Zhu Xi's commentaries shaped China's civil service exams for nearly six centuries
A rival prime minister had Zhu Xi's teachings attacked and even called for his execution, yet almost a thousand people braved official disfavour to attend his funeral in 1200. Within decades his readings of the Four Books became the backbone of China's imperial examinations, a role they kept from 1313 to 1905.
Zhu Xi was born in Fujian on 18 October 1130. His father lost his post in 1140 for opposing appeasement of the Jurchen and taught the boy at home; at five, the story goes, Zhu asked what lay beyond Heaven. Inspired by Mencius's claim that anyone could become a sage, he passed the highest imperial examination in 1148 at 19. For most of his adult life he avoided office, and when appointed he tended to be demoted for denouncing corrupt officials.
As prefect of Nankang from 1179 he revived the White Deer Grotto Academy, partly because he disliked local schools and worried that cheap printing flooded students with books they did not read carefully. He wrote or edited nearly a hundred books, and pupils recorded thousands of his conversations. Instead of centring the I Ching, he built the core curriculum around four shorter works: the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, a choice seen as unorthodox in his own time.
His metaphysics joins two aspects of reality: li, the rational principle, whose sum is the Supreme Ultimate, and qi, the vital material force. Every person has a perfect li, but murky qi obscures it, so moral cultivation means clarifying one's qi. That is why he branded Xunzi a heretic for calling human nature bad. Whether he was ultimately a monist or a dualist is still argued.
He urged the investigation of things, since moral principles are inexhaustible, and compared knowledge and action to eyes and legs: knowing comes first in order, acting first in importance. He practised quiet sitting, a meditation that sought balanced reflection rather than emptying the mind. Rehabilitated in 1208, he received a memorial tablet in the Confucian Temple at Qufu in 1241.
Source: Zhu Xi
