研究

For more than a millennium, Neo-Confucianism and related intellectual traditions informed literary and aesthetic practices, moral philosophy, philology, and religious life in East Asia and beyond. These pursuits developed in close interaction with one another, giving rise to related and sometimes competing schools of thought and cultural movements. Thousands of scholars in China, Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and Vietnam, as well as Jesuit missionaries, participated in this complex and multilayered intellectual milieu.

The revival of Confucian learning began as a literary reform. Ancient-style prose (guwen 古文), initiated by Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824) and later championed by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072), Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086), Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), and others, promoted a mode of writing conducive to sustained argumentation on moral, political, and epistemological questions. These included the relationship between the Confucian tradition and competing Buddhist and Daoist world views, human nature and intellect, the principles of ethical conduct, and the foundations of good government. Ancient-style prose helped establish enduring conventions of literary expression in Literary Sinitic, providing models that subsequent generations of scholars across East Asia continued to study, imitate, and refine according to their own intellectual and sociopolitical circumstances.

The traditions conventionally grouped under the English designation “Neo-Confucianism” emerged from this wider revival of classical learning. Learning of the Way (daoxue 道學), which acquired lasting authority under Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), and Learning of the Mind (xinxue 心學), closely associated with Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529), developed competing interpretations of the classical tradition, with particular emphasis on moral self-cultivation and the collective renewal of society. Their pupils and followers continued to employ ancient-style prose to articulate philosophical arguments, discuss the meaning and authority of the classics and ancient sages, participate in intellectual fellowship, and criticize rival positions. Literary and philosophical scholarship remained closely intertwined, even as individual scholars placed different emphases on moral cultivation, literary accomplishment, and classical exegesis.

Within China proper, literary culture diversified considerably from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, when commercial publishing expanded and privately operated woodblock printing houses flourished. The archaist movement (guwenci 古文辭), associated with Li Mengyang 李夢陽 (1473–1529) and Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1526–1590), placed particular emphasis on the formal qualities of earlier literary models. Other writers and critics challenged established literary hierarchies by giving greater prominence to narrative literature and forms of expression that appealed to the emotions of a wider reading public. Jin Shengtan 金聖嘆 (1608–1661) placed novels and drama alongside canonical literary works in his influential selection of the Six Works of Genius (liu caizi shu 六才子書), asserting their claims to serious literary consideration. These developments complicate any account of Confucian revival organized exclusively around the genealogies of philosophical schools or the succession of recognized literary movements.

Philology was integral to literary and philosophical inquiry. The interpretation of classical texts depended on questions of textual authority and the relationship between words and meaning. These concerns acquired particular prominence in evidential scholarship (kaozhengxue 考證學). Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 (1610–1695) undertook a retrospective reconstruction of Confucian learning that later compilers extended into influential histories of intellectual schools and lineages. The Qing court sponsored successive Manchu translations of the Four Books and Five Classics, including the 1677 Kangxi edition (r. 1661–1722) and the 1755/56 Qianlong edition (r. 1735–1796).

The movement of classical learning beyond China made linguistic interpretation especially consequential. In Tokugawa Japan, Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) drew on Ming archaism and examined the linguistic differences between Japanese and Chinese, paying close attention to ancient usage to engage directly with classical antiquity without relying on Zhu Xi’s interpretations. In Chosŏn Korea, Zhu Xi’s teachings enjoyed considerably greater authority, although scholars continued to develop diverse intellectual positions that complicate the conventional image of Korean Confucianism as a rigidly orthodox tradition. Classical learning also acquired distinctive forms in the Ryūkyū Kingdom and Vietnam, reflecting their respective linguistic and political settings. Jesuit missionaries introduced Catholic theology into these exchanges, with Matteo Ricci 利瑪竇 (1552–1610) seeking common ground with Chinese classical learning in the scholarship associated with Western Learning (xixue 西學), conducted in both Literary Sinitic and Latin.

Playing Heaven investigates how literary, philosophical, and philological pursuits developed into larger intellectual and cultural formations, attending to the writings, scholarly networks, and aesthetic practices of canonical figures as well as thousands of scholars whose contributions have received comparatively little attention. Our team seeks to recover the diversity of intellectual positions, aesthetic sensibilities, and cultural practices that inherited taxonomies of schools and movements, as well as modern disciplinary boundaries, have tended to obscure.

Recent advances in transformer-based models allow us to construct successive interpretations of historical texts and examine their relationships at different scales, in a manner that preserves access to the underlying sources. Beginning with the reception of Chinese literary and philosophical traditions in Korea and the Qing court’s Manchu translations of the Confucian classics, Playing Heaven develops methods for investigating the interpretation, dissemination, and reception of intellectual traditions across different linguistic and political settings. These investigations also provide a basis for examining how language models construct historical interpretations and extending our research to scholarly communities and cultural movements in other parts of East Asia and beyond.