Cosmos, state and society

This dissertation examines a series of debates concerning the relationship between the cosmos and human society that took place during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). In the Northern Song, the legitimacy of the cosmological paradigm that had dominated the preceding millennium, "correlative cosmology," came to be questioned by a number of prominent intellectuals. As part of larger arguments about how to cultivate the self and create political order, these intellectuals rejected correlative cosmology and formulated alternative conceptions of the relationship between the human and natural worlds. In opposition to previous studies of Chinese cosmology, which have tended to read cosmological doctrines as unquestioned baseline cultural assumptions shared by all Chinese thinkers alike, I argue that they were claims about the nature of the cosmos. I analyze how and why intellectuals reinterpreted and replaced the tenets of correlative cosmology in their construction of new visions of social and political order. The first chapter of the dissertation gives a historical survey of cosmological argument from the Warring States period to the end of the Tang dynasty. I describe how correlative cosmology developed in conjunction with the rise of centralized political rule and investigate its periodic decline in popularity during times of political division. I further demonstrate that clear connections inhered between cosmological theories, the form of government implemented by the state, and the position of the shi, or scholar-official class, in the socio-political order. In the remainder of the dissertation, I analyze the different cosmological and political doctrines advanced by the adherents of four important Northern Song intellectual movements--the Ancient-style Learning movement, a more socially engaged Chan Buddhism, the New Learning movement and Neo-Confucianism. I show how prominent intellectuals affiliated with these movements formulated their cosmological theories in opposition to those contained in traditional correlative cosmology. I moreover describe how their decisions to refute, and provide alternatives to, correlative theory were tied to their conceptions of political order and self-cultivation. In the conclusion of the dissertation, I discuss how the theories of Neo-Confucianism eventually came to supplant those of traditional correlative cosmology in the political arena during the early Ming dynasty.