Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties by Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties by Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman Peter Bol Christian Soffel and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman. Cultural Authority and Political Culture in China: Exploring Issues with the Zhongyong and the Daotong during the Song, Jin and Yuan Dynasties. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012. Pp. 223. €42 (paper). ISBN 978-3-515-10134-9. This book combines two rather discrete studies. Christian Soffel’s three chapters concern the Zhongyong in the Song; Hoyt Tillman’s three discuss the intellectual career of Hao Jing 郝經 (1223–1275). Christian Soffel introduces some Song views of the authorship of the Zhongyong 中庸 to make the point that not all shared Zhu Xi’s certainty about Zisi’s 子思 authorship and implication that the work thus conveyed Confucius’ ideas. Second, he takes up views of the concept of Daotong 道統 in Southern Song. The two, the Zhongyong and Daotong, go together because Zhu Xi establishes the idea that there was a true transmission of the Way in the first lines of his preface to the Zhongyong. Depending on one’s perspective, that preface is important because it is the most influential statement of Daotong as the name for the idea that there is one true line of Confucian thought or because it sets out the all-important Zhu Xi claim that human consciousness is fundamentally dualistic, drawing on bodily consciousness and an innate moral consciousness. I raise this because it gets at a methodological question for intellectual historians. The authors in their introduction state that “one goal of the present study is to understand the role of the Zhongyong during the Song dynasty … and then to use these results to gain additional perspective on the issue of cultural authority and the formation of ‘Confucian traditions’” (p. 21). This more sociological way of looking at intellectual traditions is concerned with the dynamics of claiming authority. It reminds us that righteousness and wisdom alone do not guarantee that others will pay attention and asks that we look at how it came about that one person, Zhu Xi in this instance, was successful in establishing himself as the leading figure in what once was a broader and more amorphous movement. This is an issue that has been of particular concern to Hoyt Tillman over the years in writing about what he has called the “Daoxue fellowship”; Soffel generally adopts that view. The other approach, most evident in Tu Weiming’s Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung,1 focuses on the ideas in the text and interprets the text in the search of meaning. Zhu’s famous preface is interesting because, on one hand, it constructs a Confucian tradition, an intellectual lineage, and [End Page 354] makes a claim to exclusive authority and, on the other hand, makes the core Neo-Confucian claim that the mind, independently of culture and tradition, is endowed with the ability to access innate moral knowledge. Zhu’s “Preface to the Zhongyong jijie” 中庸集解, translated here (p. 53), is all about lineage, but the final work, the “Preface to the Zhongyong zhangju” 中庸章句, is about both lineage and ideas. It seems to me that the question of how authority is established needs to go together with the question of what ideas that authority is being used to promote. Critics of the history of ideas have pointed out that reading texts without attention to linguistic and historical context often goes together with the assumption that texts are coherent and contain doctrines. This was, as evidential scholars would later demonstrate, a key failing of Neo-Confucian hermeneutics. Soffel is alert to linguistic context – see for example his study of Zhu’s citation of the Chengs (p. 58). There are issues of historical context that might well have been adduced. For example, Ye Shi’s 葉適 skepticism about the Zhongyong, is treated here as a problem with “the language, and not so much the philosophy behind it” (p. 71). Can we say this without knowing what was the philosophy Ye discerned in the text, if we grant that what a text means depends on the reader (something not all...