Genealogy and History in Neo-Confucian Sectarian Uses of the Confucian Past

Abstract

How did Neo-Confucians understand the history of Confucianism?' How did they articulate this understanding in books about the Confucian past? One of the earliest and most widely read books about the Neo-Confucian tradition is Reflections on Things at Hand (Jin si lu), compiled by Zhu Xi (1 130-1200) and Lu Zuqian (1137-1181) in 1175. This text is one of over a hundred anthologies compiled by Confucians from the Song dynasty (960-1279) well into the Qing era (1644-1911). Before the Song there were no such texts in the Confucian tradition. Although the emergence of Neo-Confucian anthologies is historically significant, these texts have not been systematically analyzed as a distinct genre which can tell us about how Confucians from the Song on understood-or constructed-the Confucian tradition. Prior to the sixteenth century most Neo-Confucian anthologists closely followed the organizational template found in Reflections on Things at Hand: selections of passages from the writings of a small number of literati concerning fourteen topics, such as substance of the Dao, investigation of things, moral self-cultivation, and regulating the household. There are at least a dozen other anthologies that use the same title, with certain modifications, and the fourteen topics of Reflections as a framework for selecting and ordering the writings of other Confucians. For example, Liu Qingzhi (1139-95) compiled Reflections on Things at Hand, Continued (Jin si xu lu), an anthology