SOURCE: “The Learning of the Mind-and-Heart in the Early Chu Hsi School,” in The Message of the Mind in Neo-Confucianism, Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 24-52.

In the essay below, De Bary examines the way in which the interpretation of Chu Hsi's teachings concerning the learning of the mind has resulted in confusion regarding the role of the “mind-and-heart” in his philosophy.

In Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart¹ I reported on developments in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries which saw the rise of the new Learning of the Mind-and-Heart as an accompaniment to Neo-Confucianism's establishment as an official orthodoxy—a development which had been largely ignored in earlier histories both of ideas and institutions. By the mid-Ming, however, with the more intensive development of Neo-Confucian thought that followed from its dominance of the educational and scholarly scene, important philosophical issues surfaced which had not been so...