China in the Song Dynasty

The Song Dynasty (960-1279), after the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) and the Tang Dynasty (618-906), was one of the greatest dynasties in Chinese history that saw great cultural flourishing.  It was also one of the dynasties that saw foreign invasions both before and during (as well as after) the dynasty.  In 1126, the dynasty had to move its capital from Kaifeng in northern China to Hanzhou in southern China because the Chinese north fell to the Tartar invaders, some of them ancestors to the latter day Manchus, who eventually established their rule in China and the last Chinese imperial dynasty, the Manchu Dynasty (1644-1911).  Between the fall of the Tang Dynasty and the founding of the Song Dynasty, there were years of disunity in China.  Border uprisings not only led to the end of the Tang Dynasty, but again plunged China into many warring states, before they were reunified under the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty.  Eventually, the Song Dynasty would fall to the invading Mongols, who, under Kublai Khan, would found the Yuan Dynasty in China.  Viewed against this context, the Song scholars' struggles against the Buddhists and Daoists to rescue Confucian learning from metaphysics could be seen as an attempt to preserve Chinese "cultural integrity" in the face of foreign invaders.  It was during this dynasty that Confucian learning underwent canonization for a second time, and new Confucian texts were selected as standard texts for scholars preparing for the imperial examinations.

1. Confucian learning and the scholar-gentry class.

In contrast to the times of Confucius and Mencius, when the ru/ju (or Confucian), were just in the process of forming into a social/intellectual group, by the Song Dynasty, they had already formed into a social class called the scholar/gentry class, made possible by the imperial examinations based on the five Confucian classics.  Starting from the 6th century, state wide imperial examinations were started to select government officials.  By the mid-Tang Dynasty, the majority of the hereditary aristocracy were threatened their political positions, and by late Tang/early Song, the scholar/gentry had firmly established his social/political/intellectual control of China.  Since the majority within the government since the Tang Dynasty were Confucian scholars who had been selected via the imperial examinations, these scholars became officials who served at the capital or at the provinces; those who passed the lower levels of examinations would serve at lower levels, e.g. the prefectural level.  But even if without a government position, scholars who passed the lowest levels of imperial examinations were respected at the local regions, who were often hired as private tutors to villagers in China where there were very few formal schools.  On the other hand, scholars who did become senior government officials would ultimately retire to their hometown and purchase large tracts of land with the money they made while serving as government officials.  The retired officials, now called gentry, assumed leadership in the local regions: they served as the go-between between the higher levels of government: prefectural, provincial, and central, and their local regions.  The respect they enjoyed in the local regions also led them to take local leadership.  Often, their descendents would pass imperial examinations and become government officials, further consolidating the prestige of the clan in the local region.  The scholar/gentry class, although not hereditary, since no Confucian could determine his son would pass the imperial examinations, became a firmly established phenomenon in Chinese society; it was a socially mobile class.  On the whole, one can say though that the Confucians constituted the upper class in China.  The Confucians, in this context, also identified with Chinese culture in their attempt to preserve Chinese "cultural integrity."

2. Zhu Xi and Confucian learning.

The greatest scholar in this second wave of canonization of Confucian learning was Zhu Xi.  Like so many of his contemporaries, although he started writing in the Northern Song Dynasty, it was in the Southern Song Dynasty, when the Chinese capital moved south to give up the northern territories to the new state established by the Tartars in the north, that he began to talk more in terms of a systematic reorganization of Confucian learning.  Instead of the Five Classics of Confucian learning standardized in the Han Dynasty, Zhu Xi proposed the adoption of the Four Books as standard Confucian texts to be used in the imperial examinations: the Analects, and the Mencius, plus Doctrine of the Mean (zhongyong), and Great  Learning (Daxue), the latter two both  selections from the Book of Documents, one of the five classics canonized in the Han Dynasty.  These four books focused more on the Confucian and Mencian emphasis on inner cultivation than the general orientation of the five classics.  As Fairbank comments, two characteristics stand out about Zhu Xi's selection: the "relative autonomy of the scholar, who is called upon to exercise his own conscience and perceptiveness in his classical studies...to find the Way in oneself," (Fairbank, 99) which sounds so very Mencian: echoing the Mencian argument that when one properly undergoes moral cultivation, one can constitute a moral universe on his own.  The second characteristic is the emphasis on "rational, moral learning," with a focus on the Five Relationships expounded by Confucius (minister/king, son/father, wife/husband, younger/older siblings, and friends.).

3. The influence of Buddhism

As mentioned earlier, Confucian scholars were concerned about the "contamination" of Confucian learning by Buddhism, foremost by Buddhism's denial of this world's worth, by its confusion of the Confucian concept of filial piety, and by the denial of ethical human nature, depriving humans of their role as moral agents in Confucian learning.  Despite their denunciation of Buddhism, Confucian scholars like Zhu Xi still absorbed Buddhism to different degrees, primarily a Buddhist influenced transcendental level of knowledge.  For Zhu Xi, the Confucian concept of li or the Way, which had primarily represented rituals to Confucius, became more or less transcendental principles that worked together with the qi, an especially Mencian concept that brought the heavenly way closer to the human being and gave it more concrete manifestation.  But in the li/qi relationship, li came to assume a predominant position.  To some Confucians who came after Zhu Xi, this was a dangerous move to lead to abstract arguments about what  was the li, instead of realizing it foremost in individual (moral) behavior.