Zhu Xi and the Neo-Confucian synthesis

Zhu Xi was born in 1130 in Fujian, where his father, an official forced from office in 1140 for opposing the appeasement of the Jurchens, taught him at home. A jinshi at nineteen, he held office only briefly and found his teacher in Li Tong, an heir of the tradition of the Cheng brothers. In 1175 the scholar Lü Zuqian visited him, and together they compiled Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsi lu), an anthology of 622 passages from Zhou Dunyi, Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi and Zhang Zai in fourteen chapters that became the primer of the school. The same year Lü brought Zhu Xi together with the brothers Lu Jiuling and Lu Jiuyuan at the Goose Lake Temple in Jiangxi: for three days they argued whether the way to sagehood lay through study and the investigation of principle, as Zhu held, or through the direct realisation of one's original mind, as Lu Jiuyuan taught, and they parted unreconciled.

Zhu Xi taught that all things arise from principle (li), which is one and good, and material force (qi), which can obscure it; the supreme ultimate (taiji) is the source and sum of principle. Moral cultivation therefore requires reverent attention and the ‘investigation of things’ — the patient study of principle in books and affairs — together with quiet sitting. He made the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects and the Mencius the core of learning and worked for decades on his commentaries to these Four Books, revising them until the day before his death. As prefect of Nankang from 1179 he rebuilt the White Deer Grotto Academy, whose rules became a model for later academies, and from 1183 he taught at his own retreat in the Wuyi Mountains; his disciples recorded thousands of his conversations.

In 1195 the consort kinsman Han Tuozhou drove the chief councillor Zhao Ruyu, who had brought Zhu Xi to court, from office; from 1196 Zhu's school was condemned as ‘false learning’, and in 1197 its adherents were listed and barred from office. Zhu Xi died at Jianyang on 23 April 1200 under this ban, yet nearly a thousand people came to his funeral. After Han Tuozhou's fall he was rehabilitated and given the posthumous name Wen, and in 1241 his tablet was placed in the Confucian temple. In 1313 the Yuan made his commentaries on the Four Books the standard for the civil service examinations, and they remained so until 1905; his teaching became the orthodoxy of later imperial China and of Joseon Korea and deeply influenced Japan and Vietnam.