A Study Of The New Learning In The Northern Song Dynasty

The New School was a very important academic faction in the procedure that Han Xue changed to Song Xue. Depended on the political power, New School became the orthodox academic in late northern Song dynasty, and had widespread influence and followers. But, after the southern Song, because of various reasons, New School had been negated, attacked, and died out at last. Recently, Wang An-shih and the New Policies have attracted many researcher attentions, but the study of New School was still very little.Distinguished with the Han-Tang Chinese classicism, New School put more attentions on pursuit of the truth of the classics, which was written by Sage. Tao, human nature, destiny and reason were their main concern. They thought that Heaven Tao was the principle of all the things, and everything should obey this nature law. New School was on the basis of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, who have been regarded as the representative of Taoism. They wanted to renew the Tao in whole, which was existed in ancient times, but had lost after Qin dynasty. Of course, in New School there were different ideological tendencies. Ludian, Zheng Xia and Geng Nanzhong, the members of New School, reflected the different direction of development. At the same time, they all participated in the political activities, and reformed and rebuilt the political and social order. In the ritual controversy in northern Song, especially about sacrifice to Heaven and Earth, New School proposed their ideas according to their political position and objectives.However, there were still some objected voices by other people, like TaoXue, ShuXue and ShuoXue, all belonged to Neo-Confucianism. They attacked New School on their own academic ideas. Though all these scholars had many differences, they grow up under the same political and literary culture. In the Mencius Status Promotion Movement, New School and other academic factions had played the important role in common. Although New School had been regarded as heresy in last thousand years, it was the indispensable part of the intellectual transitions in Tang and Song as well, and laid the foundation for TaoXue becoming the orthodox.