復社の學

Abstract

The establishment of the Fushe does not merely constitute the closing scene of the history of the late Ming partisan incidents ; it is worthy of our attention also because it fostered a large number of excellent scholars active during the early Qing. The Fushe defined itself initially as a scholarly movement that strove for the revival of "ancient learning" 古學. "Ancient learning" basically meant the study of the Confucian classics. The movement arose on the background of antipathy against the principles of the Cheng-Zhu 程朱 orthodoxy of Song learning which was felt as a constraint ; it expressed the belief that one's worth as a person was complete in itself and did not depend on anything else. Because individual morality was to be perfected within oneself, morality and scholarship were set apart, and the possibility arose that the pursuit of scholarship had a value in itself. In this the members of the Fushe became able to take the classics and other ancient documents as objects for their research. But ultimately they cannot be regarded as self-conscious rebels against orthodoxy 名教 : though they prepared the ground for Qing dynasty textual criticism, they failed to escape from the rule of tradition and create a new system of learning.