The single most influential work in Chinese history is Lunyu, the Confucian Analects. Its influence on the Chinese people is comparable to that of the bible on the Western world. It is neither a tract of prosaic moralism contained in the fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants nor a manual of political administration that prescribes do's and don't's for new initiates. A book claiming a readership of billions of people throughout the history in China and East Asia and now even in the Western world must be one that has struck a chord in the readers, one which appears to arise from the existential concerns that Confucius shared: How can one overcome the egoistic tendency that plagues life? How does one see the value of communal existence? What should be one's ultimate concern in life?These questions call for a line of inquiry on the Analects that is explicitly existential. An existential reading of the Analects differs from other lines of inquiry in that it not only attempts to reveal how the text spoke to the original audience but also to us today. It is not only a pure academic exercise that appeals to the scholarly minded but also an engagement with all who feel poignantly about existential predicaments.In this existential reading of the Analects, the author takes Paul Tillich as an omnipresent dialogical partner because his existential theology was at one time very influential in the West and currently very popular in Chinese academia. His analysis of ontological structure of man can be applied to the Analects. This conceptual analysis reveals that that this foundational text has three organically connected levels of thought, proceeding from personal cultivation through the mediation of the community to the metaphysical level of Ultimate Reality. Few scholarly attempts like this one have been made to reveal systematically the interconnectedness of these three levels of thought and to the prominence to their theological underpinnings.This existential reading of the Analects carries with it a theological implication. If one follows the traditional division of a systematic theology, one will find that the Analects has anthropological, ethical, and theological dimensions, which correspond to the three levels of thoughts mentioned. If one understands soteriology more broadly, one will find the Analects also has a soteriological dimension. The Analects points to the goal of complete harmony in which a harmony within oneself, with the society and cosmos are ensured.If one is to construct a theology of the Analects, the existential reading enables the drawing of certain contrasts with Paul Tillich's existential theology. The Confucian idea of straying from the Way differs from the symbol of fall. The Confucian reality of social entanglement differs from the reality of estrangement. The Confucian paradoxical nature of Heaven differs from trinitarian construction of God. The most important contribution of this study is that it reveals the religious or theological dimension of the Confucian Analects.This is an important book for those engaged in the study of the Confucian Analects, including those in Chinese studies as well as comparative theology and religion.

This book is based on the study of the traditional Chinese philosophy, and explores the relationship between philosophy and people's fate. The book points out that heaven is an eternal topic in Chinese philosophy. The concept of heaven contains religious implications and reflects the principles the Chinese people believed in and by which they govern their lives. The traditional Chinese philosophy of fate is conceptualized into the "unification of Heaven and man". Different interpretations of the inter-relationships between Heaven, man and their unification mark different schools of the traditional Chinese philosophy. This book identifies 14 different schools of theories in this regard. And by analyzing these schools and theories, it summarizes the basic characteristics of traditional Chinese philosophy, compares the Chinese philosophy of fate with the Western one, and discusses the relationship between philosophy and man's fate.

Persia is home to one of the few civilizations in the world that has had a continuous tradition of philosophical thought for over two and a half millennia. As Islamic theology developed in the Middle Ages, many of its schools interacted with existing Persian philosophical currents and evolved into a distinctive philosophical 'Kalam', or dogmatic theology. Among the definitive masters of both Shi'i and Sunni theologians were numerous Persians, chief among them Al-Ghazzali and Fakhr al-Din Al-Razi, who are prominently represented here. Important selections from both Shi'i and Sunni theological schools (including Mu'tazila and Ash'ariyya) are included in the volume, many of which have never before been available in translation in the West until now.

This book explores recent developments in ethics of virtue. While acknowledging the Aristotelian roots of modern virtue ethics - with its emphasis on the moral importance of character - this collection recognizes that more recent accounts of virtue have been shaped by many other influences, such as Aquinas, Hume, Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx, Confucius and Lao-tzu. The authors also examine the bearing of virtue ethics on other disciplines such as psychology, sociology and theology, as well as attending to some wider public, professional and educational implications of the ethics of virtue. This pioneering book will be invaluable to researchers and students concerned with the many contemporary varieties and applications of virtue ethics.

This book offers a comprehensive account of the great Neo-Confucian Master Cheng I (1033-1107), showing his philosophical ideas in a modern light. It systematically examines Cheng's extensive literature and provides an ingenious interpretation of Cheng's social and political views. The author, Yung-ch'un Ts'ai, was a respected scholar of sociology and theology in 20th century China.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism - Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste.

An alternative, fallibilist model of moral reasoning rooted in the American Pragmatic tradition. Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions.

This collection of twenty-one essays constitutes the first history of modern Japanese aesthetics in any language. It introduces readers through lucid and readable translations to works on the philosophy of art written by major Japanese thinkers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Selected from a variety of sources, the essays cover topics related to the study of beauty in art and nature.

This book is a compilation of several sections of a larger work, a book by the name of African Origins of Civilization, Religion, Yoga Mysticism and Ethics Philosophy. It also contains some additional evidences not contained in the larger work that demonstrate the correlation between Ancient Egyptian Religion and Buddhism. This book is one of several compiled short volumes that has been compiled so as to facilitate access to specific subjects contained in the larger work which is over 680 pages long. These short and small volumes have been specifically designed to cover one subject in a brief and low cost format. This present volume, The Ancient Egyptian Buddha: The Ancient Egyptian Origins of Buddhism, formed one subject in the larger work; actually it was one chapter of the larger work. However, this volume has some new additional evidences and comparisons of Buddhist and Neterian (Ancient Egyptian) philosophies not previously discussed. It was felt that this subject needed to be discussed because even in the early 21st century, the idea persists that Buddhism originated only in India independently. Yet there is ample evidence from ancient writings and perhaps more importantly, iconographical evidences from the Ancient Egyptians and early Buddhists themselves that prove otherwise. This handy volume has been designed to be accessible to young adults and all others who would like to have an easy reference with documentation on this important subject. This is an important subject because the frame of reference with which we look at a culture depends strongly on our conceptions about its origins. in this case, if we look at the Buddhism as an Asiatic religion we would treat it and it'sculture in one way. If we id as African Ancient Egyptian] we not only would see it in a different light but we also must ascribe Africa with a glorious legacy that matches any other culture in human history and gave rise to one of the present day most important religious philosophies. We would also look at the culture and philosophies of the Ancient Egyptians as having African insights that offer us greater depth into the Buddhist philosophies. Those insights inform our knowledge about other African traditions and we can also begin to understand in a deeper way the effect of Ancient Egyptian culture on African culture and also on the Asiatic as well. We would also be able to discover the glorious and wondrous teaching of mystical philosophy that Ancient Egyptian Shetaut Neter religion offers, that is as powerful as any other mystic system of spiritual philosophy in the world today.

This volume brings together diverse Asian religious perspectives to address critical issues in the encounter between tradition and modern western evolutionary thought. Such thought encompasses the biological theories of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Earnest Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and later "neo-Darwinians," as well as the more sociological evolutionary theories of thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Henri Bergson. The essays in this volume cover responses from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist (Chinese, Japanese, and Indo-Tibetan), Confucian, Daoist, and Muslim traditions. These responses come from the decades immediately after publication of The Origin of Species up to the present, with attention being paid to earlier perspectives and teachings within a tradition that have affected responses to Darwinism and western evolutionary thought in general. The book focuses on three critical issues: the struggle for survival and the moral implications read into it; genetic variation and its seeming randomness as related to the problems of meaning and purpose; and the nature of humankind and human exceptionalism. Each essay deals with one or more of the three issues within the context of a specific tradition.

An unabridged edition to include: Wherein I Bow to the Reader - A Prelude to the Quest - A Magician Out of Egypt - I Meet A Messiah - The Anchorite of the Adyar River - The Yoga Which Conquers Death - The Sage Who Never Speaks - With The Spiritual Head of South India - The Hill of the Holy Beacon - Among The Magicians And Holy Men - The Wonder-Worker of Benares - Written in the Stars - The Garden of the Lord - At the Parsee Messiah's Headquarters - A Strange Encounter - In a Jungle Hermitage - Tablets of Forgotten Truth

Asoka Bandarage provides an integrated analysis of the twin challenges of environmental sustainability and human well-being by investigating them as interconnected phenomena requiring a paradigmatic psychosocial transformation. She presents an incisive social science analysis and an alternative philosophical perspective on the needed transition from a worldview of domination to one of partnership.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Nature, "The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference." The great Chinese synthesizer of Neo-Confucian philosophy Zhu Xi expressed a similar idea in the twelfth century: "In the realm of Heaven and Earth it is this moral principle alone that flows everywhere." Though living in different ages and cultures, these two thinkers have uncanny overlap in their work. A comparative investigation of Emerson's Transcendental thought and Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism, this book shows how both thinkers traced the human morality to the same source in the ultimately moral nature of the universe and developed theories of the interrelation of universal law and the human mind.

Promoting cultural understanding in a globalized world, this text is a key tool for students interested in further developing their understanding of Chinese society and culture. Written by a team of experts in their fields, this book provides a survey of Chinese culture, delving deeper into areas such as Chinese philosophy, religion, politics and education. It offers the reader a wide range of essential facts to better understand contemporary China through its history and cultural background, touching on key areas such as the development of science and technology in China, as well as the country's economy and trade history, and is a key read for scholars and students in Chinese Culture, Sociology and Politics.