Content area
Full Text
The orthodox Daoxue (Learning of the Way) teachings, particularly that of Zhu Xi, paid considerable attention to the emotion of anger. The influential thinker not only defended anger from unwarranted dismissal, but also proposed three concrete scenarios to legitimate the emergence of the emotion. More precisely, he affirmed the virtue of righteousness to be the moral conditioning of anger and held that ritual improprieties justified the emotion's outburst. Furthermore, Zhu Xi regarded the absence of indiscriminateness from anger as evidence of the emotion's righteousness. The classical novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is similarly concerned with whether an angry character possesses righteousness, and whether ritual deviation triggers a character's anger. The novel's earliest extant edition questions the coherence and compatibility of Zhu Xi's proposed conditions for the emergence of righteous anger. However, the heavily commented early Qing edition realigns the novel with the orthodox thinker's teachings on anger, effacing the potential incoherence through textual modification and commentarial intervention. The re-alignment evidences the further canonization of Zhu Xi's thought in the early Qing dynasty.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
The Importance of Anger
Despite consistently figuring in such set phrases that collectively refer to various emotions as liuqing (six emotions), qiqing ... (seven emotions), and so on,1 nu ... (anger) has largely been absent from the scholarly discussions of the late-imperial Chinese conception of qing †⅝ (emotion/feeling/passion).2 The sheer quantity of scholarship on qing confirms the notion's importance, yet the record shows a tendency to prioritize ai S (love) and yu Ж (desire) over other emotions as qing's equivalent.3 Other notable treatments of qing that do not foreground love and desire, however, adopt a holistic approach to exploring the notion's various facets without specifically focusing on other emotions, anger included.4 This article seeks to break the relative reticence about such understudied emotions that qing also denotes by paying greater attention to anger.5
Scholarly silence alone does not adequately justify the necessity of contemplating anger in particular; this emotion is worth discussing for many further reasons. Apart from providing an entry point to shift the focus of qing-related scholarship to other unexplored emotions, anger itself stands out as a prominent subject in Daoist teachings, medical writings, and other discursive fields. Most pertinent to the...