Confucian culture handbook content

Confucian culture is a cultural school with Confucianism as its guiding ideology, which has been revered by Confucianist believers through the ages.

Confucianism was created by Kong Qiu during the Spring and Autumn Period, advocating blood relatives and human relationships, present-day deeds, cultivation of the body to save and maintain, moral rationality, and its central idea is forgiveness, loyalty, filial piety, fraternal duty, courage, benevolence, righteousness, etiquette, wisdom and faith. Confucianism has been revered by successive rulers for more than 2,000 years without change, and has undergone the inheritance and development of Confucius' later studies.

After the Han Dynasty, Confucianism evolved into metaphysics during the Wei and Jin Dynasties. The Tang regime was basically dominated by Confucianism, but it was also permeated by Buddhism and Taoism. During the Song Dynasty, it developed into the science of reasoning, honoring Zhou Dunyi, Cheng Hao, and Cheng Yi as the originators, and Zhu Xi as the mastermind. It later gained official status. The vast majority of what is called Confucianism comes from the literature of the Song dynasty (960 AD-1279 AD). During the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, the imperial examinations were based on the content of Zhu Xi's rationalism. It was not until the May Fourth Movement that the dominance of Confucianism was abolished.

1. Confucius was the founder of Confucianism, who proposed "benevolence", which is of a classical humanitarian nature: he advocated "rites" and maintained the Zhou ritual, which was a conservative part of Confucius' political thought. Confucianism later developed into the orthodox culture of ancient China.

2. Mencius, a representative of Confucianism in the Warring States period, advocated benevolent government and put forward the idea of "the people are precious and the ruler is light"; advocated "government in getting the people" and opposed tyrannical government; advocated giving peasants a certain amount of land, not to encroach on the peasants' labor time, and leniency in punishment and thin tax.

3. Dong Zhongshu of the Western Han Dynasty established Neo-Confucianism based on Confucianism, with Yin-Yang and the Five Elements as the framework and a variety of schools of thought. Its core is "the induction of heaven and man" and "the divine right of kings". His ideas were concentrated in the Three Treatises of Heaven and Man and the Spring and Autumn Annals.

4. The metaphysics that emerged at the time of the Wei and Jin dynasties used the ideas of Laozhuang to explain the Confucian I Ching, which was a kind of negative thinking in defense of the scholarly community. The Zhou Yi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi were called the "Three Xuan". Xuanxuanism advocated inaction on the part of the monarchs and dictatorship of the gatekeepers, and was mainly active in Luoyang. Representative figures include He Yan, Wang Bi and the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.

5. Han Yu, a Confucian master in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, used Confucianism's theory of heavenly destiny and feudal discipline to oppose the views of Buddhism and Taoism from the perspective of maintaining feudal rule.

6. Rigaku, a neo-Confucianism based on Confucianism and absorbing Buddhist ideas, was the main philosophical idea of the Song Dynasty. Zhu Xi is a master of the development of science, Zhu Xi inherited the thought of the Northern Song philosophers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, and further perfected and developed the system of science of objective idealism, which is later called Cheng Zhu science. Its core content is: "reason" is the source of all things in the universe, is the first nature; "gas" is the material that constitutes all things in the universe, is the second nature. He opposed "Divine Principle" and "Human Desire" and believed that human desire was the root cause of all evils, so he proposed that "Divine Principle should be preserved and human desire should be destroyed". This was actually a defense of the feudal hierarchical order.

7. In the middle of the Ming Dynasty, Wang Yangming opposed Zhu Xi's view that the mind and reason were two separate things, and founded the theory of subjective idealism, xinxue, which was opposed to Zhu Xi's. The theory of xinxue was changed from objective idealism to objective idealism. The evolution of rationalism from objective idealism to subjective idealism shows that it has gone to extremes.

8. Deng Mu of the Yuan Dynasty: He called himself "a layman of the three religions" and wrote a book that boldly denied the rule of the feudal monarchy, and his non-monarchical ideas had a certain influence on the progressive thinkers of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

9. Ming Dynasty: Li Zhi is the late Ming "heretical" progressive thinkers, he accused the Confucian classics is not "the most important theory of the world", exposing the hypocrisy of Taoism, and opposed to the discrimination against women and the suppression of merchants. He was a pioneer of anti-feudal thought in China, and his ideas reflected the demands of the budding capitalist era in a certain sense, with democratic overtones.