Abstract

This paper examines the Neo-Confucian hermeneutic debates surrounding the interpretation of Zhu Xi's poem ‘The Boat Song of Wuyi's Nine Bends’. The question of whether to regard the poem as a poetic description of landscape or as a philosophical lesson in a poetic form led to serious philosophical discussions in China and Korea in the centuries that followed its publication. This paper investigates the philosophical commentaries on the poem produced during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, and the contentious hermeneutic debates it sparked among Chosŏn Neo-Confucians which fanned the flames of factional politics. On the whole, this paper aims to reveal the divergent and unsettling interpretive traditions within Neo-Confucianism, and argues that the common division of Neo-Confucian poetry into the categories of philosophical and non-philosophical does not aptly represent the highly nuanced discussion of the subject.