Abstract:CONFUCIUS, if we may trust our sources, believed in the existence of a golden age in the far past of his country's history. For in the days of the Sage-Sovereigns Yao and Shun, and even later, the mor...CONFUCIUS, if we may trust our sources, believed in the existence of a golden age in the far past of his country's history. For in the days of the Sage-Sovereigns Yao and Shun, and even later, the moral excellence of the ruler was reflected in the perfect functioning of the state and in the character of its citizens. Chung-ni (Confucius) handed down the doctrines of Yao and Shun, as if they had been his own ancestors, and elegantly displayed the regulations of Wen and Wu, taking them as his model. 1 Recently, however, three writers on the political theory of China, on the basis only of a single and suspicious passage in the late and much-interpolated Li-chi, or Book of Rites, have attributed to Confucius the conception of a Utopia much like that of the Taoists.2 In this particular passage, the state of the Hsiao K'ang, or small Tranquillity, where the five virtues and five social relationships function perfectly, the condition which Confucius and Mencius and even their opponent Micius, attribute to the days of Yao and Shun, Wen and Wu, Yu and T'ang, is set off disadvantageously against the time of the Ta T'ung or Grand Union when these virtues and relationships are superfluous. Inasmuch as there is no time in early Chinese history, according to the reckonings of the Confucian classics, when such a period c *uld have occurred, these writers assume that Confucius had such a Utopia in view for the distant future, as a goal to which the Chinese nation could turn after the time of the small Tranquillity, once lost, had been regained. The two Chinese writers try further to strengthen their contention by rendering the verbs which, in Legge's translation given below, are put in the past tense, by the present or the future. While the nebulous nature of the Chinese language makes such a grammatical volte-face quite possible, the translation of the greatRead More
Publication Year: 1934
Publication Date: 1934-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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