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Updated: May 29, 2025
There is no scheme of creation, properly so called. The Unwalkable Way leads us to nothing further in the way of a cosmogony. Confucius's Agnosticism He did not speculate on the creation of things nor the end of them. He was not troubled to account for the origin of man, nor did he seek to know about his hereafter. He meddled neither with physics nor metaphysics.
"Shohei" is the Japanese pronunciation of "Changping," Confucius's birthplace, and the school was known as the Shohei-ko. It received uniform patronage at the hands of the Tokugawa, whose kinsmen and vassals were required to study there, their proficiency, as determined by its examinations, being counted a passport to office.
Since the scholars of Confucius's type specialized in the knowledge and conduct of ceremonies, Confucius gave ritualism a correspondingly important place both in spiritual and in practical life. So far as we have described it above, the teaching of Confucius was a further development of the old cult of Heaven.
Tso-ch'iu Ming, commentator on Confucius's Annals, frequently introduced legend into his history. He is the first to mention the story of Hsi Wang Mu, the Western Queen, and from his day onward the fabulists have vied with one another in fantastic descriptions of the wonders of her fairyland.
For all this there is not a vestige of documentary evidence. This vagueness is deliberate. This was also Confucius's purpose.
Through bitter experience, however, Confucius had come to realize that nothing could be done with the ruling house as it existed in his day. So shadowy a figure as the Chou ruler of that time could not fulfil what Confucius required of the "Son of Heaven". But the opinions of students of Confucius's actual ideas differ.
He possessed a comprehensive knowledge of the religions of all nations, and described each with equal love and an endeavour to show us all their merits. I remember how warmly he praised Confucius's command not to love our fellow-men but to respect them, and how sensible and beautiful it seemed to me, too, in those days.
Thus on one occasion a ruler had to flee from a feudal prince, which in Confucius's view was impossible behaviour for the ruler; accordingly he wrote instead that the ruler went on a hunting expedition. Elsewhere he tells of an eclipse of the sun on a certain day, on which in fact there was no eclipse.
It is hinted at in the Bhagavad-Gita: "whatsoever is practised by the most excellent men"; again, it is the Aryan doctrine of the Guruparampara Chain. The whole idea is so remote from modern practice and theory that it must seem to the west utopian, even absurd; but we have Asoka's reign in India, and Confucius's Ministry in Lu, to prove its basic truth.
The demonstration that the Annals of Spring and Autumn can only be explained in this way was the achievement some thirty-five years ago of Otto Franke, and through this discovery Confucius's work, which the old sinologists used to describe as a dry and inadequate book, has become of special value to us.
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