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Tracing Inner Logic and Reconstructing an External World: Reading Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World: A Study of the Political Culture of Song Scholar-Officials

Ivan Yi-fan Hu · 2022.12.10–15

This was my first attempt at writing a book review. Looking back, it strikes me as so academic that it becomes rather dull.

Yu Ying-shih, Zhu Xi's Historical World: A Study of the Political Culture of Song Scholar-Officials. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing, 2011.

Even before its formal publication, Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World: A Study of the Political Culture of Song Scholar-Officials attracted scholarly attention. Its appearance prompted numerous reviews and conferences, with lively discussion across disciplinary boundaries. Yu explains that the project began as a commissioned preface to the Collected Writings of Master Zhu, but "questions arising from the historical materials kept multiplying, forcing me to probe further and eventually change the direction of the work."1 The result was a book of more than half a million Chinese characters and a thousand pages. It stimulated debate not only over the "philosophizing" of Neo-Confucianism—the genealogies of intellectual reasoning that originally occupied the project2—but also over its "historicizing" approach: a method giving equal weight to "inner logic" and the "reconstruction of a world," which drew the attention of political and cultural historians.3 Praise and criticism diverged sharply, sometimes reaching opposite conclusions. Yet these disagreements themselves reveal the depth of the book's innovations and the scale of its influence. Few recent works have generated such debate among increasingly specialized fields. Within the limits of this review, I cannot survey all the rich discussion already available. I therefore concentrate on two influential aspects of the book as a scholarly "paradigm": "inner logic" and "reconstructing a world." These organize my brief account of its content and a reconsideration informed by more recent scholarship. Before introducing the book and evaluating its paradigm, however, I first review Yu's intellectual development and its scholarly setting. This should help us enter his orientation and questions, and better understand both the book and its method. Perhaps this way of "knowing the person and considering his times" is itself a tribute to the insight animating Yu's work.4

I. Yu Ying-shih: "The Road I Have Travelled"

In "The Road I Have Travelled," Yu writes that "the road I travelled in pursuing learning was a very difficult one." He divides it into three stages: "1937–1946: Life in the Countryside," "1946–1955: Wandering amid Great Upheaval," and "1955–1962: Advanced Study in American Academia."5 His memoirs, interviews, and recollections by younger scholars generally follow this division when reviewing his scholarly formation and the historical circumstances with which it interacted.6 Drawing on these texts, this section traces that development, focusing on experiences and contexts that shaped his intellectual orientation and questions.

Yu was born in Tianjin in 1930, when his father, Yu Xiezhong, was serving as chair of the history department at Nankai University, a position he held in 1929–1930.7 He subsequently accompanied his father to Beiping, Nanjing, Kaifeng, Anqing, and elsewhere. Following the outbreak of full-scale war in 1937, he returned that October to the family home in Guanzhuang, Qianshan County, Anhui. This began eight years of childhood in the countryside, followed by nearly a year of life and secondary schooling in Tongcheng. The "natural education" and "social education" of rural life profoundly affected him. As he later recalled: "My eight or nine years in the countryside allowed me to live quite thoroughly within traditional Chinese culture; the intuitive understanding acquired through lived experience greatly helped my later study of Chinese history and thought."8 His "book education" in a traditional private school likewise immersed him in classical learning. An interest in classical fiction and extensive reading also gave him an intimate understanding of popular culture. In 1945–1946 he lived with his maternal uncle's family in Tongcheng, having already entered secondary school there. Wartime circumstances and local culture nevertheless meant that "my interest in the Chinese classics deepened further, while modern knowledge remained a complete blank."9

When the war ended in August 1945, Yu was still in Tongcheng, waiting for his father to collect him, and did not continue school. His father had meanwhile gone to Shenyang to establish Northeastern Chung Cheng University. After June 1946, Yu travelled through Nanjing and Beiping, finally reuniting that summer with the father from whom he had been separated for nine years. His father then required him to catch up rapidly with modern subjects. During 1946–1947 he studied English, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other subjects largely absent from his classical education, entering the history department of Northeastern Chung Cheng University in summer 1947. Circumstances brought him to Beiping at the end of that year, interrupting his studies. Ten months later, in November 1948, he fled from Beiping to Shanghai. On his father's instructions, he stayed in Shanghai in summer 1949 to attend to family affairs; that autumn he entered the second year of Yenching University's history department in Beiping. This period had a latent but profound influence on his thought and scholarship. First, he realized that his interests meant he "probably could never specialize in the natural sciences and could only develop toward the humanities."10 Second, extensive reading and reflection on the May Fourth movement and Marxism prepared the way for his later comparative engagement with both "tradition" and "modernity." His subsequent opposition to "Western-centrism" and search for "ways of bringing Chinese and Western cultures into communication" can also be traced to this period of reflection on May Fourth thought and Marxism as a "moderate Westernizer." The methods of "inner logic" and "reconstructing a world" in the book reviewed here are likewise connected to a course in the history of Western philosophy that he took at this time: "In my later study of intellectual history, I did not concentrate exclusively on abstract concepts, but often sought the complex political, social, economic, and cultural factors behind ideas. Perhaps this course provided that inspiration."11

At the end of 1949 Yu received a letter from his family in Hong Kong. He went there to visit his parents in January 1950 and remained, never returning to Beijing. In February he entered New Asia College, founded the previous autumn by Qian Mu and others, and formally became Qian's student. Qian's care made him feel "like a member of the family, far beyond an ordinary teacher-student relationship,"12 and from that point "my life changed completely."13 Traditional scholars such as Qian Mu and Tang Junyi deeply influenced him. Training in scholarly standards and classical reading was accompanied by deeper reflection on the coherence of culture; this "indeed exerted an incalculable influence on my subsequent scholarly life."14 At the same time, he maintained his interest in Western historiography, philosophy, and social science, continuing his earlier thinking about "cultural communication." He could "no longer accept any abstract formula of history, still less acknowledge that Western periodization could furnish a normative model for the study of Chinese history." Yet he remained convinced that "Western history and thought are an important frame of reference, making it easier for me to explore the distinctive features of Chinese culture and history comparatively."15 This accorded with New Asia College's central commitment to "giving equal weight to Chinese and foreign cultures and bringing the cultures of the world into communication."16

In 1955, nominated by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Yu went to Harvard as a visiting scholar that autumn, subsequently studying there as a doctoral candidate until January 1962. His previous interest in Western learning, which he had "explored in the dark, with only a superficial understanding,"17 could now become formal, systematic study. He received guidance from Yang Lien-sheng. Yang's "critical spirit, rigorous textual scholarship, sharp vision, precise analysis, and penetrating judgment," together with Harvard's demanding training, corrected Yu's former "undisciplined habit of reading as the mood took me." He thereby "at least truly came to understand what scholarly standards were."18 Especially significant is his account of the past and future orientation of Chinese humanities scholars in the United States: his awareness of intellectual history also carries a personal scholarly aspiration. He characterizes 1915–1925 as "the beginning of modern Chinese humanistic research," and the late 1930s to the mid-1940s as "deliberating on old learning and cultivating new knowledge." He sees the 1950s, his own period, as "an entirely new turn."19 His praise of Kao Yu-kung and Chang Kwang-chih—that they "not only mastered abundant primary sources but also brought original ideas and different perspectives," subsequently "made important contributions to American (and Western) Chinese studies or sinology," "broadened and deepened Western understanding of China," and "imperceptibly transformed American (and Western) Chinese studies"20—also expresses what he expected of himself.

This briefly reviews Yu's intellectual formation and scholarly setting. His early reflections on "tradition" and "modernity," "East" and "West," clearly form a lifelong thread. His education, combining East and West and integrating old and new learning, profoundly shaped a method that sought "the distinctive features of Chinese culture" within an understanding of "human cultures as broadly alike, with smaller differences,"21 and asked "how the Chinese cultural tradition might re-establish its modern identity under the challenge of modern Western culture."22 It likewise illuminates his commitment to "not discussing separate fields in complete isolation, but examining their connections and communication from a holistic perspective."23

Seen in this light, Zhu Xi's Historical World uses "inner logic" and "reconstructing a world" to contest an older practice of "philosophizing" Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism out of its context through "strained analogies" under the sway of "Western-centrism" and "Western normative models." This late monumental work must be understood within the questions Yu pursued throughout his life. A "synthetic study of the cultural and political history of the Song," focusing on "cultural developments centered on Song Neo-Confucianism and political dynamics fundamentally oriented toward reform,"24 it approaches the scholar-official stratum in the Chinese cultural tradition through Song scholar-official political culture,25 thereby seeking a basic understanding of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism and the broader Confucian tradition. Innovative methods and accomplished use of sources sustain that undertaking. Although later discussion has focused mainly on "inner logic" and "reconstructing a world," we should also recognize and respect the "warmth and reverence toward one's own country's past"—to borrow his teacher Qian Binsi's phrase—and the persistent search for "ways of bringing Chinese and Western cultures into communication" that inform the book.

II. Tracing Inner Logic: A Main Thread in the Overall Movement of Confucianism

"If intellectual history looks only to external circumstances without probing 'inner logic,' it can never exhaust the intricacies of its subject; it may even neglect the essential for the incidental."26 Yu's On Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng, first published in 1976,27 offered his earliest systematic account and case study of "inner logic." It placed Qing evidential scholars and Song-Ming Neo-Confucians within one "research tradition": the canonical texts they studied and the Way they sought within them formed a continuous line. "This is a problem internal to the Confucian tradition; it has its own inner requirements of development and transformation, which need not be intimately tied to external influences."28 The book stresses that "changes in scholarly thought also possess autonomy—what is called 'the autonomy of intellectual history'" and seeks thereby to "dispel the superstition of various modern determinisms."29 This does not mean opposing "external influences": the approach "not only excludes no well-founded external explanation, but can also support and complement every effective external explanation."30 Although "intellectual development cannot possibly remain untouched by stimuli from various external circumstances," "if we speak only of the external and ignore 'inner logic,' intellectual history cannot be fully or finely understood."31 Written to correct an older "external determinism," the book was nevertheless misunderstood as showing "a tendency in intellectual history to choose the 'internal' and discard the 'external.'"32 Yu's subsequent explanations that he "had from the beginning attended to interactions between intellectual trends and social change"33 did not settle the debate. Zhu Xi's Historical World, first published in 2003, can thus be read as another response, and an attempt to move beyond his earlier dichotomy that "'inner logic' and 'external influence' each have their own field of application: separated, both are beautiful; combined, both suffer."34

How does this attempt proceed? The concept of a "historical world" continues the historiographical tradition of "knowing the person and considering his times." "Knowing the person" means examining Zhu Xi's political ideals, positions, and concerns as a Neo-Confucian, as well as his political groups, relationships, and networks. "Considering his times" means examining the political climate, institutions, and situation. "Political culture" integrates these dimensions. As the first preface states: "This book is a synthetic study of Song cultural and political history, especially attentive to their interactions. Its central concerns are the revival and development of Confucianism in cultural history, and the structures and operation of power manifested in reform in political history. Yet in the actual historical process these two series were fundamentally interwoven and could not be clearly separated; both were encompassed within the overall activities of scholar-officials."35 Crucially, Zhu Xi's historical world is not simply his own life and intellectual history. He is a pivotal figure who inherits and transforms a longer development. That world's origins reach back to the Northern Song and even the earlier ancient-prose movement; after inheriting traditions of the Way, learning, and government, he in turn profoundly reshaped later historical worlds. The book's logic is therefore interlocking. It uses pre-Zhu Xi, Northern Song political culture and Confucian development to illuminate his world and their influence on him, while using Zhu Xi as a vantage point from which to present Song scholar-official political culture as a whole.

This interweaving of "tracing inner logic" and "reconstructing an external world" appears in the structure. The book has two parts, "General Discussion" and "Special Studies," each beginning with an introduction followed by detailed chapters. The introductions and chapters are self-contained yet connected. The first introduction outlines interactions between Confucianism and political culture. Following Confucian trends, it divides Northern Song development into three stages. The first began in the early Song ancient-prose movement, inheriting Han Yu's prose reform and opposition to Buddhism, and matured during the Qingli reforms; scholar-officials shared an ideal of outward political achievement through "returning to the Three Dynasties." The second began with Wang Anshi's New Learning and matured during the Xining reforms, when the earlier ideal became large-scale political and sociocultural action. The third began with the rise of Learning of the Way. Unlike its predecessor, it stressed inward moral cultivation through the study of morality, human nature, and destiny as the foundation of outward social reform. Its ultimate concern nevertheless remained outward political and social transformation. This was Zhu Xi's historical world. Chapters 1–7 elaborate the introduction. Beginning with the ideal of the Three Dynasties, the status of the scholar-official, and the emergence of subjective political consciousness, they examine actual power relations, leading to factional conflict over "state policy" and divisions among scholar-officials under a shared concern for reconstructing order. This is a general account of political culture from the Northern Song to the early Southern Song: "discussing the two Song periods together to reveal the overall background of Zhu Xi's historical world" (387). The second part concentrates on scholar-official political culture under Emperors Xiaozong and Guangzong, particularly complex relations between Neo-Confucians and the power system. "Inner logic" becomes a history-of-mentalities perspective exploring the psychological structures of Neo-Confucians and rulers such as Xiaozong. These internal and external perspectives jointly portray that political-cultural world, discussed below under "reconstructing an external world."

This "tracing of inner logic" differs from the older "inward turn" thesis, which took the path to concern mainly mind, principle, vital force, and inward sagehood. It can even be seen as a "challenge" to that thesis. Hence criticisms that a "Copernican reversal" had "destroyed the Neo-Confucians' most important lifelong work—that is, the absolute and universal moral values they had painstakingly established."36 Yu explains that he too once accepted the view that "because Neo-Confucians devoted themselves to establishing inward sagehood, they seemed to adopt a detached attitude toward practical politics." But "after studying Southern Song Neo-Confucians' political activity, I could not help raising a major question: if this view is credible, how do we explain the extraordinary activity of so many Neo-Confucians within the power world of Xiaozong, Guangzong, and Ningzong?" (399). He therefore treats "Learning of the Way, or Neo-Confucianism, as one part or stage in the overall movement of Song Confucianism." From this perspective, "one main thread runs throughout: the Confucian demand to reconstruct a reasonable human order" (45). Under this concern for "reconstructing order," he identifies the three stages summarized above. The first inherited Han Yu's ancient-prose movement. Since Confucianism had "responded dynamically to the demands of the times since the early Song" (36; see also Chapter 6, "Reconstructing Order," 289–314), its inheritors, confronting the demand for stability after prolonged warfare, "could no longer be satisfied with correcting abuses, but demanded the reconstruction of political and cultural order according to 'the way Yao, Shun, and the Three Kings governed humanity'" (36). Its scholarly form was a governance-oriented classical learning. The Qingli reforms marked the maturation of a scholar-official political consciousness of "taking responsibility for the world," shaping "the direction of Song Confucianism and the distinctive character of scholar-official political culture" (37). The second stage continued this direction and culture, beginning with Wang Anshi's New Learning and maturing in the Xining reforms. New Learning extended the earlier outward political ideal toward inward sagehood. Earlier concerns "had largely favored political order and had not deeply explored morality, human nature, and destiny"; by the Xining period at the latest, "the awareness that 'inward sagehood' and 'outward kingship' must both be present had emerged." Wang Anshi grounded inward sagehood in moral and metaphysical learning and outward kingship in the Three Dynasties and the Rites of Zhou. Contemporary Neo-Confucians such as Cheng Yi and Cheng Hao observed and criticized this, but shared his concern for building order and absorbed the inward-sagehood/outward-kingship framework. This too belonged within the overall Confucian movement. The third stage began from the rise of Learning of the Way in the second. Its slight difference from New Learning lay in a stronger emphasis on inward moral learning as the foundation of outward order, while its fundamental concern remained "outward kingship." Inward effort sought "cosmological and metaphysical grounds for reconstructing human order" (109). This explains Yu's objection to the "inward turn": the political culture of Zhu Xi's Chunxi-Shaoxi period continued the Confucian movement of the Qingli-Xining age. Wang Anshi's encounter with Shenzong and the possibility of "winning the ruler and putting the Way into practice" powerfully inspired later scholars, helping explain their activity under Xiaozong, Guangzong, and Ningzong. Yu calls Zhu Xi's age the "post-Wang Anshi age" (421), emphasizing this continuity of "inner logic."

III. Reconstructing an External World: Redrawing the "Determinate" and "Indeterminate" Elements of Politics

The main thread of "reconstructing order" within Song Confucianism explains why "so many Neo-Confucians were extraordinarily active in the power world of Xiaozong, Guangzong, and Ningzong." But this remains a general account of intellectual "logic": it clarifies the political consciousness and initiative of Neo-Confucian scholar-officials. The tension between political ideals and practice better reveals actual circumstances. These circumstances form a "missing link buried for eight hundred years" (390): Xiaozong's preparations for reform and later abdication in favor of Guangzong, while continuing to influence government through an alliance with Neo-Confucian scholar-officials; Guangzong's mental deterioration soon after accession and his abdication in favor of Ningzong after Xiaozong's death; and the bureaucratic group's subsequent use of imperial power to expel Neo-Confucians through the Qingyuan prohibition. This "missing link" connects three reigns. The inquiry focuses particularly on Neo-Confucian political activity under Xiaozong, the emperor's psychological projects and arrangements, and struggles with the bureaucratic group. Imperial power, Neo-Confucian scholar-officials, and professional bureaucrats interacted in complex ways; each group could also divide internally. These interactions and divisions formed the political landscape of Zhu Xi's world. Yu seeks to "examine the sources comprehensively and reconstruct every relevant person and event" (390), depicting its relatively "determinate" structural factors and "indeterminate" evental factors.

The second introduction accordingly concludes: "From the fifteenth year of Chunxi to the early Qingyuan years, the Neo-Confucian group, the bureaucratic group, and imperial power were the three driving forces of the power world. Each possessed relative autonomy, yet all interacted and could not be sharply separated" (394). It then outlines Xiaozong's "late-reign politics" and psychological conflict with Guangzong, using these to examine encounters and struggles between Neo-Confucians and bureaucrats. It ends with the Qingyuan prohibition after Ningzong's accession and its repercussions over more than a decade, marking the bureaucrats' use of imperial power to exclude Neo-Confucians from the center. Their conflict was always one between different political orientations within the scholar-official stratum. Neo-Confucians entered the center by combining their ideals with imperial power under Xiaozong; they were expelled when a reorganization of power enabled bureaucratic scholar-officials to exclude them. Political ideals brought them into court, and political practice drove them out. Between these moments lay both relatively determinate, institutionalized "state policy" and its factional consequences, and the less predictable "imperial pivot": the emperor's personal psychological preferences within an established power structure. These "determinate" structural and "indeterminate" evental factors jointly formed the political landscape.

Chapter 8 surveys new developments in the political culture of "inward sagehood and outward kingship" among scholars such as Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan, whose expectation was "winning the ruler and putting the Way into practice." Chapters 9–12 then "elucidate the distinctive features of Southern Song political culture through textual investigation of a series of key problems and individual events" (456). The focus is on only fourteen or fifteen turbulent years across three reigns: from Chunxi 8 (1181), when Wang Huai became chief minister, to Qingyuan 1 (1195), when the prohibition began. Chapter 9 adopts the Neo-Confucians' perspective, tracing conflicts and changing fortunes between scholar-officials aspiring to "win the ruler and practice the Way" and professional bureaucrats. Chapters 10 and 12 approach imperial power through psychohistory: Xiaozong, committed to territorial "recovery" and actively pursuing "late-reign politics"; Guangzong, constrained from childhood and resentful of his father Xiaozong, whose self-directed conduct was constantly "held in check" until mental disorder followed; and Ningzong's accession and the prohibition, fulfilling the warning that "the great calamity of the realm begins with 'Learning of the Way' and ends with the 'imperial pivot'" (840, quoting Zhou Nan in Shaoxi 1). Chapter 11 focuses on professional bureaucrats, tracing the origins and continuity of a group skilled in power competition but lacking an ambition to "practice the Way." Together, these chapters reveal the interweaving of the three forces. Imperial power "was naturally the principal and most decisive force, since in Confucian theory the central authority issuing commands lay in the emperor's hands" (622–623). Precisely for that reason, it was often caught between self-direction and being held in check, and was "indeterminate." Neo-Confucians generally "tended toward reconstructing an ideal order," while professional bureaucrats "tended toward maintaining the status quo." Although "their strength was far inferior to imperial power, each possessed some autonomy and did not simply obey it. They sought imperial support while also trying, through various means, to influence the direction in which imperial power operated" (623). Their concerns, and autonomy limited by the existing system, framed their actions and made them comparatively "determinate."

Yu analyzes these three driving forces—imperial power, bureaucrats, and Neo-Confucians—by "first separating, then combining" them, producing a vivid landscape of complex interaction. His innovation also moves beyond traditional political-group analysis. Distinguishing political groups from social networks, he separates bureaucrats and Neo-Confucians according to political concerns rather than simply classifying actors by family, region, or social stratum. He thereby avoids an older limitation: "centered on 'events' and supplemented by classifications of political figures' family backgrounds, regions, and strata, the analysis inevitably concentrates on concrete power struggles and their underlying political formations, while often neglecting Chen Yinke's concern with changes in social strata."37 More importantly, it reveals the densely interwoven interpersonal networks that blur group boundaries. Such ambiguity was embedded in the political structure itself. In reconstructing a political world, it is therefore not noise but useful evidence. "Members of the bureaucratic group were also scholar-officials who had grown up in the Confucian atmosphere of the Song," so "their political culture could not be entirely distinct from that of the Neo-Confucian group" (667). Yu does not reduce them to a moralized opposition between "gentlemen" and "petty men"; he even attends to mediating social networks that prolonged factional struggle before the prohibition. These overlaps also illuminate structure. Despite shared political culture, the groups can still be distinguished by fundamental concerns: bureaucrats "always concentrated on gains and losses of 'power,' rather than the correctness of 'learning'" (667), while Neo-Confucians ultimately sought to enter politics through learning by "winning the ruler and putting the Way into practice." Why did overlapping groups choose such different paths? Their apparently divergent pursuits of power and principled rule both depended on the structures of the "imperial pivot" and "state policy." The former adopted a parasitic relation to preserve an existing system and its vested interests; the latter sought recognition and reform through dialogue. Differences in personal moral character may explain their sharply divergent purposes, but the means of realizing either remained tied to the same political structure. Mediating individuals between them were also incorporated into it, sometimes combining features of both. Shaped by the same political culture, these distinctive individuals may reveal particularly complex structures of subjective meaning beneath the political landscape.

Examining these interactions and their relation to the "imperial pivot" and "state policy" corresponds to political history's attention to "political culture" and "political process": evental processes disclose structural landscapes. "Unlike earlier political history, which concentrated on form, structure, and static arrangements, this approach observes impulses, conflicts, and dynamic aspects, revealing the complexity of political activity through close attention to process."38 It also accords with current interest in a "living" history of institutions. By examining constraints and agency among groups, we glimpse structures centered on the "imperial pivot" and "state policy," while also identifying interactions between Neo-Confucians and professional bureaucrats and the emperor's personal will. This reveals both "determinate" and "indeterminate" elements while avoiding the extremes of rigid structure and endless flux.39 It thus portrays political operations accurately and vividly, remaining connected to the earlier examination of "inner logic" rather than fragmenting into a separate inquiry.

IV. Opening the Internal and External: "Once the Threshold Is Removed, There Is No Inside or Outside"

The methodological account and introduction above follow two threads: "tracing inner logic" and "reconstructing an external world." This separation serves only to clarify the book's complex argument; it does not mean the threads merely "run in parallel," still less that they are "opposed extremes." Through "political culture," Yu observes that "Zhu Xi was not alone in accommodating both politics and learning; virtually all Song scholar-officials did so."40 His opposition to one-sided approaches is innovative. Yet the prefaces' program often appears in the main text as a narrative subordinating "learning" to "politics." This generated criticism of a "Copernican reversal" from "inward sagehood" toward "outward kingship," even an excessive emphasis on the latter,41 and the parties became caught in "ineffective" criticism in which "each clung to his own position."42 Yu may have overcorrected an earlier imbalance, while his critics defended a "world of values." More fundamentally, however, the difficulty seems to be that:

"... In both Yu Ying-shih's writing and that of several critics, traditional dichotomies remain evident: 'inward sagehood' versus 'outward kingship,' the 'tradition of the Way' versus the 'political tradition,' and 'thought' versus 'politics.' Yu's historical narrative certainly tends to turn from inward sagehood toward outward kingship, but his commentators, whether supporting or opposing him, also share this apparently opposed yet fundamentally identical dualism. ... Yet a Chan master said, 'Once the threshold is removed, there is no inside or outside.' I want to ask: are these internal and external poles really as remote from one another as separate constellations? Do they require a reversal or revolution as immense as that between heliocentrism and geocentrism, making them incompatible and irreconcilable?"43

Ge Zhaoguang finds in Yu's narrative a tendency to turn from "inward sagehood" toward "outward kingship." Yet Song political culture itself moved within an integrated ideal of inward sagehood and outward kingship. Earlier scholarship overemphasized the former as an eternal moral value, overlooking the latter both as its context and as its fundamental concern. Yu tried to redress this and encountered criticism from defenders of traditional values, sometimes being misunderstood as separating the two himself. We should distinguish "Yu Ying-shih's inward sagehood and outward kingship" from "the Neo-Confucians' inward sagehood and outward kingship." Yu reconstructs Zhu Xi's world as a researcher, seeking "through investigation of all relevant 'particulars' to establish certain long-neglected but important 'universals' in Song political and cultural history."44 Both methods serve this end. Retrospective research inevitably offers a detachment unavailable to historical actors: it can situate Neo-Confucianism within the overall Confucian movement and place Neo-Confucian political action within Song political-cultural history. This later standpoint is both legitimate and unavoidable. What requires caution is the linear conception of history that a retrospective perspective can bring. Yu's combined methods largely avoid that tendency. History itself grants researchers hindsight; the demanding and valuable task is to resist the directional teleology that may accompany it, adopting an "outwardly detached yet inwardly centered" perspective to observe and reconstruct a historical world. Later observers can identify the overall movement and its main thread; participants themselves often encounter only obscurity and faint, scattered clues.45

Consider Yu's statement: "Taken as a whole, 'inward sagehood' and 'outward kingship' form a continuum that absolutely cannot be divided. By 'turning,' I do not mean turning from inward sagehood to outward kingship, but returning to their integrated whole."46 To see them as a whole within Neo-Confucian subjective consciousness, while analyzing their two interwoven dimensions, is naturally an advantage of hindsight. What of individual Neo-Confucians living then? They might feel only the tension between inward sagehood and outward kingship, without stepping outside it to see themselves as members of an overall movement or attaining an omniscient view of the two as one pursuit. Cheng Hao's lines, quoted by Yu, express such feeling: "Were our Confucian calling not to order the world, / How lightly would we ever leave the mountain?" Cheng certainly valued inward cultivation of mind and disposition, and likewise aspired to outward kingship: to "fulfil Heaven's principle of nurturing the people" by "governing the realm and state." Later observers may see inward sagehood as establishing an ontological ground for outward kingship and thus regard them as a whole. From the Neo-Confucian's own standpoint, however, inward cultivation and outward political aspiration may simply have been two dimensions of subjective consciousness, with little or no intention of theoretically connecting them. Alternatively, inward sagehood was the theory, while outward kingship was its practical passage from "words" to "action."

Looking at the two sides of this scholarly controversy, we find that many critics specialized in philosophy. Their opposition to the "reversal" defended a paradigm of philosophical history, but may also have expressed a personal affinity with the Neo-Confucians, making them wary of destroying "absolute and universal moral values painstakingly established." Those advocating the removal of the internal/external divide tended instead to be intellectual historians. They considered Neo-Confucian work within its historical context, with warmth and respect but less immediate identification. These differences in thinking became differences of scholarly paradigm. Ge writes candidly: "I have always opposed abstracting thought into philosophy and then turning philosophy into a logic suspended above politics and life. I have always supported returning thought to its historical context and reconstructing its background."47 Yet scholarship, particularly historical research, cannot remain a matter of personal affinity in which "each sees things differently." We must value hindsight and place thought in historical circumstances in order to bring it to life. This does not prevent appreciation of pure speculation: the two pursuits can coexist without interference, but their relevance depends on context. Critics may personally sympathize more with "the Neo-Confucians' inward sagehood and outward kingship"; as historians, however, we should especially value the methodological insight of "Yu Ying-shih's inward sagehood and outward kingship."

In sum, this book makes full use of hindsight without falling into directional, retrospective thinking. Detailed source criticism, rigorous inference, clear structure, and advanced methods restore the "historical world" inhabited by Song Neo-Confucians. Yu has, I believe, largely fulfilled the plan stated in his preface: "Traces of a historical world remain in transmitted sources. Through research procedures that have proved effective and others still developing, historians can sketch an image of that world, if only indistinctly."48 He had also anticipated that "the same historical world necessarily presents different images to historians of different backgrounds and periods; no image can become its final definitive form."49 This allowed him to respond modestly even to sharp criticism after publication.

The book is entitled Zhu Xi's Historical World. Let us conclude with Yu's own words: "What I aspire to is to reconstruct Zhu Xi's historical world on the basis of the most reliable evidence, allowing readers to enter it and almost see him expressing his views and engaging in his activities."50 Having read the book, readers may confidently conclude that he achieved the goal to which he aspired.

Final assignment for the course "Historical Philology."

Written on 25 December 2022 at home in Xuzhou, after returning from Tsinghua because of the circumstances of the time.

Revised on 28 April 2024.

Notes

  1. Yu Ying-shih, first preface to Zhu Xi's Historical World (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing, 2011), 1. References to this book are given directly by page number in the text; except for its prefaces, full citations are not repeated.
  2. See the discussions among Yang Rur-bin, Liu Shu-hsien, and Yu Ying-shih: Liu, "Review of Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World: A Study of Song Scholar-Official Political Culture," Jiuzhou Xuelin, no. 2 (2003); Yu, "'Abstraction,' 'Reversal,' and 'Inward Sagehood and Outward Kingship': A Reply to Liu Shu-hsien," Jiuzhou Xuelin, no. 1 (2004); Liu, "A Response to Professor Yu Ying-shih," Jiuzhou Xuelin, no. 2 (2004); Yu, "On the Overall Confucian Project: After Reading Liu Shu-hsien's Response," Jiuzhou Xuelin, no. 2 (2004); Yang, "If the 'Copernican Reversal' Were Reversed Once More: Reading Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World," Contemporary Monthly, no. 11 (2003); Yu, "Did I Destroy Zhu Xi's World of Values? A Reply to Yang Rur-bin," Contemporary Monthly, no. 1 (2004); and Yang, "We Need More Paradigm Shifts: A Respectful Reply to Yu Ying-shih," Contemporary Monthly, no. 2 (2004). Yu's three replies are appended to the 2011 SDX edition of Zhu Xi's Historical World as "Three Supplementary Essays," 859–922. See also Chen Lai, "From the World of Thought to the Historical World: A Review of Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World," Twenty-First Century, no. 10 (2003); Jin Chunfeng, "Inward Sagehood and Outward Kingship as Two Sides of One Whole," Jiuzhou Xuelin, no. 4 (2004); Peter K. Bol, "Reflections on Yu Ying-shih's Method of Studying Song Learning of the Way," translated by Cheng Gang, World Philosophy, no. 4 (2004); and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, "Review of Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World," translated by Cheng Gang, World Philosophy, no. 4 (2004).
  3. See Ge Zhaoguang, "Once the Threshold Is Removed, There Is No Inside or Outside: Between Political, Intellectual, and Social History—Reading Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World and Its Reviews," Book Town, no. 1 (2004); Wang Fan-sen, "Historical Method and Historical Imagination: Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World," Chinese Scholarship, no. 2 (2004); Zhang Guogang, "A Historical Perspective on the Origins of Learning of the Way," Academic Review, no. 1 (2005); Deng Xiaonan et al., "Political Culture from a Historical Perspective," Dushu, no. 10 (2005); and Xu Bo, "How Is a Historical World Possible? Reflections on Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World," Journal of Tsinghua University, no. 3 (2015).
  4. "'Can we recite his poems and read his books without knowing the man? That is why we consider his age.' When I began writing this preface, these words of Mencius were my sole guiding principle. ... My ideal of 'knowing the person and considering his times' was neither to write a short biography of Zhu Xi, nor to summarize his principal intellectual ideas, still less to judge his words and actions through modern prejudices. I aspired to reconstruct his historical world as far as possible from the most reliable evidence, allowing readers to enter it and almost see him expressing views and engaging in activities. Once readers inhabit the same world as Zhu Xi, his arguments and activities will no longer seem entirely unfamiliar." Zhu Xi's Historical World, second preface, 5.
  5. Yu Ying-shih, "The Road I Have Travelled," in Collected Works of Yu Ying-shih, vol. 5, Modern Scholars and Scholarship (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2014), 567–575.
  6. Examples include Wang Fan-sen, "The Historian and His Age: Yu Ying-shih's Scholarship," Book Town, no. 3 (2011); Yu Ying-shih and Chen Zhi, Interviews with Yu Ying-shih (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2012); Yu Ying-shih and Li Huaiyu, Memoirs of Yu Ying-shih (Taipei: Yun Chen, 2018); and Yu Ying-shih and Chen Zhi, The Road I Have Travelled: Interviews with Yu Ying-shih, expanded edition (Taipei: Linking, 2021).
  7. Yu's father, Yu Xiezhong (1898–1983), came from Guanzhuang, Qianshan County, Anhui. Educated in modern schools, he studied history at Yenching University, completing a graduation thesis on Liu Zhiji's historiography under Chen Yuan. In 1926–1928 he studied American history at Colgate College and Harvard University. After receiving his master's degree he returned to China, succeeding Tsiang Tingfu as chair of Nankai University's history department in 1929. He later taught at Henan and Anhui Universities and was a candidate in the first election of Academia Sinica academicians. After 1937 he accompanied the Nationalist government from Nanjing to Chongqing, beginning the separation between father and son recalled by Yu. Later observers have associated Yu's literary scholarship with his paternal family learning. His maternal family, however, belonged to the distinguished Zhang lineage of Tongcheng. His mother, Zhang Yunqing, descended from Qing ministers Zhang Ying and Zhang Tingyu and wrote Poems from the Guxiang Studio. She died in childbirth when Yu was born.
  8. Yu, "The Road I Have Travelled," in Collected Works, vol. 5, Modern Scholars and Scholarship, 569.
  9. Ibid., 567–575.
  10. Ibid., 571.
  11. Memoirs of Yu Ying-shih, 83–84.
  12. Memoirs of Yu Ying-shih, 110.
  13. Ibid., 88.
  14. Ibid., 108.
  15. Yu Ying-shih, second original preface to Collected Works of Yu Ying-shih, in vol. 10, Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism and Political Culture (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2014), VIII.
  16. Memoirs of Yu Ying-shih, 102.
  17. Yu, "The Road I Have Travelled," in Collected Works, vol. 5, Modern Scholars and Scholarship, 574.
  18. Ibid., 575.
  19. Memoirs of Yu Ying-shih, 198–230.
  20. Ibid., 229.
  21. Yu Ying-shih, preface to Collected Works of Yu Ying-shih, in vol. 10, Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism and Political Culture (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2014), II.
  22. Ibid., VII.
  23. Ibid., II.
  24. Yu Ying-shih, general preface to the Yu Ying-shih series, in Zhu Xi's Historical World (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing, 2004), 3.
  25. Yu had a longstanding interest in the shi within traditional culture. See his Scholars and Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2013); Collected Works, vol. 4, Historical Studies of Chinese Intellectuals (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2014); and vol. 5, Modern Scholars and Scholarship (same publisher, 2014).
  26. Yu Ying-shih, preface to the expanded edition of On Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng: A Study of Mid-Qing Intellectual History, dated Princeton, 9 October 1996 (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing, 2012), 3.
  27. First published by Lung Men Bookstore in Hong Kong in 1976. Revised editions were subsequently issued by San Min in Taiwan (1996, 2016, 2020) and SDX Joint Publishing in mainland China (2000, 2005, 2012).
  28. Yu, preface to the expanded edition of On Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng, 3.
  29. Ibid., 2.
  30. On Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng: A Study of Mid-Qing Intellectual History, preface to the expanded edition, 3.
  31. On Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng, 356.
  32. Ibid., 3.
  33. Ibid., 4.
  34. Ibid., 4. This suggests that Yu still implicitly tended to distinguish "inner logic" from "external influence." In the 1999 preface written before Zhu Xi's Historical World was completed, however, he brought both within scholar-official "political culture": "Political culture is a flexible concept. It includes politics, encompasses scholarship, and points to their inseparable relationship" (second preface, 7). In the 2002 preface written after completion, he states more explicitly: "This book is a synthetic study of Song cultural and political history, especially attentive to their interactions. In terms of its emphasis, cultural history concerns the revival and development of Confucianism, while political history concerns the structures and operation of power manifested in reform. Yet in actual historical processes these two series were fundamentally interwoven and could not be clearly separated; both were encompassed within the overall activities of scholar-officials" (first preface, 1). Comparing the passages shows continuity in his distinction between inner logic and external influence, together with a new attempt to understand them integrally.
  35. Zhu Xi's Historical World, first preface, 1.
  36. Yang Rur-bin, "If the 'Copernican Reversal' Were Reversed Once More: Reading Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World."
  37. Qiu Luming, "Events, Processes, and Political Culture: Reviewing and Reflecting on Recent Research in Medieval Chinese Political History," Academic Monthly, no. 10 (2019).
  38. Qiu, "Events, Processes, and Political Culture," discussing the Japanese historian Teraji Jun's A Study of Early Southern Song Political History.
  39. That is, after "showing the complexity and divergent possibilities of historical processes," one should also "abstract factors with structural effects" (Qiu, "Events, Processes, and Political Culture"). Criticism of rigid approaches includes the practice of "evaporating people and personality, contingency, momentary or local events, and situational factors in order to obtain the essence of history, as though there were something absolute at the bottom of the well, a truth independent of time and circumstance." Instead, one should "recover the richness of concrete life in the past" (Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, translated by Zhang Yueming and Liu Beicheng [Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2012], 41). Equally, we should beware the opposite extreme: "Political-process research stresses complexity while evading structure, continually presenting change and incompletion, with description replacing explanation" (Qiu, "Events, Processes, and Political Culture").
  40. Zhu Xi's Historical World, second preface, 7.
  41. Liu Shu-hsien, "Review of Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World"; Yang Rur-bin, "If the 'Copernican Reversal' Were Reversed Once More."
  42. Ge Zhaoguang, "Once the Threshold Is Removed, There Is No Inside or Outside: Between Political, Intellectual, and Social History—Reading Yu Ying-shih's Zhu Xi's Historical World and Its Reviews."
  43. Ibid.
  44. Yu Ying-shih, "'Abstraction,' 'Reversal,' and 'Inward Sagehood and Outward Kingship': A Reply to Liu Shu-hsien," Jiuzhou Xuelin, no. 1 (2004), reprinted in Zhu Xi's Historical World, 861–871.
  45. Wang Fan-sen, Yu's student and himself a major intellectual historian, offers an insightful account: "When observing a forest, we must also attend to the activity of the roots beneath its large trees. ... We understand the trees above ground quite well. Two trees may appear unrelated, yet we forget that their roots may be intertwined beneath the surface" (Wang, "On The Persistent Bass [Preface]," in The Persistent Bass: Reflections on Ways of Thinking about History [Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing, 2020], 7). Among proliferating ideas, where "mainstream and non-mainstream tendencies coexist in overlapping layers and competition, with complex and subtle relations of interdependence," historical actors may particularly believe certain ideas and bring them to the fore as "mainstream" through "several levels of competition and cooperation," enabling their "power of ideas." This is also because these ideas fit more closely than others with structures of feeling and thought embedded in their period. Such actors may, however, "know that something is so without fully knowing why." Which ideas become mainstream cannot be explained by a retrospective assumption of historical actors' omniscient "unlimited rationality." Rather, "limited rationality" is constrained by "the finitude of the historical world" and "the opacity of the historical world" (ibid., 45). This holds for thinkers consciously accommodating or resisting their age, and for ordinary people drifting with the times or remaining apart from public affairs.
  46. Yu, "'Abstraction,' 'Reversal,' and 'Inward Sagehood and Outward Kingship'," in Zhu Xi's Historical World, 865.
  47. Ge, "Once the Threshold Is Removed, There Is No Inside or Outside."
  48. Zhu Xi's Historical World, second preface, 6.
  49. Ibid., 6.
  50. Ibid., 5.

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