Word: confucianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...struggle between good and evil. The famous principles of Yin and Yang imply an alternate cosmic rhythm but not a struggle. Nor is there a relationship of struggle-or love or dialogue-between man and God. China is agnostic and scarcely knows a religion in the Western sense. Confucian teaching is not concerned with metaphysics. As the Master once told his disciples: "Till you have learned to serve men. how can you serve spirits?" In the Confucian view, man is essentially good-which is why the Chinese have a sense of shame but not of sin. To stay good...
...Fairbank said that the Chinese leader actually more closely resembles the prototypical Chinese emperor than any of his heroes in the Marxist pantheon. Eventually, he said, the better side of the feudal Chinese ruler may reassert itself in his successors. China is still governed, after all, by a "great Confucian political fiction, the myth of rule by virtue...
...second point is that the old Peking rulers were the custodians and propagators of a true teaching, the Confucian classical doctrines of social order, an orthodoxy which told every man how to behave in his proper place and kept the social pyramid intact with the emperor on top. The emperor was himself the high priest of a cult of social order. The three main bonds of the Confucian social order were the filial piety of children to their superior parents, the admirable devotion of wives to their superior husbands, the loyalty of scholar officials to their superior the emperor. This...
...conclude, I think that the ideological component of power in China has been proportionately greater than in the West. Calling everything by its orthodox name helped keep things in order. The emperors were constantly spelling out the true doctrines, having them read in the Confucian temples and studied by all scholars. Heterodoxy and deviation could not be permitted, or if they did exist, could not be acknowledged to exist. Even when the foreigners were more powerful, the myth of China's superiority had to be solemnly recorded and preserved in ritual. This stress on orthodoxy strikes one today when Peking...
...what has happened to the old Confucian tradition of balance, harmony, and tolerance for private variations in faith and custom? The training of bureaucrats who were also humanists, artists and scholars, to carry on the established order, was the major tradition, dominant over most of the centuries, whereas the present regime seems to be in a minority rebel tradition of dynastic founders, more like a band of sworn brothers rising from the countryside as leaders of peasant rebellion, animated by an extreme fanaticism...