Cheng Hao

Life and Historical Context

Cheng Hao (程顥, 1032–1085), courtesy name Mingdao (明道), was a central figure in the early development of Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism. Born in Luoyang in the Northern Song dynasty, he came from a scholarly family and, along with his younger brother Cheng Yi (程頤), became one of the most influential interpreters of the Confucian classics in Chinese intellectual history.

Cheng Hao passed the civil service examinations at a young age and held a series of official posts. His governmental career, however, was often interrupted by political tensions. Like many literati of his era, he was caught amid debates over reform policies, factional rivalries, and the proper role of the scholar-official. Although he occasionally supported reform-oriented positions, his lasting importance lies less in policy and more in his efforts to articulate a comprehensive philosophical vision rooted in Confucian moral concerns.

Cheng Hao’s teaching activity, especially during his periods away from high office, attracted numerous students, some of whom became important transmitters of his thought. He died in 1085, but his influence expanded in later centuries. In the Southern Song, thinkers such as Zhu Xi (1130–1200) regarded Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi as major predecessors, often referred to jointly as the “Two Chengs” (二程), and integrated much of their work into the mainstream Cheng–Zhu school of Neo-Confucianism.

Metaphysics and View of Human Nature

At the heart of Cheng Hao’s philosophy is a distinctive account of li (理, often translated as “principle,” “pattern,” or “coherence”) and xing (性, “nature”). For Cheng, li is the pervasive, organizing principle of the cosmos: it is not a separate substance but the intelligible pattern or norm that all things share. He is often associated with the slogan “the myriad things and I form one body” (萬物一體), which expresses the idea that all beings are linked through the same underlying li.

Cheng Hao emphasized the unity of li and human nature. He drew on the Confucian and Mencian tradition to argue that human nature is originally good, because it directly partakes in this universal principle. The innate moral dispositions (such as compassion, shame, deference, and a sense of right and wrong, famously listed by Mencius) are for Cheng Hao concrete manifestations of li within the human heart-mind (xin, 心).

This led him to argue that the distinction between “heavenly principle” and human nature is, at root, only conceptual. In his view, when one speaks of li in the world, one speaks of the same structure that, within the person, appears as moral nature. This stance, sometimes labeled a more “monistic” or “immanent” interpretation of li, is contrasted by some scholars with the more systematized metaphysics of Zhu Xi, who later distinguished sharply between li and material force (qi, 氣).

Cheng Hao also developed an account of qi, the dynamic, material-energetic aspect of reality. While li is constant and normative, qi is variable and can be clear or turbid. Differences in moral character and psychological disposition arise from the varying endowments of qi, even though the underlying li remains the same. This framework allowed him to explain moral failings and emotional disturbances without denying the fundamental goodness of human nature.

Interpreters disagree over the extent to which Cheng Hao’s position should be understood as metaphysical realism about li (treating it as an independently existing structure) or as a more ethical-experiential account emphasizing the lived unity of self and world. Proponents of the former view see him as a key architect of a metaphysical system later elaborated by Zhu Xi. Others contend that Cheng Hao was more concerned with moral phenomenology—how the sense of unity with others arises in experience—than with building a strict ontological doctrine.

Ethics, Cultivation, and Legacy

Ethically, Cheng Hao focused on moral cultivation as the process of recovering one’s original good nature. Since li is already fully present within the heart-mind, the problem is not acquiring morality from outside but removing obscurations caused by selfish desires, confusion, and the turbid aspects of qi. He emphasized sincerity (誠, cheng) and reverent attentiveness (敬, jing) as central virtues that stabilize the mind and allow moral awareness to emerge.

Cheng Hao’s reflections on emotion were particularly influential. He did not advocate suppressing emotions; instead, he argued for aligning emotions with li so that feelings become appropriate responses to moral situations. Compassion for others, for example, expresses the underlying unity of all beings; to act indifferently would be to deny one’s own nature. This attention to lived emotional life distinguished his approach from more purely ritual or legalistic strands of Confucian thought.

In education, Cheng Hao stressed close reading of the classics—especially the Analects, Mencius, and the Book of Changes—combined with self-reflection in everyday conduct. He urged students to treat family and social roles as primary sites of practice, where the Confucian virtues of ren (仁, humaneness), yi (義, righteousness), li (禮, ritual propriety), and zhi (智, wisdom) could be realized.

Cheng Hao’s legacy is complex. Later Neo-Confucians, particularly Zhu Xi, treated the Two Chengs as authoritative sources and incorporated many of their formulations into a grand synthesis. At the same time, Zhu Xi critiqued and reinterpreted aspects of Cheng Hao’s more unitary emphasis on li and human nature, seeking greater systematic separation between principle and material force. In contrast, other currents of thought, such as the Lu–Wang school (associated with Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming), later found inspiration in Cheng Hao’s stress on the immediacy of moral knowing and the idea that principle is wholly present in the mind.

Modern scholarship often situates Cheng Hao as a bridge between classical Confucian ethics and the metaphysically articulated Neo-Confucian systems of the Southern Song. Some historians highlight his role in deepening the cosmological stakes of Confucianism by interpreting human moral life as continuous with the order of Heaven. Others focus on his analysis of moral psychology and emotional life as anticipatory of later debates on innate knowledge and conscience in East Asian philosophy.

Despite the brevity of his life, Cheng Hao remains a key figure for understanding the transformation of Confucianism in the Song dynasty. His articulation of the unity of li, the goodness of human nature, and the centrality of moral cultivation through everyday relationships continues to inform both historical studies and contemporary reinterpretations of Confucian ethics and East Asian moral philosophy.