The Message of the Mind in Neo-Confucianism.

• Author: Peterson, Willard J.

This book presents W. T. deBary's account of the development of certain aspects of Neo-Confucianism, particularly ideas associated with the label hsin hsueh (Learning of the Mind) and their relation to what he terms orthodoxy from the fifteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. It thus picks up more or less where his earlier work, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (1981), left off in early Ming. There he focused on key ideas as they came to be accommodated and even co-opted by governments in Southern Sung, Yuan, and early Ming as what deBary calls "an official orthodoxy." In Message of the Mind he pursues his inquiry into the intellectual history of the same two central ideas: the tao-t'ung, which he renders as "tradition" and "Succession to the Way," and implicitly as Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy; and hsin, which he translates as "mind" and "mind-and-heart," along with related terms, particularly hsin fa ("method" and "message of mind") and ch'uan hsin ("transmission of mind").

Beginning with a brief look at some facets of Chu Hsi's thought, deBary stresses the central role in Chu's teachings of hsin as the "embodiment of principle" and its cultivation. He notes that in his preface to the Chung yung, Chu Hsi introduced the term hsin fa, and deBary is adamant that Chu Hsi's sense of the term was, and still is, to be distinguished from its prior Buddhist usage. He also shows Chu Hsi arguing for an unbreakable link between the Mind of the Way (tao hsin) and our ordinary human hearts (jen-hsin). This holistic view of hsin imbued with structuring principles was in contrast to Buddhists' view of mind as "fundamentally characterized by emptiness and nothingless". DeBary's point in all this is two-fold: to keep religious and spiritual cultivation at the center of Chu Hsi's program, and at the same time to fend off any imputation of positive Buddhist influence. The latter defense is not established here, even though we all may accept that Chu Hsi was not a Buddhist; the references to Tsung-mi's earlier critique of some Ch'an teachings serve to remind us of the need for a more nuanced account of the range of Buddhist polemics which were available in the twelfth century as Chu Hsi articulated his explanations of hsin. As for the former claim it is indubitable that hsin was central, both as object of philosophical explanation and of personal moral cultivation, and that twentieth-century textbooks, by...