Many scholars of early China agree that the fourth century bce witnessed a surge in intellectual interest in concepts that have been dubbed the self, “subjectivity,” the private realm, and the body. As such a sphere came into greater focus in intellectual circles, so did a new discourse that evaluated what it meant to benefit or deprive the self and its related parts. The famous statement purportedly by Yang Zhu 楊朱 (or Yangzi 楊子) that claims he was not willing to (...) pluck out a single hair in order to benefit the world reminds us of such a discourse.2 Around the same time, there also emerged discussions that polarized various ideas of self and the private sphere (si 私), on the one hand, ver- sus the state and the public sphere (gong 公), on the other, especially in circles that concerned themselves with public policy and statecraft, but also more generally. These discussions formed a forceful counterpoint to the discourses involving human subjectivity and the body. Indeed, their open dislike of the influence of private, individual, and personal realms in politics strongly suggests that the statecraft writers were re- acting to and in dialog with those intellectuals who engaged discussion of subjectivity, the self, and its agencies. (shrink)

Central to Confucian teachings in the Analects is the ideal of self-cultivation—in particular that of the junzi 君子 (“gentleman” “nobleman”) ideal. At the same time that Confucius recommends that individuals follow such an ideal, he also places limits on who actually might attain it. By examining statements involving such terms as the junzi, the “petty man” ( xiao ren 小人), and the “masses” ( min 民, or zhong 眾), or common people, this essay highlights the sociopolitical and gender restrictions informing (...) one of the most basic, yet lofty, ethical goals of the text. A new means is also offered of discussing these socially delimited discrepancies in moral cultivation by referring to leading, or self-determining agency in association with junzi on the one hand, and to conformist agency for women and common people on the other. (shrink)

The Taiyi shengshui 太一生水 is one of only a few texts in the early Chinese corpus to present a detailed cosmogony, one that traces the beginnings of the cosmos back to a variety of spiritual and natural forces, such as the divinity Taiyi and water. My primary question in this chapter is not to ask what that cosmogony was, but why such a cosmogonic text might have been written in the first place. Why in particular did authors in Warring States (...) China deem it necessary to go all the way back to the very beginning of everything to try to situate their thought and recommendations for human action? By comparing the Taiyi shengshui to various other cosmogonies in the textual tradition, we arrive at interesting insights into both the overarching moral agenda of the text as well as its specific contributions to cosmological thinking in early China. (shrink)

This essay explores a call for non-action in certain ancient Chinese texts that, contrary to expectation, implicitly upholds definitions of action that are comparable to Western understandings of the term. The call for non-action in ancient Chinese texts differs significantly, however, from what Western theorists usually define as legitimate, agent-led action through its negation of viewing means-end calculations as the basis of action. Closer analysis of such formulations on non-action reveal that that there is room for a broader definition in (...) action theory of what constitutes a coherent, unified, creative agent. (shrink)

The Guodian texts that appear to follow a Ruist line of thought are noteworthy in their special emphasis on the relationship between the spiritual world of Heaven and the world of humans. The Wuxing 五行 text is one of the main texts that clearly prioritizes such a divine–human connection. This chapter examines the way in which the author of the Wuxing establishes “Sagacity” as a key psychological marker of moral realization—associated with the divine Way of Heaven. I show how Sagacity (...) epitomizes the ideal of harmony among the Five Conducts by merging human, mundane realms of moral thought and feeling with divine apprehension of moral perfection. Through an analysis of musical metaphors that reveal the nature of the human–Heaven relationship in the human body, I demonstrate how some early Chinese Ruist thinkers grounded their ethics in a highly spiritual attitude towards the human psyche. (shrink)