In the second year of the Chunxi reign, 1175, Zhu Xi, Lü Zuqian, Lu Jiuling and Lu Jiuyuan gathered at Ehu to lecture and to debate. The gathering has a name of its own, the Ehu meeting, and it is remembered in Chinese intellectual history as the moment the two lines of Neo-Confucian thought that would run through the Song and the Ming came into open confrontation. What is unusual is that they met in person, over several days, with an audience, and that the disagreement was not settled.
From the journal
The argument at Ehu
In 1175, Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan met at Ehu for a philosophical debate about how people come to know things.
In the same city · Shangrao ↗The second year of Chunxi
What they actually disagreed about
The dispute concerned how understanding is arrived at: whether the mind should meet things directly in the ordinary course of reading and thought, as Lu's school held, or whether it must first be prepared by the accumulated discipline of investigation and examination, as Zhu held. Both positions were argued from the same classical texts, and both men were serious scholars with positions to defend in a scholarly culture. The academy is worth visiting for that reason. It is not a memorial to a conclusion; it is the place where an argument was conducted.
Why an academy in the hills
The Southern Song academy was a working institution with rules, a curriculum, teaching posts and a name granted by the court, and it existed to prepare men for the examinations while also trying to make them fit to govern. Ehu is one of three such places in Jiangxi with a claim to being a great academy, together with Bailudong in the Lushan mountains and Bailuzhou on the Gan. Together they give the province a distinct place in Chinese intellectual history, and visiting them in sequence shows a common pattern of a river, a mountain and a hall.
