Taoist masters, rarely referred to him substantively, and called him disparag-
ingly (and somewhat inaccurately) “poor Zen brother.” Chou Tun-I’s branch
of occultist cosmology, centered on the Supreme Ultimate, was quite different
from the more rationalist position of the Ch’eng brothers, based on li (princi-
ple) and lacking the diagrams which were so central to Chou Tun-I (Graham,
1958: 160–166; Chang, 1957–1962).
In addition to the two occultist wings represented by Shao Yung and Chou
Tun-I, there was a third lineage of Chang Tsai and his followers. He too
developed a cosmology based on the Yi Ching appendices. But Chang Tsai
moved farther away from occultism, rejecting spirits of the dead and giving a
more naturalistic interpretation of the universe. He identified the Supreme
Ultimate with ch’i, (matter/energy), which produces all things by different
states of dispersion and condensation. This enabled him to dismiss Buddhist
void and Taoist non-being as a mistaken view of ch’i in a state of extreme
dispersion. Chang Tsai’s own religious theme came in the form of pantheism:
since ch’i is everywhere, it makes up one’s own mind and body, which are akin
to the rest of the universe. He extended Confucian universal love from human-
ity to the entire universe, and implied that human sincerity upholds the natural
as well as the social order. At the same time, since ch’i is everywhere, one is
mistaken in trying to escape from the world, as the Buddhists do; the sage
simply lives a normal life, attuned to the universe. Chang Tsai carved out a
stance combining religious sensitivity with a rationalist philosophy; he attacked
both the occultists and the archaizing of the orthodox Confucians. It was
probably Chang Tsai who began the Neo-Confucian practice of meditation
aimed at the goal of attaining “sagehood,” which the Neo-Confucians carefully
distinguished from Buddhism and Taoism by interpreting the result not as a
state of self-absorption or immortality-seeking but as an ethical condition.
The Ch’eng brothers were personally connected with all three of these
intellectual factions, and they made the most abstract philosophical advances
and had the most successful lineage of followers. They were quite selective in
which predecessors they endorsed. They avoided mentioning the ideas of Chou
Tun-I, though he was their neighbor and friend, and never referred to the
Supreme Ultimate; conversely, Chou Tun-I never used the Ch’engs’ favorite
concept, li, or principle (Graham, 1958: 158). The Ch’engs also militantly
criticized all Confucians since Mencius, rejecting alike Tung Chung-shu’s oc-
cultism, Yang Hsiung’s naturalism, and even Han Yü’s effort to create a
Confucian sage religion during the late T’ang. The Ch’engs alone claimed to
be restoring the ancient sage wisdom. They rejected contemporary occultism
as well, and especially disliked the Yi Ching and its appendices as mystical
speculation (Graham, 1958: 143, 162). Among their contemporaries the only
ones they praised as not “deluded by false doctrines” were Shao Yung, their
308 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths