ZhiXi Foremost Neo-Confucian thinker
3 min readZhu Xi was not only an important shaper of Neo-Confu-cianism in the Southern Song Dynasty（1127-1279），but also a world-class thinker who greatly influenced the social and cul-tural development in East Asia in the last millennium.
Born into a declining bureaucratic and landlord family in southeast China’s Fujian Province, Zhu was a precocious child.
He first studied under the instruction of his father and after the old Zhu passed away, he continued his studies with assistancefrom some of his father’s friends. The prodigy passed the top “presented scholar”(jinshi) exam when he was only 18.
First, Zhu showed eclectic interest in Daoism and Bud-dhism. However, after he became the student of Li Tong (1033-1163),a Neo-Confucian master, Zhu was converted to Confucian cultivation and devoted the rest of his life to inter-preting and propagating Neo-Confucianism.
He served in a dozen or more administrative offices, but he never stayed long in any of his positions because he always criticized the policies of the central court.
Later he became a temple curator,a post that gave him sufficient leisure time to read, write and teach. He rebuilt the famed White Deer Grotto Academy in today’s Jiangxi Prov-ince and it was there that he gave lectures that attracted hun-dreds of scholars from all over the country.
Zhu was a philosopher of objective idealism. He devel-oped numerous explanations of the fundamental nature of the world.
Zhu’s philosophical system is wide ranging, and includes ontology, cosmology, nature, moral cultivation, ethics and politics.
The central concepts in his ontology are qi (material force) and li(principle) and the source and sum of creation is the supreme ultimate(tai chi).
He said that tai chi gives birth to yin and yang, and li brings forth qi. Li are the patterns underlying the constant change of the psychological and material world; qi is thedynamic stuff of which this world is composed. However, he believed li to have logical priority over qi but to have no ex-istence independent of qi.
He also likened the relationship between li and qi to a man riding a horse.All the time, Zhu sought to re-establish the fundamental principles and ideals of Confucianism in order to restore the vitality of a Confucian society.
Thus, he devoted most of his time to formulating a con-crete vision of the Confucian canon, dividing it into the Four Books(these consisted of the Analects of Confucius, the Men-cius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean) and the Five Classics(the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of History, the Book of Changes(Yi Jing), the Classic of Rites and the Spring and Autumn Annals).
After his death, Zhu’s writings were selected as the au-thoritative interpretations of the classics and the official text-books for the imperial examination system (or civil service examinations) until they were eventually abolished in 1905.
Zhu’s thinking later became the reigning orthodoxy in Korea for 600 years, and in Japan his teachings were dominant during the Tokugawa period (1603-1867).
Besides his thinking and teachings, Zhu was also a renowned calligrapher who had attained a superb level in theart. Unfortunately, most of his manuscripts have been lost and his brilliance in calligraphy has always been overshadowed by his fame as a preeminent thinker.
