A Study of Wang Sihuai's.

This paper aims to analyze Wang Sihuai's Taijitusuo lun (On the Explanations of the Diagram of Supreme Ultimate) to understand Wang's thoughts against the background of the Ming-Qing intellectual history. The first part of the paper discusses the main purpose of Wang's composing this text, which is to distinguish "true" Confucianism from Daoism, Buddhism, and Song-Ming Confucianism. Wang Sihuai believed Taijitu and Taijitu shuo belong to Taoist works and betrayed the meaning of the Yijing (The Book of Changes). Wang's opinions followed those of Lu Jiushao and Lu Jiuyuan and corresponded with the new wave of criticizing the Diagram of Taiji in the Jiangnan area during the early Qing period. In the second part, the paper elaborates Wang Sihuai's thoughts from four aspects, which are (1) the fundamental difference between being and non-being, (2) the concepts of life, death, spirit, and ghost, (3) his ideas about human nature, the nature of myriad things, and the Mandate of Heaven, (4) the ethical teachings by Confucian sages. Finally, this paper also traces the friendship between Wang Sihuai and the Confucian Catholic Zhang Xingyao, and tries to explain why Zhang paid compliments to Wang Sihuai and his Taijitusuo lun by comparing their works. This also leads us to see more about the interactions between Confucianism and Christianity in 17^th-century China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]