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Islam first arrived in China more than 1,200 years ago, but for more than a millennium it was perceived as a foreign presence. The restoration of native Chinese rule by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), after nearly a century of Mongol domination, helped transform Chinese intellectual discourse on ideological, social, political, religious, and ethnic identity. This led to the creation of a burgeoning network of Sinicized Muslim scholars who wrote about Islam in classical Chinese and developed a body of literature known as the Han Kitāb. This book examines the life and work of one of the most important of the Qing Chinese Muslim literati, Liu Zhi (ca. 1660–ca. 1730), and places his writings in their historical, cultural, social, and religio-philosophical context. His Tianfang danli (Ritual law of Islam) represents the most systematic and sophisticated attempt within the Han Kitāb corpus to harmonize Islam with Chinese thought. The book begins by situating Liu Zhi in the historical development of the Chinese Muslim intellectual tradition. Delving into the contents of Liu Zhi's work, it focuses on his use of specific Chinese terms and concepts, their origins and meanings in Chinese thought, and their correspondence to Islamic principles. A close examination of the Tianfang dianli reveals Liu Zhi's specific usage of the concept of Ritual as a common foundation of both Confucian morality and social order and Islamic piety. The challenge of expressing such concepts tested the limits of his scholarship and linguistic finesse.

Even as globalization has exposed the Eurocentric character of the academic theories used to understand the world, most scholarship continues to rely on the same parochial vocabulary it critiques. Against those who insist our thinking cannot escape the dominant terms of Euro-American modernity, this book shows how methods for understanding cultural others can take theoretical guidance from those very bodies of thought typically excluded by political and social theory. Examining a Chinese conversation over “Western Learning” from the 1860s to the 1920s, the book argues that we might follow these Chinese thinkers in viewing foreign knowledge as a theoretical resource—as a body of knowledge that formulates methods of argument, goals of inquiry, and criteria of evidence that may be generalizable to other places and times. The call of reformers such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu to bianfa—literally “change the institutions” of Chinese society and politics in order to produce new kinds of Western knowledge—was simultaneously also a call to “change the referents” those institutions sought to emulate, and from which participants might draw their self-understanding. They show that the institutional and cultural contexts supporting the production of knowledge are not prefigured givens that constrain cross-cultural understanding but dynamic platforms for learning that are tractable to concerted efforts over time to transform them. These thinkers point us beyond acknowledgment of cultural difference toward reform of the social, institutional, and disciplinary spaces in which the production of knowledge takes place.

Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801) has primarily been read as a philosopher of history. This volume presents him as an ethical philosopher with a distinctive understanding of the aims and methods of Confucian self-cultivation. Offered in English translation for the first time, this collection of Zhang's essays and letters should challenge our current understanding of this Qing dynasty philosopher. This book also contains translations of three important essays written by Tang-dynasty Confucian Han Yu and shows how Zhang responded to Han's earlier works. Those with an interest in ethical philosophy, religion, and Chinese thought and culture will find still relevant much of what Zhang argued for in his own day.

Drawing upon cutting-edge knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Mind and Body in Early China employs the lens of mind-body concepts to critique Orientalist accounts of early China. Views of China as the radical, “holistic” Other are unsupportable for a variety of reasons. The idea that the early Chinese saw no qualitative difference between mind and body (the “strong” holist view) has long been contradicted by traditional archaeological and qualitative textual evidence. New digital humanities methods, such as large-scale textual analysis, make this position even less tenable. Finally, a large body of empirical evidence suggests that “weak” mind-body dualism is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. More broadly, this book argues that the humanities need to move beyond social constructivist views of culture and embrace instead a view of human cognition and culture that integrates the sciences and the humanities. Methodologically, it attempts to broaden the scope of humanistic methodologies by employing team-based qualitative coding and computer-aided “distant reading” of texts, while also drawing upon current best understanding of human cognition to transform the basic interpretative starting point. It has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities integration.