounter Confucian books and delight in the support their own doctrines receive from them. So they rely on Confucian books in discussing Daoism and Buddhism. Encountering similarities with their own views, they take them as further proofs of the tradition of Mind; encountering differences, they lend their own interpretations to the Six Classics, Confucius, and Mencius, saying, “What I have attained [is] the subtle teachings and profound meanings of the sages.” Crisscrossed and interlocking, such [thought]-structures have undergone repeated changes and augmentations, willy-nilly becoming seamlessly joined. . . .
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 8