World Philology by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780674052864
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Intellectual and Social Context in Eighteenth-Century China

During the seventeenth century a unified academic field of empirically based classical knowledge emerged among Qing literati scholars in the Yangzi delta provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui and eventually informed the orthodox curriculum authorized in Beijing. This philological grid for classical learning represented a fundamental shift in the common codes of elite knowledge about the past. The textual vocabulary of classical scholars during the eighteenth century in turn reinforced a shift from Song-Ming rationalism, typified by the moral philosophy of Zhu Xi, to a more skeptical and secular classical empiricism. The empirical approach to knowledge advocated by Qing classicists, “to search truth from facts” (shishi qiushi), placed proof and verification at the heart of organization and analysis of the classical tradition. During this time, scholars and critics also began to apply historical analysis to the official Classics. Classical commentary by now had yielded to textual criticism and evidential learning (kaozheng, lit. “search for evidence”) to refortify the ancient canon.8

A scholarly position stressing that valid knowledge should be corroborated by external facts and impartial observations in turn added impetus to the study of what eighteenth-century literati called the “natural world” (ziran xue). A full-blown scientific revolution, as in Europe, did not ensue,9 but evidential scholars made astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and geography high priorities in their research programs. Animated by a concern to restore native traditions in the precise sciences to their proper place of eminence after less overt attention during the Ming dynasty until the coming of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century,10 evidential scholars such as Dai Zhen (1723–77), Qian Daxin (1728–1804), and Ruan Yuan (1764–1849) successfully incorporated technical aspects of Western astronomy and mathematics into the literati framework for classical learning. Qian, in particular, acknowledged this broadening of literati traditions, which he thought reversed centuries of focus on moral and philosophic problems: “in ancient times, no one could be a literatus [Ru] who did not know mathematics. Chinese methods [now] lag behind Europe’s because Ru do not know mathematics.”11

Qing scholars were also determined to pierce the thick veil of Song and Ming metaphysical and cosmological systems of thought known popularly as “Learning of the Way.” During the early Qing, when Cheng-Zhu learning revived, scholars such as Yan Ruoju (1636–1704) dramatically demonstrated that the Old Text chapters of the Documents Classic were a later forgery. Although Yan’s discovery was passed around only in manuscript form until 1745, it helped to gainsay certain Learning of the Way doctrines concerning the “human mind and the mind of the Way” that had been based on one of the Old Text chapters.12 Without great fanfare, Hu Wei (1633–1714), Yan’s colleague, exposed the heterodox origins of Song cosmograms known as the “Luo River Inscription” (Luoshu) and the “He [Yellow River] Map” (Hetu). Their findings later were corroborated in the mid-eighteenth century by the Suzhou scholar Hui Dong (1697–1758), whose followers revived ancient “Han Learning” (Hanxue) and criticized Cheng-Zhu Song Learning more forcefully than Yan Roju or Hu Wei.

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