%title This week
%date 2007-12-10 20:07:26
:diary:livejournal:fossils:

Giving the internet a bit of a break.  It's finals week, and the thing I need is a huge source of potential drama.

Instead of any real content, have some blather about Confucianism.

<details><summary>Read more...</summary><blockquote><strong>8.3 The Doctrine.</strong>  Although Confucianism is part of the three religions that form the traditional heritage of China (with Taoism and Buddhism), it is legitimate to question its being a religion in the common, however inadequate, sense of the term.  Superficially, it does not seem to be one, for its enterprise appears to be the <em>demythologization</em> of Chinese beliefs: supernatural beings are made into virtues, heaven stops being a god, being made into a mere principle that warrants order, and so forth.  In a certain sense, Confucius' criticism of traditional religion had much in common with the Buddha's critique of Hindu beliefs and practices; yet in sharp contrast with the latter, it did not at all concern the "salvation" of human beings, for the simple and basic reason that it in no way occurs to Confucius <em>that there is anything in social life to be saved from, nor consequently anyone to be saved</em>.  "When one is unable to serve human beings, how can one serve spiritual beings?" says one aphorism, clearly meaning that one is to abandon any pursuit of an invisible reality.  "When you do not know life, how would you know death?" is meant to discourage whoever has any inclination toward the mysteries of afterlife.

In contrast to Buddhism, which developed a powerful organization based on a hierarchy of monks and laypeople, Confucianism did not have priests.  The performers of rituals were the same <em>ju</em>, or bureaucrats, who filled, by state examination, the openings in the imperial administration, bot central and provincial.  Our term "religion" does not immediately seem to apply to this formal cult mechanically performed by nonpriests for divinities toward which they do not aspire.

[...]  Logic did not interest Confucius any more than mythology.  His main concern was to discover the Middle Way (<em>Tao</em>) in human society and in individual actions, the Way that would guarantee the balance between the will of the earth and the will of heaven.  "Heaven" here, it should be carefully stated, was not a divinity, but a universal and omnipresent principle, hidden and undefinable, whose operations "are noiseless and odorless."

If Confucianism pursues some form of "salvation," this is not religious soteriology.  Confucians do not have a negative worldview, like Buddhists or Christians; they do not understand immortality, like Taoists, as something one may individually acquire, but as a goal naturally attained by the succession of many generations; they do not have a direct, however painful and problematic, relation with God like Jews, and do not tremble before the will of heaven like Muslims before Allah.  Confucianism does not assign human beings any other objective than the pursuit of the excellency of their humanness (<em>jen yi</em>) by the correct and proper accomplishment of their social duties (<em>li</em>).  The foundation of Confucianism is summarized in the aphorism: <em>The father must be a father, and the son a son.</em>

Human society is supposed to be regulated by a movement, educational in intent, that goes from the top to the bottom and corresponds to paternal love (for a <em>son</em>) and by an opposite movement of reverence that goes from the bottom to the top and is tantamount to filial piety.  This is the only Confucian duty whose absoluteness nearly shows a trace of passion, for otherwise gentlemen indiscriminately abhor passions.  A breach of the rule of piety (toward one's family, one's superior, one's homeland, one's chief of state, etc.) is the only Confucian definition of sacrilege.  Historians of the Far East had a tendency to emphasize, after World War II, that such a paternalistic ideology could perhaps degenerate more readily than others into blind obedience to the interests of a totalitarian state.

-- <em>The HarperCollins Concise Guide to World Religions</em>. Eliade, Mircea and Couliano, Ioan P.</blockquote>

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