Causation in East Asian and Southeast Asian Philosophy

After the fall of the Han dynasty, China's cultural tradition diversified as a result of the entrance of Buddhism, which gave rise to the expansion of Daoism and the resurgence of Confucianism. The theories of historical causation also flourished. Yet a general tendency remained identifiable, marked by the decline of the notion of a Heaven–humanity correlation. This decline was shown in the tradition, established in the seventh century, of writing official dynastic histories, which, following Ban Gu's model, purported to draw analogies from the history of previous dynasties for the benefit of the reigning dynasty. Hence the writing of dynastic historiography amounted to a serious effort to find specific causal relations in history, rather than to apply the mysterious and superstitious correlative idea. In his Zizhi tongjian (A comprehensive mirror of aid for government), Sima Guang (1019–1086) made a valiant attempt to generalize the causes for the successes and failures of the previous rulers. Of the important ones identified by him, few were attributed to the will of Heaven.

Yet the notion of Heaven remained important. Influenced by the metaphysics of Buddhism, the Neo-Confucians of the Song period (960–1279), such as Zhu Xi (1130–1200), averred that li (principle), or tianli (heavenly principle), was the ultimate cause for the change of history, commanding the ebb and flow of good and evil times. At the same time, they searched for tianli's various worldly manifestations in order to demonstrate and explain the mutability and temporality of life and history. This effort was continued by Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) in late imperial China and Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725) of Tokugawa Japan (1603–1867). Wang and Arai discussed the concept shi (circumstance), which they used to underscore the uniqueness of the causal relations of historical events, an emphasis also readily identifiable in the Buddhist construction of historical causation.