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Eighteen accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Neo-Confucianism stream of the Confucianism timeline.
Streams: All of Confucianism Classical Confucianism Imperial Confucianism Neo-Confucianism New Confucianism
Under the Song, scholar-officials remade Confucian teaching in answer to the centuries of Buddhist and Daoist ascendancy. The Cheng brothers, Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, and their circle built a metaphysics of principle and material force and a discipline of self-cultivation meant to recover the Way of the ancient sages. Their renewal, carried to its sum by Zhu Xi, is the movement the West calls Neo-Confucianism.
Zhu Xi gathered the Song renewal into a complete system: principle and material force in all things, the investigation of things as the road to knowledge, and a curriculum of study for every student of the Way. His commentaries on the Four Books became the most influential reading of Confucius ever written, and for six centuries the examination system tested candidates on his words. No teacher after Confucius himself shaped the tradition more.
Zhu Xi lifted four texts above the older Five Classics: the Analects, the Mencius, and two chapters of the Book of Rites, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, and published them with his commentaries as the Four Books. The set became the tradition's core curriculum, the first books a student read and the ground of the civil examinations from the Yuan adoption onward.
The Mongol Yuan dynasty, restoring the civil examinations in 1313, decreed that candidates be tested on the Four Books in Zhu Xi's commentaries. The decree fixed one man's reading of the classics as the empire's standard for the next six hundred years, and it made Neo-Confucian orthodoxy the official teaching of China through the Ming and Qing.
The Ming ruled China through the examination orthodoxy Zhu Xi had defined, and inside that order Wang Yangming raised the tradition's last great challenge, teaching that principle is found in the heart itself and that knowledge and action are one. His school split the late Ming world between the Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy of the examiners and the intuition of the heart, a division the Qing inherited.
The Manchu Qing kept the Confucian state whole: the examinations, the imperial cult of Confucius, and the sacred edicts read to every village. Within the order, evidential scholars turned philology against Song metaphysics, and Dai Zhen charged that principle, as the examiners used it, had become an instrument of oppression. The dynasty was the Confucian empire's last and longest late form.
