FRIENDSHIP AND ITS CONFLICTS WITH OTHER HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

The writer Yuan Zhongdao (1570–1623) once characterized Li Zhi this way:

He had an obsession with making friends ever since he was very young.… Throughout his life, he never considered the home of his wife and children to be his own; instead, he considered his friends’ homes to be his own; he never regarded his hometown as his own; instead he regarded the hometowns of his friends as his own; he never treated his life as his own; instead, he treated the lives of his friends as his own. When poor he forgot his own poverty once he saw his friends; when old he forgot his old age when he met his friends.⁵

Indeed, friends occupied an almost sacred place in Li Zhi’s heart, as he once said:

For those who have yet to firmly set their feet in their pursuit of the Way, the company of friends is indispensable. For those who already have their feet firmly set, the company of friends is even more indispensable. Why? “Friend” [you 友] means “enabling one to have” [you 有]. This is why people often say that one’s friends and teachers enable one to have virtue. This certainly testifies to the indispensability of friends. In this world, however, it is hard to have a genuine friend but even more difficult to have a genuine friend who is also a comrade. For ancient people, having a comrade was more important than having a brother; one’s brother shares with one many physical similarities, whereas one’s comrade enables one to wholly fulfill one’s inborn virtue in that body. Confucius and Mencius traveled everywhere under Heaven. Why did they do this? They were only in search of comrades.⁶

Here Li Zhi is making a fine distinction between the general term “friend” and the narrower concept of “comrade” (tongzhi), a term becoming increasingly popular among the members of the School of the Mind (Xinxue) branch of neo-Confucianism in the late Ming).⁷ Elsewhere, Li Zhi differentiated between xiang’ai (someone to whom he was attached) and xiangzhi (someone he really understood and appreciated); the former was a friend who was emotionally close, whereas the latter was a comrade or an intellectual soulmate. He considered some of his friends to be his xiang’ai but not yet his xiangzhi.⁸ Obviously, for him, the latter was a level higher than the former. However, an ideal friend must be more than a mere comrade. More significantly, he was suggesting that having such a genuine friend or comrade was more important than having a brother (a family member) and that men usually needed to travel far away from their family and hometown to search for friends and comrades just as the sages in the past had done.

Given the importance of jia (home/family) and native place in a Chinese man’s life at that time, Li Zhi’s devotion to friends was indeed remarkable as well as disturbing to some of his contemporaries, although he did not lack admirers in this regard. His seemingly unconditional championing of friendship directly challenged the core values of the Confucian concept of wulun (the five cardinal human relationships), in which family was sanctioned as the most sacred. In this chapter I explore the implications of the conflicts within Li Zhi himself as well as between him and others as a result of his relentless pursuit of friendship.

Among Li Zhi’s friends, the Geng brothers, Geng Dingxiang and Geng Dingli, were probably two of the most important in that they might have helped change the course of Li Zhi’s life after he quitted officialdom in 1580. The deterioration of the relationship between Geng Dingxiang and Li Zhi was largely a result of their ideological differences and Li’s supposedly unconventional behavior, something Geng Dingxiang found increasingly difficult to tolerate after the death of his younger brother, who was apparently much closer to Li. Such differences between Li Zhi and Geng Dingxiang were clearly manifested in their divergent attitudes toward two controversial figures at that time, He Xinyin and Deng Huoqu, both of whom were accused by conservatives of going to extremes in pursuing friendship while totally disregarding the other four human relationships (see also chapter 4). Both He Xinyin and Deng Huoqu, two radical activists and members of the neo-Confucian School of the Mind, were once guests at the residence of the Gengs. Geng Dingxiang offered detailed accounts of these two in a collective biography titled “The Biographies of Three Eccentric Visitors to the Village.” According to Geng Dingxiang, one particularly disturbing moral failure shared by these two eccentrics was their total disregard for their familial obligations. He Xinyin was said to have “ruined his own family and destroyed himself,” and Geng accused Deng Huoqu of having committed the egregious sin of unfiliality for neglecting his aged father when the man was alive and failing to mourn him after he died.⁹ Contrary to Geng Dingxiang, Li Zhi praised He Xinyin as an outstanding man and expressed deep admiration for Deng’s determination to seek friends/comrades at the expense of his own career success and the interests of his family.¹⁰ One important reason Li Zhi spared no effort in defending the two, neither of whom he had ever met in person, was, at least in part, because he saw himself as the target of similar accusations, as he mentioned that He Xinyin had been accused of “disregarding four of the five cardinal human relationships.”¹¹

These controversial proponents of friendship, especially He Xinyin and Li Zhi, shared many similarities: like He and Deng, Li Zhi lived away from his family and hometown for long periods; also like both of them, Li Zhi considered the company of friends and comrades more important than that of his own family members. All three alarmed their conservative contemporaries and some officials in power with their unconventional deeds as well as views, and all were accused of being heterodox. Like He Xinyin, Li Zhi was arrested, although he eventually committed suicide in jail, while He Xinyin was executed by a local official.

What Geng Dingxiang dreaded in He Xinyin and Deng Huoqu was precisely what Li Zhi admired in them. The profound differences between Li Zhi and Geng Dingxiang were captured by Zhou Sijiu (1527–1592), who was friends with both, when he characterized Geng as someone who emphasized mingjiao, or the Confucian teachings of social order, but described Li Zhi as someone who excelled at capturing the truth through subtle intuition. Geng himself, however, strongly disagreed with these characterizations.¹²

In 1593, after almost a decade of tension between Li Zhi and Geng Dingxiang, the two, at the urging of several mutual friends, finally reconciled, although that did not necessarily mean that either had substantially revised his position on a variety of issues. However, it is probably worthwhile to examine a related incident that seems to have drawn them closer to each other. A brief look at this incident can serve as a good point of departure for our discussion of how Li Zhi tried to come to terms with the conflicts between his familial obligations and his passionate pursuit of friendship.

A few years after their reconciliation, Geng Dingxiang mentioned the delight he experienced when he read Li Zhi’s essay “Reading a Letter from Ruowu’s Mother” (Du Ruowu mu jishu; see also chapter 2).¹³ The essay recounts Li Zhi’s emotional reaction to reading a letter written by the mother of the monk Ruowu (Wang Shiben) to her son. In this letter, the mother begs her son not to leave her to pursue Buddhist enlightenment.¹⁴ Reading this letter made Li Zhi regret his own previous remarks congratulating Ruowu on taking the tonsure because he now realized that if one genuinely believed in Buddha one should start with the practice of filiality.¹⁵

One of the disputes between Geng Dingxiang and Li Zhi, according to the former, was that Li disregarded basic human relationships in his pursuit of comradeship and personal enlightenment. Apparently, Geng Dingxiang regarded Li Zhi’s expression of regrets and acknowledgment of his past mistakes as evidence that Li had now renounced his previous position on a man’s right to seek personal enlightenment and to take the Buddhist tonsure. However, despite his apparent regrets and acknowledgment of mistakes, Li Zhi’s views on the tension between one’s filial obligations and one’s right to seek the company of friends and personal enlightenment probably had not changed as much as Geng wanted to believe. First of all, what moved Li Zhi about the mother’s letter must have been the old woman’s almost Chan-like rhetoric, as she argued that the heart and mind must be “quiet.” To her, this took precedence over finding a tranquil environment in which to study the Dao, which her son gave as his reason for leaving her. She contended that if her son’s mind was quiet, then whether he sought his enlightenment at home or in a faraway temple should not matter. What further moved Li Zhi must have been the simple and genuine feelings of an aging mother. Elsewhere he condemned as hypocritical anyone who claimed to be a filial son yet neglected his parents’ health in order to seek career success far from home.¹⁶ As Wai-yee Li argues in chapter 1, what mattered to Li Zhi was being genuine in one’s feelings or beliefs: “When you want to pray to Buddha, pray to Buddha; when you want to visit your mother, visit your mother. One does not need to be affected; one does not need to go against one’s own nature; one does not need to go against one’s conscience; one does not need to suppress one’s own intention; following one’s own heart is true Buddha nature.”¹⁷ Li Zhi never questioned the validity of one’s filial love, but he did see much hypocrisy in the manipulation of the concept of filial piety by his many contemporaries.¹⁸

In his earlier defense of Ruowu’s taking the Buddhist tonsure, Li Zhi contended that even Confucius, though he never formally renounced his family (chujia), as Buddha Sakyamuni did, traveled throughout his life to seek soulmates for saving. Here Li Zhi employed the word chujia as a double entendre (switching between its literal meaning, “leaving family or home,” and its special meaning of “taking the Buddhist tonsure”; the latter was used anachronistically in the case of Confucius since Buddhism did not begin to influence China until long after the death of the Master). According to Li Zhi, Confucius was away from home all the time even though technically he “had remained home” and never undergone the ritual of renouncing family to take the tonsure. More significantly, Li Zhi confessed that he felt fortunate that he had no familial obligations to constrain him, since by that time his parents and wife had passed away.¹⁹ In other words, he believed that the conflicts between familial obligations and the right to seek soulmates for personal salvation had been resolved, since he had already fulfilled all his familial obligations. In fact, Li Zhi must have felt that a large part of his life was already devoted to the welfare of others in his family (taking care of his father and other family members): after passing the provincial examinations, he gave up the chance to continue to study for the prestigious jinshi degree because he had to find employment immediately to support his family. After the deaths of both parents and later his wife, and with his sisters and brothers having already started their own families, he finally felt that he was entitled to live for his own self.²⁰ However, some still deemed him unfilial since, although he had no heir, he refused to take a concubine.²¹ Once again he was forced to appeal to the example of Confucius for self-defense; according to Li, not only did Confucius travel extensively and seldom stay at home long, but after the death of his wife, Confucius also did not remarry. Apparently, Confucius was not that attached to the idea of family after all.²²

Of course, there were different kinds of family obligations. Like many of his contemporaries, Li Zhi apparently took far more seriously his duties toward his elders than his duties as a husband.²³ He could sometimes be quite indifferent toward his wife. When he was appointed prefect of Yao’an in Yunnan, he reluctantly agreed to take his wife along only after she repeatedly pleaded with him. She insisted on going to Yao’an with him because he had often failed to return home for long periods of time whenever he traveled elsewhere.²⁴ A few years later, when he decided to quit officialdom, he simply sent his wife back to his hometown so that he could embark on a journey seeking soulmates and personal enlightenment. He deplored that his wife was not an intellectual “comrade” for him,²⁵ yet he nevertheless regarded her with affection, as evidenced in some of the poems and letters he wrote after he learned that she had passed away.²⁶ Li Zhi’s complaint that his wife was never his spiritual companion and his apparent neglect of her may come as a surprise at first, given the views he expressed in his essay “On Husband and Wife” (Fufu lun). There, he argued eloquently for the importance of the husband-wife relationship.²⁷ The apparent discrepancy between the rather abstract views he put forth in that essay and his own behavior toward his wife points to gaps between his theory and practice. Viewed from a different angle, however, this may not necessarily be a case of inconsistency on Li Zhi’s part: precisely because he valued the husband-wife relationship so highly, his wife’s failure to be his spiritual companion must have greatly disappointed him.²⁸

On the other hand, several of Li Zhi’s friends believed that he simply lacked interest in women altogether or even loathed being intimate with women.²⁹ Whereas being able to have many friends was usually considered an important sign of manliness,³⁰ spending too much time with one’s wife and family was often considered detrimental to one’s image as a true man. Li Zhi considered confining oneself to the company of one’s wife and children something only a vulgar person would do.³¹ Jiao Hong observed in his eulogy for Li Zhi, “His willingness to die for his friends should put to shame those who only worry about how to preserve their own lives and protect their wives and children.”³² Here again, wife and family are cast as potentially compromising one’s manhood.

Yuan Zhongdao also observed that Li Zhi once praised the famous Tang poet Du Fu (712–770) for helping his friend Cen Cen (ca. 715–770) before attempting to rescue his own wife during the chaos caused by the An Lushan rebellion.³³ Another friend of Li Zhi’s, Li Cai (1520–ca. 1606), was once deeply moved by Li Zhi’s demonstration of friendship and wondered how he could have shed so many tears upon learning of the sufferings of a friend such as himself and yet remain utterly unmoved when he sent his own wife and daughter back to his hometown.³⁴ Apparently Li Zhi wanted his manhood to be defined by his willingness to place the interests of his friends above those of his own wife and family.³⁵

However, there were more pressing reasons for Li Zhi to leave behind his family. More than once he expressed the sentiment that his wife and family had become impediments to his pursuit of friendships and personal enlightenment, whereas having friends/comrades and achieving personal enlightenment were virtually inseparable. One of the main purposes of his chujia (taking the tonsure) was to make it easier to seek friendship and inquire about the Way throughout the four corners of the earth (sifang qiuyou wendao).³⁶

Whereas friends occupied a very important place in the lives of many enthusiastic proponents of philosophical debates (jiangxue), such as Wang Ji (1498–1583), Luo Hongxian (1504–1564), and Luo Rufang (1515–1588),³⁷ probably no one pursued friendship with such desperate passion as Li Zhi and no one gave up for the sake of friendship as much as Li Zhi did. As an enthusiastic participant in the jiangxue movement himself, Li Zhi was deeply influenced by Wang Ji and Luo Rufang, and he shared their view that without the help of friends and comrades it was difficult to master any true learning.³⁸ In his mind, regular participation in assemblies for philosophical debate (jianghui) was closely associated with opportunities to cherish the company of friends (zhongyou) and to realize the importance of the Way (zhongdao).³⁹

In Li Zhi’s case, friendship could also be much more personal. In a recent study, Xu Jianping mentions two possible reasons for Li Zhi’s obsession with friendship. First, the adult Li Zhi was probably seeking compensation in the company of his friends for his lost maternal love (his mother died when he was only a young child). He once admitted that as a child, he had very few friends. Later, the deaths of many of his family members also contributed to his loneliness; thus he conceived a more desperate need for friends. Second, he came to a fuller realization of the importance of friends when his friend Deng Lincai offered crucial help to his wife and children during the drought while he was away arranging the burial of his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father.⁴⁰ However, neither of these reasons explains why Li Zhi turned away from his family in his pursuit of friendship; for example, one may wonder why the loss of his mother early in life failed to make him cherish his relationship with his wife.

One thing that Li Zhi emphasized repeatedly about himself was his spirit of independence: “Ever since I lost Mother at six or seven, I have become quite capable of depending on myself. Now at seventy, I live by myself and am quite independent.”⁴¹ In explaining why he joined the Buddhist order instead of taking the less radical step of becoming a lay Buddhist, he said that joining the Buddhist order enabled him to achieve true independence, for if he merely became a lay Buddhist he would still have to take orders from local officials.⁴² It is this profound dread of having to take orders from others and his cherishing of independence that led Li Zhi to make the decision to quit his post as prefect of Yao’an and to take the Buddhist tonsure instead of returning home. Homeless and without income, he turned to his friends, believing these more egalitarian relationships would allow him to regain or even enhance his independence. He was only partly right.

TENSIONS WITHIN FRIENDSHIP(S) AND THE ISSUE OF LIFE AND DEATH

After leaving his family, did Li Zhi achieve the kind of independence he aspired to? One of the immediate consequences of his feud with Geng Dingxiang was the painful realization that he was never as independent as he believed himself to be. With virtually no regular income, economically he was totally dependent on his friends, a not so pleasant fact he probably did not fully appreciate until he had to leave the villa of the Geng brothers in Huang’an to find another place to live after the death of Geng Dingli and the deterioration of his relationship with Geng Dingxiang. In late 1584 Li Zhi had already tried to leave Huang’an, where he had lived for the past five years, to move to Macheng, but he had to postpone the move because he could not find accommodation there. (Probably he could not afford what he found.) Not until the third month of the following year was he able to make the move, after Zeng Zhongye, the son-in-law of his friend Zhou Sijiu, provided temporary housing for him in Macheng. Later Zhou Sijing (jinshi, 1568; Zhou Sijiu’s younger brother) had a house converted into a temple for Li Zhi to live in, a place Li Zhi would call home for the next three years.⁴³ Li Zhi once mentioned with deep gratitude the specific amount of money (seventy-two taels of silver) Zhou Sijing contributed to cover part of the cost of getting the temple ready for him. In a letter to Jiao Hong, Li Zhi expressed his gratitude to Yang Qiyuan (1547–1599) for asking Li’s disciple, the monk Wunian, to bring money to him from Nanjing.⁴⁴ Another time, Li Zhi had to ask for funds from his friend to build a Chan studio for himself.⁴⁵ In addition to his livelihood, Li Zhi’s scholarship depended on the goodwill of his friends, since he had to obtain financial support from others in order to have his works published.⁴⁶

Obviously, Li Zhi was keenly aware of his economic dependence on his friends. Once he had to cancel his plan to visit Jiao Hong in Nanjing for fear that he could become a financial burden on his friend, whose financial situation then was precarious.⁴⁷ In another letter, Li Zhi asked Jiao Hong not to worry about him because as a mendicant he could look for food wherever he went since there would likely be almsgivers everywhere.⁴⁸ Ironically, the image of a mendicant captured Li Zhi’s homelessness as well as his economic dependency.

Living on the goodwill of others (even one’s friends) was probably never as “liberating” as Li Zhi had thought it would be, and later in life he often complained about loneliness. At the death of Geng Dingli and the break with Geng Dingxiang, his loneliness only deepened.⁴⁹ When the feud with Geng Dingxiang escalated, many of Li Zhi’s best friends who were also good friends or students of Geng Dingxiang’s had to choose between them. During the heated moments of their feud, Li Zhi must have felt very disappointed that few of these friends came to his defense while several of them openly sided with Geng. Such disappointment became even more bitter precisely because these friends were often those he cherished most and because he was a person who lived for his friends. For example, after Li Zhi’s rupture with Geng, Guan Zhidao (1537–1608), one of Geng’s disciples, wrote Li Zhi to ridicule him, and Zhou Sijing, one of Li Zhi’s best friends, deliberately distanced himself.⁵⁰ At the same time Li Zhi was also aware of the quandary his feud with Geng must have caused for many of their common friends. A dozen years later, after he and Geng had reconciled, Li Zhi became even more appreciative of the sacrifices made for him by friends caught in between, such as Zhou Sijing, who was Geng’s student and relative but who nevertheless did his best to help Li.⁵¹

Another of Li Zhi’s close friends caught in the feud was Jiao Hong, who also happened to be a student of Geng Dingxiang’s. Historians have noted many signs of awkwardness in their relationship after the hostilities became public.⁵² People could well imagine the frustrations Li Zhi must have felt given the importance of his friendship with Jiao Hong. Indeed, even before the strain on his relationship with Geng Dingxiang became publicized, Li Zhi expressed his frustrations in an essay titled “On Mr. Li’s Ten Kinds of Friends.” He complains that he has yet to find a friend to whom he can entrust “life and death.”⁵³ In this essay he divides his friends into ten categories, the highest being what he terms “friends of life and death” (shengsi zhi jiao) and the second highest being “friends of the heart” (xindan zhi jiao). He regarded Zhou Sijing as a friend who really understood him, whereas elsewhere in his writings he characterized others, such as Yang Dingjian, as friends who were merely emotionally close to him: “Although I could not consider them friends who really understand me [xiangzhi], I have to deem them friends who really love me [xiang’ai].”⁵⁴ In other words, although Li Zhi felt emotionally attached to people such as Yang Dingjian who provided for his material needs, he did not consider them close intellectual companions. And yet he did not shy away from the fact that the friends he socialized with most frequently, and probably needed most on a daily basis, were friends who could share wine and food with him. He relegated them to the end of his list of categories of friendship, despite the fact that he relied heavily on their generosity for his daily survival.⁵⁵ However, such reliance did not stop him from pursuing his ideal friends. Furthermore, what Li Zhi cherished most in a friendship was intellectual companionship rather than emotional closeness, although the latter was also important. He insisted that common people’s understanding that a friend was merely someone emotionally close or intimate was inadequate (“tuyi jiejiao qinmi zhe wei zhi you”).⁵⁶ For him, a true friend also had to be someone who was intellectually worthy of the title of a teacher, someone he could learn from. However, what is particularly surprising is that he even regarded Zhou Sijing as belonging to only the second tier, “friends of the heart,” rather than the top tier, “friends in life and death.”⁵⁷ Consequently, his best friends, such as Zhou Sijing and Jiao Hong, still fell short of his highest ideal of friendship.

One of the important criteria by which Li Zhi judged whether someone fit his ideal of friendship appears to be whether that friend was intellectually curious enough to be interested in the fundamental issue of life and death, a question he himself had become obsessed with in the second half of his life.⁵⁸ He felt that some of his best friends, such as Jiao Hong, were too worldly to be fully interested in the issue of life and death, and he was disappointed that in Nanjing, where he was staying at that time, he could not find anyone seriously interested in this issue.⁵⁹ He expressed similar disappointment in another friend and colleague, Gu Yangqian (1537–1604): “Although Gu Tongzhou [Gu Yangqian] loves [ai] me and his moral character is also worth my emulation, he does not pay too much attention to the question of ‘life and death.’ ”⁶⁰

That Li Zhi’s pursuit of friendship was inevitably tragic is a view shared by some of his contemporaries who were convinced that he had such a high standard that people were bound to disappoint him.⁶¹ Since his standards were too high and he was probably too frank and straightforward in his dealings with others, he tended to alienate many of his friends. In one of his letters to Zhou Sijiu’s son after Zhou’s death, Li Zhi sought understanding by acknowledging that his own quick temper might have contributed to generating the dispute between himself and Zhou.⁶² Indeed, striking the right balance between criticizing a friend whom he believed to be at fault and maintaining harmony was a delicate issue that anyone serious about friendship has to face, and Li Zhi was not very successful in this regard. That was probably why he bitterly complained that it was much harder to be a genuine friend who was willing to point out the mistakes of his friend than to be a minister who openly criticized the emperor with the expectation that he might be put to death for upsetting the sovereign. This was because a man would get nothing from criticizing his friend (except that the two might become enemies), whereas the minister who dared to criticize the emperor was guaranteed to win a reputation for “remonstrating at the risk of death,” even if the emperor did not actually execute him.⁶³

In the last few years of his life, Li Zhi complained even more frequently about the hardships and loneliness associated with his life as a self-styled mendicant. He once asked, “I have wandered around throughout my life. When will I be able to settle down?”⁶⁴ As the aging Li Zhi sensed death approaching, his search for a friend in whose company he could die peacefully intensified. When Jiao Hong tried to persuade him to return to Dragon Lake, the site of his temple-residence, because he suspected that some of Li’s enemies might try to have him killed, Li Zhi replied:

I learned that you were able to stop someone from trying to have me killed. I am very grateful to you for that. However, I would rather travel beyond the Great Wall and die in a foreign land, since in the Middle Kingdom I have not been able to find anyone who truly understands me, even though I was born in this country. Why should you urge me to return to Dragon Lake? Dragon Lake is not a resting place for me because I will only die in a place where I have real friends and someone who can truly understand me.… Given no chance to die among friends, I would much prefer to die in prison or on the battlefield.… Generally speaking, a man who does not want to die for the sake of his wife and children is determined to die for the sake of his friends. The reason for this should be quite obvious.⁶⁵

Ironically, “to die in prison” became his self-fulfilling prophecy. (Also note his negative reference to “dying for the sake of one’s wife and children.”)

Elsewhere Li Zhi repeatedly expressed his disappointment that he could not find any real friend for whom he would die or in whose company he could die. To find a friend or friends in whose company he could die became a mission that constantly occupied his mind as he was getting old: “Now I have grown old and have few friends [close by]. Reading books all day is not what an old man should do. At the moment I am only waiting to die. If I don’t want to die in the company of my wife and other family members or among those pseudo neo-Confucians, in whose company should I die?”⁶⁶ He sometimes even became impatient that death was approaching too slowly: “Death did not come to me this year and it will not come to me next year. Each year I expect to die. Disaster came, but death did not.”⁶⁷ Not long before his arrest and eventual suicide, he wrote in his will, “Since spring I have often been ill and I am anxious to bid farewell to this world. Fortunately, I am going to die in the company of my good friends if I die now. Such a happy arrangement is difficult to accomplish and I feel very lucky. You should not fail to know the importance of this matter.”⁶⁸ Now staying with his new friend Ma Jinglun, who admired him tremendously, Li Zhi appears to have finally found a friend in whose company he could die content, although he probably would not regard the much younger Ma Jinglun as a friend belonging to the top category of his “ten kinds of friends.” Unfortunately, he would soon be arrested and deprived of the company of even this friend.

In many ways, for Li Zhi the values of true friendship could be fully understood and appreciated only in the context of death. Interestingly, he closely associated friendship with death in that he always considered a good friend someone worth dying for or somebody in whose company one would be happy to die. Such close association of friendship with death probably had its origin in Li Zhi’s own life-long obsession with the issue of death (discussed in chapter 11). This obsession might have a lot to do with his trying to come to grips with the sudden deaths of many of his family members. (All his four sons and two of his three daughters died very young.) As he reached old age himself, the issue of how to come to terms with death became even more urgent and personal.⁶⁹ His seeking a true friend was tied to his attempts to confront the approach of his own death. In his essay “On Five Ways of Dying,” Li Zhi lists what he considered five honorable ways of dying, using historical figures as illustrations. Almost all of them had died either for someone who had demonstrated real appreciation of their talent or for a great cause (benefiting the society or country). At the end of the essay, Li Zhi turns to discuss the limited options for death available to himself:

There must be a reason for the birth of a true man. If so, how could this man die without a proper reason? If there is a cause of his birth, there must be good reason for his death.… Now I have grown old and won’t be able to die in any of the five ways that I have mentioned above. If I cannot die in one of these ways, to die otherwise would certainly not be how a heroic man should behave. Then how should I choose the way I die? The only option left is to make a few small deals. I left my hometown long ago and gave up my servants. I have come all the way here in search of a buyer [someone who really understands my worth]. However, I have yet to find any soulmates. How could I die without any soulmates? I understand striking a great deal is already something beyond my reach. Being a heroic man and lacking both any outlet for my frustrations and any soulmates worth dying for, I would die among those who have failed to understand me just in order to give vent to my pent-up frustrations. I wrote this to inform those who claim to understand me: when you come to see me after learning of my death, do not collect my body!⁷⁰

Li Zhi’s reference to that elusive “true friend” as a “buyer,” who, however, refuses to show up, had much to do with the traditional emphasis on the centrality of “recognition” in a relationship between two men, whether or not they were social equals.⁷¹ However, such blunt insistence on the parallel between “finding and dying for a true friend” and a business transaction did have its intended shock value. It was as if Li Zhi wanted to remind people of the ambiguities associated with friendship, something he had already tried to come to terms with when he was classifying his friends and acquaintances. At the same time, we can also feel his tremendous frustration at being unable to die the way he wanted because he could not find a true friend (a buyer, to use his word) to die for. For him, a true friend was someone to whom he could entrust his “life and death” and who was as deeply concerned with the fundamental question of life and death as he was. Given his almost overwhelming concern with how he should meet his death and the important role he assigned to a friend in helping him to transcend death, friendship acquired an importance for him that was almost religious. By insisting on dying for a true friend or dying in the company of a true friend, Li Zhi seems to have proposed a new concept of wulun, in which friendship was elevated to the most sacred position. Friendship became almost “transcendental,” for he believed it would be able to help him overcome the boundary between life and death. The fervor with which he pursued friendship and his obsession with the issue of life and death were certainly related to the jiangxue movement and some of its members’ zealous pursuit of transcendence, which was also quite religious.⁷²

Li Zhi’s tragic pursuit of friendship highlighted and dramatized the tension between family and friends in the life of a man completely devoted to studying the Way. Being unable to die in the company of a true friend, he chose to die in jail rather than be forced to go back to his hometown to die. Such adamant rejection of family, home, and native place must have appeared quite shocking to many of his more conservative contemporaries.⁷³ The case of Li Zhi was probably unique at that time, but it points to the potential and yet serious threats friendship could pose to the sanctity of the most sacred Confucian institution: family. Thanks to the unprecedentedly radical nature of his approach to friendship, Li Zhi personified the pluralistic intellectual atmosphere of the late sixteenth-century China, when friendship enjoyed a degree of legitimacy it never had before. At the same time, his tragedy highlighted the potential conflicts between friendship and family that orthodox Confucians were often reluctant to confront.⁷⁴ In a way, contrary to the arguments made by more conservative late-Ming promoters of friendship—namely, that friendship was beneficial to the other four human relationships—Li Zhi’s case painfully demonstrated to people then and later that friendship, when pursued as passionately as he pursued it, could fundamentally challenge the ethical underpinning of the orthodox Confucian understandings of the most important human relationships. Moreover, it could call into question the carefully constructed hierarchical order envisioned among these relationships. Indeed, no one had challenged the Confucian limits of friendship as rigorously as Li Zhi did, both in theory and in practice. Although the perceived radicality of his approach to friendship almost predetermined its tragic outcome, his influence on his contemporaries and the people of later generations in terms of how friendship was theorized and practiced cannot be underestimated.

NOTES

1.   1    “Deng Lincai zhuan,” in Neijiang xianzhi, j. 1, quoted in Lin Haiquan, Li Zhi nianpu kaolüe, 151.

2.   2    See Martin Huang, “Male Friendship in Ming China”; Timothy Billings, introduction to Ricci, On Friendship.

3.   3    Li Zhi, “Wusi pian,” in LZ 2:69.

4.   4    On Li Zhi’s image, see chapter 6.

5.   5    Yuan Zhongdao, “Dai Hushang shu,” in Kexuezhai ji, 807. Elsewhere Yuan Zhongdao quotes Li Zhi as saying that as long as he could enjoy the company of a few good friends, there was no need for him to return to his hometown (“Li Wenling zhuan,” in Kexuezhai ji, 720).

6.   6    Li Zhi, “Yu Wu Dechang,” in LZ 3:55.

7.   7    Martin Huang, “Male Friendship and Jiangxue.”

8. 8    Li Zhi, “Qiongtu shuo,” in LZ 3:210; more on this later.

9.   9    Geng Dingxiang, “Lizhong san yi zhuan,” in Geng Tiantai xiansheng wenji, in Mingren wenji congkan, 6.30a (1633).

10. 10    Li Zhi, “Yu Jiao Yiyuan Taishi” and “Nanxun lu xu,” in LZ 3:86 and 3:191.

11. 11    Li Zhi, “He Xinyin lun,” in LZ 1:246. Li Zhi faced the similar accusation that he “had disregarded the basic principles of human relationships” (qi renlun); Li Zhi, “Fu Deng Shiyang,” in LZ 1:25.

12. 12    Geng Dingxiang, letter 18 in the twenty-one letters under the title “Yu Zhou Liutang,” in Geng Tiantai xiansheng wenji, in Mingren wenji congkan, 3.54a (352).

13. 13    Geng Dingxiang, “Du Li Zhuowu yu Wang seng Ruowu shu,” in Geng Tiantai xiansheng wenji, in Mingren wenji congkan, 19a–23b (1861–68). While in her chapter Epstein demonstrates the importance Li Zhi attached to the Confucian notion of filiality, in this chapter I draw attention to his differences from those more conservative in terms of his view of specific filial obligations. For example, as I discuss later, he refused to remarry or take a concubine even though he did not have a male heir. Apparently, he carefully distinguished between his obligations to his elders and responsibilities to his wife and children. For him, family could have different meanings, depending on whether it included parents.

14. 14    Li Zhi, “Du Ruowu mu jishu,” in LZ 2:19.

15. 15    Li Zhi, “Du Ruowu mu jishu,” in LZ 2:19.

16. 16    Li Zhi, “Fu Deng Shiyang,” in LZ 1:25. Elsewhere, Li Zhi argues that filiality cannot be taught, implying it is innate (“Yu Jiao Ruohou Taishi,” in LZ 3:50).

17. 17    Li Zhi, “Shiyan sanshou,” in LZ 1:199.

18. 18    In fact Li Zhi repeatedly advised others not to take the tonsure (chujia) if they could be lay Buddhists (zaijia xiuxing) while citing himself as an exceptional case (“Yu Zeng Jiquan,” in LZ 1:129). See also chapter 6.

19. 19    Li Zhi, “Shu Huang’an er Shangren shouce,” in LZ 1:363. Elsewhere, Li Zhi defended Ruowu’s taking the tonsure as an act of great filiality because it was aimed to save all under Heaven as a way to repay the kindness of his mother (“Daxiao yishou,” in LZ 1:194). This is a conventional defensive tactic against the accusation that taking the tonsure and leaving one’s family were unfilial acts.

20. 20    Li Zhi, “Fu Deng Shiyang,” in LZ 1:25.

21. 21    Li Zhi, “Da Geng Sikou,” in LZ 1:76–77. According to Li Zhi, Geng Dingxiang complained that Li’s otherworldly (chaotuo) lifestyle and his neglect of the important matter of his own male heir in particular might have a bad influence on Geng’s own son.

22. 22    Li Zhi, “Fu Deng Shiyang,” in LZ 1:25. (Here Li Zhi is defending the controversial monk Deng Houqu rather than himself, but self-defense was certainly part of his agenda.) On Li Zhi’s refusal to take a concubine, see also chapter 6.

23. 23    Li Zhi, “Zhuowu lunlüe,” in LZ 1:233–35. For a discussion of this autobiography, see chapters 1 and 2. See also Wu, The Confucian’s Progress, 19–24. To a modern reader, in this account of the dispute with his wife, the image of Li Zhi is that of a very unsympathetic or even callous husband. However, this might well be the kind of masculine image Li Zhi was seeking, which might not have been problematic to many of his contemporary male readers.

24. 24    Li Zhi, “Zeng Yao’an shou Wenling Li xiansheng zhishi qu Dian xu,” in LZ 1:189.

25. 25    Li Zhi, “Da Liu Jinchuan shu,” in LZ 1:140. For Li Zhi’s complaint that his wife could not understand him, see “Ji Jiao Ruohou,” in LZ 3:30.

26. 26    See his letter to his son-in-law, “Yu Zhuang Chunfu,” in LZ 1:108, and the six poems titled “Ku Huang yiren,” in LZ 2:262–63. Living far from his hometown, Li Zhi apparently never attended his wife’s funeral.

27. 27    Li Zhi, “Fufu lun,” in LZ 1:251–52.

28. 28    Another factor to be considered is that this essay was probably written by Li Zhi shortly after he learned of his wife’s death (see Lin Haiquan, Li Zhi nianpu kaolüe, 202–3). It might have been related to his guilt about neglecting his wife (a feeling he had expressed in some of his compositions mourning his wife, such as the poems “Ku Huang yiren liu shou,” in LZ 2:262–65.). Li Zhi’s ideal would have been to find a best friend among his own family members. He once told Geng Dingxiang that Geng was extremely fortunate to have been able to find his best friend within his own family (namely, in his younger brother Geng Dingli); see Li Zhi, “Fu Geng Zhongcheng,” in LZ 1:212.

29. 29    Yuan Zhongdao, “Li Wenling zhuan,” in Kexuezhai ji, 720. See also the testimony of Ma Jinglun, one of Li Zhi’s admirers and friends, who tried to help him when he was arrested in 1602: “Yu Zhangke Li Linye zhuan shang Xiao Sikou” and “Li Zhi shengping zhuanji ziliao huibian,” in Li Zhi yanjiu cankao ziliao 2:54–55. Ma equates a man’s tendency to study hard with his disinterest in women, implying that a manly man like Li Zhi, who studied so hard, would take little interest in women (thus refuting the accusation that Li Zhi was a womanizer). For discussion of Li Zhi’s manliness and his relations with women, see chapter 6.

30. 30    Li Zhi certainly shared this view; see the second letter in “Fu Gu Chong’an weng shu, you shu,” in LZ 1:186.

31. 31    Li Zhi, “Wusi pian,” in LZ 2:69.

32. 32    “Zuijian shu,” in Li Wenling waiji, reprinted in “Li Zhi shengping zhuanji ziliao huibian” in Li Zhi yanjiu cankao ziliao 2:67. This is a common phrase used to ridicule the unmanliness of officials who were disloyal to the throne due to their fear of losing their own lives in critical situations. See Sima Qian, “Bao Ren’an shu,” in Yan Kejun, Quan Shanggu Sandai Qin Han Sanguo Liuchao wen, 501.

33. 33    Yuan Zhongdao, Zuolin jitan in LZ 18:309.

34. 34    Li Jianluo (Li Cai), “Wei Zhongxian chanke shujuan,” in Zhengxue tang gao, vol. 34, reprinted in Li Zhi yanjiu cankao ziliao 2:31.

35. 35    Li Zhi appears to have had quite a strong sense of how a masculine man should behave and how such a man should die. See “Wusi pian,” in LZ 2:69. His obsession with his masculine image can also be confirmed by the high frequency with which the term zhangfu (true man) appears in his writings: twenty-four times in Fenshu and Xu Fenshu (based on a search of the electronic texts of these two works in the online database Guoxue baodian).

36. 36    Li Zhi, “Da Li Weiqing,” in LZ 3:73.

37. 37    Martin Huang, “Male Friendship and Jiangxue.”

38. 38    Li Zhi, “Da Shen Wang,” in LZ 3:128–29. On Li Zhi’s relationships with these two masters, see chapter 5.

39. 39    Li Zhi, “Huiqi xiaoqi,” in LZ 1:181. In fact, one of Li Zhi’s major disappointments with his wife was her lack of interest in jiangxue (see “Yu Zhuang Chunfu,” in LZ 1:108).

40. 40    Xu Jianping, Li Zhi sixiang yanbianshi, 141–43.

41. 41    Li Zhi, “Yu Geng Kenian,” in LZ 3:65.

42. 42    Li Zhi, “Gankai pingsheng,” in LZ 2:109.

43. 43    Li Zhi, “Yuyue,” in LZ 2:104–5.

44. 44    Li Zhi, “Fu Jiao Ruohou,” in LZ 1:110. In his letter “Yu Pan Xuesong,” in LZ 3:123, Li Zhi told Pan not to worry about the expense of his trip to Beijing because everything was already taken care of.

45. 45    Li Zhi, “Da Liu Jinchuan shu,” in LZ 1:140.

46. 46    Li Zhi, “Yu Fang Ren’an,” in LZ 3:24. On the publication of Li Zhi’s writings, see chapter 8.

47. 47    Li Zhi, “Yu Ruohou Jiao Taishi,” in LZ 3:69.

48. 48    Li Zhi, “Fu Jiao Ruohou,” in LZ 3:34. In his discussion of the financial assistance Li Zhi received from his gentry-official friends, Ray Huang emphasizes how their help enabled Li Zhi to lead a relatively comfortable life. Huang’s analysis aims to refute some mainland Chinese scholars’ attempts to characterize Li as the “spokesman for the peasantry against the exploiting classes” (1587, 189, 194–95).

49. 49    See Li Zhi, “Shu Changshun shoujuan cheng Gu Chong’an,” in LZ 1:230. It was probably written in 1589 (see Lin Haiquan, Li Zhi nianpu kaolüe, 216). See also Li Zhi, “Gaojie shuo,” in LZ 1:294–95 (probably written in the same year), where he defends himself against the accusation that he is too arrogant to have many friends.

50. 50    Cf. Li Zhi, “Yu Zeng Zhongye,” in LZ 1:128. In this same letter (probably written in 1590) Li Zhi also mentions that he is quite relieved that with the help of Zeng, he has reconciled with Zhou Sijiu. The strained relationship with Zhou was apparently related to Li Zhi’s dispute with Geng Dingxiang. It was said that some years later, when Zhou Sijing (Sijiu’s younger brother) learned of the reconciliation between Li Zhi and Geng Dingxiang, he shed tears of joy. See Zhou’s postscript to Li Zhi’s “Geng Chukong xiansheng zhuan,” in LZ 2:22–23.

51. 51    Li Zhi, “Da Mei Qiongyu,” in LZ 3:74.

52. 52    Zuo, Li Zhi yu wan Ming wenxue sixiang, 114.

53. 53    Li Zhi, “Li sheng shijiao wen,” in LZ 1:354 (most likely written in 1583; see Lin Haiquan, Li Zhi nianpu kaolüe, 139).

54. 54    Li Zhi, “Qiongtu shuo,” in LZ, vol. 3.

55. 55    Li Zhi, “Li sheng shijiao wen,” in LZ 1:354.

56. 56    Li Zhi, “Zhenshi,” in LZ 1:197. Obviously, Li Zhi was following Confucius’s admonishment “Do not accept as friend anyone who is not as good as you” (“Xue’er,” in Yang Bojun, Lunyu yizhu, 8; Lau, The Analects, 1.8, 60). In his writings, Li Zhi frequently used the term shengji (someone morally or intellectually superior to oneself) as an alternative term for “good friend” (see, for example, “Yu Jiao Ruohou,” in LZ 3:19). Although teacher/friend (shiyou) was quite a common concept in late-imperial Chinese culture, as Rivi Handler-Spitz mentions in chapter 5, Li Zhi’s observation on the tendency of many of his contemporaries to consider “emotional closeness” or “intimacy” the defining element in friendship is very interesting, pointing to the emotional aspect of the late-imperial conceptualization of friendship, which, however, was not a prominent topic in more formal contemporary discourses on friendship. On the other hand, Li Zhi also argued that one must not take as a teacher anyone in whom one did not feel comfortable confiding (“Zhenshi,” in LZ 1:197–98).

57. 57    Li Zhi, “Li Sheng shijiao wen,” in LZ 1:354.

58. 58    For a discussion of Li Zhi and the issue of life and death, see chapter 11.

59. 59    Li Zhi, “Yu Ruohou Jiao Taishi,” in LZ 3:69.

60. 60    Li Zhi, “Da Liu Jinchuan shu,” in LZ 1:140.

61. 61    “Xiling tongzhi” in “Baichan gongde shu,” Li Wenlin waiji, j. 1, reprinted in “Li Zhi shengping zhuanji ziliao huibian” in Li Zhi yanjiu cankao ziliao 2:68.

62. 62    Li Zhi, “Yu Zhou Guiqing,” in LZ 3:99.

63. 63    Li Zhi, “Da Geng Sikou,” in LZ 1:71.

64. 64    Li Zhi, “Yu Fengli,” in LZ 3:115.

65. 65    Li Zhi, “Yu Jiao Ruohou,” in LZ 1:153.

66. 66    Li Zhi, “Shu Changshun shoujuan cheng Gu Chong’an,” in LZ 1:231.

67. 67    Li Zhi, “Yu Zhou Youshan,” in LZ 3:35.

68. 68    Li Zhi, “Li Zhuowu xiansheng yiyan,” in LZ 3:314.

69. 69    Cf. Xu Jianping, Li Zhi sixiang yanbianshi, 351–66.

70. 70    Li Zhi, “Wusi pian,” in LZ 2:69.

71. 71    For a discussion of this “recognition” motif in writings from early China, see Henry, “The Motif of Recognition.” Many cases Henry examines are related to the relationships between powerful lords and their retainers.

72. 72    See Martin Huang, “Male Friendship and Jiangxue.”

73. 73    Li Zhi might have believed that what he did was not that radical. As I mentioned earlier, he must have felt that he had decided to pursue friendship and personal enlightenment away from his family and hometown only after he had already fulfilled all his familial obligations. At least, it seems that he was not intentionally trying to be radical in this regard.

74. 74    Orthodox Confucian discourse emphasizes the commonality among all the five relationships, namely, a good minister/subject makes a good friend; a good friend in turn makes a good son. See, for example, Zhongyong (The Doctrine of the Mean), in Legge, The Chinese Classics, 1:412.