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Posts: 1989

Peasant

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Q: Is Confucianism still present in modern-day China?

I see statues of the guy everywhere, but do any people actually live by the "moral code of Confucius" still?

Maybe more so outside of the big cities?

12 years 23 weeks ago in  Culture - China

 
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Posts: 1318

Emperor

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Signs of it are still around and sure that are a few that follow it. But it is like Buddhism, the average person knows little and only sees it as a photo opportunity or good status for their qq profile.

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12 years 23 weeks ago
 
Posts: 1932

Emperor

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The original organized religion was so tied into the imperial government, that all but the most superficial aspects of it collapsed with the empire, in the 1910s.

The Nationalists (after a time) reinvented it their own way, owing a lot more to the old tradition, but dropping 90% of the voluminous commentary and ritual that went along with the old religion. That type is more true to the original spirit of the religion, if you will, than what you would see on the mainland, but nothing like the hyper-sophisticate,d mind-numbingly complicated Rujia that once dominated every aspect of imperial Chinese government. The are to Confucianism what Matchbox Twenty was to Nirvana, so to speak.

The communists have lately brought back a westernized version, in spite of the fact that they seem to have brought it back as part of the recent wave of hyper-nationalistic propaganda. A sort of philosophical Confucianism that was invented in the 1700 and 1800s by French, Brits, and a handful of Germans who had no knowledge of the cultural legacy, but where just mining it as food-for-though (along with all kinds of other "oriental" philosophies, as was the trend at the time), and who read it -and often strangely misinterpreted it-as some kind of exotic Plato. This sort of Confucianism sort of glosses over ancestor worship, and the intense focus on ritual, and all that, and gets down to the philosophical core of the Analects, while abstracting it away from the specifics the traditional Confucians were extremely focused on. While it fully recognizes the "study the ancestors" aspect of Rujia, it only pays mouthservice to the early-Zhou classics that the traditional Confucians felt was more important than the words of the master himself.

To make myself more clear, the master himself complained about a turtle being out of place at an official ceremony (or whatever). He obviously cared very deeply that the ceremony be an exact replica of early-Zhou ceremony, and he provided a very detailed reasoning of why this was important. The Europeans ignored the turtle and focused on the observations about the importance of tradition, without caring about the tradition itself. The commies turned it into some message about how they protect x thousand year of tradition. By this time, we've already abstracted this twenty levels away from what Confucius actually cared about: that the turtle be in the right place.

It ignores the vast, vast, vast body of commentary (which still rots in Chinese archives, and once made up the majority of a six-year Chinese university education), and focuses more on commentary fitting the fashions of 18th century European philosophers. The commies have even sort of twisted all those bland old wine-and-cheese country-estate Victorian metaphysics debates into some kind of fucky "five-a thousand-a year-a historyyyy" thing. It's really funny when the Chinese take patriotic pride in mindlessly photocopying a photocopy of something non-Chinese did decades or centuries ago, and then hold it above our heads. ("You no have China five thousand year history! Famous Chinese Voltaire! You never heard of stupid ocean ghost! Voltaire famous Chinese five thousands years old!")

Anyway, sociologists call it "pizza effect" and this is probably a more striking example of it than pizza itself.

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12 years 23 weeks ago
 
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