Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

cannot hear and see.¹³ His position is best summarized with his statement that “it is wrong to say that Heaven contains a person who judges guilt and sin, but it is equally wrong to say that the Way completely lacks a ruler” (今說天有箇人在那裏批判罪惡，固不可。說道全無主之者，又不可) (Zhuzi Yulei, 1: 5). Zhu Xi denies that heaven has his mind because it has no intentions or thoughts on the alternation of seasons and the reproduction and propagation of life, nor on extraordinary or unnatural phenomena like that of a horse born from a cow.¹⁴ Yet he emphasizes how the divine or personal attributes of Heaven contained in the Classics are due to the sublimity of principle (天下莫尊於理，故以帝名之。「惟皇上帝，降衷于下民。」降便有主宰意).¹⁵ Additionally, he recognizes a certain implied idea of authority together with those of pure principle and physical nature (若全做理，又如何説自我民視聼? 這裏有些主宰底意思).¹⁶ Thanks to its transcendent morality, heaven is thus represented as a coordinator of principles and at the same time as the ruler of the dynamic process of life reproduction.¹⁷

A definition of destiny offered by Zhu Xi in his comments to Mencius¹⁸ states that during life, good and bad luck, fortune and misfortune are all predestined by heaven, and what happens outside a person’s control is due to destiny (人物之生，吉凶禍福，皆天所命。然惟莫之致而至者，乃為正命).¹⁹ The same concept is expressed in Zhu Xi’s quote from Cheng Yi who specifies that natural destiny is that which cannot be avoided, except for disasters caused by oneself, like a death in prison for one’s behavior or the imprudence of staying near a crumbling wall.²⁰

A popular reflection of such debates with Dao-Buddhist influences can be seen in the late Ming fiction, and the role of destiny in particular is discussed in vernacular stories. Usually, the main thesis is that one cannot do anything related to life, wealth, and career against destiny; any action or effort has no effect, and long years of saving and sacrifices can be lost at once if this is destiny, as gold can be turned into lead.²¹ However, the point here is about the limits of human behavior in the face of what is not dependent on the power of humans. Far from fatalism and