Good Morning - I plan on continuing to write on Chinese culture for a few threads. The culture has lasted for several thousand years and has been extensively documented by its citizens. Looking back can teach us, life can be rich and complex without modern conveniences. We just need to have the knowledge of the methods and tools to live a different life style. Suspending judgement on if China is/was a better society than Western provides multiple case studies on development of human civilizations, agriculture and politics.

A modern animation of Along the River During the Qingming Festival painting from the Song Dynasty originally created by Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145 AD) shows a rich urban culture based on trade and small businesses. Multiple versions have been painted in the following centuries showing everyday people and activities,
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxff-4GktOI]

Christianity has spent a longer period of time in China than I realized. It has also been kicked out several times.

Historical Legacy of Jesuits in China - Linked to a PDF

The attempt by members of the Society of Jesus to convert Chinese to Christianity from the late-16thto early-18th centuries was part of the Catholic Reformation’s missionary expansion a round the world.

Christians perhaps as early as the 4 th century AD. Then, in 635 Alopen, leader of the Church of the East (the Syro-Oriental Church, also known incorrectly as Nestorianism), arrived in China from the West. Within a few years Alopen had written the first Christian book in Chinese, Xuting mishi suojing, which stressed the universality of Christianity.

Christianity briefly re-entered China during the Yüan (Mongol) Dynasty (1271-1368), in a Franciscan mission authorized by the Pope, the time of the first Archbishop of Peking, John of Monte Corvino.

The main Jesuit presence began with the Portuguese settlement of Macao in 1579 and ended with the faltering of the mission in the 1720s due to a combination of pressures from Rome and Peking.

8th century began......The controversy started when Mendicant missionaries (Franciscan and Dominican) objected to certain rituals in China, particularly how Jesuit missionaries seemingly participated in Chinese Confucian ceremonies and Chinese converts continued to worship at ancestral altars. .....Mendicant friars, arriving in China from Mexico, and especially the Philippines, were not inclined to make any concessions to local culture. Disputes between French and Portuguese Jesuits back in Europe was another important part of the Controversy.

The challenges the Jesuits faced from their own Church in the early 18th century were now joined by domestic crisis, as the new emperor Yongzheng decided in 1724 that the best solution to the squabbles among Christian missionaries was to expel them all, excepting those in service to the court.

The methods of the Jesuits remained dubious until Pope Pius XII reversed the Church’s stance with a statement in 1939 that Chinese customs were not superstitious but an honorable way to respect one’s relatives, and permitted to Chinese Christians.

Catholicism and the teachings of Confucius.

In 1582, a Jesuit named Ricci landed in Macau. He and his fellow Jesuits highly appreciated the philosophy and the culture of the Ming people and they studied the teachings of Confucianism and Daoism deeply.

By 1615, there were 10,000 converts. Some Jesuits were welcomed as court officials after 1601.

The value of Confucius to the Catholics

Matteo Ricci pioneered this approach in his True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, first published in 1603. In this work, Ricci quoted the Confucian Classics to argue that a true Confucian ought to be a Catholic. He did so by focusing on morality and playing down the more supernatural aspects of Catholicism. Thus, while Ricci sought to prove from reason that God and an eternal soul existed, he scarcely mentioned the doctrine of the Trinity, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, or the nature and importance of the sacraments. This was because The True Meaning was intended as an introductory text only.12 Ricci wanted to show that the foundations of Catholicism accorded with human reason and Confucian ethics before discussing those supernatural elements of the faith based on Christian revelation that would have been more difficult for Confucian scholars to accept.13 This book was widely read, though most Confucian scholars criticized its arguments and rejected Catholicism out of hand.

History of Christianity in China.

When the Papal bull reached the emperor, Kangxi (who sided with the Jesuits on the issue) in 1715, it spelled disaster. Not accustomed to taking orders, Kangxi was infuriated. The goodwill built up by the Jesuits for more than one hundred years was replaced by vexation. Kangxi contemplated banning Christianity within China. His successor, Yongzheng, finally put it into law, issuing an edict of expulsion and confiscation in 1724.
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As the nineteenth century dawned, protestant missionaries arrived in China for the first time. Despite its unpromising beginning, their missionary effort would shake the whole country with a number of prominent individual Christians. The first one is a Protestant convert Hong Xiuquan, who started the Taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864 that nearly toppled the Qing government.
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Another individual is an English Protestant missionary, Hudson Taylor, who revolutionized Christian missions in China. As noted above, previous Christian missionaries sought to work among the ruling literal class. But Taylor had an audacious idea. He founded the China Inland Mission (CIM) with the aim to take the Gospel into the hearts of Mainland China. It was the first massive grassroots missionary effort ever taken place of this type in China. Taylor decided that CIM would be interdenominational and accepted single women as missionaries. It turned out to be a huge success. By 1895, there were 641 missionaries in every Chinese province except Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.
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As Chinese society struggled in turmoil at the turn of the twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen, an overseas Chinese Christian, rose to lead a revolution that gave birth to the Republic of China. The once unthinkable — that a Chinese leader would be a Christian — became a reality. Moreover, China’s next leader, Chiang Kai-shek, turned to Christianity in order to marry the future Madame Chiang Kai-shek (whose father was a Methodist) and Chiang was publicly baptized in 1930.? Despite facing a deadly blow during the anti-foreign outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900s, Christianity’s presence in China is irreversible as its monarch rule came to an end.
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The expulsion of foreign missionaries after 1949 opened a new chapter of Christianity in China as the Chinese government tried to gain full control of all religions. Over a thousand years since the Nestorian monks’ arrival in Xi’an, and against a culture (namely, Confucianism) that has no place for God, Christianity was playing critical roles in education, medicine, science and society. In 1949, Chinese Christians numbered approximately three million Catholics and around 800,000 Protestants. Today, China’s Christian population has grown to over one hundred million, combined, according to various unofficial estimates

The legacy of James Legge.

Legge was a representative of the second generation of missionaries to the Chinese, Robert Morrison having arrived thirty-two years earlier and William Milne twenty-six years earlier.
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Following the First Opium War (1839-42), treaty conditions eased these restrictions and made the role of professional missionaries simultaneously possible and problematic. Precisely because missionaries were regularly perceived by Chinese officials as part of the militarily imposed vanguard of Western intrusions, an uneasy tension continued to govern the relationships between foreign missionaries and the Chinese bureaucracy representing the Manchurian imperial authority. Especially after further concessions were granted in treaties following the Second Opium War (1856-1860), cross-cultural contacts made by resident missionaries, whether Catholic or Protestant, were often susceptible to xenophobic reactions. Any aggressive missionary methods produced heated responses from the already threatened Confucian/Ruist civil officials. Some officials indirectly or overtly supported riotous mob action intent on destroying the missionaries, their newly formed and minuscule Chinese Christian communities, and their attached institutions.(4)
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During these years he returned three times to England and Scotland for furloughs (1846-48, 1857-58, and 1867-70) and once to Japan (1865), most often because of sickness or fatigue.
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Ultimately it was the Chinese Classics that earned Legge international acclaim and later justified the creation of a professorship for him in Oxford. He taught there in association with F. Max MUller at Corpus Christi College from 1876 until his death in 1897,
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Believing in his later publications (beginning in the 1870s) that the Ruist traditions were not inherently antagonistic to Christianity (as were Buddhism and Daoism, in his understanding of them), Legge later promoted through his missionary scholarship an accommodating attitude toward Ruist classical traditions.

Discussion on Confusionism and changing the terminology to Ruism. The constant changing of terminology and spelling creates significant confusion in reading documents from varies publication dates.

Yes, “Confucianism” is a Western coinage, but you have to be careful about that criterion, because if you decide that it’s enough to disqualify a term, then you also have to eliminate “philosophy,” “religion,” “ethics,” and any number of words that philosophers use every day. I’m not being facetious, because if you were to travel back in time and ask Confucius whether he thought his teachings constituted a philosophy or a religion (after explaining those concepts), I think his answer would be “neither.” (Of all the English words I can think of, “tradition” probably fits best. ????.)

My biggest concern with “Confucianism” is one that I’m sure you share: it’s not just a Western coinage, but a Western coinage with a distinct discursive purpose. It was a Jesuit invention designed to convince a skeptical European Christian readership that Chinese sources contained teachings comparable to those of the New Testament. And THAT is a serious falsification, even if a well-intended one.

Bill Haines says:
May 10, 2016 at 6:29 pm

I’ve been wondering about the relation between e.g. Confucius’ “????” and the claim that “the central commitment of Ruism is ‘sheng sheng’ (??, birth birth), which means continuous creativity.”
Reply

Bin Song says:
May 10, 2016 at 9:30 pm

Continuous creativity is an organic type of creativity, maintaining a subtle balance between inheritance of the old and breaking-through of the novelty. In this regard, the humble word, ????, said by Confucius is a perfect example of how ‘continuous creativity’ was conceived and executed in his case. Actually, Confucius ? a lot. He inherits a rich legacy of Zhou rituals, modifies it according to its practicability in his time, and most importantly, grounds it upon his moral philosophy centering upon the concept of ‘humaneness’ (?). If this is not creativity, I don’t know who is the decisive founder of the Ruist tradition.

Farm Report
Already preparing for winter. spent most of yesterday in the barn prepping it for hay delivery today.

A surprise afternoon visitor