Free The History of the Renaissance World by Susan Wise Bauer Page A

is a French corruption of the word zaituni , used by merchants from Baghdad as the name of Quanzhou, the Southern Song city where satin manufacturing was centered. Farming grew more systematic, as Song intellectuals bent their attention to ways of increasing crops; Chen Fu’s Agricultural Treatise , completed around 1149, laid out astonishingly effective rules for land utilization, crop rotation, and systematic fertilization. The Emperor Gaozong rebuilt a series of official kilns for firing the lovely celadon porcelain of the Song, on the outskirts of Lin’an; they were duplicates of the official kilns at Kaifeng, now lost. 2
    Painting and poetry flourished at the court of Gaozong, in part because Gaozong banned, in 1144, the writing of any private, non-state-sponsored histories of the past. This was intended to cut off criticism over the way his dynasty had handled the Jin invasion, but it halted only criticism written in prose. Painting and poetry soon became the safest, and clearest, way to dissent. 3
    “The good sword under the recluse’s pillow / Clangs faintly all night long,” wrote Lu Yu, who hoped to see the Song invade and reclaim the north:
    It longs to serve in distant expeditions,
    I fetch wine and pour a libation to the sword:
    A great treasure should remain obscure;
    There are those who know your worth,
    When the time comes they will use you.
    You have have ample scope in your scabbard,
    Why voice your complaints? 4
    Landscapes were safe to paint. And so blossoming plums, once the symbol of spring and new hopes, came to symbolize the southern willingness to go into exile, the misfortune and melancholy of the displaced.
    Philosophers coped with the loss of the north in another way; instead of protesting, they searched for a new kind of peace with the status quo.
    Traditional Confucianism had directed its followers towards the orderly performance of duties and rituals as the path to virtue: “It is by the rules of propriety that the character is established,” Confucius himself was reported to have said. Confucian academies taught the rules of order, the duties of each man in his place and station, the importance of ceremony. They had long been used to train and prepare state officials, and as a tool for statecraft, Confucianism had never progressed very far in tackling more abstract ideas. *

    8.1 Ink Plum Blossoms, by Wang Yansou of the Song dynasty.
Credit: © Smithsonian, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
    Now the philosopher Zhu Xi began to transform Confucianism from a tool of the impotent state into a philosophy for every man. He brought to Confucianism a consideration of ultimate reality; he taught and spoke of the relationship between the essence of material things (the li ) and their physical existence (the qi ). Li in itself does not have form that can be touched; qi gives shape to li , but at the same time obscures it. The essence, the li , of every human being is essentially good; that goodness shines through when the qi is refined, polished, brought to the place where it is transparent. And that polishing and refinement is achieved not by faithful service to the government but through private contemplation and individual education: in Zhu Xi’s own phrases, “quiet sitting” and “pursuing inquiry and study.” 5
    “Start with an open mind,” the sage told a student who was struggling to find the truth, “then read one theory. Read one view before reading another. After you have read them again and again, what is right and wrong, useful and useless, will become apparent of itself.” Far to the west, Peter Abelard was making the same argument for dialectical inquiry: “No theory is so false,” he wrote, in the Collationes , “that it does not contain some element of truth; no dispute is so trivial that it does not possess something that can be learned.” Abelard’s argument was sired by Aristotle, born of an intellectual preoccupation; Zhu Xi’s, produced by more