Portrait of Qian Daxin painted by the Qing Dynasty.
Shi Aorui's "Chinese Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and Taoism in the 18th Century," centered on the Qing Dynasty scholar Qian Daxin, discusses the academic turn of the late traditional era, and the subtitle is a good illustration of the author's ambition: he wants to discuss not only the study of language and literature, but also the entire Chinese intellectual circles of the 18th century. His choice of Qian Daxin as the entry point was undoubtedly very appropriate—Qian Daxin was recognized as a leading figure in the intellectual world at that time, and Qian's specialization and breadth represented the height and breadth of Chinese scholarship in the 18th century. Unfortunately, in the past, sinology circles focused on ideas and paid less attention to technical evidence-based scholars such as Qian Daxin, but we should not forget the fact that as the mainstream of 18th-century academic research, the spirit of Pu Xue was to hide ideas in the literature; as far as the examination of evidence is concerned, ideas cannot grasp its essence.
The main text of the book is divided into three parts: the first part, "The Way of Man," discusses Qian Daxin's experience and the network of officials and private scholars at that time; the second part, "The Ancient Way," discusses the methodology of interpreting the classics; and the third part, "The Way of Heaven and Earth," explores the science of astronomical law and arithmetic, the metaphysics of Confucianism, and the encounters of Chinese and Western scholarship. The most interesting of these is the conclusion part, in which the author looks at the influence of Qian Daxin and Pu Xue from a more macroscopic time scale. The author argues that the key transformation in Chinese scholarship in the eighteenth century was that scholars had to understand the meaning of Confucian classics through linguistic and documentary evidence, in other words, the identity of the Pu scholar and the self-orientation of the Confucian were closely integrated. The author writes that Qian Daxin regarded himself as a "true Ru"—the author misunderstood here, because "true Confucianism" is a positive word in the context of Chinese, which can only be used for praise, not just boastfulness, and Qian Daxin said in the preface to Zang Lin's "Miscellaneous Knowledge of Scripture and Righteousness", "The book of the gentleman, seek truth from facts, do not judge in vain, and do not try to rush to his words, denigrate the sages, the learning of the true Confucians, the pragmatic and not the famous", here " The study of true Confucians" is Qian Daxin's praise for Zang Lin's scholarship, and the author's reading of "true/Confucian learning" (admittedly Confucian learning) as "true Confucianism" and understanding it as Qian Daxin's self-praise is probably untenable. However, even if there is a misunderstanding in semantics, the author's judgment is still correct. Qian Daxin did present himself as a Confucian, and believed that the method of Pu Xue was a characteristic of Confucian learning that distinguished it from The Buddhist Tao ("There is no righteousness outside the precepts, such as Sangmen's non-establishment of writing as the supreme one, and non-Confucian learning"). Such self-censorship has its far-reaching background. The Yangming zhizhi, which flourished in the Ming Dynasty, was often considered to be a confucian aid to the Buddha, and was even called "Yangming Zen". Even Zhu Xi, who was officially orthodox, often went in and out of the Buddhist path, and "the study of the Buddha's clan bears much resemblance to that of Wu Confucianism" (Zhu Zi Shu Shi Shi). We can think of this attitude of Qing Confucianism as a kind of purification, which is also the motivation for some important achievements of Pu Xue, such as the negation of innate gossip with deep roots in Taoism through literature examination.
The author keenly grasps this pure Confucian thought of Pu Xue, but there seems to be some debatability in the argument. The author reveals that this self-identification stems from the anxiety of the Qing court's Manchurian and Buddhist identity, with particular emphasis on the influence of Tibetan Buddhism under the qianlong period. The author deliberately reveals the phrase "a protector of ancient learning" - the translation of "shou" as "shou" undoubtedly implies the existence of sectarian disputes, but the "shou" here obviously means "firmly keeping", emphasizing that scholars do not tend to learn new and different, playing an analogy that may not be appropriate, like painting self-limiting, not to prevent people outside the circle from entering, but to prevent people inside the circle from going out. In fact, sectarian disputes are likely to exist. Under the multi-ethnic structure of the Qing Dynasty, Confucianism and Tibetan Buddhism are not in the same dimension, and it seems unlikely that there will be doctrinal disputes similar to those of the Middle Ages. At least in the field of Ideology oriented to The Han Dynasty, Confucianism has an absolute superiority. Even the Qianlong Emperor, who revered Tibetan Buddhism, wrote in his "Lama's Sayings": "The Xinghuang Sect is the so peaceful Mongolia, and its attachment is not small, so it must not be protected, not the Ruoyuan Dynasty's Qu Pi Zhen Fan monks." The emphasis on reverence for the Yellow Sect (Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism) is purely for practical gain ("Anzhong Mongols"). Therefore, it seems that we can assume that if the Confucian does have anxiety, then it does not come from paganism, but from within Confucianism.
Chinese Philological Shifts: Scholars, Textualism, and Taoism in the 18th Century, by Shi Aorui, Columbia University Press, 2018
According to the mainstream view of the intellectual circles at that time, the death of the Ming Dynasty had a lot to do with the academic emptiness of its time. In most cases, Confucianism regards the economic and social welfare of the people as the highest value ("do not do the prince, noble his ambitions" is often a helpless move), so he often associates scholarship with the current situation. This idea is also revealed in Qian Daxin's pen, such as when he said, "Cai Jing forbade people to read history, took Tongjian as Yuanyou scholarship, and Xuanhe so quickly cursed", blaming the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty on the lack of historiography. We can see that no matter how much qianjiapu scholars are immersed in literature, they will never give up the Confucian values of scholarship as a tool of the world. Still taking Qian Daxin as an example, Qian's "Spring and Autumn Style Examples": "Nanchang Tao Jun Rang Zhou, Bo Tong, ancient and modern, contains economic talents, a small test of an official, unable to show his ambitions, is Qin Si Chunqiu, the ultimate is extremely humiliating, writing "Spring and Autumn Style Examples" hundreds of thousands of words. According to Qian's account, Tao Rangzhou, who "has the talent of the economy", retreated to write a book under the condition of "unable to show his ambitions", which shows that "economy" is still the first value. This means that Qianjiapuxue is a transformation of methodology, not a transfer of fundamental Confucian values. In the past, scholars emphasized that Pu Scholars were addicted to old paper and only looked at the methodology, which was undoubtedly the correct picture, but as a group, indulging in old paper did not necessarily mean introverted personality. Wang Niansun, who was equally famous with Qian Daxin, was an official with outstanding political achievements, and Qian also had a high-profile experience as an official eunuch. From this point of view, we look back at the problem of "anxiety" of Confucians, and from the root cause, the object of "anxiety" is precisely the impurity of Confucian scholarship, and the result is that it loses the effectiveness of helping the people through the world, and even endangers the world.
This is obvious. Pu Xue can be traced back to Gu Yanwu and others in the early Qing Dynasty, and Gu Shi's motivation for ruling the school was to feel that the Ming people had destroyed the country with emptiness. The reason for the "emptiness" is that Confucianism is mixed with "non-Confucian" factors such as the Wei and Jin dynasties to descend the Buddhist Tao, so the Pu scholars have to go back to the Han Dynasty (or earlier) to seek unpolluted Confucian scriptures. Traditionally, the Confucian classics recorded the necessary knowledge for the ideal politics of the rule of three generations, and that "refining" the interpretation of the classics became the proper meaning of the topic. In other words, Park Xue is the necessary way to obtain the knowledge of ideal politics, and the purpose of Park Scholars still falls between the daily use of human beings, as Qian Daxin said: "Song Ru regards filial piety as a vulgar and rude deed, rather than seeking sex in the empty place, so what he says is often too high." It is a criticism of the Song people's pursuit of metaphysical knowledge under the influence of Buddhism, and the so-called "excessive" naturally refers to the distance from worldly life.
However, the subtlety is that the park scholar has a strong pragmatic tendency, but at the same time believes that the classics record the knowledge that guides practice, so the classics become the only way to be pragmatic. From a certain point of view, this is just one more layer of barrier than the Yang Mingzhi learning that advocates "tempering in matters" and faces up to real affairs; it is precisely because of this barrier that Pu Xue and the science with similarities have a strange path.
Park scholars regard Song Mingren's learning as "rootless" and "empty", and this "root" is understood as a classic; because of its "emptiness", in contrast, Park Xue appears "real". However, the classics remain on paper after all, and ancient knowledge is difficult to put into practice (such as the rituals in the "Rituals", the official system in the "Zhou Li", the Ida system, etc.), and the main ones that can be learned and applied are the aphorisms about personality cultivation and treating people and things. There is a paradox here: the focus of the Pu Xue examination is precisely on the parts that are difficult to put into practice (such as the famous objects of the Three Rites), and the parts that can be learned and applied often do not require evidence, or it is difficult to determine right and wrong through the evidence, depending on which interpretation the reader is more willing to believe. In this way, Park Xue seems to be "virtual" compared to Song Mingren's self-use and response to things.
In the final analysis, Pu Xue's objective research tendency toward texts and Confucianism's inherent pragmatic tendencies are not in harmony, leading to an awkward situation of opposites. The masters of the late Pu Xue period especially noticed this, such as Sun Yirang's "Zhou Li Zhengyi", observing reality while rigorously examining the evidence, saying: "The power of the present Taixi is not to be examined by the Zhou Gongcheng King's canonical law. And the political and religious people who are knowledgeable and widely learned, with the passage road, strict pursuit, and the genus of the earth and minerals, xian and this sutra are far away. If you cover the political and religious cultivation, you will become rich and strong, and if you the left contract. The general principle of the world is universal and universal. This ancient political religion will certainly be feasible for the present day' obvious effect. By identifying the powerful Western political practices in reality and the records of the Zhou Li, it is emphasized that the political knowledge of Confucianism can be "universally applicable" and "ancient politics and religion must be feasible for those who are now." However, this kind of implicit union, or lost in the vague ("knowledge of the broad and broad learning"), or only similar in categories and completely different connotations (such as traffic, police, chemical mining), Sun's statement is too far-fetched. In the late Qing Dynasty, This kind of "self-help" of Park Xue was completely out of place, and Sun's book received extremely high evaluation in academics, but its long-distance and difficulty in "using the world" was also obvious to all, fully exposing the inherent contradictions of Park Xue.
The author of this book makes a rather interesting point: the academic turn of the 18th century has a far-reaching impact, and even the anti-Park scholars admit that the discussion of the problem should be based on the empirical evidence of the linguistic literature, and this positivism still echoes until modern times, and the author even mentions "seeking truth from facts" at the end of the book, arguing that the use of this word has 18th-century origins. This view of the author is in line with the mainstream of academic circles since Liang Qichao. According to this view, Pu Xue is methodologically close to science, in other words, it is the most modern discipline in the Chinese tradition, and the reason why it has not been modernized is only because its research object is mainly classics rather than nature. Of course, such a recognition has its rationality, but it inevitably ignores the fact that scholarship in a broad sense is not limited to Confucian classics, but also includes various applied sciences, but in the context of the traditional Chinese "Confucianism", all kinds of work are covered by Confucianism. Confucianism is considered to be a principle that can guide all industries, but at the specific operational level of the industry, there must be a practical system of knowledge, and the principles of this system must also be derived from empirical evidence. In other words, the empirical tradition is never absent, although they are indeed absent in the mainstream narrative of intellectuals. The academic turn of the 18th century is not so much that Chinese scholarship discovered empirical principles, but rather that Confucianism introduced empirical principles into classical interpretations, and its uniqueness lies in the interpretation of metaphysical principles in a metaphysical way. If we adopt such a view, there is not necessarily a correlation between China's highly valued positivist tradition and the academic shift of the 18th century.
So where did Chinese passion for positivism since the 19th century come from? It seems that we cannot deny the influence of 18th-century Pu Xue, but historically, it is more like a warm-up campaign for the intellectual elite, acting as a cognitive buffer before science is fully introduced into China. Since then, with the invasion of the West and the collapse of traditional Chinese society, Confucianism has not only ceased to be sacred, but for a considerable period of time has been blamed as the source of China's backwardness, and people's enthusiasm has been poured into the hundred works that were once covered by Confucianism. This issue deserves in-depth discussion, and this book is certainly a good start.
Cheng Yu black