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The Learning of the Way

Daoxue, the Learning of the Way, is the Song movement’s own name for itself; “Neo-Confucianism” is a modern Western coinage. At its outset it turned formal education away from literary attainment towards the moral Way. It divided into the Learning of Pattern (Lixue) of the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi and the Learning of Heart-mind (Xinxue) of Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming. From 1313 Zhu Xi’s reading of the classics was the basis of the civil service examination.

Its point is sagehood, and sagehood can be learned. Zhou Dunyi’s Tongshu asks: “Can sagehood be learned?” and answers: “It can” (ch. 20). The Great Learning says that “all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides” (tr. Legge).

The Great Learning also gave the method. It runs back from an ordered world to a cultivated person, a rectified heart, sincere thoughts and extended knowledge, and “such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things” (gewu zhizhi). Zhu Xi made this the core of study, joining the reading of the classics with the investigation of things to discern their pattern (li). Wang Yangming tried it literally. He and a friend set out to investigate the bamboos in front of a pavilion, to “investigate to the utmost the Pattern”, and both fell ill. He came to teach the unity of knowing and acting (zhixing heyi): “There has never been one who knows and does not act; to know and not act is simply not yet to know”; “knowing is the beginning of acting, acting the completion of knowing” (Chuanxilu). He offered the doctrine as a remedy, not a definition: “My current teaching regarding the unity of knowing and acting is a medicine directed precisely at this disease” (tr. Van Norden), the disease of those who think “one must first know and only then can one act”.

In the Qing, scholars who called their own work Han learning turned against the Song readings, and their method was evidence (kaozheng). Dai Zhen (1724–1777) put it as a path: “What the classics reach to is the Way; what makes the Way clear is their words; what makes the words is the characters. Through the characters one gets through to the words, through the words to the Way; it must go step by step.” The path ran through phonology, astronomy, mathematics, ancient buildings and dress, geography, and the names of plants and animals. In a letter of 1755 he named “the roads of learning, past and present”, as three, pattern and meaning, institutions and numbers, and literary writing, and sided with neither camp: “The Han Ru got their institutions and numbers but lost their meaning and pattern; the Song Ru got their meaning and pattern but lost their institutions and numbers.” In the Mengzi ziyi shuzheng (1777) he turned the method on the Song word li itself. The ancients’ li meant the fine divisions in things, and “li is feelings without error”. The powerful used it against the weak: “The honoured reproach the lowly with li … even when right they are called rebellious … When a man dies by the law, there are still those who pity him; when he dies by li, who will pity him?” His younger contemporary Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801) went further, and read the classics not as timeless teaching but as records: “The Six Classics are all history. The ancients did not write books; the ancients never spoke of pattern apart from affairs; the Six Classics are all the governing records of the former kings.”