Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics by Wm. Theodore de Bary

Author:Wm. Theodore de Bary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Asia/Central Asia
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 725.

2. Ibid., 568–570.

3. Ibid., 724.

4. Reflections on Things at Hand, translated by Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).

5. de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 729–730.

6. Reflections on Things at Hand, 35.

7. de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 733

8. Ibid., 731.

15

WAITING FOR THE DAWN

HUANG ZONGXI’S CRITIQUE OF THE CHINESE DYNASTIC SYSTEM

Wm. Theodore de Bary

HUANG ZONGXI (1610–1695) was the son of a high Ming official, affiliated with the reformist Donglin party, who died in prison at the hands of court eunuchs. At the age of eighteen, after the fall of Wei Zhongxian, the chief eunuch, Huang avenged his father’s death by bringing to justice or personally attacking those responsible for it. Thereafter he devoted himself to study, took part in a flurry of political agitation at Nanjing just before the fall of the Ming dynasty, and then engaged in prolonged but unsuccessful guerrilla resistance to the Manchus in southeastern China. There is evidence that he even took part in a mission to Japan, hoping to obtain aid. After finally giving up the struggle, Huang settled down to a career as an independent scholar and teacher, refusing all offers of employment from the Manchu regime.

Warfare being less total and intensive in those days, Huang was probably not forced to neglect his intellectual interests altogether during those unsettled years. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that his most productive years should have come so late in life. His first important work, Waiting for the Dawn (Mingyi daifang lu), was produced at the age of fifty-two. Thereafter, he worked on a massive anthology of Ming-dynasty prose and a broad survey of Ming thought, Mingru xuean, which is the first notable attempt in China at a systematic and critical intellectual history. At his death, he was compiling a similar survey for the Song and Yuan dynasties. Huang’s range of interests included mathematics, calendrical science, geography, and the critical study of the classics, as well as literature and philosophy. In most of these fields, however, his approach is that of a historian, and this underlying bent is reflected in the fact that his most outstanding disciples and followers in the Manchu period also distinguished themselves in historical studies. Huang was an independent and creative scholar who questioned whether individual self-cultivation (self-discipline) was a self-sufficient means of achieving good governance. His father had been a heroic example of Confucian personal character defeated by a system that gave power to less worthy men. Hence Huang balanced the predominant Neo-Confucian emphasis on individual virtue as the key to governance by stressing the need for constitutional law and systemic reform as well.

In his synthesis, Huang drew upon several major strains of Chinese thought that readers of Chinese classics will recognize. As a successor to the Donglin school of political, social, and moral reform, he combined the basic principles of the Neo-Confucian Four Books with the statecraft

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