dbo:abstract
- Shanrendao (Chinese: 善人道; pinyin: Shànréndào; lit. 'Way of the Virtuous Man') is a Confucian-Taoist religious movement in northeast China. Its name as a social body is the Universal Church of the Way and its Virtue (万国道德会; Wànguó Dàodéhuì) or simply the Church of the Way and its Virtue (道德会; Dàodéhuì), which is frequently translated as the Morality Church. Shanrendao can be viewed as one of the best examples of the jiaohua (教化; jiàohuà; 'spiritual transformation') movements. It is one of the most prominent religions of redemption of China, and was formally established as the Universal Church of the Way and its Virtue in Shandong in 1921 by Jiang Shoufeng (1875–1926), a member of the Confucian Church (孔教会; Kǒngjiàohuì) of Kang Youwei. Kang Youwei himself was the president of the church during the last year of his life. The movement was concerned with a reconstitution of morality, at a time in which people no longer understood what morality means because of the decline of religion. By the 1930s the religion had a strong presence in Manchuria, where it persists to the present day. A great contribution came from Jiang Shoufeng's son, Jiang Xizhang (1907–2004), an intellectual prodigy who composed commentaries on the Confucian classics before the age of ten. Father and son composed vernacular versions of the classics in order to disseminate Confucianism among the Chinese masses. After the World War I, Xizhang wrote a leaflet, the Xizhanlun with anti-war teachings inspired by the content of the world religions. The strongest impetus in the social importance of the movement, however, came from Wang Fengyi (王凤仪; 1864–1937), a charismatic healer and preacher of peasant origins who led the Universal Church of the Way and its Virtue in the 1930s. He is celebrated as a peasant saint throughout northeast China, a shànrén (善人; 'virtuous man') with the epithet "Wang the Good" or "Virtuous King" (王善人), a wordplay as his surname means "king" or "ruler". (en)