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Philosophy in China
The word for the work is learning, xue. It is the first word of the Analects, and every later movement named itself, or was named, as a learning: the Learning of the Way (Daoxue), divided into the Learning of Pattern (Lixue) and the Learning of Heart-mind (Xinxue); the Dark Learning (xuanxue), named in the fifth century; the Han learning and Song learning of the Qing dispute; the learning of heart-mind and nature (xinxing zhi xue) of the twentieth-century New Confucians. What learning seeks is the Way, dao, and the two words join in Daoxue. Feng Youlan: “The term Neo-Confucianism is a newly coined western equivalent for Tao hsüeh.”
The thinkers were filed as jia, houses or lineages, which translators render “schools”, and as zhuzi, the masters. In the imperial library catalogued by Liu Xin, the masters stand in a section of their own, apart from the Six Arts, the classics: “ten schools of masters, of which only nine are worth looking at”. Several of the familiar names are Han labels. The historian Sima Tan, in the second century BCE, was the first to speak of a “School of Names” (mingjia) and of the fa school (fajia), the “Legalists”; no early thinker counted himself a member of either.
China surveyed its own schools early and often. The last chapter of the Zhuangzi, “Tianxia” (“All under Heaven”), not by Zhuangzi himself, sets the art of the Way (daoshu), which the ancients had and which “is everywhere”, against the methods (fangshu) of its own day, each held to be beyond improvement. “Most in the world get hold of one insight and are pleased with themselves; like ears, eyes, nose and mouth, each has its clarity but they do not connect”: each is “a scholar of one corner”. So “the way of sageliness within and kingliness without is dark and not clear”, the hundred schools “go off and do not return”, and “the art of the Way is about to be torn apart by the world”. Sima Tan named six schools, the Yin-Yang, the Ru (Confucians), the Mohists, the Names, the fa and the Way and its Virtue, and quoted the Book of Changes on “one aim and a hundred deliberations, one destination by different roads”: “all of them work at bringing about order; they differ only in the road their words take, and in whether they see clearly or not”. Liu Xin has each school “take up one end and exalt what it is good at”; with their blind spots, taken together, they are “branches and descendants of the Six Classics”. When the Buddhist scriptures arrived from India, Chinese Buddhists sorted them in turn, by doctrinal classification (panjiao).
The work was done as transmission. Confucius calls himself “a transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients” (Analects 7.1, tr. Legge), and much of the writing that followed is commentary on the classics. In the first century CE Wang Chong set out three tiers: the classics are making (zuo), the histories transmitting (shu), and works like his own Lunheng discussing (lun), “and discussing ranks after transmitting”.
The lines
English without a named translator is rendered from the Chinese.
- The Confucians — learning for oneself, from scholar to sage: Confucius, Mencius’s lost heart-mind, Xunzi on the masters blinkered by one corner, Wang Chong’s hatred of falsehood.
- The Mohists and the disputers — disputation (bian) and what it is for: the three standards, disputation has a winner, Hui Shi and Gongsun Long, and their critics.
- The Daoists — the Way that cannot be said, learning that adds and the Way that subtracts, Zhuangzi on who shall adjudicate.
- The fa tradition — Shang Yang and Han Fei against learning and disputation: speech measured by its use, officials as the teachers.
- Dark Learning — Wang Bi on words, images and meaning, the sage who embodies nothingness, Guo Xiang.
- Buddhism in China — the doctrinal classifications of Zhiyi, Fazang and Zongmi, Xuanzang’s journey for the texts, Chan’s transmission outside the scriptures.
- The Learning of the Way — sagehood can be learned: the investigation of things, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, and the Qing turn to evidence with Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng.
- Modern China — zhexue taken from Japan, the first histories of Hu Shi and Feng Youlan, Jin Yuelin’s question, the New Confucian manifesto of 1958, and the debate over the “legitimacy” of Chinese philosophy.