The philosopher and the stream that named him

Zhou Dunyi, born in 1017 and dead in 1073, was a cosmologist and philosopher of the Song dynasty, and his two short books, the Taiji Tushuo and the Tongshu, laid the theoretical foundation of Neo-Confucianism. His Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate fused Confucian ethics with the ideas of the Book of Changes and with Daoist naturalism, and it argued that the many are ultimately one and the one is ultimate, a metaphysics in which taiji, the great ultimate, and wuji, the limitless, stand together, and from whose movement the yin, the yang and the five phases are generated. The work was placed at the head of the Neo-Confucian anthology Jinsilu by Zhu Xi, who made Zhou Dunyi the first great sage of the Song. Zhou himself held modest offices all his life, from record keeper to magistrate and prefectural supervisor, and never rose high, but the diagram he drew outlived his career and became the seed of the Cheng-Zhu school that dominated Chinese thought for seven hundred years. His Tongshu held up sincerity as the root of moral nature and made the sage the model of the good life.

Zhou Dunyi was born in Yingdao County, Daozhou prefecture, in what is now Dao County, Yongzhou, and it is his home county that keeps his name. He took the title Lianxi, the Lian stream, in retirement to honour the stream near his home, and after his death he was commonly called Zhou Lianxi, so the man and the place-name became one. In Dao County the name has spread across the landscape: a Lianxi subdistrict, a Lianxi academy and a Lianxi square all carry it, and his hometown memorial, with its memorial hall, academy and square, stands in Loutian village, Qingtang town, on the eastern slope of Dao Mountain. The county's claim to him is direct: the philosopher was born here, and the stream that gave him his name runs through the place that now takes it back, a village and a county that have made the man's title their own. The stream that gave him his name is the Lian, and the man's title and the county's place-names are the same two syllables, so the philosopher and his birthplace cannot be told apart.

Dao County now keeps Zhou Dunyi as an identity as much as a memory. The memorial complex in Loutian village gathers a memorial hall, an academy and a square around his name, and the Lianxi subdistrict carries it into the county's administration, so the philosophy is written into the place-names of the region. Across China other places claim him too, for the Lianxi name and its academies spread far beyond Hunan, to Jiangxi, Guangdong and elsewhere, each holding a Lianxi academy or a memorial of its own, and the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi carried his thought outward. But the home claim is Dao County's: the philosopher was born here, and the stream that named him runs here. What the county presents today is that claim, a man remembered less for his small official posts than for the diagram that founded a school of thought, and a hometown that has made the philosophy its name. The memorial hall, the academy and the square in Loutian village present the man to the public, and the name Lianxi keeps the philosophy alive as a local identity.