legitimation. In the next generation, the long-standing network of elite phi-
losophers answers with the Tao Te Ching, blending a Confucian concept of
behavior and propriety, the way (Tao), with abstract issues of the significance
of nominalism, into a cosmology whose core ingredient is nameless natural
spontaneity.
From now on the cosmological systems sweep to domination in Chinese
philosophy, derailing the secularized tone of moral and political discussion, as
well as turning back the short-lived trend into epistemology and metaphysics.
In the next two generations (the eighth and ninth after Confucius), the main
intellectual events are the formulation of new cosmologically oriented texts
within the Confucian school: The Great Learning, which takes a naturalistic
stance toward the “investigation of things”; The Doctrine of the Mean, which
interprets the Confucian Superior Man as a mystical sympathy with the cosmic
Way. At this time also is composed a Confucian appendix to the old Yi Ching
divination text, thereby bringing it into the Confucians’ professional canon.
The takeover by the cosmological schemes is sealed in the twelfth generation
by Tung Chung-shu, who systematizes Confucianism as a synthesis of Yin-
Yang, Five Agents, and Yi Ching divination systems into a grand scheme of
counterparts between cosmology and the political and moral order. Tung
Chung-shu’s contemporary is the Hui-nan Tzu group of scholars, who produce
a rival cosmology of nature elements, divination practices, and political reso-
nances, drawing together a mixture of non-Confucian cultural capital now
becoming identified as Taoism.
China ends up by the time of the Han dynasty in much the same place as
Greece about the time of the late Presocratics or India at the time of the
Buddha’s older contemporaries, although with a stronger political component.
Confucian cosmology becomes relatively impervious to intellectual change now
that its carriers are the curators of canonical texts and simultaneously ritual
specialists administering the cult which legitimates a strongly centralized state.
From now on, even in downward times of the dynastic cycles when the empire
disintegrates, the Confucians are ideologists of centralization and imperial
legitimacy. Competition among intellectuals loses its autonomy from political
faction fighting and falls to a particularistic level: the various cosmological
elements and colors, along with the phenomena of climate and natural disaster,
are taken as correlated with the rise and fall of dynasties, and their discussion
is equivalent to political prognostication favoring one state faction or another.^5
Confucianism becomes a religious pantheon, engaged in particularistic disputes
with the rival pantheons of Taoism and popular Buddhism; intellectual debate
drops to the level of arguing whether Lao Tzu, Confucius, or the Buddha
taught the others first.
When external conditions of intellectual production change, the cosmologi-804 •^ Meta-reflections