![]() Anyone who hoped to become a scholar-official in Late Imperial China had to spend years studying and memorizing the core texts and commentaries as collated and written by Zhu Xi. It is his vision of the Confucian tradition that eventually became state orthodoxy in the 13th century. He is considered the great synthesizer of Neo-Confucian thought. In the 12th century, Zhu Xi streamlined the tradition. There were diverging selections of core texts to study, competing interpretations of Classical Confucian texts, and wide-ranging debates about the role of Neo-Confucians in society and politics. The core Neo-Confucian ideas were developed in the 11th and 12th centuries by a number of different thinkers. Through the process of self-transformation, one hoped to become a sage: a moral, social, and political paragon. From this affirmation, Neo-Confucians developed integrated social, political, and philosophical systems pointing toward the individual’s obligation to find the appropriate role within these overlapping systems and thereby contribute to universal harmony. ![]() ![]() To this was added a metaphysical argument affirming the ultimate reality of the world, which responded to the Buddhist assertion (overly simplified by their Neo-Confucian detractors) that this world is illusion. At its core, Neo-Confucianism focused on the works of the Classical Confucian tradition (particularly Confucius’s Analects, the Mencius, and selected chapters from the Book of Rites) as a means of ordering human society. As early as the 9th century, there was a renewed interest in Confucianism, which had been eclipsed by Buddhism for roughly seven hundred years. Neo-Confucianism is the English reference to the revival of Confucian religious, social, and ethical thought that eventually dominated Chinese official culture from the 13th through the 19th century. ![]()
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