Introduction

When under siege in K'uang, the Master said, "With King Wen dead, is Culture [wen] not here with me? Had Heaven intended that This Culture of Ours [ssu-wen] should perish, those who died later would not have been able to participate in This Culture of Ours. Heaven is not yet about to let This Culture of Ours perish, so what can the men of K'uang do to me?"

— Analects 9.5

This Culture of Ours, Confucius notes, has survived the death of the Chou founding king, posthumously known as King Wen. This fact is both a sign of Heaven's regard for this culture and a guarantee of Confucius's safety, as a participant and carrier of that culture. But what is wen? Does it survive in Confucius as the arts and traditions of the Chou dynasty he has mastered? Is it, as many later commentators supposed, a reference to the writings of the ancients they believed Confucius edited and transmitted as the Classics? In the Analects, the term "wen" can mean external appearances and forms in general as well as normative patterns and models whose authority derived from their Chou dynasty origins. But in this account of Confucius in K'uang, we do not need to know the exact meaning of wen to see that Confucius is making two claims: participating in ssu-wen, "this wen" that has survived King Wen's death and is esteemed by Heaven (This Culture of Ours), continues the legacy of the Chou founder and accords with Heaven's will.

By T'ang (618 — 907) times, ssu-wen had come to refer first to the textual traditions that originated in antiquity, when the sage-kings translated into human institutions the patterns of heaven, now taken as "heaven-and-earth" or the natural order. By extension, This Culture included the traditions of proper forms in writing, governing, and behaving that men believed stemmed from the ancients and had been preserved and refined by Confucius in the Classics. T'ang and Sung dynasty (960 — 1279) scholars "participated in This Culture of Ours": they mastered the traditions, they imitated them in practice, and they continued and elaborated on them with their own scholarship and literary writing. They could claim, as Confucius had before them, that by maintaining This Culture of Ours as a cumulative tradition they were according with the natural order of things and continuing the legacy of antiquity.

Heaven and antiquity or "heaven and man," the natural realm in which heaven-and-earth brought things into being and the historical realm in which humans created institutions, came to stand for the two greatest sources of normative values. This Culture of Ours could stand for the idea of a civilization that combined the two, a civilization based on both the models of the ancients and the manifest patterns of the natural order. But T'ang and Sung scholars also saw that at moments of political crisis This Culture could perish. To save it, and to save the times, scholars could always return to antiquity and the natural order as the grounds for shared norms. In the early T'ang the historical and natural were not seen as incompatible. Seventh — century T'ang scholars sought to reintegrate the diverse strands of tradition, and thus to establish a cultural synthesis that would support the newly unified empire. For them the patterns of the cosmos and the civilization of the ancients corresponded. But in the latter half of the eighth century, as the T'ang coped with decentralization and rebellion, the literary intellectuals who tried to save This Culture began to speak of the "way of the sage" (sheng-jen chih tao) and the "way of the ancients" (ku-jen chih tao). The sages in this case did not take their guides from the cosmos; their eyes were on "human affairs," and they looked to the common needs of the people and responded to them. Scholars supposed that they could infer values for the present from the sages' actions and writings, that they could manifest these values through writing in an ancient style (ku-wen), and that they could put these values into practice through government. Attempts to formulate persuasive understandings of the Way and the sages continued through the Northern Sung (960 — 1126), inspiring a diverse and competitive intellectual culture. In the eleventh century such ideas justified far-reaching efforts to change the relationship between government and society. But the turn away from heaven, the patterns of cosmic process as the ultimate grounds for moral life, also made for a more uncertain world, where normative models were at best provisional and the intentions of the sages were a matter of interpretation. A challenge to the focus on human affairs emerged late in the eleventh century and came to dominate intellectual life in the Southern Sung (1127 — 1279). The moral philosophers who established Tao-hsueh (the "Learning of the Way"), Neo-Confucianism in a narrow sense, contended that each individual was innately endowed with the patterns of the integrated processes of heaven-and-earth. It was only necessary, then, that men realize the "pattern of heaven" (t'ienli) that was in their own nature, for this was the real foundation for a moral world.

An account of the shifting grounds for values in T'ang and Sung intellectual life is a vital part of the story this book tells. But to discuss this alone would obscure a far larger change in how scholars conceived of values. Put most simply, early T'ang scholars supposed that the normative models for writing, government, and behavior were contained in the cumulative cultural tradition. Debates over values were arguments over the proper cultural forms. But by the late Sung, thinkers had shifted their faith to the mind's ability to arrive at true ideas about moral qualities inherent in the self and things, and the received cultural tradition had lost authority. Between the early T'ang faith in the ability of the cultural tradition to provide the models necessary for a unified order and the late Sung belief that real values were innate principles came a period of extraordinary intellectual diversity that began in the latter half of the T'ang and continued into the Northern Sung. An erosion of faith in the possibility of guiding the world by defining correct appearances marked this period. Nevertheless, the most famous scholars during this transitional era insisted that the individual could apprehend an underlying tao with his own mind from the writings and accomplishments of the ancients. This Culture of Ours, as the...