Olejar Books

The purpose of this book is to investigate the process through which Chu Hsi formulated a new metaphysics, one which, in contrast with that of Buddhism, provided the foundation for a world-view characterized by morality. Before the rise of Neo-Confucianism, Chinese philosophy was dominated by the Subjective Idealism of Ch’an. Neo-Confucianism arose with the task of defending the validity of social and inter-personal morality, and for this purpose Northern Sung Neo-Confucianism proposed the metaphysics of Immanent Vitalism. Chu Hsi's philosophical enquiry started with an Eclecticism which was the combination of Ch’an and Immanent Vitalism. From his late twenties, Chu Hsi gradually rejected the Ch’an element in his philosophy as a result of his apprenticeship with Li T’ung.
Nevertheless, while trying to approach the Way subjectively, Chu Hsi found that Immanent Vitalism was defective in dealing with selfcultivation. So, during the period from his thirtyseventh year to his forty-fourth, Chu Hsi struggled to revise this philosophy. One of the characteristics of his metaphysics which resulted from this revision was that Man was not only a function of Heaven, as the cosmic life-principle, but was also a subject, and, because he had Mind, was self-determining and had the capacity to establish substance and functions in his own right.