Zhu Xi

Zhu Xi was born in 1130 in Fujian, in southern China, during the Southern Song dynasty. He passed the highest civil examination at eighteen, but spent most of his life not in office but in teaching, writing and running academies, notably the White Deer Grotto Academy, which he restored. In his youth he was drawn to Buddhism and Daoism, before committing himself to the Confucian learning of the Cheng brothers.

He drew together the work of the Northern Song thinkers, Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, into a comprehensive system of principle (li) and vital energy (qi). He selected four texts, the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, as the Four Books, and wrote commentaries on them. With Lü Zuqian he compiled Reflections on Things at Hand, an anthology of the Northern Song masters.

His teachings were attacked in his last years as “false learning”, and he died in 1200 under a political cloud. Within decades he was rehabilitated, and from 1313 his commentaries on the Four Books were the official basis of the civil service examinations, which they remained until 1905. His thought also shaped Korea and Japan.