SOURCE: “The Learning of the Mind-and-Heart in the Early Chu Hsi School,” in The Message of the Mind in Neo-Confucianism, Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 24-52.

[In the essay below, De Bary examines the way in which the interpretation of Chu Hsi's teachings concerning the learning of the mind has resulted in confusion regarding the role of the “mind-and-heart” in his philosophy.]

In Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart¹ I reported on developments in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries which saw the rise of the new Learning of the Mind-and-Heart as an accompaniment to Neo-Confucianism's establishment as an official orthodoxy—a development which had been largely ignored in earlier histories both of ideas and institutions. By the mid-Ming, however, with the more intensive development of Neo-Confucian thought that followed from its dominance of the educational and scholarly scene, important philosophical issues surfaced which had not been so fully addressed in the phase of rapid early growth. My earlier study stopped short of this later development, recognizing it to constitute a new chapter in the history of Neo-Confucian thought. Yet as long as this later phase remained unexamined, we would be left without an adequate explanation of how such a radical change could have come about in the later way of perceiving the earlier development. This is especially true of the modern identification of the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (hsin-hsüeh) with the so-called “Lu-Wang School,” reserving it to that branch of Neo-Confucianism alone, while the Learning of Principle (li-hsüeh), originally almost coextensive with hsin-hsüeh, became designated as a separate Ch’eng-Chu reservation.

By now the association of “hsin-hsüeh with “Lu-Wang” has become such a fixture of modern scholarly thinking that one encounters it almost everywhere in histories, textbooks, encyclopedias, and dictionaries.² Two brief quotations from Fung Yu-lan's History of Chinese Philosophy will serve to illustrate the point:

Contemporary with Chu Hsi, the greatest figure in the Rationalistic (Li-hsüeh) school of Neo-Confucianism, there lived another thinker who is important as the real founder of the rival idealistic (Hsin Hsüeh) school. This is Lu Chiu-yüan (1139-93), better known under his literary name as Lu Hsiang-shan … If we wish to sum up the difference between the two schools in a word, we may say that Chu's school emphasizes the “Learning of Principle” (li-hsüeh) … whereas that of Lu emphasizes the “Learning of the Mind (Hsin-hsüeh).³

A concomitant of this oversimplification has been the tendency to view principle (li) as opposed to mind (hsin), and thus arrive at a neat dichotomy of the orthodox Ch’eng Chu school, representing the “school of principle,” versus the unorthodox “Lu-Wang School of the Mind.” Further confusion has arisen from the breadth of the concept of “mind-and-heart” (hsin) itself, as also from the inherent generality and multiple uses of the Chinese term for learning, hsüeh, which serves equally as a form of learning, a school of thought, or some institutionalization of it.

Some of this confusion underlies the issue raised by Ch’ien Mu in his monumental study of Chu Hsi's teaching, the Chu Tzu hsin hsüeh-an. After presenting his overview of Chu's “learning,” Ch’ien devotes a major portion of his five-volume work to Chu's view of the mind-and-heart, and comments on the Ch’eng-Chu/Lu-Wang dichotomy as follows:

In later times men have said that Ch’eng-Chu emphasized the nature as principle, while Lu-Wang stressed the mind as principle. Accordingly they differentiated Ch’eng-Chu as the learning of principle (li-hsüeh) and Lu-Wang as the learning of the mind-and-heart (hsin-hsüeh). This distinction has something to be said for it, but actually there was no one to match Master Chu in his ability to elucidate the similarities and differences, divergences and convergences, in the matter of mind and principle, as well as the precise connections and interactions between them. Therefore in general to say that the learning of Chu Hsi was most thoroughly, from beginning to end, a vast and fully-defined learning of the mind is not at all inappropriate.⁴

Lest this be taken as a mere passing comment of Ch’ien's rather than one truly representative of his work as a whole, it should be said that these lines introduce a major segment of Ch’ien's study (vol. 2), and the view they express is reinforced frequently elsewhere in the work. For instance:

To say that the learning of principle is the learning of the mind may be allowable, but to say that Ch’eng-Chu and Lu-Wang can be divided into two separate lineages, is something for which I find no warrant. …

(2:106)

Men of later times have spoken of the learning of principle as the learning of human nature and principle. As one can see from the preceding quotations [by Chu Hsi on the mind and nature], the learning of the nature and principle (hsing-li hsüeh) is truly the learning of the mind. All understanding and effort with respect to the nature and principle depends completely on the mind, so that if you leave out the mind, there is nothing left of the learning of the nature and principle to speak of.

(1:49)

When recent scholars have discussed the similarities and differences between Chu and Lu, they have generally identified Chu with the Learning of Principle and Lu with the Learning of Mind, the error of which I have discussed above. Actually the difference between the two lies squarely in [their different views of] the learning of the mind.

(1:139; see also 1:49, 59, and 2:5)

When Ch’ien Mu says, as in the first quotation above, that “the learning of Chu Hsi was most thoroughly, from beginning to end, a vast and fully-defined learning of the mind-and-heart …,” he speaks in terms almost exactly like those used by early followers of Chu Hsi;⁵ but not in the terms of Chu himself, who referred to the new teaching most often as the Sage Learning (sheng-hsüeh) or Learning of the Way (tao-hsüeh). “Sage Learning” meant the learning which had come down from the sages, but also the “learning of sagehood,” i.e., how one can achieve sagehood, as the overarching conception of the new movement and as the alternative to the ideal of attaining Buddhahood. Although Chu talked a great deal about human nature, principle, and mind, it was only after Chu Hsi's time that the terms “learning of principle” (li-hsüeh), “learning of human nature and principle” (hsing-li hsüeh), and “learning of the mind” (hsin-hsüeh) came into wide use to describe the essential content of the sage learning. As Ch’ien Mu has said, discussing Chu Hsi's learning of the mind as one that leads to sagehood:

Those who have not yet reached the stage where the mind is completely identified with principle, must have a gate and a path, through which, by degrees and stages, they come to understand the substance of the mind and make judgments in practice, and through which they can hope to attain their goal—this is the essence of the learning of the mind as discussed by Chu Hsi.

(2:5)

If a proper understanding of the mind-and-heart was essential to the attainment of sagehood, it was no less intimately bound up with Chu's philosophy of human nature as grounded in his cosmology of principle and material force (ch’i). Of this Ch’ien Mu says:

In this Master Chu made every effort to point out the importance of the mind. … Therefore when it is said that Lu-Wang represents the learning of the mind and Ch’eng-Chu the learning of principle, this distinction is not appropriate. If one said the Lu-Wang school was exclusively oriented toward the human order, while Ch’eng-Chu equally emphasized the human and cosmic orders, that might be closer to the truth.”⁶

Chu Hsi apparently did not use the term “hsin-hsüeh” himself, but then neither did Lu Hsiang-shan, the reported progenitor of the School of the Mind, although their contemporary Yang Wan-li (1127-1206), known for his devotion to the teaching of the Great Learning, gave the title “Essays on the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (Hsin-hsüeh lun) to a series of discussions on themes central to the developing Neo-Confucian hsin-hsüeh: the Confucian classics and rites as manifestations of the Way; the word in speech, writing and book-learning as means of communicating the Way of the Sages; the holistic unity of the Way joining inner self and outer world; and the roles of Yen Hui, Tseng Tzu, Tsu Ssu, Mencius and Han Yü as the transmitters of the Way and defenders of it against heterodoxy.⁷ Yet, notwithstanding Yang's title, he too makes no use of the term hsin-hsüeh in the essays themselves.

The terms Chu Hsi himself used, which became most important in the later discussion of the learning of the mind, were the transmission of the mind (ch’uan-hsin), the method of the mind (hsin-fa), and by contextual association the Tradition of, or Succession to, the Way (tao-t’ung). All three concepts involve a similar conception of the Way, how it is communicated, and practiced, and how these relate to the mind. First I shall deal with the concept of tao-t’ung.

1. SUCCESSION TO, OR TRADITION OF, THE WAY (TAO-T’UNG)

This concept is used to represent both the process by which the Way is perpetuated (“Succession to the Way”) and its content (“Tradition of the Way”). It came down to Chu through the school of Ch’eng I but was first formulated in these terms by Chu in his preface to the Mean (Chung-yung).⁸

“Why was the Mean written? Master Tzu-ssu wrote it because he was worried lest the transmission of the Learning of the Way (tao-hsüeh) be lost.⁹ When the divine sages of highest antiquity had succeeded to the work of Heaven and established the Supreme Norm, the transmission of the Tradition of the Way (tao-t’ung) had its inception. As may be discovered from the classics, “Hold fast the Mean” is what Yao transmitted to Shun.¹⁰ That “the mind of man is precarious” and the “mind of the Way is subtle and barely perceptible”; that one should “have refined discrimination and singleness of mind” and should “hold fast the Mean,”¹¹ is what Shun transmitted to Yü. Yao's one utterance is complete and perfect in itself, but Shun added three more in order to show that Yao's one utterance could only be carried out in this way. …

Subsequently sage upon sage succeeded one another: T’ang the Completer, Wen and Wu as rulers, Kao Yao, I Yin, Fu Yüeh, the Duke of Chou, and Duke Shao as ministers, received and passed on this tradition of the Way. As for our master Confucius, though he did not attain a position of authority, nevertheless his resuming the tradition of the past sages and imparting it to later scholars was a contribution even more worthy than that of Yao and Shun. Still, in his own time those who recognized him were only [his disciples] Yen Hui and Tseng Ts’an, who grasped and passed on his essential meaning. Then in the next generation after Tseng, with Confucius' grandson Tzu-ssu [reputed author of the Mean], it was far removed in time from the sages and heterodoxies had already arisen. …

Thereafter the transmission was resumed by Mencius, who was able to interpret and clarify the meaning of this text [the Mean] and succeed to the tradition of the early sages; but upon his demise the transmission was finally lost. … Fortunately, however, this text was not lost, and when the Masters Ch’eng, two brothers, appeared [in the Sung] they had something to study in order to pick up the threads of what had not been transmitted for a thousand years, and something to rely on in exposing the speciousness of the seeming truths of Buddhism and Taoism. Though the contribution of Tzu-ssu was great, had it not been for the Ch’engs we would not have grasped his meaning from his words alone. But alas, their explanations also became lost.¹²

Chu goes on to explain with what difficulty he pieced together and pondered for himself the essential message of the Mean from the fragmentary material available to him. He reiterates not only the theme of the precariousness of the Way as transmitted by human hands, but also the successive struggles of inspired individuals to recover its true meaning. Thus, tao-t’ung almost literally has the sense of “linking or stitching the Way together.”

A few key points should be noted in this passage. One is that the tao-t’ung involves the transmission of a teaching which comes down from the sages but is discontinuous after the age of the sage-kings.¹³ Then there is the tribute to individuals like Confucius, Mencius, and the Ch’eng brothers for reviving the Way after it had fallen into disuse. Another point is the importance to these individuals of the surviving fragmentary texts as a clue to the sage's teaching; in the case of the Ch’engs “they had something to study in order to pick up the threads of what had not been transmitted for a thousand years.” Finally, there is the statement “had it not been for the Ch’engs, we would not have gotten the mind [of the sages] from the words of Tzu-ssu alone.”¹⁴

Taken together these statements characterize a tradition which depends on both text and interpretation for its transmission. One cannot have a “worldless transmission” as in Ch’an Buddhism, nor on the other hand can one depend simply on the preservation of texts and their literal reading. Only a few inspired individuals are capable of grasping the inner meaning of the text, and their contribution is indispensable. Without it, texts like the Mean and Great Learning are as lifeless (according to this Neo-Confucian view) as they had been for over a millennium since the passing of Mencius. On the other hand, without the texts there is no objective, public record, only subjective imagination and private experience, incommunicable in words (as in Ch’an Buddhism)—which cannot serve to reestablish the Way of the sage-kings as the solid basis for a humane polity and community.

In Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, I have distinguished two aspects of the tao-t’ung, as prophetic and scholastic, depending on whether one emphasizes the inner inspiration or solitary perception which Chu so highlights in this passage, or whether one appeals to received authority by continuous transmission either of texts or instruction from teacher to student.

This ambiguous legacy is the product of Chu's own intellectual situation as heir first to the Ch’eng brothers, and then to other Sung masters. He affirms at once the Ch’eng brothers' independent access to the essential meaning, or heart (hsin), of the Way, along with the collective contributions which other Sung thinkers, starting with Chou Tun-i, made to his own philosophical synthesis. The constructing of this synthesis was itself a creative process, depending on both inner inspiration and Chu's unique “linking-up” of elements drawn from diverse sources. Chu's Reflections on Things at Hand (Chin-ssu lu) is a good example of the latter. In it, he pulled together, in a way not done before, disparate elements from predecessors not themselves linked by any master-disciple relation or Ch’an-like succession. Moreover, his own experience in trying to piece together the philosophy of the Ch’eng brothers from the discrepant and conflicting versions of their disciples and successors, is another example of the need actively to repossess the Way rather than just passively to receive it.¹⁵ Yet it was equally important that this synthesis be grounded in classical texts, which is why Chu devoted so much of his time in later years to editing or commenting on the classics as the documentary foundation of his synthesis. Chu's commentary on and preface to the Mean was recognized as one of the most important statements of this mature scholarship. Every word of Chu's in it was chosen with extreme care.¹⁶

Both versions of the tao-t’ung, prophetic and scholastic, appear frequently in later Neo-Confucian writings. It is rare indeed that a scholar in the later tradition does not orient himself or his scholarly lineage, in one way or another, to the tradition of the Way as set forth in this preface to the Mean. Like Chu's preface to the Great Learning, it was among the first things read by students almost anywhere in East Asia as part of their basic education in the Four Books.

T’ung (here translated as “tradition” or “succession”) conveys the senses both of a chain or link and of overall control or coordination. The term cheng-t’ung, in its Neo-Confucian guise, appeared at about the same time as tao-t’ung to express the idea of legitimate succession by virtue of reestablishing control over the empire (and not necessarily in direct succession to the previous dynasty).¹⁷ For Chu Hsi tao-t’ung represented the active repossession or reconstituting of the Way in a manner akin to regaining or reconstituting the Empire as the basis for legitimate dynastic succession.

In 1172, some seventeen years before Chu wrote his preface to the Mean, a work entitled Sheng-men shih-yeh t’u (Diagrams of the Proper Business of the Sages' School) was produced by Li Yüan-kang, a follower of the Ch’eng brothers and Chang Tsai.¹⁸ The first of Li's Diagrams is entitled “Ch’uan-tao cheng-t’ung” (The Legitimate Succession in the Transmission of the Way; see figure 1). Its account of this succession is similar to that in Chu's preface, showing the Ch’eng brothers to be the direct successors to Mencius, and including no mention of Chou Tun-i or Chang Tsai.¹⁹ The great eighteenth-century scholar Ch’ien Ta-hsin (1728-1804) drew attention to this, saying, “The two characters tao-t’ung first appear in Li Yüan-kang's Sheng-men shih-yeh t’u. The first diagram speaks of ‘The legitimate succession to the transmission of the Way’ in explanation of the Ch’engs' inheriting it from Mencius. This work was completed in 1172, contemporaneous with Chu Hsi.”²⁰

In this very brief note Ch’ien Ta-hsin is quite precise in stating only what he knew—that Li's work represents the first appearance of these two characters in an extant text (though not abbreviated to the compound tao-t’ung), and that this appearance was contemporaneous with Chu Hsi. He does not say that it was the first use of the term tao-t’ung, or that Chu got the compound term from this source. He leaves open the possibility that it had been current in the Ch’eng brothers school and might have come to Chu by another route.

The only reason this minor point was worth noting at all by Ch’ien was that his readers would be familiar with Chu Hsi's reference to tao-t’ung in the preface to his commentary on the Mean, a reference repeatedly cited by generations of Neo-Confucian scholars, whereas hardly anyone would have seen or known about Li's charts. Ch’ien was reporting an out-of-the-way fact about the Succession to the Way everyone had come to know through Chu Hsi, as the dominant authority in the later tradition.

In Chu Hsi's preface the active agency of the individual mind in grasping the meaning of fragmentary texts and discerning the original intent of the sages was indicated. In Li Yüan-kang's charts the role of the mind is also greatly emphasized (see figures 2, 3, or original diagrams 4, 5, 8, 9, and 11). But, aside from this, it was the immediate juxtaposition of the Succession to the Way (tao-t’ung) with the Method of the Mind (hsin-fa) that led to the association of the two in the Learning of the Mind (hsin-hsüeh).

2. THE METHOD OF THE MIND (HSIN-FA).

At the beginning of Chu Hsi's commentary on the Mean and immediately following his preface in most early editions, he quoted some comments of Ch’eng I on the general nature of the Mean:

This work (the Chung-yung) represents the method of the mind-and-heart as transmitted in the Confucian school. Tzu-ssu feared that in time it would become misunderstood, and so he wrote it down in this work so as to pass it on to Mencius. This book was the first to explain that the unitary principle, from its position of centrality, is dispersed to become the myriad things and from its outer reaches returns to become one principle; release it and it fills the universe; roll it up and it is retracted into the most hidden recesses. Its savor is limitless. It is all solid learning. The careful reader, having searched its depths and savored its meaning until he has truly gotten it, can use it throughout his life without ever exhausting it.²¹

This quotation, which is a concatenation of several different phrases appearing in the extant writings of Ch’eng I²² became the primary reference to the method of the mind among later Neo-Confucians. Here too, however, we have it prefigured by one of the diagrams by Li Yüan-kang, entitled “The Essential Method for the Preservation of the Mind” (Tsun-hsin yao-fa) (see figure 3). The contents of the diagram come largely from the Mean, as interpreted in the light of Mencius and Ch’eng I; they concern the preservation of the equilibrium of the mind in the unaroused and unexpressed state, and the attainment of harmony in one's expressed thoughts and desires through such disciplines as self-watchfulness, caution and apprehension, holding to reverence. Thus both Li and Chu Hsi associate the method of the mind with the Mean and with a transmission from the sages. Chu confirms this later in a subsequent preface to the Mean which also cites Ch’eng I and the method of the mind handed down from the sages.²³

The message from Ch’eng I as quoted by Chu, however, is more metaphysical than Li's and has a more oracular tone. It speaks of the mysterious process by which principle manifests both its unity and diversity, and thus can serve as the ground for a practical learning based on solid principle. From this it is evident that hsin-fa could cover a range of meanings from the most abstruse to the very practical. Later writers took full advantage of this flexibility to make hsin-fa serve their own purposes.

One use to which it should not have been put, however, was the earlier Buddhist use of the term to represent a nonverbal communication of enlightenment from mind-to-mind, as from master to disciple, or patriarch to patriarch.²⁴ Earlier I have discussed preexisting Buddhist and Neo-Confucian use of hsin-fa and need not repeat that here.²⁵ Chu Hsi made plain in his preface that the transmission from the sages differed fundamentally from that of the Buddhas, and he did so further in his commentary on the important passage in the Analects (12:1) dealing with Confucius' disciple Yen Yüan and “subduing the self and restoring riteness.” There Chu specifically identifies hsin-fa with this key concept of sustained moral discipline:

This chapter, with its questions and answers, represents a most cogent and important statement concerning the method of the mind-and-heart as handed down to us [from the sages]. If one is not altogether clear in his mind about this, he will not be able to discern its subtle points, and if one is not altogether firm about it, one cannot carry out one's decisions. Thus what Yen Yüan alone had been able to hear and understand [by virtue of his determined effort] no scholar should fail to apply himself to. Master Ch’eng's admonitions [cited in the commentary] too are most revealing. The scholar should savor and ponder them deeply.²⁶

Elsewhere, in the Classified Conversations, Chu emphasized the point that the Buddhists might have a method of self-control but they do not have the method of “restoring riteness” (fu-li), as a way of defining the norms of practical action. Here in his commentary Chu points out that rites are not to be equated simply with principle in the abstract; rites are the measured expression of Heaven's principle (t’ien-li chih chieh-wen) and thus are the “the means whereby the virtue of the mind-and-heart may be perfected.”²⁷ Without the latter the Buddhists and Taoists have no means of determining what specific standards should guide one's actions in the conduct of daily life. Thus principle remains for them something vague, amorphous, and subject only to the rule of expedient adaptation.²⁸

Further in the Classified Conversations of Master Chu (Chu Tzu yü-lei) there is a reference to Ch’eng I and the hsin-fa which clearly identifies the latter with the key elements in Chu Hsi's presentation of the tao-t’ung in his preface to the Mean: with the distinction between the human mind and the mind of the Way, with the method of refined discrimination and singleness of mind, with the transmission of the Way from Yao and Shun which lapsed after Mencius, and even with the essentials of mind-cultivation in the eightfold method of the Great Learning:

Master Ch’eng says “The human mind is human desires; hence it is precarious. The mind of the Way is Heaven's principle; hence it is refined and subtle. ‘Refined discrimination’ is that whereby [the method] is carried out; singleness of mind is for preserving [the mind of the Way]. With this one is able to hold fast the Mean!” These words say it all! Refinement is to have refined discrimination and not let [the mind] become mixed and confused. Singleness is to concentrate on unity from beginning to end. Never since this was transmitted from Yao and Shun has there been any other theory. First of all there were these words, and ever since there has been no change in the sages' method of the mind-and-heart.

In the classic [of the Mean] one finds many expressions of this idea. In what is referred to [in the Mean] as “choosing the good and firmly holding to it,” “Choosing the good” is “having refined discrimination.” “Firmly holding to it” is “singleness of mind.” “Broad learning, judicious inquiry, careful thought, and clear differentiation” (in the Mean 20) are all “refined discrimination,” and “earnest, resolute practice” is “singleness of mind.” “Understanding the good” in the Mean (also ch. 20) is “refined discrimination” and [in the same chapter] “achieving personal integrity” is “singleness.” In the Great Learning the extension of knowledge and investigation of things cannot be accomplished without “refined discrimination,” and achieving integrity of intention (ch’eng-i) is singleness of mind. He who pursues learning only has this principle to learn. When the transmission was lost after Mencius' time, it is just this that was lost.²⁹

This was not, however, the first time that the method of the mind had been identified with the ruler's method of self-cultivation as taught in the Great Learning. As I pointed out in Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, Ch’en Ch’ang-fang (1108-1148), in his “Essay on the Learning of the Emperors (Ti-hsüeh lun),” spoke of it as the essential message passed down from Yao and Shun to Confucius and Mencius. “Its content is identified both as ‘the learning of the sage emperors and kings’ and as ‘the ruler's method of the mind’ (jen-chu hsin-fa). No other knowledge, no other capability, is so important for the ruler as being able to examine his own motives and conduct to insure that he is not misled into making errors of catastrophic consequence for the people.”³⁰ Thus the method of the mind was already understood as a political doctrine before Chu Hsi's time, and it was so understood by followers of Chu Hsi like Ts’ai Shen and Huang Chen, whose views will be discussed presently.

3. TRANSMISSION OF THE MIND (CH’UAN-HSIN).

We have already noted in discussing the “Succession to the Way” (tao-t’ung) how important it was for Chu Hsi that this succession should be achieved by grasping the mind of the sages, or their true intention, based on a correct reading of the classic texts. In fact, for Chu Hsi, the “transmission of the [sage's] mind” was something that evolved from the earlier concepts of the “transmission of the Way (ch’uan-tao).” Ch’ien Mu has already shown, at some length and in detail, how this development took place from Chu's earlier writings to his articulation of the concept in his later works.³¹ Chu's personal development is reflected in the regrets he expressed in 1163-64 over his own failure to appreciate fully the instruction he had received earlier from Li T’ung, because he had not yet grasped the significance of the “transmission of the mind [of the sages].”³² Also, in a postface for the Written Legacy of the Ch’eng Brothers (Ch’eng shih i-shu) Chu speaks of the errors of “scholars who have not yet learned the essentials of the transmission of the [sages'] mind and get stuck in the literal meaning of words.” From this paraphrase of Ch’eng I and much other evidence Ch’ien concludes that for Chu “the transmission of the Way lay in the transmission of the mind [of the sages],” and that Chu had discussed this long before Lu Hsiang-shan.³³

Later scholars who call Lu-Wang the learning of the mind and Ch’eng-Chu the learning of principle do not realize what [Chu] had said about the “transmission of the [sages'] mind.” … Impressed by Hsiang-shan's fondness for talking about the mind, they fail to take note of all that Chu had said about the learning of the mind.³⁴

Given this genetic connection between the “transmission of the Way” and “transmission of the mind,” we can more readily understand why Chu closely associated the succession to the Way (tao-t’ung) with what Ch’eng I had said about the “method of the mind transmitted from the sages.” We note however that there is a shift in the content of what is considered essential in these transmissions. Li Yüan-kang's version of the “Essential Method for Preserving the Mind” had featured the concepts appearing in the Mean: the unexpressed and expressed states of the mind, self-watchfulness, etc., but these are not found in the message Chu conveys in his preface to the Mean. In the latter the keys to the Way and the essentials of the transmission are identified in what became famous as the “Sixteen Words” concerning the “human mind being precarious, the mind of the Way being subtle,” “having utmost refinement and singleness of mind,” and “holding fast to the Mean.” This view, centering on the distinction between the human mind and the mind of the Way, predominates in Chu's later thought and in his commentaries on the Four books. His preface to the Mean (1189) may be taken as a definitive statement of this central concept.³⁵

If however we refer back to Li Yüan-kang's charts again, we find that this same cluster of ideas is represented in the eighth chart, entitled “Secret Purport of the Transmission of the Mind” (Ch’uan-hsin mi-chih), wherein the mind is seen to combine two aspects (the human mind and mind of the Way); where one is instructed to follow Heaven's Principle while overcoming human desires; where refinement and subtlety are counterposed to the danger and insecurity of the human mind; and wherein singleness of mind is spoken of as appropriate to the mind of the Way, while refined discrimination is proper to the human mind. Thus Li identifies with the Transmission of the Mind what Chu identifies with the Succession to the Way, while both associate the Method of the Mind (hsin-fa) with the Mean but in different ways. From this it would appear that these concepts were closely related in the thinking of late twelfth-century representatives of the Ch’eng brothers school, and that this cluster of associations clung to Chu Hsi's use of the terms when he incorporated them into his widely used prefaces and commentaries on the Four Books. Since each of them stood as an alternative to Buddhist understandings of the same term—of the Way and its transmission, of the mind and its cultivation—it was only natural for early followers of Chu Hsi to think of this ensemble as representing the Confucian alternative to the Buddhist Learning of the Mind, and for a much later scholar like Ch’ien Mu to think of them as the Ch’eng-Chu Learning of the Mind in contrast to that which became identified with “Lu-Wang.” Neo-Confucians did not think of these Chinese expressions as having become the exclusive property of Buddhism, any more than did Han Yü, who, in his celebrated essay “On the Way (Yüan tao),” was unwilling to concede to Buddhists an exclusive right to interprete the Way in their own terms.³⁶

There is one other concept concerning the mind which has an important place in Chu Hsi's teachings on the mind. This is hsin-shu, representing basic attitudes, dispositions, or habits of mind. It is a major category of self-cultivation in Chu Hsi's Elementary Learning, and because of the latter work's wide use as a Neo-Confucian textbook was a term much employed by thinkers who also discussed the learning of the mind-and-heart.³⁷ It is not, however, encountered frequently in discussions of hsin-hsüeh itself, and does not appear to have had such a direct connection with it as did the sixteen-word message concerning the human mind and mind of the Way, the tradition of the Way, or the transmission of the mind of the sages. While, therefore, it may be taken as evidence of the basic orientation of Neo-Confucian thought toward a discipline of mind, hsin-shu is not part of the cluster of terms—tao-t’ung, hsin-fa, and hsin-ch’uan—that constitute the essential core of the hsin-hsüeh in early Neo-Confucian discussions of the learning of the mind-and-heart.

The view of the orthodox tradition presented above is reiterated by Chu Hsi's premier disciple, Huang Kan (1152-1221),³⁸ in his “General Account of the Transmission of the Succession to the Way Among the Sages and Worthies” (Sheng-hsien tao-t’ung ch’uan-shou tsung-hsü shuo), wherein he explains the content of the “sixteen-word” teaching concerning the human mind and mind of the Way as the essential message handed down from Yao and Shun in the Succession to the Way (tao-t’ung).³⁹ Elsewhere, commenting on the work of his colleague Huang Shih-i,⁴⁰ entitled “Two Diagrams on the Transmission of the [Sages'] Mind from Shun and Yü, and the views of Chou and Ch’eng on Human Nature” (Shun Yü ch’uan-hsin Chou Ch’eng yen hsing erh t’u), Huang Kan confirms that the teaching concerning the human mind and mind of the Way is the authentic “transmission of the mind” from Shun and Yü as interpreted by Chu Hsi in the preface to the Mean, but he criticizes the interpretations of Huang Shih-i which would blur the distinction between these two aspects of the mind.⁴¹ From this we can see that Huang Kan equated the Transmission of the [Sages'] Mind (ch’uan-hsin) with the Succession to the Way (tao-t’ung) as imparted by the Sages, on the basis of their common content in the doctrine of the mind set forth in Chu Hsi's preface to the Mean.

From another major disciple of Chu Hsi, Ch’en Ch’un (1159-1223), often considered one of the most reliable interpreters of Chu Hsi, we get a similar picture.⁴² In his important Yen-ling lectures Ch’en gave a concise summary of Chu's mature teachings, how they were to be studied and practiced, and how the Confucian Way has been transmitted through many vicissitudes. In the second lecture, entitled “The Source of Teachers and Friends (Shih-yu yüan-yüan),” Ch’en gives a fuller and more systematized account of the orthodox tradition than is found in Chu's preface to the Mean. Having described the lapse in the tradition after Mencius, he speaks of its resumption in the Sung by Chou Tun-i, who “did not receive it from any teacher but got it directly from heaven,”⁴³ and then passed it on to the Ch’engs and Chu. Of Chu himself Ch’en Ch’un says, “He got at the subtle words and ideas the Ch’engs had left to posterity, and refined and clarified them. Looking back he penetrated the mind of the sages; looking to the present he drew together the many schools and assembled them as one.”⁴⁴ As a result of these efforts, says Ch’en, those who would seek to attain sagehood have a sure guide in Chu. “But should anyone refuse this guidance and seek to enter upon the path to sagehood by some other gate, there would be no reason to believe that he could attain the true transmission of the mind of the sages.”⁴⁵

Further, in the Fourth Lecture concerning the order in which the Four Books should be read, Ch’en reaffirms the sequence Chu Hsi had recommended, starting with the Great Learning, going on to the Analects and Mencius, and ending with the Mean.⁴⁶ Of the latter he says:

Coming to the Book of the Mean (Chung yung), it represents the method of the mind handed down in the Sages' School.⁴⁷ Master Ch’eng I said: “Its savor is limitless. The careful reader, having searched its depths and savored its meaning until he has truly gotten it can use it throughout his life without ever exhausting it.”⁴⁸ But what it speaks of refers mostly to the higher level and there is relatively little that refers to the lower level. This is not something the beginner can start talking about all at once. He must familiarize himself with the Great Learning, the Analects, and Mencius before he can expect to reach this level, for only so can he appreciate that it is all, without any doubt, solid, practical learning.⁴⁹

Ch’en Ch’un, as an able student closely acquainted with Chu Hsi's thought in his later years, has long been recognized as an authoritative interpreter of Chu's teaching. In the preceding passages he confirms the following points relevant to our inquiry:

1. In the repossession of the Way after Mencius, the penetrating insights of the Sung masters and the great intellectual powers of Chu Hsi—both analytic and synthetic—play a key role in the reinterpretation of classic texts. Among the Sung masters Chou Tun-i, unmentioned in Chu Hsi's account in the preface to the Mean, assumes the path-breaking role Chu had previously assigned to the Ch’eng brothers, but this role is still a “prophetic” one in that Chou was said to have had no teacher and received his inspiration from Heaven.

2. If the mind of Chou Tun-i was directly illumined by Heaven, Chu Hsi's contribution was made through the depth and subtlety of his insight into the thought of the Ch’engs and his penetration of the mind of the sages. As a result Chu became the true heir and supreme authority on the “transmission of the Sage Mind.”

3. Ch’en Ch’un sees the Mean as the culminating expression of this mind in the Four Books, but acknowledges that much of it is metaphysical. He repeats, however, Chu's quotation from Ch’eng I about the Mean representing the method of the mind transmitted from the sages, and tries to explain, like Ch’eng, how this teaching, while seemingly abstruse, can serve as the solid basis for a truly practical learning.

Thus, in this succinct presentation of Chu's legacy, Ch’en Ch’un closely associated the sages' method of the mind (hsin-fa), the transmission of the mind of the sages, and the sixteen-word teaching concerning the human mind and mind of the Way, with the succession to the Way (tao-t’ung). If both Huang Kan and Ch’en Ch’un agree on these points in their summation of the essential teachings of Chu Hsi, it is not reasonable to suppose that these were inadvertent, ill-considered, or gratuitous appendages to the system.

In fact this conclusion is confirmed by prefaces to Ch’en's work written by scholars in the thirteenth, fifteenth, and eighteenth centuries successively: in a preface of 1247 the Pei-hsi tzu-i is described as containing the Message or Method of the Mind (hsin-fa); another preface of 1490 speaks of Ch’en Ch’un as the successor to Chou, the Ch’engs, Chang, and Chu as perpetuators of the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart; while still another of 1714 speaks of Ch’en's work as an integral synthesis of the Learning of the Mind;⁵⁰ thus over a span of five centuries the same characterization of Ch’en's (and Chu's) thought was acknowledged.

Another disciple of Chu Hsi was Ts’ai Shen (1167-1230), whose father Ts’ai Yüan-ting (1135-98),⁵¹ also considered a student and colleague of Chu Hsi, had had a special interest in the Great Plan (Hung-fan) section of the Book of Documents (Shu-ching). After the elder Ts’ai's death, Chu, in failing health himself, sensed that he would be unable to fulfill his own ambition of compiling a commentary on the Documents and, in the winter of 1199, asked Ts’ai Shen to carry out this task. In his preface to the Collected Commentaries on the Book of Documents (Shu-ching chi-chuan), Ts’ai modestly disclaims any qualifications for the task but says he felt compelled to undertake it, not only out of filial obligation to parent and teacher, but also because of the great importance of the Book of Documents, which held the key to good government:

The orderly rule of the Two Emperors and Three Kings was rooted in the Way, and the Way of the Two Emperors was rooted in the mind-and-heart. If one could grasp (lit. “get”) this mind, then the Way and orderly rule could be expressed in words. What then were these words? “Be refined and single-minded. Hold fast the Mean.” This was the method of the mind handed down from Yao, Shun, and Yü. Establishing the Mean and setting up the Supreme Norm was the method of the mind as passed on by King T’ang of Shang and King Wu of Chou. Call it “virtue,” call it “humaneness,” call it “reverence,” call it “sincerity”—the expressions may differ but the principle is one and the same. They are all without exception means of explaining the wondrousness of this mind. As expressed in terms of Heaven, it conveys the majesty whence this mind derives. As expressed in terms of the people, it conveys the care with which this mind is to be exercised. The rites, music, and transforming power of education issue from this mind. All institutions and cultures are products of this mind. The regulation of the family, ordering of the state, and bringing of peace to all-under-Heaven are extensions of this mind. Thus indeed does the virtuous power of this mind flourish abundantly. …

Preserve this mind and order prevails; lose it and there is disorder. The difference between order and disorder is determined by whether or not this mind is preserved. How so? Rulers in these later ages, if they aspire to the orderly rule of the Two Emperors and Three Kings, cannot but seek their Way; if they aspire to this Way, they cannot but seek this mind; and if they seek the essentials of this mind, how can it be done except through this book?⁵²

Here the message of the mind transmitted from Yao and Shun is identified with the sixteen-(here abbreviated to four) word formula which Chu Hsi had spoken of in the preface to the Mean as the orthodox tradition (tao-t’ung). Its central importance is further underscored by Ts’ai's description of it as embracing the central Confucian virtues that should constitute the basis of the ruler's self-cultivation.

The same point is reiterated by Ts’ai in commenting on the apocryphal text of the sixteen-word formula itself as it appeared in the “Counsels of the Great Yü” in the Book of Shang (Shang-shu). After explaining the distinction between the human mind and the mind of the Way, and the need to be discriminating and single-minded, he concluded:

The ancient sages, at the point of handing over the empire to others, never failed to pass on with it the method for its orderly rule.⁵³ Seeing it like this in the classic, rulers today cannot but ponder it deeply and reverently take it to heart.⁵⁴

Later in the next generation of Chu Hsi's school, the distinguished historian, classicist, and official, Huang Chen (1213-1280), a student of one of Chu Hsi's principal disciples, Fu Kuang (n.d.),⁵⁵ had occasion, when commenting on the “human mind/way mind” formula in the Book of Shang, to complain of how this had been misconstrued. He noted that in the original context of the passage, it had a hortatory and admonitory significance in the handing on of the mandate to rule. This is ignored, he says, by those who make much of the passage for purposes other than those originally intended:

Nowadays those who delight in talking about the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart disregard the original context and concentrate only on the mind of man and the mind of the Way. The worst of them just seize upon the two words “Way mind” and proceed to speak of the mind as the Way. This is to fall into Ch’an Buddhism and not realize that one is departing far from the basic mandate transmitted by Yao, Shun, and Yü.

Ts’ai Chiu-feng [Ts’ai Shen], when he wrote his commentary on the Book of Documents,⁵⁶ cited Master Chu's words as follows: “The ancient sage-kings, at the point of passing on the empire to others, never failed to pass on with it the method for governing it.” We can say that this truly conveys the basic meaning of this passage. Although by this Chiu-feng meant to set forth clearly the “mind of the emperors and kings,” for him it was the mind-and-heart for governing the state and pacifying the world. This view is solidly grounded in principle.

Although Chiu-feng himself took this as setting forth the mind of the sage emperors and kings, in his explanation of this mind as the root and basis of ordering the state and bringing peace to the world, he certainly affirmed the correct principle. Later, those who presented his commentary at court spoke of it as the “transmission of the mind” of the three sages, whereupon scholars of the time pointed to the sixteen-word formula as the essence of the “transmission of the mind” and Ch’an Buddhists borrowed this as support for their own view [of the transmission].⁵⁷

In my humble opinion the mind does not need to be transmitted. What pervades heaven-and-earth, links past and present, and is common to all things, is principle. Principle inheres in the mind and is experienced in things and affairs. The mind is what coordinates these principles [within and without] and makes distinctions of right and wrong. Worthiness or unworthiness among men, success or failure in human affairs, order and disorder in the world, are all determined in this way.⁵⁸

In contrast to this, says Huang, Ch’an Buddhism sees the principles articulated by the sages as handicapping self-realization and impeding enlightenment, so they simply point directly to the mind and seek to transmit hints without the use of words. The mind of the sages, however, was common to all men and the principles which should govern affairs were clearly known to all without the need for any special transmission of mind. It was only necessary for men to act on these principles and for their minds to make the necessary judgments in dealing with human affairs.

If Huang Chen found the “transmission of the mind” an unfortunate choice of words susceptible of misappropriation by Ch’an Buddhists, he did not disagree with Ts’ai Shen's basic view of moral self-cultivation and its importance for the mind of the ruler, or with Ts’ai's view, as Huang put it, that “this mind is the root of ordering the state and bringing peace to the world.” Such a view of the nature and nurture of the morally responsible, socially conscious mind, was what the true learning of the mind-and-heart was about, in contrast to the wordless transmission of the Ch’an Buddhists.

Huang made this still clearer in his discussion of the orthodox tradition in the Sung. Tracing the “correct teaching” as it came down from Chou Tun-i to Chu Hsi, and thence to Huang Kan, he acknowledges that in the course of its transmission two followers of the Ch’eng brothers, Yang Shih (1053-1135) and Hsieh Liang-tso (?-1120), became somewhat tainted by Ch’an. Nevertheless enough of the original teaching was conveyed to Lo Ts’ung-yen (1072-1135) and Li T’ung (1093-1163) so that the latter “could save Chu Hsi from falling into Ch’an,” and Chu, with his brilliant powers of analysis could shed great light on the teachings of the Ch’engs and regain the main road of the orthodox way. This was possible only because Li T’ung, “through this clarifying of the learning of the mind, could, despite the proclivity to become diverted toward Ch’an, himself hold onto the correct learning of the mind (hsin-hsüeh).⁵⁹

From this one can say that despite his reservations concerning the use of the expression “transmission of the mind,” Huang Chen saw the “learning of the mind” itself, not as a deviant form of Confucianism contaminated by Buddhism, but precisely as the authentic orthodoxy holding fast against such occasional lapses.

At about the same time Ch’en Ta-yü (c.s. 1259),⁶⁰ a Ch’eng-Chu scholar in the line of Huang Kan, in his commentary on the Book of Shang asserted that the passage on the human mind and mind of the Way “presented the tradition of the Way (tao-t’ung) as transmitted in the method of the mind (hsin-fa),” while the immediately following passage in the same text, having to do with the love and respect which the ruler should command, represented the succession to rulership (chih-fa).⁶¹ Thus he makes the same connection as Ts’ai Shen between the tradition of the Way, the method of the mind, and the succession to rulership.

Ch’en Ta-yü's views on the point are reiterated by another commentator on the Book of Shang, Ch’en Li (1252-1334),⁶² known for his devotion to Chu Hsi, who cites the latter's Recorded Conversations (Yü-lu) as confirmation of the view that the formula of “refinement and singleness of mind” was the method or practice (kung-fu) handed down from Shun to Yü as the Sages' method of the mind (hsin-fa).⁶³ Thereafter the practice (tzu-ti) in the Confucian school followed this formula. Though the methods of self-cultivation set forth in the Mean and Great Learning were expressed in different terms, the meaning was the same as the method of refinement and singleness. “What one needed to study was only this principle, and when, after Mencius, the transmission was lost, it was this that was lost.”⁶⁴ In other words, the practice of “refinement and singleness” was the “method of the mind” and the latter was the heart of the “tradition of the Way” passed down from the sages but lost after Mencius.

This view is also found in other writings of Ch’en Li. In his preface to the Collected Commentaries, he says: “The Book of Shang records the orderly rule of the early emperors and kings. One seeks the Way through the cultivation of reverence in the mind-and-heart, and one seeks orderly rule through the practice of the Mean in government.⁶⁵ The teaching concerning the human mind and mind of the Way, he says, is the essence of the Tradition of the Way (tao-t’ung),⁶⁶ while the teachings of “refinement and singleness” and “holding fast to the Mean,” as found in Chu Hsi's preface to the Mean, are indispensable ingredients of the Tradition of the Way (tao-t’ung). They represent as well the practice of the real principles and real learning spoken of in Ch’eng I's characterization of the message of the mind placed by Chu Hsi at the beginning of his commentary on the Mean.⁶⁷ Moreover, since this message is concerned with “real principles,” it is in no way incompatible with the “learning of the Way” (tao-hsüeh) and “learning of principle” (li-hsüeh) which comes down from Chou Tun-i, the Ch’engs, Chang Tsai, and Chu Hsi.⁶⁸ Finally, Ch’en sums it all up in his comment on the Analects' passage in which Confucius speaks of setting his heart on learning at age fifteen (a comment of Ch’en's preserved in the Ming Great Compendium on the Analects (Lun-yü ta-ch’üan), though Ch’en's own commentary on the Four Books (Ssu-shu fa-ming) has been lost):

The learning of the sage [Confucius] began with his heart set on learning [at the age of fifteen] and ended (at age seventy) with his being able to follow his heart's desire without transgressing the norm. From beginning to end it was all learning of the mind-and-heart

(hsin-hsüeh).⁶⁹

For another view of the matter among the early followers of Chu Hsi, we may cite the testimony of Wei Liao-weng (1178-1237) and Lo Ta-ching (n.d.). Wei is often cited with Chen Te-hsiu as a principal leader of the learning of the Way in the early thirteenth century. Together Wei and Chen were responsible for the Sung courts' reversal of the ban on Chu Hsi. Lo Ta-ching, active in the mid-thirteenth century,⁷⁰ had a great admiration for Chu Hsi, Chen Te-hsiu, and Wei Liao-weng, and in a miscellany of reading notes included the following quotation from a letter by Wei to a friend concerning the role of the mind in studying the classics:

“One should study the classics, reflecting on each word so as to get it oneself. One cannot just employ the method of simply following what has been said by former scholars.” He also said, “In employing the method of fathoming principles through the investigation of things, one should always bear in mind and keep in one's heart the model of the Three Dynasties. If one just follows in the tracks of the Han and Chin scholars, one will not have done the job.” Wei also said: “Just reading a great deal in the recent interpretations and reflections of former scholars is not as good as reading the sages' classics one by one for oneself. …”

These comments of Wei Ho-shan are something students should cherish and respect. I have compiled a work entitled “Classics and Commentaries on the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart”⁷¹ in ten fascicles, and have said in the preface: “It will not do if one does not seek to learn from Chou [Tun-i], the Ch’engs, Chang [Tsai], and Chu [Hsi], but [on the other hand] only to learn from them and not base it all in the Classics would be like neglecting one's father's memory and venerating one's elder brother. One must certainly not fail to read the Six Classics, but only to study them and not reflect upon them in one's own mind would be like buying a jewel box and throwing away the pearl.⁷²

If one considers this passage in the light of what was said earlier about Chu Hsi's insistence on the equal need for reading the original texts, studying the commentaries and reflecting oneself on the meaning of texts, as combined in Chu Hsi's conception of the “transmission of the mind [of the sages]” (ch’uan-hsin], we can recognize another component of the learning of the mind-and-heart referred to earlier by Ch’ien Mu (see above, pp. 24-27). Since Wei Liao-weng and Lo Ta-ching were both from Kiangsi, one might suspect some lingering influence on them of Lu Hsiang-shan, but in fact the kind of classical textual study recommended here and practiced by Wei Liao-weng was quite in contrast to the teaching of Lu, as was the emphasis above on the fathoming of principles through the investigation of things. Moreover Wei Liao-weng was associated with Fu Kuang, a leading disciple of Chu Hsi, and though like Chen Te-hsiu, disposed to minimize the differences between Chu and Lu, had no comparable association with the latter's limited following in the early thirteenth century.⁷³

It was at about this time that Chen Te-hsiu compiled his Classic of the Mind-and-Heart (Hsin-ching, abbreviated here as “Heart Classic”), based on passages in the Confucian classics and the interpretations of the Sung masters, which, as anthologized in concise form, became a “classic statement” of the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart. That this “Learning” was clearly identified with the well-known sixteen-word passage from the Book of Documents, as quoted by Chu Hsi in his preface to the Chung-yung chang-chü, is shown by Chen's choice of it as the opening passage of the Heart Classic, together with Chu's comment on it.⁷⁴ Moreover, that Ts’ai Shen had served as an intermediary in linking this “message of the mind” and “transmission of the mind” is suggested by a eulogy Chen had written for Ts’ai Shen in which he praised his commentary on the Book of Documents and cited it particularly for its account of the transmission of the Sages' and Kings' doctrine of the mind and its practice in rulership.⁷⁵ To his own “classic” Chen Te-hsiu appended a paean of praise for this “Learning,” which begins with the lines:

Transmitted from Shun to Yü
Were these sixteen words,
The Learning of the Mind-and-Heart for all ages
Had its inception here.(76)

These words were quoted by the late Sung scholar Hsiung Chieh (c.s. 1199), a Chu schoolman who studied under Huang Kan, when he compiled his Anthology on Human Nature and Principle, showing that this use of the term hsin-hsüeh was in no way incompatible with the view of Chu Hsi's teaching as centrally concerned with human nature and principle (hsing-li).⁷⁷ In the anthology it is included in the matter prefatory to selections from Chu Hsi, as if to sound a keynote.

Elsewhere Chen made it clear that hsin-fa represented not only the essential message handed down from the sages, but also the essential method to be practiced and attitude to be cultivated by all those committed to the Way of the Sages:

When one has committed himself to this Way, to what should he then devote his practice of it? If we look to remote antiquity, we can see that in the one word ‘reverence,’ as passed down through a hundred sages, is represented their real method of the mind-and-heart (hsin-fa).⁷⁸

Chen's Heart Classic had an especially deep influence on the great champion of Ch’eng-Chu orthodoxy in Korea, Yi T’oegye (1501-1570), for whom Lu Hsiang-shan was completely anathema. Yi wrote his own summation of the essentials of the tradition in Ten Diagrams of the Sages' Learning (Song-hak sip-do),⁷⁹ the seventh diagram of which was entitled “The Learning of the Mind-and-Heart” (see figure 7). Yi incorporated therein most of the concepts discussed above, and acknowledged that his chart was based on that of Ch’eng Min-cheng (c.s. 1466) (see figure 6), which was in turn devised from an earlier Yüan dynasty prototype by Ch’eng Fu-hsin (1257-1340)⁸⁰ appearing in the latter's Diagrams and Explanations of the Four Books (Ssu-shu t’u-shuo) of 1313⁸¹ (see figures 4, 5).

Ch’eng Fu-hsin was from Chu Hsi's ancestral hometown of Hsin-an in An-hui. Early accounts speak of him as having studied the words of Huang Kan and Fu Kuang and having become thoroughly “devoted to Chu Hsi's teaching, through which he was able to grasp (lit. ‘get’) the mind of Confucius, Mencius, Tseng Tzu and Tzu-ssu (i.e., as revealed in the Four Books).”⁸² He believed that the Great Learning particularly featured the doctrine of the mind, while the Mean featured the teaching concerning the nature (hsing), which was equated with principle (li). The two texts together thus expounded the combination of mind and principle so central to the tradition of the Way and to the early learning of the mind in the Ch’eng-Chu school, a combination emphasized in Ch’eng's diagrams.⁸³

Besides citing Ch’eng's views on the Learning and Method of the Mind in the text accompanying his own diagram, T’oegye, in his I-hak t’ong-nok (Comprehensive Record of the Learning of Principle),⁸⁴ identified this source of his Learning of the Mind with the Learning of Principle (to which he said Ch’eng made signal contributions) and also with the orthodox succession.⁸⁵ This orthodox tradition of the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart T’oegye clearly identified with the message and method of the mind (hsin-fa) coming down from the sages to the Sung masters as is indicated in his commentary on Chu's “Precepts of the White Deer Grotto,” summarized by Yiu as “the essentials of the Method of the Mind.”⁸⁶ Ch’eng presented his own Diagrams and Explanations of the Four Books to the Yüan court in 1313, at precisely the moment in Chinese history when the Four Books were first being adopted for use as the standard texts in the resumed civil service examinations. Prime among Ch’eng's sponsors in this presentation was Ch’eng Chü-fu (1249-1318), the chief architect of the system that would remain the official orthodoxy of China and Korea down into modern times.⁸⁷ (For illustration of above, see T’oegye's diagram in the Japanese edition of Ri Taikei Zenshū, 2:260.)

From the foregoing discussion of the Neo-Confucian Learning of the Mind-and-Heart in its initial phase, we may draw the following conclusions as to its essential characteristics:

1. Although the expression hsin-hsüeh was not used by either Chu Hsi or Lu Hsiang-shan, Chu had much to say about the nature and nurture of the mind which warranted his immediate followers' use of the term of differentiate Chu Hsi's view of the mind from the Buddhists' or Taoists'.

2. Chu's early followers identified this Learning of the Mind with three concepts appearing in key writings of Chu—key in the sense that they dealt with central issues and also, having wide dissemination, played an important role in shaping the new Learning of the Way as it left the hands of Chu Hsi. These concepts were the “Tradition of the Way” (tao-t’ung), the Method of the Mind (hsin-fa), and the Transmission of the [Sages'] Mind (ch’uan-hsin). Early writers of the Chu Hsi school spoke of these as inseparably related aspects of a core tradition handed down from the sages.

3. The passage most often cited as expressing the kernel of this teaching was the sixteen-word formula identified by Chu Hsi with the “tradition of the Way” (tao-t’ung) in his preface to the Mean. Elsewhere Chu, and others after him, also referred to it as the Message or Method of the Mind (hsin-fa), thus establishing a close correlation between this method and the tradition of the Way.

4. Though the “sixteen words” were obscure in themselves and drawn from an apocryphal version of the Book of Shang, they were taken by Chu Hsi as scriptural authority for the distinction between the human mind and the Mind of the Way—a crucial distinction in Ch’eng-Chu philosophy between the fallible mind of the ordinary man and the Sages' mind of pure principle (the mind of the Way). As moral injunctions these dicta comprised a method of self-cultivation including constant self-examination; making fine moral and cognitive distinctions (corresponding to the manifold particularizations of the Way in practice); concentrating the mind on the oneness of principle as constituting the essential unity of the human order with the creative process in Heaven, Earth, and all things; and holding to the Mean in the conduct of human affairs. Thus principal Neo-Confucian doctrines, especially as based on the Mean, were seen as implicated in these sixteen words.

5. Further, this kind of correlation was extended to include the methodical steps of intellectual and moral cultivation found in the Great Learning. From this the sixteen-word formula came to be seen as a concise, though cryptic, encapsulation of the Confucian teachings found in the Great Learning and the Mean, now coordinated by Chu Hsi's commentary with the interpretation of the Four Books as a whole, and most particularly with the important passage in the Analects on the discipline of “subduing the self and restoring riteness.” Given the almost mystical language in which Ch’eng I, as quoted by Chu, spoke of the “method of the mind,” it took on the aspect of an oracular message from the primordial age confirming not only the perennial truths of Confucian self-cultivation but also the fully articulated speculations of the Sung philosophers.

The cryptic character of this message is not to be confused with the kind of secret transmission spoken of in Ch’an (Zen) or Esoteric Buddhism. It involves no passing on of a truth which goes beyond all formulation in words, nor is there any implied distrust of language such as one finds in the Ch’an “nondependence” on words and phrases (pu-li wen-tzu). When Chu Hsi speaks of the “secret purport” of the sixteen-character message he means only that the words alone do not convey the full-meaning and significance of the sages' teaching. It is a teaching, however, written by Heaven, so to speak, on the mind-and-heart of everyman, by its endowment of the luminous rational and moral nature replete with all principles. All that is needed for the comprehension of this truth is clarity of perception—the kind of unobstructed vision possessed by the sages and the Sung masters, vouchsafed, in terms of their psycho-physical dispositions, by a specially clairvoyant ethereal endowment, brought to its full realization by a corresponding effort at self-cultivation of their individual natures.

Thus the Sages' teaching remains in the domain of rational discourse, and the orthodox tradition, far from claiming to be a private or exclusive transmission, is something open to all. Indeed it is this open and public character of the Way, so vital to its educational propagation in the late Sung and Yüan periods, to which appeal is made by later Neo-Confucians who protest the tendency to make of the orthodox tradition a private or exclusive possession in a single line of transmission.

6. Since this Tradition of the Way had come down from Sage-kings who had presided over a social order fully consonant with that Way, the injunctions discussed in no. 4 above were thought to have a special relevance to rulership. Here was the crucial link between the Neo-Confucian philosophy of mind and its political philosophy: the method of self-discipline and intellectual cultivation that was key to the governance of men (hsiu-chi chih-jen)—a point emphasized by early commentators on the sixteen-word passage in the Book of Shang.

7. The process by which this message was communicated—a combination of careful textual study and inspired interpretation by the Sung masters—was expressed in the term “transmission of the mind [of the sages]” (ch’uan-hsin). For Chu Hsi the significance of this transmission lay in the balance of cognitive learning, critical reflection, deep insight, and lofty vision as the Way was reconstructed in the mind of the dedicated scholar seeking to realize the ideals of the sages. There was no established process, no automatic transmission by which the tradition of the Way (tao-t’ung) could be assured of perpetuation in a given age. In this view the routine scholarship of the Han and T’ang had failed to appreciate the inner dynamic of the classics that had come into their possession, a dynamic which could be perceived by reading between the lines, bridging the gaps in the texts, piecing together the fragments, and entering body and soul—indeed, heart and mind—into both the spacious halls and secret recesses of the sagely mind.

8. Each of these Neo-Confucian terms and concepts had parallels in Buddhism and Taoism for which they might be mistaken, but Chu Hsi and his followers saw this as no reason for surrendering the use of such terms as the method of the mind (hsin-fa) or transmission of the mind (ch’uan-hsin) to Buddhism. Instead they spoke of the former as a systematic moral and intellectual discipline in the service of the latter as an explicit, publicly transmitted and documented discourse, open to reexamination and rational discussion.

9. From the foregoing a further conclusion can be drawn of the greatest importance for the later development of Neo-Confucianism: this learning of the mind-and-heart was also understood to be a learning of principle. There could be no opposition between hsin-hsüeh and li-hsüeh for these Neo-Confucians because their whole view of the mind, in contrast to the Buddhist, was that this mind was fundamentally imbued with the rational, moral principles implanted in it by Heaven. There might be some—but few enough in the thirteenth century—who questioned the distinction between the human mind and the mind of the Way, but none among the Neo-Confucians who doubted that the whole point of this mind was to understand and express Heaven's principles.

The Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, as a term or concept in itself, was not a major focus of discussion in the early Ch’eng-Chu school, but it was a way of characterizing disciplines and doctrines considered essential to the learning of the Way. When Chen Te-hsiu promoted that learning in the early thirteenth century, acclaiming it as the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, he was also recognized as the great champion of the Learning of the Way and the Learning of Principle in his time, not as someone propounding an idiosyncratic or deviant doctrine.

Nevertheless, as we have seen, it was a doctrine, for all its exoteric professions, not free of its own enigmatic and ambiguous formulations. As the sixteen-word formula had it, the mind of the Way was subtle and difficult to perceive, while the human mind was unstable and liable to err in its judgments. Whatever the Neo-Confucians might say about the palpability of the word or constancy of the Way, the endurance of the teaching—even on Chu Hsi's terms—was contingent upon its critical reexamination and creative reinterpretation. As the teaching spread, and became deeply rooted, one could expect to see new buds bursting from the old wood and new branches reaching out—which also means contending with each other—for a place in the sun.

Notes

1. Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, Parts I, II.

2. Typical examples are Tz’u-hai, 3b; Tz’u-yüan, p. 1096; Wei Cheng-t’ung, Chung-kuo che-hsüeh tz’u-tien ta-ch’üan, pp. 112-15. Morohashi Testsuji, Dai kanwa jiten, 1960 No. 10295-45; Hihara Toshikuni, ed., Chūgoku tetsu-gaku jiten, p. 225. Fung Yu-lan, History of Chinese Philosophy, Derk Bodde, tr., 2:500, 572, 586, 623; de Bary, Chan, and Watson, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp. 510, 559; Wing-tsit Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, p. 573. Chan's comments in this earlier work should be viewed in light of his later article in Wei Cheng-t’ung above.

3. Fung, History, Bodde, tr., 2:572, 586, see also pp. 500, 623. The corresponding passages in the original Chinese edition of 1934 remain unaltered in the latest edition, Chung-kuo che-hsüeh shih, 2:928-29, 938-39.

4. Ch’ien Mu, Chu Tzu hsin hsüeh-an, 2:1.

5. See reference to Ch’en Li (T’ing-yu)'s commentary on Analects 2; Shih yu wu chang.

6. Araki Kengo, citing the Hsin hsüeh-an 1:418, differs with Ch’ien on this. Although I do not find the language Araki cites on 1:418, similar statements are made here and on 2:106. Araki's view is presented in the aforementioned preface to his Minmatsu shūkyō shisō kenkyū, 27, 48.

7. Hsin hsüeh-an, 1:55.

8. Yang Wan-li, “Hsin Hsüeh lun,” in Ch’eng-chai chi, SPTK, ch. 84-86, esp. 85:10b-12b. On Yang Wan-li see Sung-shih 433:12863-66; MJHA 44:74-81; Sung-jen so-yin 3186-88; Hervouet, Sung Bibliography, pp. 417-18. See also Wing-tsit Chan, “Hsin-hsüeh,” in Wei Cheng-tung, ed., Chung-kuo che-hsüeh tz’u-tien ta-ch’üan, p. 113.

9. de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, pp. 5-6.

10. As recounted in Analects 20:1.

11. Book of History, “Counsels of Great Yü,” in James Legge, The Chinese Classics, 3:61.

12. Chu Hsi, Preface to Chung-yung chang-chü, in Ssu-shu chi chu, also in Shushigaku taikei (Tokyo: Meitoku Shuppansha, 1974), 8:451-52 (11-14). In references to this edition the Chinese text is cited first, the Japanese second. My translation has benefited from consulting, in addition to the Japanese translation of Tanaka Masaru and notes of Kurihara Keisuke, the draft translation by Wing-tsit Chan prepared for the Sources of Neo-Confucianism project.

13. An idea advanced by Han Yü and reiterated by Ch’eng I. See Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, pp. 3-5.

14. Chu Hsi, Chung-yung chang-chü hsü, p. 3 (42).

15. Ch’ien, Hsin hsüeh-an, 1:186-96; 4:184.

16. Ibid., 1:28-35, 143, 160-61, 169-70; 4:184-87, 197; and, 2:113, 4:218.

17. See de Bary, Chan, and Watson, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp. 503-9; Richard L. Davis, “Historiography as Politics in Yang Wei-chen's ‘Polemic on Legitimate Succession’”; and Hok-lam Chan, Legitimation in Imperial China, pp. 38-40.

18. Li Yüan-kang, Sheng-men shih-yeh t’u, in Pai-ch’uan hsüeh-hai, 1927 photolithographic ed. of original Sung ed. of T’ao Hsiang as supplemented by the Ming Hung-chih (1488-1505) ed. of Hua Ch’eng; prefaces of Li dated 1170, 1173. See Hervouet, Sung Bibliography, p. 490.

    The extant edition of the Diagrams also carries a post-preface dated 1172 by one Wang Chieh of San-shan. In paying tribute to Li, Wang expresses views common to Ch’eng I and Chu Hsi. Given Chu's great reputation and the wide influence of his writings, as well as mutual scholarly associations such as this, it is as possible that Li was familiar with some of Chu's ideas as vice versa. However, given the date of this preface, the Wang Chieh here could hardly be the Wang Chieh (1158-1213) identified as a follower of Chu Hsi from Chinhua. See Ch’ang Pi-te Sung-jen chuan-chi tzu-liao so-yin, p. 106; Chan Wingtsit, Chu Tzu men-jen, pp. 60-61; Sung shih, 400:12152-55; SYHA, 73:30-31; Pu-i, 73:6b.

    Li Yüan-kang (n.d.); T. Kuo-chi, H. Pai-lien chen-yin. A reclusive scholar of Ch’ien-t’ang, Chekiang, known for his devotion to learning. He is linked by the Sung-yüan hsüeh-an pu-i with the school of Chang Tsai, but his diagram identifies the Ch’engs as the successors to the Way and makes no mention of Chang. Sung-jen so-yin, p. 951; SYHA, Pu-i, 17:18b.

19. Both Davis (p. 48) and H. L. Chan (p. 41) include Chou Tun-i in the transmission, but Li's chart is quite clear in representing the Ch’eng brothers as direct successors to Mencius, and has no mention of Chou Tun-i. Both Li and Chu Hsi bespeak a view apparently prevalent in the Ch’eng brothers' school. The other view, including Chou Tun-i, is found in Chu Hsi's “Memoir for the Altar to the Three Masters at the Yüan-chou Prefectural School,” Yüan-chou chou-hsüeh san hsien-sheng tz’u-chi, in Chu, Wen-chi, 78:76a-77b (pp. 5709-12), which also describes Chou's reception of it in terms of a direct unmediated inspiration from Heaven, rather than a teaching acquired by some lineal transmission. So far as I know Chu never completely reconciled the two accounts, and later Neo-Confucians invoked both.

20. Ch’ien Ta-hsin, Shih-chia chai yang-hsin lu, 18:10a.

21. Ssu-shu chi-chu, Chung-yung chang-chü, 1:1 (p. 45).

22. Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, p. 129 and n. 157.

23. Chu, Wen-chi, 81:10a; Shu Chung-yung hou, p. 5845.

24. Ch’ien, Hsin hsüeh-an, 1:112.

25. Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, pp. 128-30. See also Wing-tsit Chan's article on hsin-fa in Chung-kuo che-hsüeh tz’u-tien ta-ch’üan (Taipei: Shui-niu ch’u-pan-she, 1983), pp. 111-12.

26. Ssu-shu chi-chu, Lun-yü, 6:12; Comm. on Lun yü, 12:1 (p. 307).

27. Ssu-shu chi-chu, Lun yü, 6:10b-11a; Comm. on Lun yü, 12:1 (p. 304).

28. Ch’ien Mu, Hsin hsüeh-an, pp. 121-22.

29. Chu Tzu yü-lei, 78:30ab No. 212 (Ta Yü Mo Item 37) (pp. 3199-3200). Here and in subsequent reference to the Yü-lei the first citation will be to the chüan and page number of the original edition, and the “p” number will refer to the overall pagination of the Cheng-chung reprint.

30. Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, pp. 30-31.

31. Hsin hsüeh-an, pp. 104-105.

32. Chu, Wen-chi, 2:26a. Wan Yen-p’ing Li hsien-sheng san-shou (p. 349); 87:3a, Chi Yen-p’ing Li hsien-sheng wen (p. 6175).

33. Hsin hsüeh-an, pp. 104-5. See also Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming, pp. 18-19.

34. Ch’eng shih i-shu, 19:7a; Chu, Wen-chi, 75:16-17a (p. 5521); Cheng-shih i-shu hou hsü; Hsin hsüeh-an, 2:105-6.

35. Hsin hsüeh-an, 2:113.

36. Ch’ang-li hsien-sheng wen-chi, SPTK 11:1a-3b; de Bary, Chan, and Watson, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 431 (Pb I, 376).

37. See Chu Hsi, Hsiao-hsüeh chi-chu, 3:1a-2b; 5:16a; 6:19b; Uno Seiichi, Shōgaku, pp. 139-49, 320, 469.

38. Huang Kan; T. Chih-ch’ing, H. Mien-chai. Sung-jen so-yin, p. 2865; Chan, Men-jen, pp. 261-62; Sung-shih, 430:1; SYHA, 63:5.

39. Huang Kan, Mien-chai hsien-sheng Huang Wen-shu kung wen-chi, 26:18a-20a.

40. Huang Shih-i (fl. c. 1170); T. Tzu-hung. A student of Chu Hsi from Fukien. See Sung-jen so-yin, p. 2884; Chan, Men-jen, p. 254; SYHA, 69:514-15.

41. Huang Kan, Mien-chai hsien-sheng wen-chi, 26:26b-28a. Shun Yü ch’uanhsin … Huang Tzu-hung.

42. Ch’en Ch’un; T. An-ch’ing, H. Pei-hsi. Sung-jen so-yin, p. 2471; Chan, Men-jen, pp. 220-21; Sung shih, 430:12789; SYHA, 68:1.

    Ssu-k’u ch’üan-shu tsung-mu t’i-yao, 91:1916-17 (see also Ch’en Ch’un, Pei-hsi tzu-i, pp. 95-96); Chan, Men-jen, pp. 220-21; also his introduction to translation of Pei-hsi tzu-i, published as Neo-Confucian Terms Explained: The Pei-hsi tzu-i, pp. 1-32.

43. Ch’en Ch’un, Pei-hsi tzu-i (The Meaning of Terms [in the Four Books] according to Ch’en Ch’un), p. 76.

44. Ibid., p. 77. Shih-yu yüan-yüan.

45. Ibid., p. 7.

46. Chu, Wen-chi, 82:26ab (5939-40); Shu Min-ch’ang so kan ssu-tzu hou.

47. Ch’en uses the same language as Chu Hsi, quoting Ch’eng I; I have translated it in the same way in both cases. Professor Chan renders hsin-fa as “the central tradition,” an interpretation which confirms its importance for both Ch’en and the Ch’eng-Chu school.

48. A close approximation of Chu's quotation. See p. 32 above.

49. Ch’en, Pei-hsi tzu-i, pp. 78-79 Tu-shu tzu-ti.

50. Pei-hsi tzu-i, pp. 89, 95; Chan, Neo-Confucian Terms, pp. 211, 213, 233.

51. Ts’ai Shen; T. Chung-mo, H. Chiu-feng, Sung-jen so-yin, p. 3783; Chan, Men-jen, p. 333; Sung shih, 434:1287; SYHA, 67:1.

    Ts’ai Yuan-ting; T. Chi-t’ung, H. Mu-an, Hsi-shan. Sung-jen so-yin, p. 3809; Chan, Men-jen, pp. 331-32; Sung shih, 434:12875; SYHA, 62:1.

52. Ts’ai Shen, Shu-ching chi-chuan, preface, pp. 1b-2a. Hervouet, Sung Bibliography, pp. 22-23.

53. Chu Hsi, Chung-yung chang-chü, hsü, 2a (p. 39).

54. Ibid., 1:28b-29a.

55. Huang Chen; T. Tung-fa, H. Yü-yüeh. From T’zu-ch’i, Çhekiang. Sung-jen so-yin, p. 2870, Sung shih, 438:12991; SYHA, 86:1.

    Fu Kuang; T. Han-ch’ing, H. Ch’ien-an, Ch’uan-t’ai. From Chekiang, Chia-hsing fu, Ch’ung-te hsien. Sung-jen so-yin, p. 3606; Chan, Men-jen, pp. 302-3, SYHA, 64:1.

56. Ts’ai Shen, Shu-ching chi-chuan, 1:18b-29a.

57. Cf. Benjamin Elman, “Philosophy (I-li) versus Philology (K’ao-cheng): The Jen-hsin Tao-hsin Debate,” p. 182. Elman takes this passage as referring to certain others who presented Ts’ai's commentary to the throne in such a way as to put undue emphasis on the “transmission of the mind.” The editors of the Ssu-k’u t’i-yao (1:228-29) indicate that the presentation was made by Ts’ai's own son, Ts’ai Hang (c.s. 1229) during the Ch’un-yu period (1241-52) and Chan Hing-ho in Hervouet, Sung Bibliography, p. 23, says it took place about 1245. This timing is significant in regard to Elman's suggestion (p. 181) that in this passage Huang expressed the fear of the “consequences of an overemphasis on doctrines centering on studies of the mind (hsin-hsüeh) by court scholars such as Chen Te-hsiu.” Chen had died in 1235, ten years before. Moreover there is strong countervailing evidence in both Chen's Hsin-ching and Ta-hsüeh yen-i that his understanding of the hsin-fa and hsin-hsüeh is the same as Ts’ai Shen's and Huang Chen's, i.e., that it is a method of world-ordering and nothing resembling the Ch’an transmission of the mind. Further, Huang identifies those who are at fault here with concentrating on the Mind of the Way, and equating the Mind with the Way. This would suggest a view similar to Lu Hsiang-shan and not Chen, who, if he differed at all from Chu Hsi, would have to be said to have overemphasized the dangers of the human mind rather than the equation of the mind with the Way. See my Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, pp. 80-82, 99, 116. Huang Chen, Huang shih jih-ch’ao, in Ssu-k’u ch’üan-shu chen-pen, erh chi, 5:2a-3b Ta yü mo: Jen-hsin wei-wei.

58. Huang shih jih-ch’ao, 5:3b-4a.

59. Huang shih jih-ch’ao, 43:5b-6b, Yen-p’ing ta-wen.

60. Ch’en Ta-yü; T. Wen-hsien, H. Tung-chai. From Tu-ch’ang in modern Shantung province. He studied under Jao Lu, a follower of Huang Kan, and wrote the Shang-shu chi-chuan hui-t’ung (Comprehensive Explanation of the Collected Commentaries on the Book of Shang, which is no longer extant). Sung jen so-yin, p. 2541; SYHA, 83:2; Pu-i, 83:12. There were two scholars named Ch’en Ta-yü; the other, a follower of Yang Chien, received the chin-shih degree in 1229. See SYHA, Pu-i, 74:66ab, and the comment of the Ssu-k’u editors in Ssu-k’u ch’üan-shu tsung-mu t’i-yao, 11:63, on the surviving work of the earlier Ch’en Ta-yü: Shang-shu chi-chuan huo-wen.

61. Cited in Ch’en Li, (Shang)-Shu chi-chuan tsuan-shu, 1:59a (v. 61, p. 231). Ch’en drew extensively on the writings of Chu Hsi, especially the Yü-lü, to supplement Ts’ai Shen's commentary. The comment of the Ssu-k’u editors, which prefaces this edition, emphasizes Ch’en's fidelity to Chu Hsi (v. 61 p. 202).

    Since both the earlier and later Ch’en Ta-yü are said to have compiled collected commentaries on the Shang-shu, neither of which is extant, one cannot be sure which might have been quoted by Ch’en Li. However the passage in question does not appear in the extent Shang-shu chi-chuan huo-wen (Wen-yüan ko Ssu-k’u ed., A:38ab) of the earlier Ch’en Ta-yü. Here it is accepted by Ch’en Li as in essential harmony with the commentary he has drawn from “orthodox” sources. Thus if the question of authorship is not actually moot, it would seem that the later Ch’en Ta-yü, identified with the Jao Lu line of the Chu Hsi school, is the more likely source. This would also be consistent with the practice of the near contemporary of Ch’en Li, Tung Ting, who is in the same line of Huang Kan as the later Ch’en Ta-yü and whose collected commentary Shang-shu chi-lu tsuan-chu, cited the earlier Ch’en Ta-yü by his hao Fu-chai and the later by his ming, i.e., Ch’en shih Ta-yü, as is the case here. See Ssu-k’u t’i-yao, 11:63, Shang-shu chi-chuan huo-wen, and 11:67-68, Shang-shu chi-lu tsuan-chu. On Tung Ting (n.d.) see Yüan-jen chuan-chi tzu-liao, 1596; SYHA, 89:2b; SYHA, Pu-i, 89:9.

62. Ch’en Li; T. Shou Weng, H. Ting-yu from Hsiu-ning (modern Anhwei province). A classicist and devoted follower of Chu Hsi, who wrote commentaries on the ritual texts and Four Books as well as on the Book of Documents. Yüan-jen so-yin, p. 1301; Yüan shih, 189/4321; SYHA, 70:97; SYHA Pu-i 70:79a-92a.

63. Ch’en Li, Shu-chi-chuan tsuan-shu, 1:57a (61-230).

64. Ibid.

65. SYHA, 70:98, Shu-chuan tsuan-shu hsü.

66. SYHA Pu-i 70:86b, Jen-hsin wei-wei ssu-chü k’ou-i.

67. Ibid., 70:81b, Chung-yung k’ou-i.

68. Ibid., 70:82a, Preface to T’ai-chi-t’u shuo.

69. Hu Kuang et al., editors, Lun-yü chi-chu ta-ch’üan, 2:10b (p. 118), Shih yu wu erh chih yü hsüeh chang. In Genroku 4 (1691) ed., 2:14b-15a.

70. Lo Ta-ching (n.d.); T. Ching-lun, from Lu-ling in Kiangsi. Sung-jen so-yin, p. 4277; Hervouet, Sung Bibliography, pp. 314-15.

71. Hsin-hsüeh ching-chuan, a work no longer extant.

72. Lo Ta-ching, Ho-lin yü-lu, 18:3b-5b, Wen-chang hsing-li. See Hervouet, Sung Bibliography, pp. 314-15, where the entry for the Ho-lin yü-lu by Araki Toshikazu mentions only the less complete 16 ch. ed. available in China, and omits this more complete edition preserved in the Naikaku bunko.

73. See my Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, pp. 17, 81, 150, 156; Shushigaku taikei, 10:8-11, article by Itō Tomoatsu.

74. Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, pp. 67-69, 73-83, 177-80.

75. Hsi-shan hsien-sheng Chen Wen-chung kung wen-chi (Taipei: Commercial Press, KHCPTS ed., 1968), 42:750-51, Chiu-feng hsien-sheng Ts’ai chün mu-piao.

76. Chen Te-hsiu, Hsin ching, early Ming edition in the National Central Library, Taipei, p. 21b. The National Central Library also has the original Sung edition of 1242, with the same text, but the print is much less legible.

77. Hsiung Chieh, Hsing-li ch’ün-shu, chü-chieh, with commentary by Hsiung Kang, 1:16a (p. 54). On Hsiung Chieh see Sung-jen so-yin, p. 3622, and Chan, Men-jen, p. 289.

78. Chen Hsi-shan wen-chi (KHCPTS ed.), p. 448 (also SSGTK, 10:96), “Nan hsiung chou-hsüeh ssu hsien-sheng ssu-t’ang chi.”

79. See Ri Taikei kenkyūkai, Ri Taikei zenshū (Tokyo, 1975), 2:260, for chart of the Learning of the Mind and for the views of Ch’eng Fu-hsin as cited by Yi T’oegye.

80. Ch’eng Fu-hsin, T. Tzu-chien, H. Lin-yin. Yüan-jen so-yin, p. 1429.

81. Also known as Ssu-shu chang-t’u. There are two extant versions known to me: 1) Ssu-shu chang-t’u yin-k’uo tsung-yao, 1337 ed. in two ts’e preserved in the National Central Library, Taipei; 1b) a hand-copied version of the same in the Shōheikō collection of the Naikaku bunko, Tokyo; and 2) Ssu-shu chang-t’u tsuan-shih, Te-hsin t’ang ed. of 1337 in 21 chüan with Ssu-shu chang-t’u yin-k’uo tsung-yao in 3 ch. in the Naikaku bunko. Unless otherwise noted, references herein are to this edition.

82. Ch’eng T’ung, ed., Hsin-an hsüeh tzu-lu, in An-hui ts’ung shu, 12:7a-10b.

83. Ssu-shu chang-t’u, 6a Fan li, Chung yung tao-t’ung chih ch’uan; chang-t’u shang 12b Lun hsin t’ung hsing-ching; Tsung yao chung 1b Sheng-hsien lun hsin chih yao; 7b Lun hsin t’ung hsing-ching.

84. Wing-tsit Chan appraises this work favorably for its careful scholarship in his “How T’oegye Understood Chu Hsi.”

85. Yi T’oegye I-hak t’ongnok, 10:21b-22a (2:519).

86. For a fuller discussion of T’oegye's views of the Learning of the Mind and method of the mind as based on the Ch’eng-Chu concept and practice of reverence, see Sin Kuihyon, Sosan Chin Toksu ui Sinkyong kua T’oegye Yi Huang ui Sinhak [Chen Te-hsiu's Hsin ching and Yi Huang (T’oegye's) Learning of the Mind-and-Heart] in T’oegye hakpo (Seoul: T’oegye Study Institute, 1987), no. 53.

87. See my Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, pp. 55, 59, 65, 148-49.

Abbreviations

The following standard sinological abbreviations are used:

CKTHMCCC Chung-kuo tzu hsüeh ming-chu chi-ch’eng

MJHA Ming-ju hsüeh-an

SKCSCP Ssu-k’u ch’üan-shu chen-pen

SPPY Ssu-pu pei-yao

SPTK Ssu-pu ts’ung-k’an

SSGTK Shushigaku taikei

SYHA Sung-Yüan hsüeh-an

TSCC Ts’ung-shu chi-ch’eng