Zhu Xi's Four Books 朱熹四書, also known as “The Collected Commentaries of the Chapters and Verses of the Four Books (四 書章句集注)”
Creators: name: Du, Feiran
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2023

description: The Four Books, namely the Great Learning (Da xue 大學), the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhong yong 中庸), the Analects (Lun yu 論語), and the Mencius (Meng zi 孟子), is a compendium of essential Confucian readings compiled, edited, annotated, and systematically interpreted by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200 CE), the eminent Southern Song scholar and chief architect of Neo-Confucianism. It is recognized as the most fundamental canon of Neo-Confucianism and marks the climax of this intellectual movement that aims to “reexamine, rediscover, reinterpret, redefine, revitalize and reinforce” the Confucian heritage. (James T.C. Liu, 1973, p.483). About one century after Zhu Xi’s death, when the Mongolian Yuan emperor Renzong (r.1311–1320 CE) issued a decree to reintroduce the imperial examination (keju kaoshi 科舉考試) system for government recruitment in 1313 CE, he assigned Zhu Xi’s edition of the Four Books, Sishu zhangju jizhu 四書章句集注 (The Collected Commentaries of the Chapters and Verses of the Four Books, below SSZJJZ), as the basic curriculum of the imperial examination. As a result, SSZJJZ became the base of state orthodoxy and remained so for the following six hundred years till the imperial examination system was terminated in 1919. In this sense, there is no other Chinese classic that has had a greater influence on Chinese thought and life than Zhu Xi’s Four Books. Among the Four Books, the Analects and Mencius had circulated separately before the twelfth century. The other two “books” are chapters selected by Zhu Xi from the Book of Rites (Liji, 禮記), one of the Five Classics (wujing 五經). But all of the four texts have seen some extent of “ascendancy” as they became part of the Four Books. The Analects, which collects Confucius’ own words and his disciples’ remarks about the Master, had always been considered essential in rudimentary education but never made it into the Classics. (Some scholars believe the “Seven Classics” in the Eastern Han includes the Analects, but others doubt whether the phrase even refers to Confucian canons as it may refer to a group of Daosit or Buddhist scripts.) Mencius used to be merely one of the pre-Qin “masters' books” (zishu 子書) but gradually gained more attention from the mid-Tang and onward. Leading Confucian scholars of previous generations had already noticed the hermeneutic potentials in these four groups of texts— especially the Mencius and the Doctrine of the Mean— in purifying and revitalizing the Confucian heritage, but it was in Zhu Xi’s hands that they were first combined together, prioritized in the Confucian teaching, given a systematic and coherent interpretation, and became the Four Books— a new Confucian canon and the pivot of the renewed tradition that would surpass the Five Classics to constitute the foundation of state orthodoxy. Before the Tang, the curriculum in the Imperial Academy (taixue 太學) was based on the Five Classics (wujing 五經)：The Book of Poetry (Shi 詩), The Book of Documents (Shu 書), The Book of Rites, The Book of Music (Yue 樂), Spring and Autumn Annals (Chun qiu 春秋). A few other texts, such as The Analects, The Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao jing 孝經), and Er-ya (“The Literary Expositor” 爾雅) were used as auxiliary books especially for elementary education. The education at this time aimed at cultivating students’ (most of them aristocratic) Six Arts (liuyi 六藝): ceremonies (li 禮), music (yue 樂), archery (she 射), carriage-driving (yu 御), writing (shu 書), mathematics (shu 數). The pre-Tang tradition’s emphasis on the value of institution, ritual, and cultural conventions is also seen in its promotion of the parallel of “Duke of Zhou and Confucius”. This model assigns the same supreme status as Confucius to the Duke of Zhou, one of the de facto rulers in early Zhou dynasty and a seminal figure in establishing the political and cultural institutions that would impact Chinese civilization for thousands of years to come. Almost all the aforementioned characteristics of pre-Tang Confucian tradition were transformed during and after the Song. Individuals’ moral cultivation replaced the establishment of social and cultural institutions to become the most valued as the cultural synthesis had collapsed. The greatest Confucian enterprise changed from building an “external kingdom” (waiwang 外王) to attaining “inner sagehood” (neisheng 內聖). The ultimate cultural heroes, accordingly, had also changed from the parallel of “the Duke of Zhou and Confucius” to that of “Confucius and Mencius,” the lesser sage (yasheng 亞聖) who brought about the discussions about the Four Cardinal Virtues/Beginnings (siduan 四端) that he believed were innate to humans and thus sparked off a long debate over human nature in Chinese history. But the most noticeable transformation from the Han-Tang Confucian doctrine to its renewed model in and after the Song till the rise of the Evidential Studies (kaoju xue 考據學) in the eighteenth century is the formulation of the idea of li 理 (Principle/ Pattern/ Coherence/ Moral Law) — where the term li xue 理學 (the Learning of Principle, or, Neo-Confucianism) comes from — and the full-blown development of Neo-Confucian hermeneutics anchored to this idea. Among all the Song dynasty Neo-Confucian philosophers Zhu Xi alone emphasizes the autonomy of knowledge and the importance of book learning to the attainment of li (or dao, the Way 道), Zhu Xi with his study of the Four Books provides a systematic methodology about it, which is precisely the area wherein lies one of his monumental contributions to the Neo-Confucian learning (Yu, 2016). The notion of li was first raised to the metaphysical level and given an ontological sense by the Cheng brothers in the eleventh century. It’s defined as the substance of nature and the fundamental moving cause of myriad things. The Cheng brothers also developed the Neo-Confucian epistemology centered around the question of how we, as subjective individuals with limited cognitive faculties, could study the Principle to the utmost (qiong li 窮理) and bring our innate moral nature to its fulfillment (jin xing 盡性). Zhu Xi inherited the Cheng brothers’ learning of li and further enhanced its metaphysical profundity by incorporating it with other Northern Song Confucian thinkers’ cosmological studies. He also made the Neo-Confucian interpretations of li more tenable in their competition against the increasingly popular Chan School of Buddhism, the teaching of which is characterized by vacuity and its disbelief of the existence of a concrete, good and eternal entity. Li as an ontological concept is interchangeable in various contexts with a few other Confucian notions including dao (the Way 道), taiji (the Supreme Ultimate 太極), xing (Nature of man and things 性), xin (mind-heart 心, here refers to the Moral Mind-heart daoxin 道心 rather than its contaminated version, the fallible renxin 人心). Zhu Xi articulates that li is identical to dao and taiji; and it is called (human) Nature in relation to the mind-heart and Principle in relation to events and things (zai xin huanzuo xing, zai shi huanzuo li. 在心喚做性, 在事喚做理). Some scholars have found li comparable to the Aristotlian notion of form in the field of nature and to the Platonic idea of goodness in the field of moral value (Chang, 1956, pp.255–56), whereas others caution against such comparison as the usual Western polarities do not apply in Chinese philosophy (Chan, 1963, p.641). The Neo-Confucianists claim that this li does not exist for itself, thus the celebrated dictum of li yi fen shu (the Principle is one but the manifestations are many. 理一分殊). With Zhu Xi, each thing (wu wu 物物) and each person (ren ren 人人) in this phenomenal world is endowed with one/the same li or one/the same taiji. He often uses the metaphor of moon and its reflections in rivers and lakes to explain why the one li does not split up into parts while being within infinite particularities. As many have noted, this analogy is borrowed, though indirectly, from the Buddhist Huayan School’s doctrine of one and many. But the real crux of the matter here is how the myriad manifestations of li— this eternal and highest goodness— are involved with conflicts, imbalance, and all kinds of deviation from the Mean (zhong yong 中庸) when it leaves the state of tranquility (that is, wei fa 未發, before it becomes active) and enters the state of differentiation as activity takes place (yi fa 已發), and how this problem of evil or badness could be solved. To respond to such a query that is perennial and universal to almost all religions and traditions of thought, the Neo-Confucians introduced the notion of qizhi zhi xing (physical nature 氣質之性. Relevant terms include qi or qi bing, material force/ material endowment 氣/氣稟). This notion was first brought into discussion by Zhu Xi’s eleventh century predecessors (primarily Zhang Zai 張載 and Chengyi 程頤) then got fully elaborated in Zhu’s system. According to Zhu Xi, it is not sufficient to simply blame the rising of badness on an individual's wrong choice— as Mencius does; nor is it proper to be ascribed to feelings (qing 情) — as the Tang Confucians do, because he believes qing buds from its roots of moral nature. The propensity to deviate from the Mean is actually attendant in each individual’s endowment of physical nature. This does not mean however the physical nature as such is evil itself. It means that within the physical nature there is the occasion for badness. And how to use this occasion, Zhu Xi claims, depends on man. This is why the Four Books is assigned such an essential and fundamental role in Zhu Xi’s entire teaching. He believes that reading keeps one’s mind from indulging in empty speculations and keeps it in a desirable state of jing (serious, attentive, alert 敬). It’s only with this attitude of jing that one can prevent their nature from lapsing into laxity, avoid being controlled by the damaging material force, be able to preserve (cun 存) and cultivate (yang 養) their moral mind, and finally achieve sagehood and attain the Way. Therefore, book knowledge always precedes any practice or action in the systematic methodology Zhu Xi designed to achieve the above goals— not necessarily in the sense of importance but in the sense of order. All of these hermeneutic and methodological changes of Confucianism were institutionalized in the aforementioned 1313 decree. Such a model transformation from the Han-Tang Confucianism to the (post-) Song Neo-Confucianism, as stated in earlier passages, was not initiated by Zhu Xi. The learning of the eleventh century dao xue (the Learning of the Way 道學) scholars had laid the foundation for Zhu Xi’s creative and comprehensive work. But as the chief architect of Neo-Confucianism and especially the founder of “study of the Four Books” (sishu xue 四書 學), Zhu Xi is reckoned by many as the most crucial thinker in the intellectual lineage that consummated this transformation (Qian, 1982, vol.4, pp.180-81), or what Thomas S. Kunn would call it— a “paradigm shift” (Chen, 2006, p.2).