Confucianism - Confucius, Warring States Confucianism, Han Confucianism, Neo-confucianism, Modern Confucianism, Bibliography
chinese ancient word name
The word Confucianism implies the existence of a philosophy, a religion, or a worldview that goes by the name. "Confucian" ideas or attributes are assumed to have roots in ancient China, to be part of the common heritage of people of Chinese ancestry in other parts of the world, and to be shared by the peoples of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, who have been heavily influenced by Chinese culture. Confucianism has been used to identify an ideology of benevolent kingship used by empires to legitimize themselves in various parts of eastern Asia. It is often applied to the practice of ancestor worship or simple respect for family elders. Yet, although there was an ancient Chinese word for "scholar" (ru), referring to those who studied ancient texts, the term Confucianism has no precise equivalent in Chinese. In order to understand why so many different phenomena have gotten lumped together in this fashion, we had better start with Confucius, or "the master," whose name was Kong (551–479 B.C.E.).
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The concepts the learners used were appropriated from the pre-Confucian discourse of a broad class of warriors across the North China Plain. In this discourse power and virtue ideally were one (de). The worlds of men and of spirits (gui or shen) were separate but communication between the two was possible, and so was mutual intervention. Shamans and oracles were the agents of communication, while …
The Confucius of the Analects answered a question about the meaning of wisdom by advising the questioner to "revere the spirits but keep them at a distance." He had very little to say about heaven. The Warring States discourse defines the domain of man as the space between heaven and earth. In this domain there is a Way (dao) —a set of principles and/or activities—that …
What modern scholars have called "Han Confucianism" comprised a broad spectrum of beliefs, social practices, and textual scholarship. The Five Classics on which imperial academy scholars based their interpretations were the Changes, Documents, Odes, and Rites—all purported to be Zhou classics—and Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu, an extremely spare text attributed to Conf…
For nearly a thousand years after the disintegration of the Han empire, the maintenance of elite family rituals and repeated invocation of filial duty were the only distinctively "Confucian"
markers of the political elite in China. The classics, now labeled "New Texts," were replaced by more recently discovered "Old Texts," which joined Buddhist scripture…
After 1868 the Meiji leaders of Japan reinvented Shinto as a state religion in the effort to create a Japanese nation that could compete in a world dominated by modern imperialist powers. In its new imperial discourse it would also claim righteousness and demand loyalty of Korean and Chinese subjects in Confucian terms. In China, moderate reformers tried to combine Confucian traditions of educatio…
Confucius. Confucius: The Analects (Lun Yü). Translated with an introduction by D. C. Lau. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York: Penguin, 1979. ——. The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors. Translated with commentary by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks. New York: Columbia University Press, c. 1998. Mencius. Mencius. Translated with an introduction by D. C. …
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