300 Neo-Confucianism No distinction was made between private and public morality—people must not anything shameful in the secrecy of their homes any more than they would commit those acts public Finally the notion of equality in diversity rendered all emotions and socioeconomic positions as analogous but intrinsically entailing different rewards and penalties While wealth, honor, blessing, and benefit are meant for the enrichment of temporal life, they are at best neutral and at worst detrimental to one’s spiritual life and cultivation of the Five Constant Virtues Conversely, poverty, humble station, care, and sorrow, although temporally unpleasant, are “helpmates to fulfillment,” which convey assistance on the path to sagehood and fertilize the seeds of virtue embedded in one’s nature CHENG HAO AND CHENG YI The brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, commonly grouped together in Asian religious discourse because of their theological concurrence, conjoined the doctrine of li as the inner structure or directive principle of things with Zhang’s developed idea of qi (ch’i) According to the Cheng brothers, li was the paradoxically unified yet diversified uninstantiated essence or pattern for both the entire universe and every organism Resembling a genetic coding, li provided the creative life structure, or shengsheng, which created all things upon being filled out by the life substance of qi In people, li manifests as human nature (hsing), equivalent to the moral nature (dehsing) or heavenly nature (tianxing or t’ien-hsing), the fulfillment of which was ren, or the virtue of humaneness By identifying li as the genetic and magnetic growth principle of the Way, moreover, the Cheng brothers contended that the joint metaphysical ground of every actual thing or affair was a shared physical existence and an intrinsically good moral nature For the Cheng brothers, a mixture of two approaches could fulfill human destiny: investigation of the principles in things and introspection of principles in the mind However the lines of objective inquiry and judgment could never be pursued separately, but the convergence or unity of li, in both its rational and moral dimensions, must be experienced in the realms of contemplation and action The twin methods of studying the classics and quiet sitting enabled humans to attain their destiny of sagehood During quiet sitting, the typical examination of one’s xin, or heart-mind, amid an active engagement with society, the Cheng brothers emphasized reverence and ethical concern instead of mental passivity Through such attention to li, practitioners could discriminate between desires and motives that served the common good (gong) and those that were selfish or prejudiced (si) As manuals for this meditation, the Cheng brothers recommended the Daxue (Ta-hsueh, Great Learning) and Zhong Yong (Chung-yung, Doctrine of the Mean) Although the Cheng brothers had many followers, their radical claim to speak authoritatively for the Way because of their personal conviction springing from immediate experience of the Way within themselves incited powerful opposition and imperial condemnation of their daoxue (tao hsueh), or learning of the Way This daoxue survived solely through its approval by Zhu Xi, who posthumously pronounced the Cheng brothers as orthodox and canonized their insights for future generations ZHU XI The greatness of Zhu Xi consisted in his ability to adapt in a unified system of thought the individual contributions of his Song predecessors His remarkable powers of analysis and synthesis allowed him to combine ideas and articulate each of them with greater clarity and cogency than their originators had achieved He delineated with greater precision such doctrines as li, qi, xing (the nature of all things), xin, and tai-qi His philosophy is often identified as the Cheng-Zhu school, since the forerunner whose work he most appropriated was Cheng Yi Zhu compared li to a seed of grain, as each seed partakes of both commonality and diversity by possessing its own uniqueness but also displaying generic and organic elements of structure, growth pattern, direction, and functional use In a slight departure from his forebears, however, Zhu modified the concept of qi by postulating that qi is not found equally in all people, and the fact that people have various endowments of ch’i accounts for their ethical differences Resembling the idea of a Buddha mind, Zhu introduced the new concept that, while all humans have the potential for perfection, evil arises through the clouding effect of li being shrouded by ch’i Zhu argued that the mind of every person contains two dimensions: the mind of the Way, or the original intrinsic principled goodness that links the person directly with the tai-qi, and the human mind, or the qi-filled arena where conflict arises between xinxing (the original mind) and carnal desires Zhu’s approach for overcoming this psychophysical imbalance consisted in the investigation of things, a fourfold process including apprehending the principles of things, reading and reflecting on the Classics, becoming