INTRODUCTION There Have Been Three Major Episodes of The

INTRODUCTION There have been three major episodes of the controversy on Confucian religiosity throughout Chinese intellectual history. The first episode started in the late 16th century with the Jesuit attempt to convert the Chinese population, and ended with the bitter twist of the Rites Controversy in the mid-18th century. Instead of seeing the sect of Literati as some form of paganism, the early Jesuits, Matteo Ricci in particular, tried to explore the compatibilities between Confucianism and Christianity from a pragmatic perspective. For them, Confucianism was nothing short of a preparation for the coming of Christianity to the Chinese land. It is through this historical encounter that Confucianism as a body of philosophy, beliefs, and rituals was systematically construed in Western societies. While the social and political conditions of the time did not allow the Jesuits to make much of headway, their effort to conciliate Confucianism with Christianity had set a long-lasting tone for modern imaginations about Confucianism and about religion in both Eastern and Western academic fields. The second surge of the controversy on Confucian religiosity took place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when China was tremendously traumatized by social and political turmoil. Many Chinese intellectuals—traditionalists and iconoclasts alike— endeavored to capitalize on Confucianism for their political causes. While Kang Youwei and his followers tried to dress Confucianism up as a state religion to counter the influence of Christianity, the May Fourth intellectuals vehemently opposed any attempt of this kind. For the former, Confucianism is the gravity for the inspiration of Chinese national spirit just as Christianity is for Western societies; for the latter, Confucianism 1 belongs to the past and has to be swept into the realm of academics. In spite of their antagonistic attitudes toward Confucianism, the two camps shared a common ground: their arguments about Confucian religiosity were complicated by social, political, and cultural agendas. The third episode of the controversy on Confucian religiosity appeared in the late 1970s, a period when China just survived the Cultural Revolution and opened up to the world. Ren Jiyu, the director of the Institute for Research on World Religions in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, presented a proposition defining Confucianism as “a religion.” This move immediately set off a storm on the intellectual landscape of contemporary China. Since then there has emerged a huge controversy on the legitimacy, relevance, and orientation of the conceptualization of Confucianism in terms of religion. There are two distinctive attitudes toward defining Confucianism: to sacrifice a “tidy” definition of religion and give legitimacy to dialogues between Confucianism and other world religions; or, to safeguard a humanistic approach and endorse dialogues between Confucianism and other traditions only on a philosophical level. Despite the fact that the debate is still plagued by ideological persuasions, its latest development has taken to an epistemological high ground that was not arrived at before. There is a growing tendency among Chinese scholars to reflect on the question on Confucian religiosity in light of the understanding of Chinese tradition and modernity. The complexity of the controversy on Confucian religiosity can only be recognized with regard to the drastic transformation of modern China in which it was shifted from Confucian paradigms to the paradigms of modernity. The discontinuity between tradition and modernity in the Chinese experience is manifested in both the crisis of ontological 2 meaning and the crisis of social and political order. Hence, any discussion on Confucian religiosity should be reflected in terms of the dual manifestation of the paradigmatic shift in modern Chinese history. Specifically, one needs to take into account two major changes on the Chinese intellectual landscape: first, traditional disciplines of religion, philosophy, and ethics have retreated from all domains of modern age to the reservoir of pure academics; second, any scholarship on Chinese philosophy, culture, and religion is entrusted with a “holy” mission of safeguarding the “national spirit,” an autonomous region which is essentially irrelevant to the process of modernization. Admittedly, the essence of the controversy on Confucian religiosity has less to do with the discipline of religious studies than with the political and cultural concerns of Chinese intellectuals. In other words, the seemingly epistemological question is inextricably entangled with political and cultural significations. The problem of defining Confucianism must be approached with regard to both its epistemological and ideological foundations. This means not only an investigation of Chinese and Western conceptions of religion but also an examination of positive and negative attitudes toward Confucianism and toward religion in general. To explore the complexity of the controversy on Confucian religiosity is in one way or another to sail through the Chinese intellectual journey of perceiving tradition and modernity. Hence, the attempt to demarcate Confucianism from the social and cultural context and to define it in the category of religion needs to be engaged in this perspective. There is no way to say that the problem of defining Confucianism has less to do with epistemological principles than with political and cultural considerations, much less that the significance of understanding Confucian religiosity can only be realized in political 3 and cultural agendas. The question of “Is Confucianism a religion?” is formulated, more than anything else, as a hermeneutic construct, and has to be addressed in accordance with epistemological terms. The political and cultural significations of the controversy on defining Confucianism are constitutive rather than destructive of the textuality of such a hermeneutic construct. Hence, defining Confucianism in the Western category of religion is probably risky and rewarding at the same time. The challenge of this experiment means both the prospect of understanding Chinese tradition and modernity through a new angle, and the potential to confront and even redefine the principles and norms we employ to qualify “a religion.” Meaning can be created not only by how a question is answered, but also by how a question is asked. This is especially true when it comes to defining Confucianism in the category of religion. What is at stake in the question is not academic accountability, but rather the possibility and feasibility of Confucianism reinventing itself in post-Confucian paradigms. The very fact that “Confucianism” and “religion” are juxtaposed in such an intriguing question has already indicated that our modern conception of Confucianism is inevitably bound up with our perception of religion. It is precisely in this sense that the question itself might be more constructive and illuminating than a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer. How we categorize Confucianism does not change the “what, when, where, and how” of the Confucian tradition unfolded in history, but it may fundamentally shape our conception, interpretation, and understanding of the Chinese people’s past, present, and future. As a hermeneutic project focusing on the controversy over Confucian religiosity, this thesis is intended to investigate its origin, development, and significance in light of 4 modern Chinese history. Specifically, it will explore the following aspects: the linguistic and epistemological foundations upon which the question is constructed, i.e., how it is possible in the Chinese textuality; the cultural and socio-political complications of the question, i.e., how it has been approached and interpreted throughout Chinese history; and the historical and existential significance of the question, i.e., what it has to do with the understanding of Chinese tradition and modernity. Although this project demands the integration of both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary paradigms, it is not meant to be either a comprehensive exploration of the manifestation of Confucian religiosity, or a scholastic apologetics on what the essence of a religion is. Instead, it focuses on the significance of the debate on Confucian religiosity to the understanding of the existential conditions of the Chinese people. The ultimate goal of the project is to examine how the seemingly “religious” question points to the very foundation of modern Chinese mentality, upon which Chinese understanding of themselves is based. The thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter tackles the epistemological problems and linguistic ambiguity of the question on Confucian religiosity, that is, how the question is construed in the Chinese textuality. In order to do so, I will investigate the terminological problems of rujia, rujiao, ruxue—the Chinese equivalents of the Western term of “Confucianism”—on the one hand, and the Chinese reception of the Western conceptualization of religion on the other. I argue that although all three terms refer to the Confucian tradition, they differ from each other in terms of their capability to signify Confucian religiosity. Which term to choose to construe the question is predetermined by and in turn supports the scholar’s attitude toward the “religiosity” of Confucianism. Meanwhile, the essentialist conception of religion in Chinese academies is likely to lead 5 the discussion on Confucian religiosity to

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