Song Reviews “Lure of the Supreme Joy: Pedagogy and Environment in the Neo-Confucian Academies of Zhu Xi” (By Xin Conan-Wu. Brill 2024) in the 2025, No. 80 issue of Journal of Chinese Studies.

Excerpt:

If Tian (天) is translated as “nature,” the upper-case Nature designates the broadest realm of being—one beyond which human imagination cannot reach. It encompasses the ritualized human world as an integral part of its order. When Zeng Dian immerses himself in this Nature, his excursion is neither solitary (as he “assembles a company of five or six young people and six or seven children”) nor detached from the human world (since the group “enjoys the breeze upon the Rain Dance Altar and then returns singing to their residence”). Rather, the harmonious, dynamic, and spontaneous unfolding of cosmic unity between human individuals and the totality of being gives rise to a profound sense of joy, ecstasy, and mystery—an experience from which a distinctly Ruist form of “religious experience” emerges. (p.236)

A full version:

Other book reviews by Bin Song linked here.