VATICAN JESUITS INVENTED CONFUCIANISM?
The Chineseness of Confucianism -- is the focus of Lionel M. Jensen,
anassociate professor of history and the director of Chinese studies at the
University of Colorado at Denver. Jensen contends that there was no such
thing as Confucianism until Jesuit missionaries entered China in the late
sixteenth century.
Until their arrival there were merely the spiritual and ethical traditions
of the ru, China's elite scholarly class, who, thanks to the off-and-on
patronage of emperors over the years, enjoyed a monopoly on education and on
the staffing of bureaucratic posts, by means of the civil-service
examinations they administered.
The ru claimed to be carrying on the tradition of Confucius, and he
certainly enjoyed pride of place in their veneration as the leading
propagator of ru values. However, as Jensen points out in his book
Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization
(1997), the Analects was only one of several literary classics esteemed and
taught by the ru (the others are attributed to Mencius and other early ru
teachers). Using the model of Christian theology, which centers on the
person of Jesus Christ, the Jesuits recast the ru tradition as a
full-fledged religion centered on the person of its supposed founder,
Confucius, who they believed had providentially stumbled across monotheism
(in his references to "heaven") and Christian morality (in his version of
the Golden Rule).
Jensen says that in exalting Confucius, the Jesuits tended to ignore any
Chinese philosophical writings other than the Analects, and they did not
value China's other, far more widely practiced religious traditions,
including Buddhism, Taoism, and the omnipresent folk cults of gods and
ghosts. The missionaries promoted their Christianized version of ru doctrine
to the West when they returned home.
And then, Jensen theorizes, it was only a matter of time before the
Enlightenment philosophes adopted Confucius, savoring his apparent
reasonableness and his skepticism about the supernatural. The philosophes in
turn created and popularized the image of Confucius that persists among
Westerners to this day, and in the process spread the misapprehension that
Confucianism is the baseline religion of China in the way that Roman
Catholicism is the baseline religion of Spain. In fact, almost no one
practices Confucianism in China today, and even in premodern times only
scholars, bureaucrats, and occasionally emperors followed the ru tradition.
If China can be said to have a baseline religion, it is a mixture of popular
Taoism and folk beliefs.
According to Jensen, the Jesuits invented the very word "Confucius," a
Latinization of Kongfuzi ("Very Reverend Master Kong") -- itself an
appellation not found in ru literature (which called the sage simply Kongzi,
or "Master Kong"), although it is occasionally found on the "spirit tablets"
honoring him in ru temples. Jensen does not believe that Kongzi even
existed. "I think he's a literary trope," Jensen says. "He's a figure who
came to stand for certain things." Jensen is currently researching the
possibility that Kongzi -- whose birth, like that of Jesus, is the subject
of many miraculous tales -- had his origins as a mythological figure of
ancient Chinese fertility cults.
Any additional information any of you guys can provide - please do so.
This history interestingly fits a puzzle planted in my mind by author Paul
Blanshard, who wrote an extensive book which enunciated, in excellent
comparison form, the dogma, theories, practices, and rituals between the
totalitarian ideologies of the Vatican and its near-mirrored relative Soviet
Red Communism!
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