The Research On The View About Ideal State Of Ercheng’s Confucian School Of Idealist Philosophy

The Ercheng refer to Chenghao and Chengyi, who are the creators of Luoxue School, the founders of Confucian school of Idealist Philosophy of the Song and Ming dynasties. Together with Zhoudunyi, Zhangzai, Shaoyong, they are called “Five Masters of Northern Song Dynasty”. Based on the inheritance of the original Confucianism of Earlier Qin Dynasty and facing the challenges of the Buddhism and Daoism, Ercheng raised the viewpoint that heavenly principles are noumenal and built their Gong Fu theory and view about Ideal state.This book introduces the view about Ideal state of The Ercheng from four parts.The first part: The historical background of the foundation of The Ercheng’ academic ideas. The historical background of preferring literature to military and many things undone in economic society in the earlier Song Dynasty provided helped the presentation and development of The Ercheng’ Confucian school of idealist philosophy.The second part: The ontology of The Ercheng. The Ercheng’ ontology is their view about heavenly principles. They built a new system with the noumenon of “Heavenly Principles”, and they used “True Principles ” against the “Nothingness” of the Buddhism and the Daoism, complete the connect from “Principles” to human, the theory focuses on human and the development of human. But different views of The Ercheng on the status and relationship of and between “truth”, “mind” and “nature” have finally led to the differences of the realms that they’re looking for.The third part: The view about of The Ercheng. On the base of Truth as the noumenon theory, Chenghao thought that “Principle is mind”, principle body, mind body, and benevolence body are just the appearances of different things, while the final Ideal state is that The Benevolent is consubstantial with the universe; Chengyi thought that ‘truth is nature’, and he treated the Principle as an exterior exist, and the Ideal state goal of human is to be ‘consubstantial with the Nature’.The fourth part: The Gong Fu theory of The Ercheng. In order to approach the Ideal state, people must do some moral practices, as Chengyi said that ‘one needs respect to get the virtue of patience and investigate things to improve knowledge’, only behave in accordance with truth and do the moral activities according to the demands of truth can we achieve the final Ideal state. For realizing the Ideal state of each, Chenghao considered that one should ‘know benevolence and cultivate it with respect ’, on the other side one should determine the Nature; while Chengyi thought that one should ‘study the nature of things’ and ‘cultivate Jing and YI from both inside and outside’ to reach the Ideal state of ‘Unity with Truth’. The author thought the common point of the Ercheng is Truth as the noumenon theory oriented and the connect with human, while the Ideal state one reached through Gong Fu is the highlight to noumenon. The Ercheng has played a leading role in building the logical structure of the theory of mind and the Ideal state theory. The theories between the Ercheng are largely identical but with minor differences, moreover, the basic difference between Truth and Human Nature of the Ercheng has influenced the flowing deformation of later generations’ Confucianism, and evolved into ‘Truth School’ and ‘Mind School’.