Good Confucianism book (pdf) - Department of Physics

228 Notes5 Keith N. Knapp, Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in MedievalChina (Honolulu: University of Hawai ’ i Press, 2005 ), 21. See 22f for a discussionof the debate on the Confucianization of the Han dynasty.6 There is disagreement here. Hall and Ames argue that by the first century BCEConfucianism had become a victor over all the contending voices: “ Its successwas due in an important degree to its ability to accommodate within a rituallygrounded society many of the profound elements of Daoism, Legalism,and Mohism, a pattern that would be repeated in Confucianism ’ s gradualappropriation of Buddhist elements by its medieval adherents ” (Hall and Ames,Anticipating China , 210).7 For a description of this process, see Edward L. Shaughnessy , Rewriting EarlyChinese Texts .8 Chinese title “ Chun Qiu Fan Lu. ” Recent scholarship has shown that this textwas written by a number of authors and over centuries. For good scholarlydiscussions of the yin - yang texts, see Robin S. Yates, Five Lost Classics: Tao[Dao], Huanglao, and Yin - Yang in Han China (New York: Ballantine, 1997 )and Sarah A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon: the Hermeneutics of the Springand Autumn, According to Tung Chung - shu [Dong Zhongshu] (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996 ).9 Yin - yang theorists were active by the time of Xunzi. Zou Yan ( c .340 BCE)is thought to have been at the Jixia academy with Xunzi; his works, onceextensive, are now lost. Even though he is considered to be the person mostassociated with yin - yang thought, texts describe him as more deeply involvedwith the five phases theory or some variation of it. Sima Qian says he assignedthe “ five virtues to things so as to explain the transformations of these fivevirtues. ” The Records of the Historian also says that Zou Yan used yin -yang thought in order to end immorality at court; he “ looked deeply intothe increases and decreases of yin and yang. ” See Records of the Historian74.5 – 6. See Knoblock, Xunzi 1, 64f for a brief introduction to Zou Yan ’ sthinking.10 The actions of yin and yang depend on their own natures, not on a germ ofyin inside yang nor yang inside yin. The idea that yin and yang interpenetrateto some degree is not found until the Song dynasty where we see it in ZhouDunyi ’ s Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate ( Tai Ji ); see chapter 11.11 Chunqiu Fan Lu , ch. 53, section 12.12 Issues around the yin - yang theory are still very much debated. For the view thatthe yin - yang theory does work as a complementary system, see Hall and Ames,Anticipating China , 261f. Sherry J. Mou argues that the yin - yang systems ofthe Han defined relationships hierarchically, and that this included gender relationsand, as she points out, these were then reinforced with ideas of loyalty,filial piety, rightness, and so on, and regulated by rituals. See Gentlemen ’ sPrescriptions for Women ’ s Lives: A Thousand Years of Biographies of ChineseWomen (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2004 ), 7.13 The word is often used oddly. There is an advertisement that claims that usingthe featured product will result in “ a state of qi . ” As everything is made of qi ,everyone already has a state of qi . Many Westerners have heard the term usedin the martial arts where often it means something more like “ energy. ”