What are the main aspects of the rigidity of Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties?

Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties can be roughly divided into Zhu Cheng Neo-Confucianism and Wang Luxin's Neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties is also called Taoism. Refers to the dominant Confucian philosophy system in Song and Ming Dynasties (including Yuan and Qing Dynasties). Philosophical thoughts of Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties. Confucian scholars in the Han Dynasty attached great importance to exegesis of famous things, while in the Song Dynasty, they mainly explained righteousness and talked about life, so they called it. At the beginning of the Northern Song Dynasty, Hu Yuan, Sun Fu and Shijie were called "the Three Masters of Neo-Confucianism".

Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties, as a new ideological system, undoubtedly has many contents. But in general, it has at least the following two main characteristics.

(A) speculative Confucianism

Different from Confucianism in pre-Qin, Han and Tang Dynasties, a prominent feature of Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties is speculative.

After Buddhism was introduced into China, China's philosophy deeply attracted Buddhist intellectuals and stimulated the development of Buddhism and China's native religions-Taoism and Confucianism. But relatively speaking, the response of Confucianism generally lags behind. In the Tang Dynasty, people of insight among Confucian scholars such as Han Yu and Li Ao realized that Confucianism was facing serious cultural challenges from Buddhism and Taoism, especially from foreign Buddhism. However, their approach to this problem is relatively simple. Han Yu advocated that "man's book is a fire" and used the administrative intervention of the government to prohibit the spread and development of Buddhism. Li Ao thought deeply, and advocated aiding Buddhism into Confucianism and embracing Buddhism with Confucianism to solve the impact of Buddhist culture.

Neo-Confucianism in the Song Dynasty realized that one of the main reasons why Confucianism was challenged by Buddhism and Taoism was that Confucianism itself was seriously deficient in metaphysics. When Confucius was founded, Confucianism was just some ethical principles and dogmas. Since Confucius himself seldom talked about "the unity of heaven and man", how to demonstrate the legitimacy and inevitability of Confucianism from the philosophical ontology has become an important topic of Confucianism. Mencius demonstrated the Confucian theory of good nature from the perspective of "four ends", Xunzi demonstrated the theory of evil nature from the perspective of false nature, and Dong Zhongshu grafted Confucian morality to the world outlook that paid attention to yin and yang disasters, and made a theological demonstration of Confucianism. In the view of Neo-Confucians in Song and Ming Dynasties, these previous arguments were either "unprepared" (inadequate, such as Mencius) or "unknown" (confused or wrong, such as Xunzi and Yang Xiong), while Dong Shi's theory of yin and yang was more superficial and actually went astray.

In order to establish the metaphysics of Confucianism, on the one hand, the neo-Confucianists learn from the achievements of Taoism and even Taoism and Buddhism in philosophical ontology, on the other hand, they look for factors that can be used to construct philosophical metaphysics in traditional Confucianism, such as the Taoist and instrumental views of Zhouyi, which is listed as the first of the six classics and has the most metaphysical nature, Confucius' benevolence, Mencius' and the doctrine of the mean. On the basis of absorbing and utilizing foreign and traditional civilization achievements, Neo-Confucianism creatively put forward many unique Confucian metaphysical ontological concepts, and gave systematic philosophical arguments, such as Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong's Taiji, Zhang Zai's Taixu, Er Cheng and Zhu's, Wang Anshi's Tao, Lu Jiuyuan's ... "Heart", and so on. Traditional Confucianism was transformed by Neo-Confucianism, and the theoretical system of moral creed eventually became a philosophical theoretical system based on philosophical metaphysics. In this respect, it embodies the philosophical wisdom created by Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties.

(B) Confucianism with ethics as the core

Judging from the development of Confucianism itself, Neo-Confucianism, as a philosophical trend of thought or a revival movement of Confucianism, emphasizes the theory of righteousness, which is a kind of reaction to Confucianism in Han and Tang Dynasties, showing the momentum that Han and Tang Dynasties abandoned the theory of exegetics, directly faced the classics and returned to the way of saints, which is quite a bit of a "renaissance". Neo-Confucianism flaunts its own theory as "practical learning" and "telling the truth", and criticizes Buddha's theory as "virtual learning" and "virtual theory", as well as the study of chapters and sentences in Han and Tang Dynasties and the study of poetry. The difference between truth and falsehood lies in whether to emphasize Confucian justice. The righteousness emphasized by Neo-Confucianism is essentially the Confucian ethical theory, including the rigid human relations advocated by Confucianism and the "why" and "why" contained in it.

As far as its content is concerned, compared with Confucianism in the East History of Han Dynasty, the justice emphasized by Neo-Confucianism is not in political philosophy, but in ethics. Compared with pre-Qin Confucianism, its discussion of ethics and morality focuses more on the expression of philosophy. Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties put forward a series of philosophical categories and theoretical structures with a very logical level to Confucian ethics and morality theory. Various ontologies of Neo-Confucianism, the theory of human nature as a moral basis, the theory of self-cultivation, the epistemology of "weight" or "center of gravity", the theory of the realm of saints' sanctification, and the functional theory of repairing peace are all centered on ethics and morality.

Looking at Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties, the theory of mind is not interested in anything other than ethics. Due to the theoretical guidance of "attaching importance to things but being poor in reason", the Neo-Confucianism seems to have a tendency to understand the reason of everything beyond the narrow scope of ethics. But its theoretical purpose is still to grasp the inevitability, universality and absoluteness of Confucian ethics. Therefore, both the cosmology, ontology and epistemology of Neo-Confucianism can be simply compared with western philosophy. The object of its thinking is not nature and everything, but ethics and morality. Its theoretical purport lies not in human rationality's grasp of natural objects and human rationality itself, but in human understanding of the legitimacy of social ethical values and norms and individual moral consciousness.