Pigeon
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Pigeon
coo coo
6d ago
I think I'd be more wary about calling Confucianism a religion or religion-like without bounding what is meant by religion and Confucianism respectively.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West.
It is true that Confucius has a temple, and he was himself strict about the preservation of the rites of Zhou and other traditional religious institutions, and many aspects of Confucian thought has seeped into Chinese folk religion; the Classic of Changes literally originates from treatises on divination...
But when I read most works in the Confucian school I get a different sense -- that it is "religious" to the extent that all political systems and philosophies in classical antiquity are religious, and it is less overtly religious than many of its contemporaries!
樊遲問知。子曰。務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。
Analects 6:22. Fan Chi asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, "To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom."
子不語怪，力，亂，神。
Analects 7:21. The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.
On the other hand, many of the Socratic dialogues reference gods and the divine much more directly than the Confucian classics do, but I think we would still consider Euthyphro more of a philosophical work than a religious one, right?
Regardless the ancients would have drawn less stark a divide than we would regarding the secular and the religious, if they did so at all.
And Confucianism is also -- I think more commonly -- referred to as 儒家 rujia (家 jia, lit. family/home, in this case meaning "school of thought"). Other contemporary examples of this usage include 法家 fajia (the Legalists) and 墨家 mojia (the Mohists), part of the Hundred Schools of Thought which we identify nowadays as primarily political or philosophical schools rather than religious ones, even if these philosophical schools were bound at the time to various superstitions and religions as well.
This is not to obfuscate the mystical parts of Confucianism, of course. The Classics referencing rites implies a certain belief in the validity of those rites, and we have further developments (e.g. 理學 lixue, often translated as neo-Confucianism) that have a more explicit focus on the metaphysical. But I would still put it as that Confucian thought is a largely humanistic school of moral philosophy that was nevertheless grounded in a superstitious and religious society, and thus utilises the assumptions and language of that society.
Pigeon
coo coo
25d ago
Have you seen pictures of any large Chinese city in 1990 and compared it to the same city in 2020?
Pigeon
coo coo
28d ago
I’m guessing this is a reference to the early Ming treasure fleets, in which case this is inaccurate as the treasure fleets were not exploring as much as they were re-establishing relations, and the ships were built for such.
Or this could be a reference to a brief period of theoretical Chinese naval superiority in technology between the Song and the Ming, before the Ming went all sea-ban and lost a lot of knowledge about building seaworthy ships.
Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?
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