Ebook: Reflections on Things At Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology

The Chin-ssu lu is an anthology of Neo-Confucianism, giving in clear outline its doctrines of metaphysics, learning, ethics, literature, government, and its evaluation of great men in Chinese history and of heterodoxical systems, notably Buddhism and Taoism. As such it is Neo-Confucianism in a nutshell. Since it is the forerunner and model of the Hsing-li ta-ch’üan [Great collection of Neo-Confucianism] which was for five hundred years the standard text for Chinese thought, its tremendous influence on Chinese philosophy can easily be imagined. In addition, just as Wang Yang-ming’s Instructions on Practical Living is the major work of the idealistic wing of Neo-Confucianism, so is the Chin-ssu lu the major work of the rationalistic wing. It is no exaggeration to say, therefore, that it has been the most important book in China for the last 750 years. Since only a fraction of Neo-Confucian works has been rendered into Western languages, its translation is imperative. This is the simple reason why it was chosen for translation. Problems concerning the translation and the book itself, such as its compilation, Chu Hsi’s and Lü T’su-ch’ien’s comparative roles in producing it, its contents, its commentaries, etc., are also dealt with.

Reflections on Things at Hand is one of the Translations from the Oriental Classics by which the Committee on Oriental Studies has sought to transmit to Western readers representative works of the major Asian traditions in thought and literature. These are works which in our judgment any educated man should have read. Frequently, however, this reading has been denied him by the lack of suitable translations. All too often he has had to choose between excerpts in popular anthologies on the one hand, and on the other heavily annotated translations intended primarily for the specialist, which in many cases are out of date or out of print. Here we offer translations of whole works, based on scholarly studies, but written for the general reader as well as the specialist.

Reflections on Things at Hand (Chin-ssu lu) is unquestionably the most important single work of philosophy produced in the Far East during the second millennium a.p. It has served as the most concise statement of the dominant Neo-Confucian philosophy as seen by Chu Hsi and his school. Considering its importance one might have expected numerous translations to have been made of this major work, but so far there has been only the compendious scholarly translation into German by Father Olaf Graf, now virtually unobtainable. One reason for this is the extraordinary demands which the Chin-ssu lu makes on the translator’s mastery of Chinese philosophical literature and his industriousness in the research needed to identify the allusions and unattributed quotations which abound in the text. Few have had the knowledge, the stamina, and the determination of Professor Chan to accomplish this task.

As a typical expression of Neo-Confucian scholarly thought the Chin-ssu lu also presents something of a challenge to the reader. Systematic treatises are almost unknown in this tradition. The customary means of carrying on philosophical discussion were conversational dialogue among philosophers and their students or phrase-by-phrase commentary on the classics. Thus an over-all view of a school of philosophy could be obtained only by painstaking study of voluminous commentaries or wide reading in recorded conversations. Chu Hsi was quite conscious of the difficulty, but instead of taking it upon himself to write his own summation of Neo-Confucian teaching—too egotistical an approach for the Confucian—, he produced a convenient anthology drawn from the sayings or comments of others. Since these too are fragmentary and have required further commentary, the convenience of this selection may not be as apparent to Western readers as it has been to generations of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scholars. Nevertheless they do provide a wide-ranging view of the collective Neo-Confucian contribution to both the speculative and the practical thought of their day.

Wing-tsit Chan is Anna R. D. Gillespie Professor of Philosophy at Chatham College, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Philosophy and Culture at Dartmouth College, and Adjunct Professor of Chinese ‘Thought at Columbia University. He is the author of Religious Trends in Modern China (1953), one of the compilers of Sources of Chinese Tradition (1960), and the translator of Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming (1963) and other works, including A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), of which he is compiler as well as translator.

This book has been accepted in the Chinese Series of the Translations Collection of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)