China Academic Library Guy Alitto Editor Contemporary Confucianism in Thought and Action China Academic Library Academic Advisory Board: Researcher Geng, Yunzhi, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Professor Han, Zhen, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China Researcher Hao, Shiyuan, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Professor Li, Xueqin, Department of History, Tsinghua University, China Professor Li, Yining, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, China Researcher Lu, Xueyi, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Professor Wong, Young-tsu, Department of History, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA Professor Yu, Keping, Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, China Professor Yue, Daiyun, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, China Zhu, Yinghuang, China Daily Press, China Series Coordinators: Zitong Wu, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, China Yan Li, Springer More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11562 Guy Alitto Editor Contemporary Confucianism in Thought and Action Editor Guy Alitto University of Chicago Chicago , USA ISSN 2195-1853 ISSN 2195-1861 (electronic) China Academic Library ISBN 978-3-662-47749-6 ISBN 978-3-662-47750-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-47750-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951434 Springer Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 This work is subject to copyright. 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Printed on acid-free paper Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Contents 1 Reconstituting Confucianism for the Contemporary World.............. 1 Guy Alitto Part I Confucianism in the Contemporary World of Thought 2 Some Historical and Methodological Reflections on Ruxue in Contemporary China ....................................................... 13 John Makeham 3 From Culture to Cultural Nationalism: A Study of New Confucianism of the 1980s and 1990s ....................... 27 Tze-ki Hon 4 A Study on Pre-Qin Confucian Scholars’ Environmental Ethics ...... 41 Qiyong Guo and Tao Cui Part II Confucianism in the Contemporary World of Action 5 Building a Loho Homeland with Traditional Wisdom ....................... 63 Liao Xiaoyi 6 Modernizing Tradition or Restoring Antiquity as Confucian Alternatives: A View from Reading Wedding Rituals in Contemporary China ........................................... 79 Margaret Mih Tillman and Hoyt Cleveland Tillman Part III Liang Shuming: Joining the Worlds of Thought and Action 7 Liang Shuming: A Lifelong Activist ..................................................... 103 Guy Alitto v vi Contents 8 Confucianism as the Religion for Our Present Time: The Religious Dimension of Confucianism in Liang Shuming’s Thought ................................................................. 113 Thierry Meynard 9 Liang Shuming’s Conception of Democracy ....................................... 131 Hongliang Gu 10 Humankind Must Know Itself .............................................................. 145 Peishu Liang Chapter 1 Reconstituting Confucianism for the Contemporary World Guy Alitto In 1921, at the high tide of the New Culture Movement’s iconoclastic attack on Confucius, Liang Shuming ằ╡Ⓩ resonantly predicted that in fact the future world culture would be Confucian. In the following nine decades, Liang’s reputation and the fortunes of Confucianism in China have risen and fallen together. Is it possible that a reconstituted “Confucianism” might become China’s spiritual mainstream and a major constituent of world culture? This volume is set to the theme of “theory” and “practice” of contemporary Confucianism, and how they relate to each other. Within that theme, it addresses several related issues: 1. What do we mean in contemporary intellectual discourse by the term “Confucianism?” 2. What is the relationship between popular “practiced” Confucianism and the philosophical doctrines that constitute the philosophical theories usually associated with it? 3. What is the relationship between Confucianism and what is perhaps the major contemporary challenge to humanity – degradation of the natural environment? 4. What is the relationship between Confucianism and perhaps the major contem- porary challenge to humanity – degradation of the natural environment? 5. What is the historical position of Liang Shuming in regard to these questions? G. Alitto (*) University of Chicago , Chicago , IL , USA e-mail: [email protected] © Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd 1 and Springer- Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 G. Alitto (ed.), Contemporary Confucianism in Thought and Action, China Academic Library, DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-47750-2_1 2 G. Alitto 1.1 What Is Confucianism? The term “Confucianism” as it has been used in Western and world discourses has carried an enormous variety of muddled meanings. Much confusion has resulted from the early Jesuit missionaries’ turning the teachings of the ritual scholars ( ru ݂) and the fundamental norms and presumably universal values of civilized human life into one hybrid “ism” to meet the cultural demands of Europe at the time. To make Confucianism comprehensible to the West, Matteo Ricci and his Jesuit colleagues performed two actions. The fi rst was to name an individual as the founder of an ism and create from him a name, along the lines of Christ and Christianity or Muḥammad and Islam. Ricci chose the sage Kongfuzi from among many sages who had been responsible for the creation of these teachings, values, and norms. Although Master Kong (Kongfuzi ᆄཛᆀ) was regarded as the “fi rst” or “fi rst ranked” sage since the beginning of the fi rst millennium AD, he certainly was not the creator of a “doctrine” much less of a code of behavior. The second action was to confl ate the Chinese classics (together with subsequent commentaries and interpretations) and the shared norms of civilized behavior. Both became “Confucianism” in the West. This confusion of high theory and popular social practice is, I would submit, the source of the most serious problems in the discourse about “Confucianism.” This second action was required because of European assumptions about the nature of religion and religious dogma. In the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, written doctrines connected directly and fi rmly with fi xed moral laws and behavioral rules. Confl icting interpretations of, and intense debates about, dogma had been prominent features of all three of these religions. These disputes were directly related to behavioral rules. The legal ramifi cations of doctrine had direct consequences for daily life, including clothing and diet. In Chinese traditions, however, there was no such link. There was literally no equivalent for the Western (and later world) concept of “Confucianism” in traditional Chinese discourse. To my mind, the closest reference to the Western concept (theory and practice) that might be made in traditional China would be “the way of the sages” ( shengxian zhi dao ൓䍔ѻ䚃) which would have included some norms and values that predated Confucius. Although it is true that the “Rules of Propriety and Status” (li jiao ming jiao ⽬ᮉ਽ᮉ) were sets of highly specifi c idealized models of social roles and behav- ior, these rules were not based unambiguously on particular written dogma. Although grounded in certain persistent general principles, they changed radically through time and certainly were not directly connected to any “orthodox” dogma. Thus, using the term “Confucianism” to refer to philosophical discourse and other theoretical ratiocinations, as engaged in by intellectuals, and the “universal” norms of civilized human life is to confuse the domain of theory and philosophy with that of social and political values and their behavioral referents. That is, the use of this term has always confl ated self-consciously Confucian philosophy and the mundane communal domain of social mores and behavior; in other words, it is a confusion of theory and practice. 1 Reconstituting Confucianism for the Contemporary World 3 1.2 Confucianism a Religion? Although the Jesuits did present their invented “Confucianism” in a fashion that would be understood by Europe, with its implicit comparison to Christianity, they did not present it as