15 - Confucian, Legalist, and Taoist thought in Later Han

Summary

Many thinkers in Later Han China were in a mood of disillusionment and bewilderment. They were dissatisfied with the social environment in which they found themselves; they considered the political, social, and economic practices of the time to be utterly corrupt. From their common Confucian background, these thinkers blamed the ruling regime for failing to curb the evil, and for failing to reform the affairs of the state; these were moral and political failings which they regarded as prime causes of other ills. Some of these thinkers went a step further and cast doubt on the prevailing Confucian doctrines, which for centuries had been the guiding principles of the state. Since these thinkers were nominal Confucians, their distress has been obscured by the so-called triumph of Confucianism in Han times, and by the highly conservative doctrine propagated by the Later Han court as the official Confucian orthodoxy. The tension between the official Confucian teaching as established in Former Han and its nonofficial critique arising in the Later Han not only evinces the diversity and complexity of Han Confucianism; it also marks an important change in the general intellectual trend from Former Han to Later Han.

With the fall of Later Han, the official Confucian orthodoxy perished. Much later it was denounced by the neo-Confucians as well as by many modern scholars as a vulgar mixture of Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and yin-yang and Five Elements cosmological thought. On the other hand, the criticism of this orthodoxy by Later Han thinkers has often been praised as being truly representative of the Confucian moral spirit.