Neo-Confucianism

Neo-Confucianism is a Chinese philosophical movement that revived Confucianism between roughly the tenth and nineteenth centuries, incorporating metaphysical notions drawn from Daoism and Buddhism into its moral and political framework. The name is a modern term that the thinkers of the period did not use themselves; it designates the broad intellectual revival of Confucian thought during the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties.

Its roots lie in the Tang dynasty, when scholars such as Han Yu and Li Ao sought to restore Confucian learning against the prestige of Buddhism and Daoism. In the Song dynasty, thinkers including Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi built a more systematic metaphysics centred on li, the principle that orders reality, and qi, the material-energetic stuff through which it takes form. Zhu Xi synthesized these ideas into what became the orthodox school of li, which for centuries shaped the civil-service examinations.

Neo-Confucians held that the world can be understood through reason and that human beings are charged with bringing their conduct into harmony with the cosmic order. Against the mysticism of Chan Buddhism, they defended a kind of knowledge combining moral reflection, study of the classics and investigation of concrete things. This last emphasis gave rise, in the view of some scholars, to a practical current that valued experience and close knowledge of the real world.

The movement was never uniform. In the Ming dynasty, the school of mind associated with Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming challenged Zhu Xi's school of li by locating moral knowledge in innate intuition. In the twentieth century, so-called contemporary New Confucians reinterpreted these ideas in modern terms, sometimes in a progressive sense, and scholars still debate how far the tradition is compatible with modernity, democracy and universal values.