Rethinking Neo-Confucian lineages and literary prestige

Earlier scholarship has concentrated heavily on a small number of canonical philosophers and texts. In a 2018 survey of 530 Korean Confucian scholars, Cha found that T’oegye 退溪 (1501–1570) alone accounted for 23 percent of published case studies in a major journal database, while sixteen philosophers comprised half of the total. The question was whether this skewed picture could be redrawn from the bottom up using a more balanced and comprehensive body of empirical evidence.

Korean Neo-Confucianism presents a particularly revealing case because its transmission depended less on direct personal contact than on the movement of texts. Korean scholars accorded Zhu Xi a position of exceptional authority, but their intellectual formation also drew heavily on Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), Su Shi, Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072), Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086), and other masters associated with ancient-style literature, or guwen 古文 in Chinese and komun 고문 in Korean.

Genealogy, claimed and attested

Bowed lines are claimed descent: solid where the reading is attested, dashed where the lineage is a retrospective construction. This is historical genealogy, not the provenance of a claim.

The diagram continues to the right — scroll it sideways.

In 2022, Cha and a team completed an annotated English translation of ten examination essays by Su Shi and their Korean emulation by the court academician Sŏng Hyŏn 成俔 (1439–1504), titled “Ten Essays Modeled after Su Shi” (ŭi Tongp’a simnon 擬東坡十論). Playing Heaven will generate a further set of ten essays under the same examination formula, producing a comparative corpus of Su Shi, Sŏng Hyŏn, and AI. The generated essays will serve as comparative instruments for clarifying what “imitation” or “modeling” (擬) entailed in practice.

Two problems remain central. The first is how to move concretely from distilled outputs to sound historical generalization. The second is how to connect the expression of ideas to their demonstrable effects on institutions, policy, and the lives of contemporaries.

Imitation 擬

Three layers of the same formula, kept distinct: Su Shi, Sŏng Hyŏn's emulation, and an AI comparative set written to the same examination formula. The generated set is an instrument of comparison and is never presented as a documented source.