Daoxue Conception of the Song Imperial Temple: Zhu Xi and His Disciples

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-158
Author(s):  
Hiu Yu Cheung
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Zhu Xi ◽  
New Learning ◽  
Northern Song

Chapter 6 focuses on the link between the eleventh-century ritual discussions on imperial ancestral sacrifices and the Daoxue conception of the Imperial Temple, as represented by the prominent Daoxue scholar Zhu Xi 朱熹‎ (1130–1200) and some of his best students in ritual scholarship. With a special focus on Zhu Xi’s Yili jingzhuan tongjie儀禮經傳通解‎, the chapter demonstrates how Zhu’s and his students’ perception of the Imperial Temple and relevant ritual ideas were deeply influenced by previous ritual discourses, especially those launched by New Learning scholars in Northern Song ritual debates.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 183-190
Author(s):  
Hiu Yu Cheung
Keyword(s):  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
New Learning ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Policies ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Wang Anshi

This book provides a missing link in the history of the Middle Period of China. It demonstrates how ritual in the Song dynasty intertwined more with scholar-officials’ intellectual endeavors than with their political stances. Based on their own interpretations of imperial ritual traditions and related ritual commentaries, Northern Song ritual officials sought monarchical support to initiate a campaign of reviving ancient temple rituals. In particular, officials and scholars under the influence of Wang Anshi’s ritual scholarship emphasized the necessity of revising the layout of the Imperial Temple, in order to conform to the ancient setting that was recorded in the ritual Classics. Scholar-officials outside the New Learning circle also championed the New Learning advocacy of an idealized ancient Imperial Temple. Some of them were adamant opponents of Wang Anshi’s New Policies. The disjunction between scholar-officials’ political stances and their ritual interests provides a counterexample to the conventional understanding of Song factional politics as polarizing political groups. As I have demonstrated in my discussion of the 1072 debate on the Primal Ancestor of the temple, it was quite understandable for some late eleventh-century ritual officials to share a common interest with Wang Anshi and Emperor Shenzong in promoting ritual reforms—despite the conservative stances of these same ritual officials on the political level. In this light, this book illustrates how Song debates and discussions over the Imperial Temple and temple rituals differentiated scholar-officials’ ritual interests and shaped their identities on the intellectual dimension....

scholarly journals FRONTIER, FORTIFICATION, AND FORESTATION: DEFENSIVE WOODLAND ON THE SONG–LIAO BORDER IN THE LONG ELEVENTH CENTURY

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-334
Author(s):  
Yuan Julian Chen
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Physical Distance ◽  
Capital City ◽  
The North ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
The Creation

ABSTRACTThis article examines the creation, preservation, and destruction of the defensive forest that the Northern Song built in Hebei along the Song–Liao border. Created as a landscape barrier against the Kitan attacks, this forest established the necessary strategic depth between the capital city and the northern frontline of the Song empire to compensate for Kaifeng's geographical vulnerability. While the Song government painstakingly maintained this forest throughout most of the dynasty, Liao troops, Hebei borderland residents, and many Song officials had nonetheless posed incessant challenges to this military forestation project. In 1122/23, at the onset of the war on the Liao to retrieve the Sixteen Prefectures, the Song army removed this borderland forest that blocked their northern expedition. The destruction of this defensive forest, which could have had thwarted attacks from the north, dismantled the strategic depth between Kaifeng and the Hebei borderland and henceforth presaged the fall of Kaifeng to the Jin, the Liao's successor, in a few years. I argue that this strategic depth was not only a physical distance, but also a diplomatic, sociopolitical, and military link that connected the ecology of the Song's northernmost periphery and the fate of the entire empire.

The Last Pharmacopeia

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
He Bian
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Pharmacological Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
Available Technology ◽  
Field Of Inquiry ◽  
Book Culture

This chapter traces the decentralization of prestige associated with the state-commissioned pharmacopeia up until the end of the sixteenth century. It argues that the decentralization of authority had already been well under way since the eleventh century, when the Northern Song court did commission multiple bencao pharmacopeias. Proceeding chronologically, three trends stand out in this examination of bencao as a field of inquiry. First, the Song state could not exert much control over these elaborate texts in transmission. A variety of authors, acting independently of the imperial court, made changes to the official edition and promoted their work through the manuscript or the newly available technology of printing. Second, major medical innovations during the Jin-Yuan period inspired physicians to explain pharmacological action in cosmic, systematic terms. Lastly, regional official publishing—a hallmark of Ming book culture—made the elaborate Song pharmacopeia widely available in print from the mid-fifteenth century. As a result, an unprecedented number of texts emerged that attempted to integrate cosmic pharmacology with the pharmacopeia, creating new discourses and textual genres.

Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihwa Choi
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Death Rituals ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
Historical Question

This study inquires into a historical question of how politics surrounding death rituals and ensuing changes in ritual performance shaped a revival of Confucianism during eleventh-century China. It investigates how polarizing debates about death rituals introduced new terrain for political power dynamics between monarchy and officialdom, and between groups of court officials. During the reign of Renzong, in reaction to Emperor Zhenzong’s statewide Daoist ritual programs for venerating the royal ancestors, some court officials maneuvered in the imperial court to return Confucian canonical rituals to their place of primacy. Later, a faction of scholar-officials took a lead in reviving the Confucian rituals as a way of checking the power of both the emperors and the wealthy merchants. By perceiving Confucian rituals as the models for social reality as it ought to be, they wrote new ritual manuals, condemned non-Confucian rituals, took legal actions, and established public graveyards.

Using Numbers to Comprehend the Cosmos: An Analysis of Liu Mu’s Yishu gouyin tu

T oung Pao ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 104 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 294-337
Author(s):  
Douglas Skonicki
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Exegetical Tradition ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThis article examines the cosmological arguments advanced within Liu Mu’s 劉牧 (n.d.) Yishu gouyin tu 易數鉤隱圖, a short work composed in the 1030s that was dedicated to explaining the meaning of the Yijing. In the Yishu gouyin tu, Liu used combinations of diagrams and text to argue that numbers underlay, and provided the keys to understanding, the development of the cosmos and the creation of the myriad entities that inhabited it. He further asserted that the important role numbers played in the process of creation and transformation was revealed to the ancient sage Fu Xi 伏羲 via two important diagrams, the Hetu 河圖 and Luoshu 洛書. In addition to explicating Liu’s conception of how the numbers of the Hetu and Luoshu informed both cosmological development and the composition of the Yi, this article situates his views within the context of Northern Song thought in an effort to shed light on their larger significance and influence. It argues that Liu played a key role in promoting several ideas that would assume great importance in the mid-eleventh century, including the questioning of the received exegetical tradition, the claim that the dao had a cosmological foundation, and the use of diagrams and numbers to explicate cosmological process.

Zhu Xi

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirill O. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Zhu Xi ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Influence Spread ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
Zhang Zai ◽  
Zhou Dunyi ◽  
Historical Issues

Zhu Xi (1130–1200) was the most influential Chinese Neo-Confucian (Daoxue) scholar of imperial China (220 bce–1908 ce). He is ranked the foremost philosopher of China since Mencius and Zhuangzi of Antiquity. His influence spread throughout East Asia, particularly to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, and it persists to this day. Zhu was a master interpreter of the Confucian classics and the teachings of Confucius and Mencius and their earlier followers. He was such exuberant interpreter of the Confucian classics that he ventured not just to edit and rearrange many of them, but in the case of the Daxue (Great Learning) he interpolated a long paragraph that he himself wrote into the text. He also absorbed the philosophical concepts of the 11th-century Northern Song masters, such as Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, and Cheng Yi, and integrated them into a comprehensive system by serious analytic and synthetic thinking. Zhu Xi’s system influenced his interpretive work, while the classics and thinkers he studied afforded him issues, topics, and examples for reflection and developing his system. Zhu had a probing, reflective mind, an analytic and synthetic acumen, and his philosophical inquiries led in every direction: ontology, cosmology, philosophical anthropology, natural philosophy, ethics, politics, epistemology, education, the transmission or succession of the Confucian Way, and so forth, making him the most well-rounded of traditional Chinese philosophers. In his philosophic thinking, Zhu Xi is distinguished for his arguing for determinate, well-defined views based on his system, categories, methodology, and place in the Confucian succession. He was at once a classical interpreter who sought deeper meanings as well as textual mastery and a philosophical thinker who discussed and debated a range of issues with his contemporaries. Many of Zhu’s writings and dialogues have been translated into English and other Western languages. And the body of research on Zhu’s scholarship, classical studies, and philosophical thought East and West is growing apace. The scholarship has evolved from general and philosophical to contextualized and historical. Issues have evolved from his comparability with Plato, Aristotle, and Whitehead to specific characteristics of his thought as transcendental versus immanental, conceptual, or formal versus process. Moreover, his ethical thought is compared with parallel Western approaches and brought to bear on a range of ethical issues.

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