No Illicit Thoughts: Practical Confucian Sexual Ethics in the Qing

Confucian ethics idealized both public and private separation of adults, but in reality, even the most devoted Confucian scholars could not avoid encountering women, and the temptations aroused by such contact. This paper explores a small set of Qing morality tales which specifically admonish against illicit sexual encounters, not from a Buddhist or Daoist perspective, but with explicitly Confucian framings, even as they mimic tales of karmic consequence (yinguo). Preface writers, including the original compiler, endorse these stories of Heaven-sent illness, exam failure, and death resulting from violating sexual ethics as bringing to life the abstractions of earlier philosophers’ pronouncements about desire. Through these collections, the paper explores popular Confucian sexual morality, extending beyond ritual abstention in mourning and medical recommendations for restraint to consider how a morally upright man might practically navigate the sea of desire that engulfed him every time he stepped outside his study.