We can also say that the author, guided by liberal ideas, portrayed Taoism as the antithesis of political unity and ignored the cultural and political contradictions with the Buddha, which is far removed from history.
Song Xiaozong himself authored the Three Teachings, in which he used the division of functions and distribution of weights of “using Buddha to cultivate the mind, using Tao to nourish the body, and using Confucianism to rule the world” to affirm the special status of Confucianism and leave room for the existence of the Buddhist monks, thus resolving the contradiction between Confucianism and the Buddhist monks in terms of politics or policy. Since then, the impact on Confucianism’s moral status came mainly from Christianity. The Ming dynasty edited book, The Collected Works of Breaking Evil, recorded the understanding of Christianity by the scholars and gentry, focusing on the “chaos and disorder of China”, which, like Han Yu and Zhu Xi, belonged to cultural and political thinking or the theory of the clash of civilizations.
Zhang Guangtian in the “evil set – wiping out the evil abstract slightly discussed” wrote: “the country in the dun Binglun, only respect for the study of Confucius and Mencius, all in the Regency of the area, all establish the temple of the Su Wang, sincere hard to the teachings of the world also. Nearly a foreign barbarian who called himself Catholic, said from Europa, is not to the country to which he belongs, but it is not called to sneak into our country, openly want to the other country’s cult, move the people of China, is to dare to change the summer barbarians also.”. Yan Moyu’s “Breaking Evil Set – Ming Dynasty Preface to the Set of Abominations” expresses the same hatred of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism: “Since the opening of Guangdong to return, the three religions and the rise of the world, the governance of the heart and the body, can not be reduced, nor can it be increased. The three religions are the same enemy: “Since the opening of Guangdong and the return of the three religions, the three religions have been established, and the work of ruling the world, the heart and the body cannot be diminished or increased. There was also a Confucian scholar from Liuzhou named Wang Qiyuan, who, realizing the severity of the Christian theoretical challenge, secretly made an effort to systematize Confucianism by writing the Qing Department Sutra Talks.
The ritual struggle, on the other hand, could be considered the official version of this clash of civilizations. As a result of the political struggle, Kangxi took down the anti-Christian official Yang Guangxian. Also in 1692 issued an order for the Yung Church: “Cha De Westerners, admiring the sanctification, sailed from 10,000 miles to come. …… sincere service, gram into its things, the achievements are many. It is not the case that there is no evil and unruly behavior among the Westerners living in the provinces, nor is it the case that they are confused and heretical. …… will keep all the Catholic churches as they are, and those who make offerings will be allowed to walk as usual, without being forbidden to do so. As soon as the order of the day, through the provinces can also.” The “sanctification” and “performance” of the wording of the culture of Kangxi’s position is clear. So, when the Vatican issued a ban on Chinese Christians to “worship the heavens”, “offer sacrifices to Confucius” and “offer sacrifices to ancestors” in 1704, Kangxi ordered that the envoy who came to deliver the order, Dorotheus, be sent to Macau to hand over the “sacred” and “consecrate the ancestors” to the Emperor. Portuguese caretaker. Kangxi said: “Look at this treaty, can only be described as Western and other villains how to speak of China’s great principles. In addition, the Westerners and other people, none of them know the Chinese book, talk about the discussion, the more ridiculous. Now I see that the treaty of Laichen is the same as the heretical little teachings of monks and Taoist priests. Those who speak nonsense to each other are more than that. In the future, there will be no need for Westerners to teach in China, to prohibit can also, so as to avoid more trouble. It is forbidden, so as to avoid trouble.” The missionaries in China proposed a number of workarounds, but Kangxi was not moved, passing the decree said: “China’s reasoning is infinite, deep and meaningful, not you and other Westerners can be arrogant.” Later, Yongzheng also said: “China has the Chinese religion, the Western has the Western religion. It is not necessary for them to teach in China, as well as in China, how can they teach in Western countries?
What I want to say is that this attitude of Kangxi and Yongzheng was not primarily an opposition to Christianity, but rather an affirmation and defense of the position of Confucianism in the structure of Chinese civilization. This is not dissimilar to that of the folk gentry. In addition, the Confucian belief of “Heaven and Earth, the Prince’s Parent Teacher” was formally promulgated after Yongzheng’s “Oracle to Confucius for Five Generations”. It is clear that it is consistent with the work of Dong Zhongshu and the structure of Chinese civilization, which was a mixture of “tyrannical” and “royal”. In the Republic of China, the title was modified to “The Parent Teacher of Heaven and Earth”, which was affirmed by Mr. Li Zehou and me when we visited Guizhou more than a decade ago.
If the conflict was still just a fight or a “cultural struggle”, then the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement” of Hong Xiuquan, with whom Zeng Guofan launched the “paper, ink, sword and spear attack and armed defense”. up. Mainstream textbooks generally treat the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement as a peasant uprising, intentionally or unintentionally downplaying its religious overtones. In recent years, many books have re-examined the movement from this perspective, and they have been quite influential. In fact, the “clash of civilizations” between the teachings of Jesus, the books of the New Testament and the rituals, ethics and rules of poetry had already been fully revealed in Zeng Guofan’s “Critique of the Guangdong Bandits”.
Since the Tang and Yu Dynasties, saints have supported famous religions and promoted human relationships, with rulers and officials, fathers and sons, superiors and descendants, and respect and deference being as irreversible as a crown. The Guangdong bandits stole the ideas of the foreign barbarians and worshipped the religion of God. Since their pseudo-ruler and pseudo-president, the soldiers and lowly servants they arrested were all referred to as brothers, and it was said that only heaven could be called father, and in addition, all people’s fathers were brothers and all people’s mothers were sisters. The farmers could not cultivate their own fields to give money, but the fields were the fields of the King of Heaven; the merchants could not buy their own goods to get interest, but the goods were the goods of the King of Heaven; the scholars could not recite the scriptures of Confucius, but the so-called Jesus and the books of the New Testament, citing thousands of years of Chinese rituals and ethics, poetry, books and codes of ethics, once swept away. This is not only the change of the Qing Dynasty, but also the strange change of the famous religion since the beginning of the period, and the cry of Confucius and Mencius in the Nine Plains.
The Que Li Zhi says: “The teachings of Confucius cannot be far-reaching unless it is the government of an emperor; the government of an emperor cannot be good and vulgar unless it is the teachings of a sage.” It was Wang Fuzhi’s ideal that “the world should be ruled by Tao”, and it was also the ideal state for the imperial civilization structure of “tyranny and kings and Tao” to function well.
This structure, once established, lasted for nearly two thousand years. Almost all important changes in Confucianism corresponded to changes in political and social structures, both as reflections and results of such changes, and as adaptations and prescriptions to such changes. The Chinese empire was in crisis under the impact of the worldwide colonial movement in the West, and the pressure to “protect the country, protect the species, and protect the religion” completely shook the people’s confidence in their own civilization. The defeats of the Opium War and the Sino-Japanese War, which were military crises, were mainly due to the generation difference in weapons and the inefficiency of the management and organization system. However, in the aftermath of these defeats, the culture (ethics and civilization) was deemed to be inferior. Thus, political, economic and military rivals turned out to be role models. Thus, the Enlightenment narrative, the revolutionary narrative, and even the Christian narrative and its keywords were considered as the basis of Western culture, which could not be used for its institutions and artifacts without wholesale transplantation, and were introduced into the Middle Kingdom. One of the characteristics of ideologies is that they contain a systematic discourse on society, history and its purpose. By setting new historical goals and taking the May Fourth Movement as a new starting point, they removed themselves and their subsequent history from the context of modern salvation. As a result, transgression of means became an end, the goal of salvation was replaced by romantic slogans, individuality and class took the stage for revelry, and the Chinese nation quietly withdrew.
This, of course, is untenable. The reason is not only in the wrong attribution of failure and the methodological tying up of artifacts, institutions and “Tao”, but also in the ignorance of the significance of Confucianism as a source of meaning and a symbol of identity for Chinese civilization and the Chinese nation, and the internal consistency between the logic of history and civilization and the destiny of our land and our people. Chinese civilization would have fallen apart long ago without this symbol of identity and its values based on the meaning of the word of God. And with this conviction and cohesion, the benevolent people represented by Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong rose up to save the country, and step by step from salvation to revival. “Unification”, the most basic political common sense, the core cultural concept, has once again become the ideological bridge that unifies and connects tradition and reality. Pan Yue, who is renowned as a theoretician within the Party, said in his speech on “Chinese Civilization and the Chinese Road” that “cultural tradition determines the choice of the road” and that “the core essence of Chinese civilization is ‘unification'”. ‘”.
In fact, the basis for this statement has long been established. The Sixteenth Party Congress amended the Party’s constitution, adding to the phrase “the CPC is the vanguard of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation”, i.e., an important node, in addition to the CPC being “the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat”. The significance of this is that it not only expands the social base of the CPC horizontally, but also connects this group vertically with history. To some extent, this means that the ruling party has begun to reorient itself and consciously return to its relationship with Chinese civilization. General Secretary Xi Jinping defined the Chinese dream in terms of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, using cultural self-confidence as the basis for road, institutional and theoretical self-confidence, understanding road, theoretical and institutional developments in terms of 5,000 years and 150 years, rather than using ideology to cut and plan history, replacing or even denying traditional civilization. General Secretary Xi Jinping said, “What kind of governance system a country chooses is determined by the country’s historical heritage, cultural traditions, and level of economic and social development. Our country’s governance system today is the result of long-term development, gradual reform and endogenous evolution based on our historical heritage, cultural traditions, and economic and social development.” “The original heart and mission of the Chinese Communist Party is to seek happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation.” This is not only a clear declaration of a return to the modern theme of salvation, but also a solemn commitment to undertake the mission of undertaking a 5,000-year civilization.
It is no coincidence that the same change has occurred in the academic world. The New Confucianism group in the mainland put forward the idea of “going beyond Mou Zongsan and returning to Kang Youwei,” the historical and philosophical significance of which was to place the May Fourth Movement back into the modern history of the salvation theme. While the modern New Confucianists’ construction of Confucianism, with Western thought as its frame of reference, has its own historical and cultural significance and status, their field of work has deviated from the ancient sages’ self-promise of establishing a heart for the world and a life for the people. The value of Confucianism cannot be recognized by establishing a relationship of one kind or another with the ideological systems of different cultures. The only way to recognize the value of Confucianism is to assume the function of one’s own civilization and commit to the meaning of one’s own civilization to those who share its values. And this requires an accurate grasp of the problems and challenges facing nations and peoples in a given situation. Unfortunately, the mainstream thinkers of May Fourth transformed the question of how China should resist and win in the face of Western colonialist aggression into the question of how a backward Eastern culture should learn from the advanced Western culture and become totally Westernized.
Kang Youwei was not one of them. In 1898, he founded the “Nationalist Protection Committee”, which clearly stated that “the protection of the country, the species and the education”, “the protection of the emperor” and “the national education” were the two most important principles. “The two ideological labels are the solution. Compared with “revolution”, “royalist” is an improved way of salvation. Unlike the “revolutionaries” who adopt the national revolutionary strategy of “expelling the Tartars and restoring China”, the “reformists” take “patriotism to save the country and save the world” as their strategy. Under the banner of “China as a whole”, they wished to implement the reform of the law and the constitutional monarchy by relying on the existing political organization system. Apart from anything else, the “Greater China” understanding of China contained in this concept, i.e., China as a whole, was undoubtedly much more far-reaching than the revolutionary “Pai Manchu” mentality. This unity was laid down by the Qing dynasty, and therefore the legal and political status of the Qing emperor as a national symbol was very important for the “unification” of the empire.
As for the “state religion”, i.e., the “state education of Confucianism”, it is generally believed that Kang Youwei understood and analyzed it in terms of maintaining the moral level, coping with the impact of Christianity, and resolving the crisis of Confucianism itself. Professor Gan Chunsong, however, pointed out that Kang Youwei’s analysis was actually based on the question, “How did China change from a dynasty to a modern nation-state? How do you design the internal order and governance system of this new country?” This kind of thinking was carried out from the perspective of the Chinese empire. If one combines this thinking with Kang Youwei’s grasp of the entire territory and diverse ethnic groups based on the Qing Empire, and if one combines this conception (“imperial protection” and “state education”) with the maintenance of the civilizational structure of the Chinese empire, the way Dong Zhongshu worked in his day Cross-referencing (Kang has written specifically on the study of the Spring and Autumn Dong) will not only enhance the strength of the argument for the view, but will also make Kang’s work more comprehensible and more persuasive.
Yes, the civilizational structure of “hegemonic dao and miscellaneous daozhi” may be facing a new round of upgrading and reborn.
Source: Chinese Politics, 2020, Second Edition
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