Shao Yong 1011 – 1077

Shao Yong was a Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher of the Northern Song dynasty and one of the founding figures of the new Confucian metaphysics that would shape East Asian thought for the next eight centuries. His Supreme Principles Governing the World developed an ambitious philosophy of numerical cosmology, in which the patterns of the I Ching are unfolded into a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of cosmic and historical cycles. Living in retirement on the outskirts of Luoyang, in close association with Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, he was venerated by later generations as one of the five masters of the Northern Song.

Shao Yong was born in December 1011 at Fanyang in modern Hebei. After early service in the imperial school he abandoned official ambitions for a life of study and settled at Luoyang, the western capital, where he lived in modest retirement on a small farm called the Anlewo, the 'Nest of Peaceful Joy'. He counted among his closest friends the historian Sima Guang, the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, and Zhang Zai — the leading minds of the Northern Song revival of Confucian learning.

His writings include the great cosmological treatise Huangji jingshi shu (Book of Supreme World-Ordering Principles), the Yichuan jirangji (Songs Beating the Earth at Yichuan) of philosophical poetry, the Yufushijing (Forest of Fishermen and Woodcutters) of dialogues, and an extensive correspondence with the Cheng brothers preserved in the Henan Chengshi yishu.

Shao developed a numerological cosmology rooted in the Yijing in which the trigrams and hexagrams generate a grand pattern of cosmic and human history reckoned in great cycles of 129,600 years; the present age, on his calculation, was already past its prime. With Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, and the Chengs he is one of the five founding figures of Northern Song Neo-Confucianism, though Zhu Xi later set him a little to the side of the main Cheng-Zhu line. He died at Luoyang in 1077.