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

of certain rules.¹⁵⁶ In Confucianism, transgression is the disrespecting of ritual duties toward the dead or spirits, rather than sins or offences against God, an illicit act toward the subject’s community or toward their own body.¹⁵⁷ To stress the different stance toward transgressions, some scholars even speak of a hedonistic “delight culture” (legan wenhua 樂感文化) for pre-Buddhist China, as opposed to a so-called Western “culture of guilt” (zuigan wenhua 罪感文化).¹⁵⁸ If in ancient Confucianism the concept of sin is almost nonexistent,¹⁵⁹ the case of Buddhism, Daoism, and post-Buddhist China is quite different.¹⁶⁰

Although there is no Chinese concept of human weakness due to an original sin, an analogous interest is found in the psychological process that allows a moral choice between good and evil.¹⁶¹ This leads us back to a famous Zhongyong’s passage which is deemed fundamental for all later debates:

It is only to that state of latency within which the four archetypal markers of human experience—joy, wrath, grief, and delight—have not yet emerged into concrete manifestation, that we may properly attribute the perfectly centered balance of the “mean.” Once these markers have emerged into reality, in such manner that they remain in balance and in due proportion, we may then speak of them as being in state of “harmony.” What is here termed the “mean” constitutes the all-inclusive ground of being of the universe as a cosmic whole, whereas the term “harmony” refers to the unimpeded path of fullest attainment in the world of human experience. When the attributes of both the balanced mean and harmony are realized to their fullest extent, then Heaven and Earth assume on this ground their proper cosmic positions and the regenerative processes of all the myriad creatures are sustained therein.¹⁶²

Weifa, “before arousal,” is the purity of human nature in its stillness (xing 性; weifa 未發), while yifa, “after arousal,” represents the human reaction to external stimuli (qing 情; yifa 已發).¹⁶³ Andrew Plaks notes that the adverbs weifa and yifa do not indicate a temporal sequence