Ch'iu Chun (1421-1495) and his views on government and history

Abstract

The biographical approach to the study of Chinese history is a particularly rewarding and at tractive one, especially in the field of history of thought, where the distinctive characteristics of individual thinkers, no matter how important they may be, are all too easily lost under hasty classifications and generalizations. The usefulness of the biographical approach in the study of Confucianism and the Chinese intellectual tradition was acknowledged by Professor Arthur F. Wright more than two decades ago. In his article "Values, Rules, and Personalities", he made the following observations: "What one says in abstractions about 'a tradition* finds its ultimate proof or disproof in the lives of men; the study of men's lives guards against the idolization of abstractions and at the same time calls attention to the rich texture of a life in time, the multiple forces that bear in upon it, and the vagaries of chance and choice that give it its final pattern." Certainly biographical study is an effective means of tracing the political and intellectual developments of certain periods, and the unfolding of facets of Chinese history which were often impelled by official-scholars of vision. It is also an economical means, as Professor Denis Twitchett points out, of exploring periods which at this stage of writing Chinese history provide little more than a chronological skeleton.- On the one hand, a rounded portrait of a personality and his thought in the context of his time and milieu may add new dimensions for understanding the subject and his times, and, on the other hand, a single biographical study may bring into focus the critical problems and the a tmosphere of an age, and thus help to close the gaps in our understanding of the Chinese tradition.