Fang Yizhi

Fang Yizhi a Chinese scholar, philosopher and polymath of the late Ming and early Qing transition (1611-1671) who is celebrated for the breadth of his learning and for his attempt to found a comprehensive philosophy of change. A loyalist to the fallen Ming who eventually became a Buddhist monk, he wrote on the sciences, philology, philosophy and the arts, and his ideas anticipated the empirical and critical spirit of later Chinese thought.

Early Life and Learning

Fang Yizhi was born in 1611 in Tongcheng, in the province of Anhui, into a distinguished literary family that had produced several famous scholars. He was a prodigy, said to have mastered the classics at an early age, and he grew up in a household where books, painting and debate were part of daily life. His father and grandfather were themselves writers of note, and the family tradition of learning shaped his entire career.

He passed the highest examinations at an exceptionally young age and entered the imperial bureaucracy, where he served in several posts during the troubled final years of the Ming dynasty. He was a man of enormous and varied curiosity, interested alike in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, phonetics, geography and the philosophy of the classics, and he collected knowledge with an appetite that impressed even his learned contemporaries.

During the 1630s and 1640s he associated with the reformist and literary circles of the capital and came into contact with the scientific learning of the Jesuit mission. He studied Western astronomy and mathematics and later wrote in defence of certain Western methods, while always insisting that Chinese tradition contained resources of its own for the understanding of nature.

The Ming-Qing Transition

The collapse of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the Manchus in 1644 transformed Fang Yizhi's life. Like many loyalist scholars he refused to serve the new Qing government, and he took part for a time in resistance and in the attempt to maintain a Ming court in the south. The failure of the loyalist cause left him a man of divided loyalties and deep sorrow.

After the death of his father and the final defeat of the Ming cause he withdrew from public life. He sought refuge in religion and eventually became a Buddhist monk, taking a new name and devoting himself to meditation and to the study of Buddhist texts. His conversion reflected both personal grief and a wider retreat of loyalist scholars from a world they could not accept.

Even as a monk he continued to write and to teach, and he gathered around him a circle of students. The tension between his Buddhist vocation and his Confucian learning, and between his loyalty to a lost dynasty and his need to live in a new age, gave his thought its distinctive depth and melancholy.

Philosophy of Change

Fang Yizhi's philosophical reputation rests chiefly on his major work, the Notes on the Principles of Things, a vast and systematic attempt to understand the nature of change. Drawing on the classic of changes and on an extraordinarily wide range of other sources, he argued that the world is a ceaseless process in which things arise, transform and pass away according to inherent patterns rather than by the decree of an external power.

He held that the fundamental substance of the universe is one, and that the apparent plurality of things is the result of its continual differentiation and recombination. This monism, combined with an emphasis on change and relation, gave his philosophy a dynamic quality unusual in the Confucian tradition, and it led him to treat observation and physical investigation as philosophically important.

He was critical of what he saw as the empty speculation of some of his contemporaries and insisted that true knowledge required attention to concrete things and their workings. In this respect his thought has been compared to the empirical and critical currents of early modern European philosophy, though it grew from entirely Chinese roots.

Scientific and Philological Work

Fang Yizhi wrote on a remarkable range of technical subjects. He produced studies of astronomy and the calendar, in which he combined Chinese and Western methods, and he worked on mathematics and on the principles of acoustics and music. His writings on the natural world bring together classical cosmology, empirical observation and the new knowledge arriving from Europe.

He was also a pioneer in the study of language and phonetics. He investigated the sounds of the spoken language and the historical changes in pronunciation, and his work on phonology contributed to the critical study of the ancient texts that became a hallmark of Qing scholarship. His interest in the precise meaning of words connected his philosophy of things with his philology.

In medicine and in the study of materia medica he applied the same systematic ambition, attempting to organise a great body of inherited knowledge according to general principles. The breadth of his interests has led later scholars to regard him as one of the last universal minds of the Chinese tradition, comparable in scope to the encyclopedic scholars of other civilisations.

Influence and Legacy

Fang Yizhi died in 1671, leaving behind a large body of work, much of which was not published in his lifetime. His most ambitious philosophical treatise circulated in manuscript and was only fully appreciated by scholars of later centuries, who came to regard it as one of the most original speculative works of the whole imperial period.

His descendants formed a distinguished scholarly lineage, and his grandson carried on the family tradition of learning and public service. Through his family and his students his ideas entered the broader stream of Qing scholarship, above all through his contribution to phonology and to the critical study of the classics.

He stands as a symbol of the intellectual vitality of the Ming-Qing transition, a moment when old certainties were collapsing and new knowledge was arriving from abroad. His attempt to hold together philosophy, science and philology in a single system, and to ground it all in a doctrine of universal change, remains a distinctive achievement of Chinese thought.

References

^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4]

↑ Willard J. Peterson, Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change, Yale University Press, 1979.
↑ Willard J. Peterson, The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
↑ Frederic Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, University of California Press, 1985.
↑ Lynn A. Struve, The Ming-Qing Conflict, University of Michigan Press, 1993.

[r1-1] Willard J. Peterson, Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change, Yale University Press, 1979.

[r2-2] Willard J. Peterson, The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[r3-3] Frederic Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, University of California Press, 1985.

[r4-4] Lynn A. Struve, The Ming-Qing Conflict, University of Michigan Press, 1993.

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