Philosophy, Philology, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century China

This study will explain the general intellectual climate of the early Ch'ing period and explore the political and cultural characteristics of the Ch'ing regime at the time. To achieve these ends I have focused on the Lu-Wang school, but will pay special attention to Li Fu (1675–1750), the most outstanding representative of this school in the early Ch'ing. By the early Ch'ing, the Lu-Wang doctrines had undergone several transformations. Li Fu's thought can be seen as the final Lu-Wang response to the Ch'eng-Chu school. Early Ch'ing rulers and scholars generally blamed the left wing of the Wang Yang-ming school for the fall of the Ming dynasty. Yet Li Fu demonstrated successfully that a Lu-Wang scholar could still lead a viable intellectual life even after the Ming. In other words, the Lu-Wang school did not end with the fall of the Ming.

Stressing the transformative power that the mind has upon moral cultivation, the Lu-Wang scholar takes a critical stance toward book learning (tu-shu), even if he does not necessarily exclude it from the process of moral perfection. One among many distinctions between the Lu-Wang school and its rival, the Ch'eng-Chu school, resides in their differing attitudes toward the role book learning plays in their moral programs. For the Ch'eng-Chu school, book learning has an inherent positive value in the course of moral cultivation.