27
which later became absorbed into the scholar-official ideal. Unlike under earlier Zhou-era
political institutions in which the political ruler mediated both Heavenly mandate and worldly
authority, Confucian junzi of the Warring States and after saw the independent alignment of their
minds with Heavenly mandate as a primary political and ethical responsibility. As such, self-
cultivation—the reestablishment of an individual‘s inner core with cosmological patterns, or
historical exemplars like Kings Wen and Wu as recorded in the classic texts of Confucianism—
stood as a radical interpretive opportunity to re-order external environments on the basis of this
personal vision, encouraging a heightened critical spirit that often rejected the necessary
impositions of external institutions (Chang 1990, 24-28).
17
Under the empire, this mediation process produced what Thomas Metzger characterizes
as a ―triangular‖ relationship of authority, a complex conceptual matrix that delimited the fields
of political intervention available to reform-minded scholar-officials. Metzger describes this
situation as one in which ―the sovereign authority of the jun [ruler] was balanced by the junzi
[the scholar-official]‘s role as the potentially ultimate vehicle of moral insight, and the authority
of the Classics overarched both these roles‖ (Metzger 1977, 179). The junzi alone had the
capacity for political admonishment, constituting in his person the ―ultimate vehicle of moral
insight‖ into a world that saw authority as ultimately lodged not in one‘s social superiors, but ―in
the structure of the cosmos itself as something accessible without mediation to each individual
will‖ (p. 176).
17
This was the fundamental motivation behind the late imperial ―statecraft‖ tradition (經世, jingshi), in which
world-ordering in the form of administrative innovation was seen as directly complementary to, rather than a
replacement for, self-cultivation activities (Chang 1983; Rowe 2001, 327-330). Chang notes, however, that other
important strands of Confucianism—especially those associated with Han-era correlative cosmology—held that the
alignment with Heaven that legitimated political authority rested in external institutions rather than in internal self-
cultivation (Chang 1989, 51-55 et passim).
Convention