China & East Asia · 1017–1073
Zhou Dunyi
Song scholar honoured as the pioneer of Neo-Confucianism
His Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate traced how the Ultimate of Non-being and the Supreme Ultimate give rise to yin and yang, the five phases and all things, and he grounded sagehood in sincerity (cheng).
Life and thought
Zhou Dunyi spent his career as a conscientious local official in south and central China and was little known as a thinker in his lifetime. He is remembered for a short essay on loving the lotus, which rises clean from the mud, and for having briefly taught the teenage Cheng brothers in 1046–47. A century later Zhu Xi placed him at the head of the line of the “Learning of the Way”, and his two short works became classics.
His Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate tells how the world unfolds: “the Ultimate of Non-being, and yet the Supreme Ultimate”. Its movement produces yang and its rest yin; their interplay yields the five phases, and from these come all things, humans receiving the finest share. The sage establishes the human standard through centrality, correctness, humaneness and rightness, “making stillness primary”. His Penetrating the Book of Changes makes sincerity (cheng) the foundation of sagehood. The diagram may derive from Daoist charts, a point Lu Jiuyuan later used against Zhu Xi in a famous debate.