/lit/ - Literature

>In other words, there is a certain line of thought that implies that Dao is not to be sought anywhere else than in everyday life. This ‘reason of common sense’ is further developed in Sung Ming Neo-Confucianism.

>Up to this point, we have only discussed the usage of Qi, but not the production of Qi. What is the role of Qi in the moral cosmology, or moral cosmogony?

>What exactly is this ch'i, which may be familiar to readers who have some knowledge of Tai Chi and Chinese medicine? It is not simply material or energetic, but is fundamentally moral. We must recognise that Sung Ming Neo-Confucianism was a continuation of the resistance against Buddhism and superstitious Daoism. It centred on a metaphysical inquiry that sought to develop a cosmogony compatible with the moral, and which emerged from the reading of two classics, namely The Doctrine of The Mean and Yi Zhuan (seven commentaries on Zhou Yi— The Book of Changes), which in turn came from the interpretation of the Analects of Confucius and Mencius. Mou Zongsan suggests that the contribution of Sung and Ming Neo-Confucianism could be understood as ‘the penetration of the moral necessity to such an extreme that it attains the highest clarity and perfection’.This consists in the unification of ‘ontological cosmology’ and morality through the practice of ren (‘benevolence’) and the full development of xing (‘inner possibility’ or ‘human nature’).

>We should pay attention here to the word hua, which does not denote a sudden movement like a quantum leap, which would be called bian, but rather a slow movement that can be likened to the changing of the shape of a cloud in the sky. In simpler terms, what underlies this theory of ch’i is a monism which furnishes the foundation for the coherence between cosmology and the moral. With this monism of ch’i, Zhang Zai was able to claim that heaven and earth, sun and moon, other human beings and the thousand beings are all connected to the I. One therefore has a moral obligation towards the ten thousand beings and in turn the ten thousand beings are part of the I. Once again we return to the core of the Confucian project, namely a moral cosmology.

>Mou insists that the Li are not sufficient to set ch'i into movement, since they are only principles, and therefore require a ‘primary mover’.This primary force resides in xin, shen, and qing. Ch’i , li, and xin continued to compete to be the most fundamental metaphysical principle of Neo-Confucianists, with philosophers trying either to integrate them or to argue for one over the other. For Mou, xin stands out as the strongest candidate. Yet how do these subjective forces drive being into movement? Mou has no other way of explaining this apart from taking a Kantian stance, where the trinity (ch’i, li, xin) is the condition of possibility of the experience of phenomena, and existence and experience are correlated.