Cheng Hao

« Cheng Hao (1032-85) Cheng Hao was a pivotal figure in the creation of a Confucian tradition that was to become the basis for intellectual and state orthodoxy in China from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century.

His decision to seek the Confucian Way ( dao) through a direct and personalized reading of the classics was later projected as the beginning of this movement.

From a new perspective, he redirected Confucian discourse on such cardinal concepts as humaneness and human nature. Born into a family which for three generations had distinguished itself in high offices, Cheng Hao accompanied his father to a succession of posts in central China.

At the age of twenty he passed the national civil service examination and, for most of the years until 1180, had a notable official career which culminated in 1169-70 with service at the emperor's court.

During audiences with the emperor and in written memorials, he followed the example of Mencius in admonishing his ruler to follow benevolence and refusing even to discuss what would bring profit and advantages.

So critical was he of Wang Anshi's utilitarian obsession with maximizing advantages and the happiness of the greatest number of people that Cheng was demoted to a local post and eventually dismissed entirely.

The last five years of his life he devoted to teaching an increasing number of disciples, drawn in part by his exceptionally gracious and warm disposition. Retrospective biographical accounts focused on his youthful fascination with Daoism and Buddhism, until his resolve to discover the Way ( dao ) led him to the classics ( Chinese Classics ).

Reading the classics in the context of his commitment to the Way, he was credited with a breakthrough in understanding the mind and heart of Mencius and reviving the transmission of the Way that had been lost since this last sage of the classical era. Cheng Hao was the first to expound the idea of 'principle' (li), the normative patterns providing coherence to all things, as a Confucian concept, but his younger brother Cheng Yi was the one who developed it into a Confucian philosophy ( Li).

By equating human nature ( Xing ) with principle and the Way, neither brother regarded human nature as merely the raw human state.

Although the younger brother would refer to human nature, principle and the Way as good, Cheng Hao considered them beyond any opposite, so he did not describe them as good.

The opposite of good arose, like dysfunctional behaviour, from imbalance and deviation from the Mean.

Cheng Hao also first broadened the Confucian idea of humaneness ( ren) to encompass not only a profound sympathy with all beings but also a mystical oneness with the universe.

Drawing support from a medical text, he noted that paralysis of the human limbs was described as an absence of ren; thus, it was the life force running through things.

Seeking to teach spiritual cultivation of the self in order to realize the unity with all things, he condemned ego-centredness as a barrier to achieving this sense of oneness ( Confucian philosophy, Chinese §5 ; Neo-Confucian philosophy §5). Cheng has been interpreted primarily in two ways.

Beginning with Zhu Xi's synthesis of the Confucian Way tradition ( Zhu Xi ), Cheng and his younger brother have been presented as a unified voice and as students of Zhou Dunyi .

This formulation facilitated Zhu's synthesis of diverse ideas, but even some of his contemporaries questioned his historical and philosophical accuracy.

Other scholars, most notably Fung Yu-lan ( 1953 ), put Cheng Hao at the head of a subjective wing of Confucianism and his younger brother at the beginning of a rationalistic wing that culminated in Zhu Xi.

Both conventional views have, since the 1980s, come to be regarded as exaggerated.. »