Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

These lecture notes are compliments of the lovely Julie Geng.

Terms:

- Zhu Xi (1130-1200)

- 5 Classics – Changes; Poetry; Documents; Spring & Autumn; Ritual

- 4 Books – Analects (Confucius); Mencius; Doctrine of the Mean; Great Learning

- After Tang, An Lushan Rebellion, government backs off locally … how will court deal with this?

- Neo-Confucians

Lecture Notes:

I. Question of the Day: After the An Lushan Rebellion, the government is unable to exercise control over much of its territory;

a. It was never clear whether the Tang had complete control over their land

b. There’s an agreement amongst the families: we all want social stability and the status quo and peaceful society, which can be achieved through Confucian ideas such as filial piety and morals and values

i. It doesn’t matter whether they’re on the government payroll, and they can still collect taxes and have a say in the local government anyway

ii. Mutual responsibility system: a notion that in any village or community that agrees if any single individual does something wrong, everyone in that community is blamed for it; everyone keeps a check on everyone else

1. This allows the government to stay back from the rest of society

iii. Everyone is socialized to memorize and think like a Confucian (especially for the examination system)

iv. They’re convinced that these sagely texts contain the solutions to real world problems like floods and other disasters

II. Five Classics

a. Problems — The classics are very hard to read; the language is constantly changing over time; the language is very old and the examinations were written in this classical language which only made it more difficult

b. Some believed that Confucius had a hand in editing these five classics; but as time went on, they realized this was probably not true

i. Complex questions about the universe such as “how did the universe come about?” did not get answered by the five classics or by Confucius

ii. In the Song Dynasty, people began to think that Confucius needed a sophisticated response to such questions as how to deal with the converts to Buddhism, Daoism, etc. and political questions of the time

iii. The theory then becomes that the Han, celebrating the five classics, got it wrong; that they’re reading the wrong set of books

III. Instead they’ve looked to 4 books:

a. Analects (Confucian sayings) – very bizarre snippets of Confucius to get a sense of his personality

b. Mencius (the next great Confucian thinker) — human nature is good; juxtapose ourselves from Buddhism (Xunzi is too similar)

i. Zhu Xi really doesn’t like the Buddhist sense that life is just suffering

ii. Neo-Confucians will tell you that the basis of reality is li (principle); which is inherent pattern or structure

1. Li is like the veins in a jade stone

c. Ritual texts (Doctrine of the Mean and Great Learning)

i. The ancient sages began ruling with their own village; their own families, themselves

ii. You start with self-cultivation, and self-examination and then move on

d. A slow movement towards a reformulation of the Confucian texts; easier to manage, to read, to understand; more appropriate to the times

i. Reduces the amount of information that people will be tested on for the examination system

ii. Nowadays, most people go looking to study Confucius’ Analects and Mencius, but very rarely anybody studies the five classics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 5:50 pm and is tagged with confucian ideas, confucius mencius, filial piety, morals and values, government payroll, zhu xi, responsibility system, mutual responsibility, peaceful society, social stability, geng, confucius, lecture notes, complete control, floods, rebellion, tang, local government, disasters, compliments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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