From Adept to Worthy

WHEN HE DIED IN 1077, Shao Yung' was counted as one of the greatest men of his era. Later ages ranked him among the greatest poets of the Sung dynasty, and listed him, with Chou Tun-i, Chang Tsai, the two Ch'eng brothers, and Ssu-ma Kuang, as one of the Six Masters of Northern Sung. In his own lifetime his reputation seems to have surpassed those of the Ch'eng brothers and Chang Tsai, who were younger, and that of Chou Tun-i, a contemporary.' He was the friend and confidant of most of the powerful men and leading thinkers of the late eleventh century at precisely the time when Neo-Confucian thought was making its first rapid strides. Yet Shao Yung's reputation did not long survive him. Writing almost a century later, Chu Hsi says in his preface to the Chin-ssu /u, the great anthology of Neo-Confucian thought, that he and his co-compiler Lu Tsu-ch'ien read the works of Masters Chou Tun-i, Ch'eng Hao, Ch'eng 1, and Chang Tsai.2 Shao's name is prominent in absence. Although Chu's motives in excluding Shao were not entirely disinterested, he was not straying very far from the standard view of his own time: aside from his son Shao Po-wen,b Shao Yung left few strong spokesmen for his views, and the influence of his ideas quickly evaporated.3 Shao had many friends but few followers; the comment recurs in biographies that although he himself understood his theories, his friends did not. With rare exceptions Shao's cosmological and philosophical ideas found few defenders in the era of vigorous intellectual rivalries that followed his death, so that by Chu Hsi's time he could be ignored. Nor has his reputation much revived in modern times, when many of his contemporaries have found able interpreters.4 His work is criticized as arbitrary and superficial; the tendency has been to view him in the context of a school of numerologists, strongly influenced by Taoism, whose ideas were among those swept aside by the great revival of Confucian thought.5 This essay, however, will argue that Shao Yung was not the last representative of an intellectually sterile and declining tradition, but a major figure in the transition from the systems of ideas and modes of expression which typified the Northern Sung to the characteristic style of later Neo-Confucianism as it was first articulated by the Ch'eng brothers and codified by Chu Hsi. Most important, Shao Yung's life ' His advanced age helps to explain Shao's precedence in the Lo-yang circle. But the fact remains that it was he, and not the philosophers whom we think of as the founders of Neo-Confucianism, who was thought of in the first rank of scholars by his contemporaries. Among standard works, A. C. Graham, Two Chinese Philosophers: Ch 'eng Ming-tao anl Cheng 1-(chuan, (London, 1958), Appendix 11, sets straight the places of Shao and Chou in contemporary thought, but most others, in both Chinese and Western languages, primarily concerned with tracing Neo-Confucian conceptions which later became prominent, tend to slight Shao's contribution. 2 Chang Wing-tsit, trans., Reflections on Things at Handi, (New York, 1967), 1. 3 Chu's motive was to establish an orthodox transmission from Chou through the Ch'engs and their disciples to himself. 4 See especially A. C. Graham for the Ch'engs or several commentators who have found Chang Tsai's monistic materialism philosophically congenial. 5 Chan Wing-tsit, Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy, (Princeton, 1963), 487. The latter view was first expressed by followers of the Ch'eng school as part of their claim to have returned directly to the sages of antiquity

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