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

If every person is endowed at birth with cognitive-moral functions that help their progress toward full moral realization, any assumption granting moral superiority to the ancients alone becomes irrelevant. The teachings of ancient sages are then not to be refused altogether but relativized. It is precisely because of this that every period in Chinese history embodies its own intrinsic and distinctive values, and that the expression of these values, as well as of popular sentiments more in general, is not less important than the precepts prescribed in classical literature. In an effort to put these beliefs into practice, the Gong’an Circle (gonganpai 公安派), headed by Yuan Hongdao, proposed new aesthetic languages and styles. The circle campaigned for a real change in literature which kept up with the times, the prevalence of individual personality and free expression of “natural creative sensitivity” (xingling 性靈) instead of an imitation of standard models.³¹ By the same token, the drama also underwent reevaluation. Yuan’s respect for personality can be summed up as follows:

Personality cannot be forced to change, and those who follow their personalities are truly honest to themselves (zhenren 真人). If we force the etiquette-ignoring people to follow etiquette and etiquette-abiding people to ignore etiquette, we would be acting like trying to cut off a crane’s head and put it on a duck’s neck. Would not that be something to lament about?³²

The program of the Gong’an Circle—with its “expressionist tendencies” in poetry, its insistence on the authenticity of expression and the uniqueness of any individual work of literature and each historical period—was centered on the literary concept of xingling, which was deemed instrumental in establishing qing as the kernel of self-assertiveness.³³

The importance of individual autonomy is reinforced by negating the monopoly of the truth of any ideological or religious system. The emphasis on the complementarity of multiple truths, of Buddhist influence, is stated in particular in the unity of the “Three Doctrines” (sanjiao heyi 三教合一), namely Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, which