Ritual and ethics: Classical scholarship and lineage institutions in Late Imperial China, 1600-1830

In response to a profound crisis of the state and society in the late Ming period, an intellectual movement, Confucian "li-chiao fundamentalism," began to take shape. Confucians identifying themselves with the Tung-lin Academy, came to stress purity of doctrine and took a sectarian stand against those schools of neo-Confucianism that promoted union with Buddhism and Taoism. The purists appealed to ancient Classics and to rituals whereby they could set themselves off from "perverted" Confucians with a syncretic bent.; The Manchu conquest gave additional impetus to Confucian purism. The trend in scholarship and the practice of ritual took on cultural overtones. Ritual and Classical studies in the K'ang-hsi period focused on the purging of unorthodox elements from Confucianism on the one hand and, on the other, on the need to seek knowledge of canonical ritual for practical purposes. Ethical ritualism together with the growing interest in building lineages increasingly drew scholars into controversial issues regarding ancestral worship and related rites that were already on the agenda of the Classical scholars.; Following the logic of fundamentalism, Confucian purists in the K'ang-hsi period came to denounce the ethics and ritual of the Ch'eng-Chu school as being pervasively distorted by Buddhism. Such fundamentalism eventually drove scholars to develop a hermeneutics for the interpretation of the Classics in the mid-eighteenth century. By employing commentaries and texts written before the introduction of Buddhism into China and by philological exegesis of the Classics themselves, these scholars hoped that their evidential study (K'ao-cheno) of the Classics would yield pristine teachings. K'ao-cheno scholarship had by the later eighteenth century the effect of unravelling the metaphysics of Sung neo-Confucianism, as well as reinforcing purism in ritual and ethics.; This trend in scholarship, it is here contended, was a part of the cultural-institutional development that promoted greater behavioral conformity and encouraged submission of the individual to authority, whether ethical or political. The proliferation of lineages in this period and the ritualist ethics not only strengthened the Confucian elite and the Ch'ing regime, but also the sanctity of the core values of Confucianism.