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The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures
东亚文明：五个阶段的对话
无论在古典形成时期、佛教传入时期、宋明新儒学时期，还是近代东、西碰撞时期，在以儒家为价值内核的东亚文明内部，均展开过持续的思想对话。而狄百瑞教授的这部《东亚文明(五个阶段的对话)》，正是以此种对话性为主线，来追问支持文明之发生和发展的基本动力。缘此，《东亚文明(五个阶段的对话)》并非表现为单纯的回溯，还更表现为积极的前瞻，因为借助于上述“既分又合”的辩证形态，作者展示了他所向往的未来世界文明的典型存在样式。
- GenresHistory
135 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 1988
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About the author
William Theodore de Bary
77 books21 followersWilliam Theodore de Bary was an East Asian studies expert at Columbia University, with the title John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University and Provost Emeritus.
De Bary graduated from Columbia College in 1941, where he was a student in the first iteration of Columbia's famed Literature Humanities course. He then briefly took up graduate studies at Harvard before the US entered the Second World War. De Bary left the academy to serve in American military intelligence in the Pacific Theatre. Upon his return, he resumed his studies at Columbia, where he earned his PhD.
He has edited numerous books of original source material relating to East Asian (primarily Japanese and Chinese) literature, history, and culture, as well as making the case, in his book Nobility and Civility, for the universality of Asian values. He is recognized as essentially creating the field of Neo-Confucian studies.
Additionally, DeBary was active in faculty intervention during the Columbia University protests of 1968 and served as the university's provost from 1971 to 1978. He has attempted to reshape the Core Curriculum of Columbia College to include Great Books classes devoted to non-Western civilizations. DeBary is additionally famous for rarely missing a Columbia Lions football game since he began teaching at the university in 1953. A recognized educator, he won Columbia's Great Teacher Award in 1969, its Lionel Trilling Book Award in 1983 and its Mark Van Doren Award for Great Teaching in 1987.
Now the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and still teaching, De Bary lives in Rockland County, New York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_de_Bary
De Bary graduated from Columbia College in 1941, where he was a student in the first iteration of Columbia's famed Literature Humanities course. He then briefly took up graduate studies at Harvard before the US entered the Second World War. De Bary left the academy to serve in American military intelligence in the Pacific Theatre. Upon his return, he resumed his studies at Columbia, where he earned his PhD.
He has edited numerous books of original source material relating to East Asian (primarily Japanese and Chinese) literature, history, and culture, as well as making the case, in his book Nobility and Civility, for the universality of Asian values. He is recognized as essentially creating the field of Neo-Confucian studies.
Additionally, DeBary was active in faculty intervention during the Columbia University protests of 1968 and served as the university's provost from 1971 to 1978. He has attempted to reshape the Core Curriculum of Columbia College to include Great Books classes devoted to non-Western civilizations. DeBary is additionally famous for rarely missing a Columbia Lions football game since he began teaching at the university in 1953. A recognized educator, he won Columbia's Great Teacher Award in 1969, its Lionel Trilling Book Award in 1983 and its Mark Van Doren Award for Great Teaching in 1987.
Now the director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities and still teaching, De Bary lives in Rockland County, New York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_de_Bary
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November 8, 2017
Covering the intellectual history of a region with over millennia of documented history, sophisticated social and political institutions, in just 180 pages, is surely an insurmountable task. Yet this daunting prospect is expertly navigated under Wm Theodore de Bary’s erudite pen in his 1991 publication ‘East Asian Civilisations: A Dialogue in Five Stages.’ It is, of course, impossible to give a nuanced treatment within this number of pages. However, Bary draws upon a lifetime of experience to make broad and astute observations that would ring hollow if written by a less experienced scholar. As Emeritus Professor T. H. Barrett notes in The China Quarterly, published by the SOAS, what we have in this publication is not an ‘introduction to the world of East Asian thought’, but is rather an ‘introduction to the mind and heart of Wm. Theodore de Bary, one of the most prolific and influential American East Asia scholars there has even been.’
Bary’s periodisation consists of five different ‘epochs’, each of which is significant in terms of its ideological influence upon political philosophy. The First Epoch, roughly eleventh-century B.C. to the second-century A.D., consists of a period where ‘classical China develop[s] the basic ideas and institutions that later became part of the classical inheritance of other East Asian peoples; the Buddhist age (third-century though to the tenth-century); the Neo-Confucian age (eleventh-century through to the nineteenth-century); the Modern period ‘in which the waves of expanding Western civilisation broke upon East Asian shore and washed over the same ancient rocks’; and finally the Fifth Epoch, dealing with the present role and possible future of Confucianism in East Asia.
[First epoch summary to come]
Bary’s second epoch ushers in Buddhism to East Asia. He begins by examining Shotoku’s ‘Seventeen articles’ in seventh-century Japan, which is viewed as a foundational document and was the most complete codification of Buddhist and classical Confucian traditions within the region. Despite its role as a formative document, however, Shotoku’s articles serve as a framework rather than a set of explicit directives. They also remain sensitive to the issue of imperial authority by avoiding reference to the sovereign, and instead advocate for public discussion and cooperation. The articles place greater emphasis upon ‘basic moral and spiritual values than on the detailed codification of laws and their enforcement.’
Shotoku's seventeen articles importance lies within its capacity to combine the Confucian belief in human intellect, Buddhist scepticism of reason, and native traditions’ discursive interaction through consultation. In comparison to Japan’s foundational document which was formed through synthesising a number of intellectual traditions, both China and Korea took ancestral lore handed down from dynastic founders as guiding documents.
In seventh-century China, Buddhism reached the height of its influence under Empress Wu Zetian. Although ostensibly governing by the Chinese dynastic system and using Confucian doctrine as the primary source of political legitimation, the Empress was a patron of Buddhism and supported it as the Empire’s official religion. Her centrally administered system of provincial monasteries and nunneries was replicated in Japan and Korea. This development had the effect of 'perpetuating the idea of the world ruler presiding over a universal spiritual community in which the political and religious orders are mutually supportive, based on the Hua-yen philosophy of the interpenetration and interfusion of all elements of reality.'
As the Tang dynasty deteriorated during the late ninth-century, Buddhism was organisationally weakened. Over the course of China's history leading up to the Tang dynasty, various administrations experiencing fiscal problems floated the notion of extracting Buddhist monasteries’ accumulated wealth and changing Buddhist monks and nuns’ tax-exempt status to generate greater revenue for the state. The combined allure of filling the imperial coffers with Buddhist gold, and influence from the Wuzong Emperor's Taoist priest advisors proved too great a temptation to bear. The Wuzong Emperor’s ‘Edict of the Eight Month’ [845] fulfilled the aspirations of his like-minded predecessors and brought formal persecution against Buddhist practitioners. The Taoist influence is apparent in the edict where he proclaimed that after expelling more than '100,000 idle and unproductive Buddhist followers… We may guide the people in stillness and purity, cherish the principle of doing nothing, order Our government with simplicity and ease, and achieve a unification of customs so that the multitudes of all realms will find their destination in Our august rule.'
Despite facing chronic fiscal, administrative and agricultural problems, the Song dynasty, in Bary’s words, ‘showed remarkable vitality.’ The dynasty was characterised by 'intensive internal development' economically, socially and culturally. Neo-Confucianism became the 'primary force in shaping a new common culture'. It encouraged the development of intensive agriculture through new irrigation and cultivation, growth of industry and commerce (internal as opposed to foreign), use of paper currency, population growth and urbanisation, and technological advances (esp. printing).
A major feature of this new order was rise of a new bureaucratic and cultural elite, which emphasised civil rather than military rule (without diminishing the importance of military affairs or cost of the military establishment). The bureaucratic class in turn encouraged scholarship and secular education. As a result, academies mushroomed throughout the empire around large collections of books ‘endowed by grants of land from the state or from private individuals.’ These academies attracted greater numbers of students and provided the fertile ground for the flowering of Neo-Confucianism.
Hu Yuan (993-1049) typified the Confucian revival experienced at the time. He devised a new educational model for officials that combined abstraction and vocational elements. The Confucian classics were taught in tandem with civil administration, military affairs, hydraulic engineering, or mathematics. The purpose of this curriculum was to provide ethical and structural anchorage which would ideally unify disparate forms of practical learning. The newly proposed method of learning was held in contrast the 'empty' teaching of Buddhism and Taoism, and their scepticism about 'any enduring substance or nature'. Confucian scholarship also came under attack, for indulging in rote learning and 'literary composition not informed by any moral purpose.'
Many contemporary literati believed eleventh-century reforms failed to develop national prosperity in the manner of the aggrandised ancient kings. The loss of Northern China as the Song dynasty was divided in two forced a reconceptualization of intellectual and civil institutions. Rather than striving to resolve the problems inherent in national affairs, the literati in the Southern Song dynasty began an intensive focus upon local matters. This political disenchantment in turn forced divergent responses among the intellectual class. They consisted of: withdrawal from political affairs, blame of previous scholars' impractical pedagogy, and utilitarian use of power.
Zhu Xi's (1130-1200) syncretism found the middle way between these responses. Despite being characterised as a quietest or conservative, Zhu challenged the notion that ancestral law was inviolable and should block basic reform.
Zhu engaged Song society through both theoretical and practical methods. He was actively involved at the local level through community organisation and cooperative activities, famine relief, instruction in schools, and the administration of justice. On the theoretical level, Zhu regarded opposing intellectual movements during the time as opposing extremes. Utilitarians on the one hand, and Buddhism and Taoism on the other. He believed that 'one was short-sighted, the other lofty and vague.' The seminal factor for Zhu was how human nature was defined and how humane values could be inculcated into leadership. Society needed education that would 'appeal to best in human nature'. This system could then be nurtured and trained to meet the responsibilities of governance.
Reflecting his preoccupation with spreading education, Zhu Xi wrote in an accessible style and endeavoured to give the Great Learning (one of the Confucian Classics Four Books) a more prominent place in the canon. In his commentary on the Great Learning, Zhu outlined a process by which an individual could obtain the Neo-Confucian ideal of enlightenment. This method comprised ‘Three Guiding Principles’, which were then followed by ‘Eight Steps’. Firstly, one should 'manifest bright virtue' - which meant to give 'expression to the innate moral nature of each person.’ This was followed by the second principle, 'renew the people', meaning to assist others with cultivating their innate good nature as the basis for societal renewal. The third principle was 'resting in the highest good', essentially striking the proper balance when dealing with human affairs.
The Eight Steps consist of successive steps in self-cultivation 'directed toward the goal of ordering the state and bringing peace to the world.' These steps are effectively the Confucian gentleman's 'Eightfold Path' - a reconfiguration of Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path. Its objective, however, is temporal peace of the world rather than the metaphysical peace of nirvana.
In concert with Song dynasty reformers, Zhu's ultimate contribution was to democratise education. He did so through devoting significant energy towards basic methods of learning and 'responding to two historic developments of his time: the availability of printing to communicate ideas and the expansion of education through the use of printing'. Despite official persecution just before and after Zhu's death, his commentaries on the Four Books (the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects, and the Book of Mencius) ingrained themselves as core curriculum in the Confucian academies during the thirteenth-century, and spread throughout the empire based on their intellectual and moral merits. While gaining traction amongst the literati, Bary believes Zhu and his followers fulfilled many of the early Song dynasty reformers' aim to wean the common people 'away from their addiction to Buddhism and religious Taoism.'
Neo-Confucianism was not a proselytising belief system. It took dislocation through war and conquest to spread the teachings throughout East Asia. Neo-Confucianism reached Northern China through the Mongols capturing Confucian scholar Chao Fu in 1235 and installing him in a Peking academy; made it to Korea through Korean princes studying the doctrine while held hostage in Peking; and to Japan through the combination of Japanese Zen monks' pilgrimages to China, Korean scholars taken as prisoners of war in the Hideyoshi invasion, and the displaced Ming dynasty scholar, Zhu Zhiyu.
Bary’s third epoch is rounded out with brief discussion Neo-Confucianism’s development throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties. Zhu Xi's conception of 'the central agency of the mind-and-heart' persisted as the core orthodoxy throughout the late Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties. This enduring tenet was displaced by influential Neo-Confucian scholar Wang Yangming (1472-1529) in the sixteenth-century. Wang sort to reorientate orthodox ideals towards an intuitive notion rather than an intellectual ideal. This recalibration shocked Korean Neo-Confuciansts who were fiercely loyal to Zhu Xi and had inculcated his ideals into their institutions to a much greater extent than the Chinese. The challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy was met with 3 standard responses: adoption, opposition, and adaptation.
The Ming dynasty's fall during the mid-seventeenth century proved the strongest catalyst for the condemnation of Wang Yangming’s teachings. Heterodox views were blamed for undermining 'objective learning, public morality, and the body politic'. They were seen as a subversive force which was ultimately responsible for the dynasty's collapse, and contributed towards the Manchu’s reassertion of Zhu Xi's curriculum as the basis for official instruction and the imperial examination system.
Bary asserts that Neo-Confucianism throughout the nineteenth-century continued to embrace both Learning of Principle and Learning of the Mind and Heart; 'the former fostered scholarly study and objective inquiry, the latter, moral and spiritual cultivation.' Over the long term, the doctrine contributed towards technical study specialization and the growth of 'evidential research' which was orientated towards an inward looking political culture.
Bary begins his epoch on modernity by questioning assumptions behind China's modernisation beginning with the empire's response to British military aggression. He states that scholarship on the subject implicitly suggests that 'even where modernisation has not simply been equated with westernisation, the progress of the west has set the norm and the pace.' Historians asked why had Japan reacted differently to the challenge of western intrusion, and why was China so slow to adapt? Showing its scholarly date but nevertheless taking a different perspective, Bary wonders why the question was never asked in reverse: 'why did the west fail to keep up with the progress of East Asian civilizations?'
Positioning his argument in a 'normative Neo-Confucian framework’ Bary implies the following: East Asian civilizations were internally focused while European powers sought resource exploitation through overseas colonies. He uses Lin Zexu’s (1785-1850) letter to Queen Victoria and the British sale of Indian opium to China to draw larger conclusions about the differences between eastern and western mentalities and notions of progress. Through Neo-Confucian teaching, both the Qing dynasty and the Tokugawa Shogunate had emphasised self-cultivation as the ideal form of governance and recognized the territorial limits of their respective empires.
In Japan, competing reformist efforts manifested in a way that was beneficial for the it's modernisation. Contrasting with Yosahida Shoin’s (1830-1859) action-orientated modernisation reforms, the emperor Meiji and his constitutional reconfiguration provided a viable alternate channel through which mobilised social forces could direct emotional and religious energies towards rational policy. Importantly, this could be pursued without seeming to abandon the powerful appeal of tradition that existed in China, where dynastic precedent was the source of inherited sovereignty and therefore legitimacy. Despite adhering to Neo-Confucian principles of individual thought and conduct as a form of moral cultivation, Bary sees China's reform efforts during the same period, in the form of the so-called 'self-strengthening movement', as a predominantly regional initiative lacking empire-wide cohesion. Due to the Manchus position as invaders occupying the imperial throne, China could not appeal to some form of ethnic nationalism as a catalyst for social change in the same manner the Japanese had done.
Although Bary makes clear that China and Japan's approach to modernisation is incomparable due to fundamentally different experiences, he does make a few nuanced observations. In his view, the Qing dynasty was not able to readily adapt to western military aggression because there was lack of a competent, alternate imperial leadership that was 'able to draw on the symbolic resources of tradition'. Secondly, geographic distance and demographic diversity made a coordinated response to mobilise popular resistance a more difficult task.
The fundamental factor which impeded China's modernisation, however, was a lack of universal education - 'the great unfulfilled promise' of the Neo-Confucian tradition. Generations of reformers had criticised dynastic regimes for treating education primarily as a method for staffing China's colossal bureaucracy through the archaic imperial examination system. This approach was detrimental to forming an education model which benefitted all of China's subjects. Despite this recognition and earnest desire to change imperial China’s education system, institutional structures and cultural heritage proved resistant to change.
Compounding the negative effects of an inadequate universal education system were intellectual currents. In comparison to Japan, where Neo-Confucians refused to severe the influence or compartmentalise their scholarship from religious thought, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Chinese Neo-Confucianism increasingly distanced itself from religious and spiritual thought and instead focused upon rationality. This meant that Chinese reformers were cutting themselves off 'further from some of the springs of popular religious inspiration and moral dynamism.'
Bary sees the intellectual debates that occurred in China during the final years of the Qing dynasty, Republican China, and finally the early P.R.C., as a struggle to identify a place for traditional Chinese values whilst also utilising concepts and methods from outside China which would be beneficial for modernisation. Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-Sen, and finally Mao Zedong, each played a role in developing a style of revolutionary utopianism that would become hallmark intellectual movements for much of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century.
Bary’s ‘Post-Confucian’ epoch poses another hypothetical question. He asks why, despite lacking an endowment with abundant natural resources, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea have been such successful post-war nations. Many economists, bound by an analysis so overworn it has become trite, assert in conceitedly divinatory tones that China’s economic success began with Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Opening Up’ in the late 1970s. As Bary points out, there is a wilful ignorance towards the idea that the startling growth in East Asia may instead be the result of 'deeply rooted social processes and cultural traditions'. Instead, modernisation is thought about exclusively in terms of rapid change.
Neo-Confucianism's influence upon social practices, especially dedication to self-cultivation through education, had an enduring influence on modern East Asian governance and served to instill advantageous cultural traits. Unusually, this influence continued despite lacking a place of worship or priesthood visible in other religions. Its society-wide prevalence suggests that these values permeated throughout the social order, rather than finding replication exclusively through a bureaucratic elite. Bary believes these values were carried into the modern era – offering, in my opinion, a more rounded explanation as to the success of both East Asian nation states and that of individual diaspora.
East Asian Civilisations is concluded with a discussion of contemporary affairs and how to remedy what the author sees as global pursuit of economic and exploratory progress adrift from an underlying set of moral principles. To remedy this deficiency, Bary suggests internal reflection and self-cultivation, and an educational model that instills a passion for lifelong learning. A marriage between Zhu Xi and Hu Yuan's scholarship would provide the framework for such a model.
Bary’s periodisation consists of five different ‘epochs’, each of which is significant in terms of its ideological influence upon political philosophy. The First Epoch, roughly eleventh-century B.C. to the second-century A.D., consists of a period where ‘classical China develop[s] the basic ideas and institutions that later became part of the classical inheritance of other East Asian peoples; the Buddhist age (third-century though to the tenth-century); the Neo-Confucian age (eleventh-century through to the nineteenth-century); the Modern period ‘in which the waves of expanding Western civilisation broke upon East Asian shore and washed over the same ancient rocks’; and finally the Fifth Epoch, dealing with the present role and possible future of Confucianism in East Asia.
[First epoch summary to come]
Bary’s second epoch ushers in Buddhism to East Asia. He begins by examining Shotoku’s ‘Seventeen articles’ in seventh-century Japan, which is viewed as a foundational document and was the most complete codification of Buddhist and classical Confucian traditions within the region. Despite its role as a formative document, however, Shotoku’s articles serve as a framework rather than a set of explicit directives. They also remain sensitive to the issue of imperial authority by avoiding reference to the sovereign, and instead advocate for public discussion and cooperation. The articles place greater emphasis upon ‘basic moral and spiritual values than on the detailed codification of laws and their enforcement.’
Shotoku's seventeen articles importance lies within its capacity to combine the Confucian belief in human intellect, Buddhist scepticism of reason, and native traditions’ discursive interaction through consultation. In comparison to Japan’s foundational document which was formed through synthesising a number of intellectual traditions, both China and Korea took ancestral lore handed down from dynastic founders as guiding documents.
In seventh-century China, Buddhism reached the height of its influence under Empress Wu Zetian. Although ostensibly governing by the Chinese dynastic system and using Confucian doctrine as the primary source of political legitimation, the Empress was a patron of Buddhism and supported it as the Empire’s official religion. Her centrally administered system of provincial monasteries and nunneries was replicated in Japan and Korea. This development had the effect of 'perpetuating the idea of the world ruler presiding over a universal spiritual community in which the political and religious orders are mutually supportive, based on the Hua-yen philosophy of the interpenetration and interfusion of all elements of reality.'
As the Tang dynasty deteriorated during the late ninth-century, Buddhism was organisationally weakened. Over the course of China's history leading up to the Tang dynasty, various administrations experiencing fiscal problems floated the notion of extracting Buddhist monasteries’ accumulated wealth and changing Buddhist monks and nuns’ tax-exempt status to generate greater revenue for the state. The combined allure of filling the imperial coffers with Buddhist gold, and influence from the Wuzong Emperor's Taoist priest advisors proved too great a temptation to bear. The Wuzong Emperor’s ‘Edict of the Eight Month’ [845] fulfilled the aspirations of his like-minded predecessors and brought formal persecution against Buddhist practitioners. The Taoist influence is apparent in the edict where he proclaimed that after expelling more than '100,000 idle and unproductive Buddhist followers… We may guide the people in stillness and purity, cherish the principle of doing nothing, order Our government with simplicity and ease, and achieve a unification of customs so that the multitudes of all realms will find their destination in Our august rule.'
Despite facing chronic fiscal, administrative and agricultural problems, the Song dynasty, in Bary’s words, ‘showed remarkable vitality.’ The dynasty was characterised by 'intensive internal development' economically, socially and culturally. Neo-Confucianism became the 'primary force in shaping a new common culture'. It encouraged the development of intensive agriculture through new irrigation and cultivation, growth of industry and commerce (internal as opposed to foreign), use of paper currency, population growth and urbanisation, and technological advances (esp. printing).
A major feature of this new order was rise of a new bureaucratic and cultural elite, which emphasised civil rather than military rule (without diminishing the importance of military affairs or cost of the military establishment). The bureaucratic class in turn encouraged scholarship and secular education. As a result, academies mushroomed throughout the empire around large collections of books ‘endowed by grants of land from the state or from private individuals.’ These academies attracted greater numbers of students and provided the fertile ground for the flowering of Neo-Confucianism.
Hu Yuan (993-1049) typified the Confucian revival experienced at the time. He devised a new educational model for officials that combined abstraction and vocational elements. The Confucian classics were taught in tandem with civil administration, military affairs, hydraulic engineering, or mathematics. The purpose of this curriculum was to provide ethical and structural anchorage which would ideally unify disparate forms of practical learning. The newly proposed method of learning was held in contrast the 'empty' teaching of Buddhism and Taoism, and their scepticism about 'any enduring substance or nature'. Confucian scholarship also came under attack, for indulging in rote learning and 'literary composition not informed by any moral purpose.'
Many contemporary literati believed eleventh-century reforms failed to develop national prosperity in the manner of the aggrandised ancient kings. The loss of Northern China as the Song dynasty was divided in two forced a reconceptualization of intellectual and civil institutions. Rather than striving to resolve the problems inherent in national affairs, the literati in the Southern Song dynasty began an intensive focus upon local matters. This political disenchantment in turn forced divergent responses among the intellectual class. They consisted of: withdrawal from political affairs, blame of previous scholars' impractical pedagogy, and utilitarian use of power.
Zhu Xi's (1130-1200) syncretism found the middle way between these responses. Despite being characterised as a quietest or conservative, Zhu challenged the notion that ancestral law was inviolable and should block basic reform.
Zhu engaged Song society through both theoretical and practical methods. He was actively involved at the local level through community organisation and cooperative activities, famine relief, instruction in schools, and the administration of justice. On the theoretical level, Zhu regarded opposing intellectual movements during the time as opposing extremes. Utilitarians on the one hand, and Buddhism and Taoism on the other. He believed that 'one was short-sighted, the other lofty and vague.' The seminal factor for Zhu was how human nature was defined and how humane values could be inculcated into leadership. Society needed education that would 'appeal to best in human nature'. This system could then be nurtured and trained to meet the responsibilities of governance.
Reflecting his preoccupation with spreading education, Zhu Xi wrote in an accessible style and endeavoured to give the Great Learning (one of the Confucian Classics Four Books) a more prominent place in the canon. In his commentary on the Great Learning, Zhu outlined a process by which an individual could obtain the Neo-Confucian ideal of enlightenment. This method comprised ‘Three Guiding Principles’, which were then followed by ‘Eight Steps’. Firstly, one should 'manifest bright virtue' - which meant to give 'expression to the innate moral nature of each person.’ This was followed by the second principle, 'renew the people', meaning to assist others with cultivating their innate good nature as the basis for societal renewal. The third principle was 'resting in the highest good', essentially striking the proper balance when dealing with human affairs.
The Eight Steps consist of successive steps in self-cultivation 'directed toward the goal of ordering the state and bringing peace to the world.' These steps are effectively the Confucian gentleman's 'Eightfold Path' - a reconfiguration of Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path. Its objective, however, is temporal peace of the world rather than the metaphysical peace of nirvana.
In concert with Song dynasty reformers, Zhu's ultimate contribution was to democratise education. He did so through devoting significant energy towards basic methods of learning and 'responding to two historic developments of his time: the availability of printing to communicate ideas and the expansion of education through the use of printing'. Despite official persecution just before and after Zhu's death, his commentaries on the Four Books (the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects, and the Book of Mencius) ingrained themselves as core curriculum in the Confucian academies during the thirteenth-century, and spread throughout the empire based on their intellectual and moral merits. While gaining traction amongst the literati, Bary believes Zhu and his followers fulfilled many of the early Song dynasty reformers' aim to wean the common people 'away from their addiction to Buddhism and religious Taoism.'
Neo-Confucianism was not a proselytising belief system. It took dislocation through war and conquest to spread the teachings throughout East Asia. Neo-Confucianism reached Northern China through the Mongols capturing Confucian scholar Chao Fu in 1235 and installing him in a Peking academy; made it to Korea through Korean princes studying the doctrine while held hostage in Peking; and to Japan through the combination of Japanese Zen monks' pilgrimages to China, Korean scholars taken as prisoners of war in the Hideyoshi invasion, and the displaced Ming dynasty scholar, Zhu Zhiyu.
Bary’s third epoch is rounded out with brief discussion Neo-Confucianism’s development throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties. Zhu Xi's conception of 'the central agency of the mind-and-heart' persisted as the core orthodoxy throughout the late Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties. This enduring tenet was displaced by influential Neo-Confucian scholar Wang Yangming (1472-1529) in the sixteenth-century. Wang sort to reorientate orthodox ideals towards an intuitive notion rather than an intellectual ideal. This recalibration shocked Korean Neo-Confuciansts who were fiercely loyal to Zhu Xi and had inculcated his ideals into their institutions to a much greater extent than the Chinese. The challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy was met with 3 standard responses: adoption, opposition, and adaptation.
The Ming dynasty's fall during the mid-seventeenth century proved the strongest catalyst for the condemnation of Wang Yangming’s teachings. Heterodox views were blamed for undermining 'objective learning, public morality, and the body politic'. They were seen as a subversive force which was ultimately responsible for the dynasty's collapse, and contributed towards the Manchu’s reassertion of Zhu Xi's curriculum as the basis for official instruction and the imperial examination system.
Bary asserts that Neo-Confucianism throughout the nineteenth-century continued to embrace both Learning of Principle and Learning of the Mind and Heart; 'the former fostered scholarly study and objective inquiry, the latter, moral and spiritual cultivation.' Over the long term, the doctrine contributed towards technical study specialization and the growth of 'evidential research' which was orientated towards an inward looking political culture.
Bary begins his epoch on modernity by questioning assumptions behind China's modernisation beginning with the empire's response to British military aggression. He states that scholarship on the subject implicitly suggests that 'even where modernisation has not simply been equated with westernisation, the progress of the west has set the norm and the pace.' Historians asked why had Japan reacted differently to the challenge of western intrusion, and why was China so slow to adapt? Showing its scholarly date but nevertheless taking a different perspective, Bary wonders why the question was never asked in reverse: 'why did the west fail to keep up with the progress of East Asian civilizations?'
Positioning his argument in a 'normative Neo-Confucian framework’ Bary implies the following: East Asian civilizations were internally focused while European powers sought resource exploitation through overseas colonies. He uses Lin Zexu’s (1785-1850) letter to Queen Victoria and the British sale of Indian opium to China to draw larger conclusions about the differences between eastern and western mentalities and notions of progress. Through Neo-Confucian teaching, both the Qing dynasty and the Tokugawa Shogunate had emphasised self-cultivation as the ideal form of governance and recognized the territorial limits of their respective empires.
In Japan, competing reformist efforts manifested in a way that was beneficial for the it's modernisation. Contrasting with Yosahida Shoin’s (1830-1859) action-orientated modernisation reforms, the emperor Meiji and his constitutional reconfiguration provided a viable alternate channel through which mobilised social forces could direct emotional and religious energies towards rational policy. Importantly, this could be pursued without seeming to abandon the powerful appeal of tradition that existed in China, where dynastic precedent was the source of inherited sovereignty and therefore legitimacy. Despite adhering to Neo-Confucian principles of individual thought and conduct as a form of moral cultivation, Bary sees China's reform efforts during the same period, in the form of the so-called 'self-strengthening movement', as a predominantly regional initiative lacking empire-wide cohesion. Due to the Manchus position as invaders occupying the imperial throne, China could not appeal to some form of ethnic nationalism as a catalyst for social change in the same manner the Japanese had done.
Although Bary makes clear that China and Japan's approach to modernisation is incomparable due to fundamentally different experiences, he does make a few nuanced observations. In his view, the Qing dynasty was not able to readily adapt to western military aggression because there was lack of a competent, alternate imperial leadership that was 'able to draw on the symbolic resources of tradition'. Secondly, geographic distance and demographic diversity made a coordinated response to mobilise popular resistance a more difficult task.
The fundamental factor which impeded China's modernisation, however, was a lack of universal education - 'the great unfulfilled promise' of the Neo-Confucian tradition. Generations of reformers had criticised dynastic regimes for treating education primarily as a method for staffing China's colossal bureaucracy through the archaic imperial examination system. This approach was detrimental to forming an education model which benefitted all of China's subjects. Despite this recognition and earnest desire to change imperial China’s education system, institutional structures and cultural heritage proved resistant to change.
Compounding the negative effects of an inadequate universal education system were intellectual currents. In comparison to Japan, where Neo-Confucians refused to severe the influence or compartmentalise their scholarship from religious thought, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Chinese Neo-Confucianism increasingly distanced itself from religious and spiritual thought and instead focused upon rationality. This meant that Chinese reformers were cutting themselves off 'further from some of the springs of popular religious inspiration and moral dynamism.'
Bary sees the intellectual debates that occurred in China during the final years of the Qing dynasty, Republican China, and finally the early P.R.C., as a struggle to identify a place for traditional Chinese values whilst also utilising concepts and methods from outside China which would be beneficial for modernisation. Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-Sen, and finally Mao Zedong, each played a role in developing a style of revolutionary utopianism that would become hallmark intellectual movements for much of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century.
Bary’s ‘Post-Confucian’ epoch poses another hypothetical question. He asks why, despite lacking an endowment with abundant natural resources, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea have been such successful post-war nations. Many economists, bound by an analysis so overworn it has become trite, assert in conceitedly divinatory tones that China’s economic success began with Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Opening Up’ in the late 1970s. As Bary points out, there is a wilful ignorance towards the idea that the startling growth in East Asia may instead be the result of 'deeply rooted social processes and cultural traditions'. Instead, modernisation is thought about exclusively in terms of rapid change.
Neo-Confucianism's influence upon social practices, especially dedication to self-cultivation through education, had an enduring influence on modern East Asian governance and served to instill advantageous cultural traits. Unusually, this influence continued despite lacking a place of worship or priesthood visible in other religions. Its society-wide prevalence suggests that these values permeated throughout the social order, rather than finding replication exclusively through a bureaucratic elite. Bary believes these values were carried into the modern era – offering, in my opinion, a more rounded explanation as to the success of both East Asian nation states and that of individual diaspora.
East Asian Civilisations is concluded with a discussion of contemporary affairs and how to remedy what the author sees as global pursuit of economic and exploratory progress adrift from an underlying set of moral principles. To remedy this deficiency, Bary suggests internal reflection and self-cultivation, and an educational model that instills a passion for lifelong learning. A marriage between Zhu Xi and Hu Yuan's scholarship would provide the framework for such a model.
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