| Chapter 1: | The Transnational Travels of the Yijing 易經 or Classic of Changes |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
The East Asian Context: A Few Brief Remarks
From the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries, the dominant cultural agents of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all enthusiastically embraced the fundamental values associated with various strands of Confucianism (儒學).7 Although this particular brand of learning might have been initially identified with Chinese culture, it transcended space and ethnicity. Foreign conquerors of China, such as the Mongols and Manchus, employed it selectively for their own purposes, as did the rulers of Chosŏn Korea, Lê dynasty and early Nguyễn dynasty Vietnam, and Tokugawa Japan.
The orthodox form of Confucianism in each environment, known as Cheng-Zhu Learning (程朱學), was named for two towering Chinese intellectuals, Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). Emphasizing loyalty to the sovereign, moral cultivation, and the power of positive example, this ideology suited the political needs of East Asian states. In the case of China, Korea, and Vietnam, the governments chose their officials (and also reinforced their shared orthodoxy) by means of civil service examinations written in literary Sinitic. In Tokugawa Japan, however, where there was no such examination system, the intellectual independence of the samurai class was especially great—all the more so because most elites were educated in schools sponsored by individual domains (han 藩). Thus, although the Tokugawa rulers eventually (in 1790) adopted Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy, there was no significant institutional reinforcement of it.8
As I will show, despite the existence of an official “Neo-Confucian” orthodoxy in each country, many other forms of Confucianism existed in the Sinosphere as did other diverse philosophies. As a result, scholarly approaches to “imported” works such as the Classic of Changes differed substantially. Not surprisingly, in each East Asian setting, the Yijing was employed for significant periods of time as a means of bolstering and/or amplifying state orthodoxy. At the same time, however, it came to be used to validate or undergird other cultural traditions, including belief systems