Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 1.pdf/435

Rh objective study of the Classics, as its proponents believed, but from Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism. This Neo-Confucianism had for centuries been officially promoted by the civil service examination system with the result that officials throughout the empire were required to learn it, and for them it became the norm for the interpretation of the Four Books and the other Confucian Classics. Imbued with this narrow education, and filled with these preconceived ideas, even the highest officials and the most influential teachers of the time had failed completely to face the realities of the political situation or to save the country from internal strife and foreign invasion. No wonder that when the crisis came many of those officials and scholars, unlike Ku, readily gave their allegiance to the new rulers and served them with zeal.

Ku Yen-wu devoted his later years of alternate travel and retirement to showing the futility of Sung Neo-Confucianism and laying down the principles for a revitalized classical scholarship. Like all the great Confucian teachers, he stressed the importance of high ethical conduct free from duplicity and self-deception. For errors such as these he severely rebuked his nephew, Hsü Ch'ien-hsüeh, and warned his pupil, P'an Lei, to avoid him. At the same time Ku preached a rigorous facing of those inadequacies in earlier thinking which had brought the nation to a condition of subservience and dishonor. Believing that the failures of the past could be retrieved only by a new broad outlook, he urged fellow-scholars to take into account, not a small selection of documents, as had been the custom in the past, but all the data necessary to a just conclusion. His general approach he summed up in two quotations from the Analects: 行己有恥, 博學於文 "In your conduct let there be some things that you are ashamed to do; in your studies make use of the widest range of sources." He stressed the importance of making new hypotheses, and testing these by evidence from all relevant sources, in the hope of thus achieving a new originality and a new practicality. Though some of his slightly younger contemporaries, such as and, took the same approach and emphasized the same methods in the philosophical field, as did also  and  in the field of historical and textual criticism, Ku himself must be regarded as the leading exponent of the new movement and the one who gave to it the greatest impetus. He laid down the method in various branches of study and outlined new avenues of approach which scholars in the ensuing two centuries pursued in greater detail.

In their search for new evidence the Ch'ing classicists discovered that scholars of the Han dynasty had studied the ancient texts successfully without benefit of Li-hsüeh and that, having fewer metaphysical preconceptions, they had no need to "resort to vague generalizations to cover up their intellectual poverty." A study of the views of Han scholars was alluring because, those scholars, being "not far from antiquity," presumably had a firmer grasp on the ancient texts. Because of this emphasis on Han commentaries the school which arose under Ku Yen-wu's influence came later to be known as the "School of Han Learning" (Han-hsüeh p'ai 漢學派), and the type of scholarship which it espoused came to be designated Han-hsüeh, to differentiate it from the Sung-hsüeh mentioned above. The Han-hsüeh school is also known as Chêng-hsüeh 鄭學 because it especially admired the annotations to the Classics made by Chêng Hsüan (see under ); and also as P'u-hsüeh 樸學, or school of "unadorned learning", for its advocacy of research in preference to literary elegance or philosophic speculation. The school came to stand for the inductive method of research, known as k'ao-chü 考據, or k'ao-chêng (證), as applied to those fields in which Chinese scholarship was then primarily interested, namely, historical and textual criticism, phonetics, and etymology.

It was in the field of phonetics—the determination of the ancient pronunciation of words by a classification and comparison of the rhymes in ancient poetry—that the utility of the inductive method was most conclusively shown. The pioneer user of this method in the recovery of ancient rhymes was Ch'ên Ti 陳第, a native of Lien-chiang, Fukien, and one-time major in command of a garrison northeast of Peking. In a work entitled 毛詩古音攷 Mao-shih ku-yin k'ao, 4 chüan, printed in Nanking in 1606 with the aid of, Ch'ên determined with a fair degree of accuracy the ancient pronunciation of several hundred rhyming words in the Classic of Poetry. (A copy of the original edition of this work is in the Library of Congress.) To show what the ancient pronunciations were, and consequently how the words originally rhymed, he listed first all the instances he could cull from the Classic of Poetry itself, and then all the sub- 423