Forthcoming in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy Zhu Xi's Spiritual Practice as the Basis of his Central Philosophical Concepts

In this paper I am attempting to connect three aspects of Zhu Xi's (1130-1200) life and work. They are: (1) the "spiritual crisis" he experienced in his thirties; (2) his identification of Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073) as the first true Confucian sage since Mencius; and (3) his concepts of taiji and li . My hypothesis is difficult to squeeze into one sentence. Basically, I am suggesting that (1) the spiritual crisis that Zhu Xi discussed with Zhang Shi (1133-1180) and the other "gentlemen of Hunan" from about 1167 to 1169, which was resolved by an understanding of what we might call the "interpenetration" of the mind's stillness and activity (dong-jing ) or equilibrium and harmony (zhong-he ), (2) led directly to his realization that Zhou Dunyi's thought provided a cosmological basis for that resolution, and that (3) this in turn led Zhu Xi to understand (or construct) the meaning of taiji in terms of the polarity of yin and yang; i.e. the "Supreme Polarity" as the most fundamental ordering principle (li ). The first of these items (the spiritual crisis) has long been well-studied, but has only peripherally been connected with Zhou Dunyi. The connection, in simple historical terms, is that