Ghosts and Spirits in the Sung Neo-Confucian World: Chu Hsi on kuei-shen

Abstract

Most scholarship on Chu Hsi has been devoted to explicating his influential Neo-Confucian metaphysics, and espacially his understanding of the two central concepts of li and ch'i. Little attention, however, has been paid to the role played by ghosts and spirits (kuei-shen) in this metaphysics. Yet the record of his conversations with disciples and his collected writings reveal a Chu Hsi who not only professes a profound belief in the existence of ghosts and spirits but also attempts throughout much of his life to explain their fundamental nature, to make them intelligible. For Chu, spirit beings, like all other things in the universe, are explicable in terms of an inherent li and their particular allotment of ch'i and, as such, are part of our understandable world, indeed natural to it. In this way, Chu incorporates spirit beings into an articulated, coherent world-view. The conventional boundaries between the natural and spirit realms that prevail in the West would thus seem to have little relevance in Chu Hsi's philosophical vision, where the two realms are intermingled and indistinguishable