Abstract

This book was originally written as a Ph.D. dissertation, submitted to the University of London in 1987. Its purpose is to chart the development and the inter-relationship of the concepts of Heaven and of Man in Chu Hsi philosophy. The development of these two concepts is discussed in six chapters . In the first chapter, I give a brief account of Buddhist Idealism, to the refutation of which Chu Hsi had dedicated his whole life. In the second chapter, I describe how, in his thirties, he had used the Immanent Vitalism of the earlier Neo-Confucianists to attack the Buddhist view of Emptiness. In the third chapter, I discuss how he struggled, in his forties, to construct his own metaphysics, after becoming disillusioned with the approach to the Way taught by the Immanent Vitalists. In the fourth and fifth chapters, I discuss both the development of the ideas of Principle, Material Force, Nature, Mind, and moral cultivation, and their systematization in his later metaphysics. In the final chapter, I explain the relation between Heaven and Man within this system, and show the way in which it differs from its Buddhist counterpart.