Cheng Hao

Cheng Hao a Chinese philosopher of the Northern Song dynasty (1032-1085), the elder of the two Cheng brothers and one of the founding figures of Neo-Confucianism. His teaching of the unity of all things through the principle of heavenly nature and his warm, intuitive approach to moral cultivation complemented his brother's rationalism and gave the movement its idealist strand.

Life and Career

Cheng Hao was born in 1032 in Luoyang, in Henan province, the elder son of a family of officials. He studied under Zhou Dunyi alongside his younger brother Cheng Yi, and the two were to become the twin founders of the philosophical school that later bore their name.

He passed the imperial examination and pursued a public career with greater success and ease of manner than his brother. He served in a number of local and central offices, and he was known as a kindly and effective administrator who treated the people under his charge with humanity and good sense.

He was associated for a time with the reform movement of Wang Anshi, whose sincerity he respected, but he became a critic of the more coercive measures and resigned his post in protest. He spent his last years teaching and writing, and he died in 1085 at the relatively early age of fifty-three.

Philosophy of Heavenly Principle

The central idea of Cheng Hao's philosophy is that all things form a single body or continuum, united by a principle that he identified with the heavenly nature or with life itself. To be fully human is to realise this unity in one's own experience and to feel the joys and sorrows of others as one's own.

This doctrine of the unity of all things, sometimes expressed through the image of concern for all beings as one's own flesh, is the idealist and experiential strand of Neo-Confucianism. It contrasts with the more analytical approach of his brother, and it gave the movement a warm and intuitive dimension that later thinkers found deeply attractive.

He held that this universal principle is present in every person and can be discovered through introspection and through the spontaneous awakening of moral feeling. His mystical or monistic side, expressed in the phrase that the sensible man forms one body with heaven, earth and all things, has been read as a native Chinese form of idealist philosophy.

Moral Cultivation and the Mind

Cheng Hao's teaching on self-cultivation emphasised ease, spontaneity and the natural growth of virtue. He warned against a strained and anxious effort that stiffens the mind, and he compared the cultivation of the moral life to the tending of a seedling, which must be watered and protected but not pulled up to make it grow faster.

He emphasised the importance of settling the mind and of finding equanimity in the midst of activity. The goal was not withdrawal from the world but a stable and joyful engagement with it, in which the mind is not disturbed by external circumstance because it has realised the principle that underlies all change.

His approach to moral psychology differed from that of his brother, who stressed the strict discipline of reverence and the exhaustive investigation of principle. Both strands were inherited by Zhu Xi and by his rivals, and the contrast between the two brothers has been a major theme of later Confucian debate.

Writings and Discourses

Cheng Hao left a body of writings that includes essays, memorials, letters and records of his teaching preserved by his disciples. His letters on the nature of the moral mind and on the unity of principle are among the most admired texts of Song philosophical prose.

His accounts of administrative practice, and especially his reflections on the humane government of the people under his care, illustrate his belief that philosophy and public service were one activity. He wrote of the relief of famine and the reform of local abuses with the same seriousness that he brought to metaphysical questions.

His recorded sayings, gathered by his students, reveal a teacher of warmth and penetration whose aphorisms and images were remembered and repeated long after his death. The corpus is smaller than his brother's but it exercised a lasting influence on the moral teaching of the tradition.

Influence and Legacy

Cheng Hao and his brother Cheng Yi are venerated together as the founders of the School of Principle, and both were honoured in the Confucian temple. Their doctrines were transmitted to Zhu Xi, who combined them into the system that dominated the thought of late imperial East Asia, and their writings became classics of the tradition.

The two brothers were understood by later ages as representing complementary tendencies: Cheng Hao the intuitive and monistic, Cheng Yi the analytic and rationalistic. This contrast, sometimes described as the opposition between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of principle, structured the debates of later Confucian thinkers, including Wang Yangming.

He died in 1085. His doctrine of the unity of all things and his serene and humane ideal of the moral life gave Confucianism a spiritual depth that appealed to later generations, and he is remembered as one of the most attractive personalities of the Song philosophical revival.

See also

• Cheng Yi
• Zhu Xi
• Zhou Dunyi
• Wang Yangming