Envisioning the Territory of the Sages: The Neo-Confucian Discourse of Jingjie (original) (raw)

Fang, Xudong 方旭東, Neo-Confucianism in East Asia 理學在東亞 Chengdu 成都: Sichuan Renmin Chubanshe 四川人民出版社, 2022, 416 pages

Dao, 2023

This volume examines how Neo-Confucianism (lixue 理學) became rooted in China, Korea, and Japan of the premodern periods, while both conflicting but harmonizing with other philosophies and local ideologies. To this end, the author investigates representative philosophers from each country, such as Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) of China, Yi Hwang 李滉 (1501-1570) of Korea, and Satō Issai 佐藤一齋 (1772-1859) of Japan, and illuminates their ideas more clearly by uncovering issues that have not yet been addressed by other recent scholars. Departing from the unilateral view of the existing scholarship, the author looks at each philosopher's thought and literature with a three-dimensional viewpoint. Escaping from the frame of focusing on which school a given thinker belongs to, this volume explores what characteristics the intellectual's life and thought have. Specifically, in the case of China, the combination and separation of Neo-Confucianism and Daoism during the 11th and 12th centuries is considered. In the case of Korea and Japan, how contemporary scholars discussed and employed the study of Zhu Xi and the study of Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472-1528) during the 16th to 18th centuries is explored. Also, the research methodology employed encompasses various disciplines such as linguistics, phonology, and bibliography. Through this, in the author's own terms, "over-local" (fenshu 分殊; specificity) and "localization" (liyi 理一; universality) (328), we are able to see the dynamics of Neo-Confucianism in East Asia-how Chinese Neo-Confucianists were entangled with each other not only within the mainland but also in Korea, Ryūkyū, and Japan. This volume also includes a discussion of the Western missionary Matteo Ricci's (1552-1610) understanding of Zhu Xi's thought among its themes. It shows that Neo-Confucianism was engaged with a critical view in the West as well as in East Asia.

Kong Yingda, Cheng Xuanying, and Their “Others”: A Synchronic Contextualization of Visions of the Sage.

Religions, 2024

The early medieval period saw the spread of Buddhism from India into China and the development of Daoism as a religious institution. By the early Tang dynasty, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism were referred to as the three teachings, and had developed separate institutions; representatives of the three teachings were competing at court for patronage and influence. This paper probes the extent to which the institutionalization of these three teachings as separate, often competing, entities is mirrored at the philosophical level and attempts to delineate the fault lines of philosophical contention among them. Scholarship on Daoist chongxuan philosophy, as it developed in early Tang Changan, documents Daoists’ utilization of Buddhist concepts and terminologies, implying shared discourses. This paper extends this investigation to include Confucianism, focusing on excerpts from two texts written in early seventh-century Changan: the Confucian Zhouyi zhengyi and the Daoist Daode jing yishu, as a case study for a synchronic contextualization across the boundaries of the teachings. Analyzing explicit demarcation discourses and intertextual occurrences of specific terminologies, the paper juxtaposes the Daoist and Confucian conceptualizations of the “sage who embodies Dao”. Through this analysis, the paper explores shared discourses and demarcations in philosophical thought among the three teachings, emphasizing the complexity of fault lines in philosophical arguments, which resist simplistic alignment with sectarian affiliations

Confucianism 2.0

paper published in: Is the 21st Century the Age of Asia? ed. J. Marszałek-Kawa, Toruń 2012, pp. 20-41