Cultivation of reverence, originally a religious virtue associated with ancestor worship and ceremonial rites, as described in the classics and taught by Confucius (551–479 BCE), serves to purify the mind, attune one to the promptings of the original good nature, and set one to act with appropriateness ( yi ).
With this idea, Zhou Dunyi was advocating that whereas the states of action and rest are mutually exclusive in the case of physical objects, such states interpenetrate and are mutually implicative in the case of human mental and spiritual phenomena (Adler 2014). This doctrine piqued Zhu Xi’s interest, and he came to see it as offering a way out of the dilemma between Li Tong’s stress on stillness and Hu Hong’s stress on activity in cultivation and practice, and their respective shortcomings. Zhou Dunyi’s doctrine was particularly exciting to Zhu Xi for it highlighted the distinctness and religiosity of the human mind and spirit, which Zhou describes as not subject to the same limitations and restrictions as are physical phenomena. Zhou Dunyi moreover associates this idea with a vital and well integrated model of human mind and spirit, self-cultivation, and cosmos. Inspired by Zhou Dunyi’s doctrine of the interpenetration of stillness and activity and related ideas, Zhu Xi worked out a twofold cultivation effort that incorporated at once nurturing one’s feeling of reverence ( jing ) to purify mind while investigating things to discern their determinate or defining patterns ( li ). Cultivation of reverence, originally a religious virtue associated with ancestor worship and ceremonial rites, as described in the classics and taught by Confucius (551–479 BCE), serves to purify the mind, attune one to the promptings of the original good nature, and set one to act with appropriateness ( yi ).
