Ontological Actuality and Sacred Actualization: Reconstructing Cheng (誠/成) and the Limits of “Religionizing” Confucianism in the Republican-Era Zhengshi Corpus

The Republican-era Zhengshi 證釋 corpus, comprising the Yijing, Zhongyong, and Daxue Zhengshi produced through the spirit-writing of the Jiushi Xinjiao 救世新教 community, arose from the institutional, epistemological, and existential collapse of classical Confucian learning under modernity. At its center is a reconstruction of Cheng (誠/成 ontological actuality and sacred actualization) as the identity between the primordial generative ground (Qianyuan 乾元) and its actualization in the return of all things to their source. What Tu Weiming’s inner transcendence leaves open, and what the dominant Song-Ming trajectories did not supply, is a concrete ontological mechanism by which transcendence is encountered not as a philosophical postulate but as a ground within the practitioner’s own existence. The Zhengshi reconstruction supplies it. The Jiushi Xinjiao community’s distinction between transformative teaching (jiao 教化) and institutional religion constitutes an implicit critique of the “religionizing Confucianism” framework: the sacrality at work here arises from the practitioner’s encounter with the primordial ground rather than from religion, an encounter that belongs to the very constitution of human existence.