The Intellectual World of Jiao Hong Revisited

This essay is a critical review of Edward T. Ch’ien’s Chiao Hung and the Restructuring of Neo-Confucianism in the Late Ming (1986). After a re-studying of Jiao Hong’s basic writings as well as other related texts of the late Ming period, this review points out how and why Ch’ien’s depiction of the life and thought of this important late Ming intellectual is more than problematic. Ch’ien is seen to be asking phenomenological-structuralist questions of Jiao Hong’s texts, not placing them in their historical context, and thus misrepresenting or distorting what the author actually said in these texts.

Reorientation of Confucian Social Thought in the Age of Wang Yangming

This essay examines how the most notable Neo-Confucian scholar Wang Yangming (1472-1529) re-oriented his Confucian project in the context of Ming despotism. It argues that Confucianism took a decidedly new turn in the sixteenth century and that Wang Yangming was at the center of this development from the sixteenth century to the early decades of the eighteenth. Details how Wang shifted the earlier central role of Confucian intellectuals in implementing reforms under the imperial support to enlightening the ordinary Chinese people, specifically including the merchant class, that they could realize the Dao or the Moral Way in their daily lives. This shift not only led to a new era of social and political thinking in the history of Confucianism, but also to the rise of the merchant class to unprecedented social and cultural prominence in the 16th century.

Confucian Ethics and Capitalism

This essay disputes Weberian ideas of how Confucian thought prevented capitalistic development in China. Accepting Fernand Braudel’s separation of capitalism from market economy, it outlines the evolution of business culture and a market economy and their relation to Confucian ethics in Chinese history. It argues that Confucian ideas about industry, frugality and the preciousness of time, and Chinese merchants’ ethical qualities such as cheng (sincerity), xin (trustworthiness), and buqi (non-deception), combined with an “immortality anxiety” led the Chinese market to undergo a “process of rationalization” between 1500 and 1800 even though it did not lead to the rise of capitalism.

Individualism and the Neo-Daoist Movement in Wei-Jin China

This study explores the Neo-Daoist movement as an example of one type of Chinese individualism. It shows how this individualism arose along with the profound social and intellectual crisis at the end of the Han and carried on into the Wei-Jin period. In contrast to the generally accepted political interpretation, this essay demonstrates that the transition from Confucianism to Neo-Daoism in the Wei-Jin period can be more sensibly viewed as an outgrowth of the discovery of the individual. It concludes with the reconciliation of Daoist individualism and Confucian ritualism in the late fourth century.

Toward an Interpretation of the Intellectual Transition in Seventeenth-Century China

This is a positive review of Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (1975) in which readers are urged to see Neo-Confucianism as a spirituality of universal significance. It sees the book as illuminating some of the fundamental changes in seventeenth-century Chinese thought.

Food in Chinese Culture

This article summarizes virtually all of the articles of food and culinary methods and tools in ancient China in the Han Dynasty. It reveals a major aspect of Han culture through its food and culinary methods.

Morality and Knowledge in Zhu Xi’s Philosophical System

This essay shows that morality took precedence over knowledge in Zhu Xi’s philosophical system. But, it is argued, this is only true on the practical, pedagogic level, not on the general theoretical level. It is further argued that in Zhu Xi’s system, morality is never allowed to interfere directly with the operation of gewu or zhizhi, that is, the pursuit of concrete knowledge

New Evidence on the Early Chinese Conception of Afterlife

This extended review article discusses how various death-related myths of pre-Buddhist origins helped reveal both early Chinese beliefs about the hereafter and basic Chinese values regarding the nature and meaning of life, as does the symbolism of funeral rituals in practically all cultures.

Life and Immortality in the Mind of Han China

By tracing the development of the worldly transformation of the idea and cult of immortality, this article demonstrates that ancient Han Chinese gradually came to perceive the worlds between the living and the dead not as two mutually exclusive realms, though not exactly as identical either. Such a perception also reflects their world view of the human, Heaven and Earth as an integrative unity.

Between the Heavenly and the Human

This article traces the origin and development of the first spiritual awakening in Chinese intellectual tradition during what some scholars call the age of “axial breakthrough”. It defines this awakening as an “inward transcendence” that helped re-orient the path of the Chinese value system, and distinguishes it from other forms of transcendence that occurred in the similar time period.