Jianhua Chen
Harvard University

Manifested by his polemic of the “licentious poems,” Chu Hsi’s exegesis of the Classic of Poetry is characterized as empathetic, figurative, quotidian, and audacious. Geared in his intellectual enterprise of reconstructing Neo-Confucian order, Chu Hsi’s lifelong wrestling with the meaning of the Poetry reveals that his approach of “human feelings” incessantly interacts with his core thesis of “Heaven’s principle versus human desire.”

Chu Hsi’s poetic hermeneutics suggests an alternative view of the rise of Neo--Confucianism. Questions arise from the uncertainty and contingency in his reading and interpreting canonical Classics: What is his language awareness in his poetic hermeneutics? What is the new impulse in the vernacular pedagogy? Under what historical conditions does the vernacular dynamism emerge?

From this linguistic perspective, Chu Hsi’s negation of human desire should be considered a significant humanist advance in the history of Chinese thought. Empowered by his poetic hermeneutics, the theme of human desire persists in his Neo-Confucian canon formation, indebted to the vernacular impulse related to the transformation of intellectual perception of literacy and self-cultivation and to the material culture in his time.