Introduction

Abstract

The American essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) wrote in Nature (1836), “The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference” (CW, 1:26). The great Chinese synthesizer of Neo-Confucian philosophy Zhu Xi (朱熹1130–1200) expressed a similar idea in the twelfth century: “In the realm of Heaven and Earth it is this moral principle alone that flows everywhere.”¹ In his essay “The Over-Soul,” Emerson wrote, “Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I the imperfect, adore my own Perfect” (CW, 2:175); Zhu instructed his disciples, “If a person is able to preserve his mind so that it is exceptionally clear, he’ll naturally be capable of merging with the Way.”² As these parallel ideas reflect, the two philosophers, though living in different ages and cultures, traced the human morality to the same source in the ultimate moral nature of the universe. Both philosophers developed theories, based on this understanding, of the correspondence and interrelation of universal law and the human mind. This book offers a comparative investigation of Emerson’s Transcendental thought and Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism.