Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy.

• Author: Ebrey, Patricia Buckley

By Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992. Pp. 328.

Historians frequently work from more recent times backwards, trying to account for the ways things turned out. As a result, people, ideas, institutions, events and trends that could plausibly have led to the known outcomes are studied closely, and ones that apparently contributed little to the direction of change are slighted, no matter how important they were considered in their own times. This is perhaps particularly true when the historical outcome is the success of a religious or philosophical school and those writing its history are its adherents. Those writing from within a tradition can be expected to present its history as the deserved success of correct ideas propounded by great men who had to contend with misguided or evil opponents.

Professor Hoyt Tillman is convinced that much of what has been written about the history of Confucianism suffers from these tendencies to ignore the historical workings of chance and to attribute success to superiority. In 1982 he published Utilitarian Confucianism: Ch'en Liang's Challenge to Chu Hsi (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Univ.), an intellectual biography of one of the scholars and thinkers who rivaled Chu Hsi in his own lifetime but was largely ignored in later centuries. The present book expands the scope of his inquiry to include the other key Confucian intellectuals of the Southern Sung, particularly four outstanding contemporaries of Chu Hsi: Chang Shih, Lu Tsu-ch'ien, Ch'en Liang, and Lu Chiuyuan. Two chapters are devoted to each of these four--one reviewing the man's ideas and personal experiences, the other his interaction with Chu Hsi. They are preceded by a chapter on scholars of the first generation of the Southern Sung and followed by one on the scholars of the thirteenth century.

Eschewing the term "Neo-confucianism" as too imprecise to be useful, Tillman focuses on what he calls the Tao-hsueh fellowship. Tao-hsueh he uses in its twelfth-century sense to encompass all those who saw themselves as continuing the teachings of the Ch'eng brothers, rather than in the narrower sense, common from the fourteenth century on, of the followers of Chu Hsi. Followers of the Ch'eng brothers were not so organized as to deserve the label "society," but they did have a sense of community and common purpose. In Tillman's view their commitment to ethical-spiritual development gave them greater cohesion than...