New Confucianism in Twenty-First Century China by Jesus Sole-Farras

Author:Jesus Sole-Farras [Sole-Farras, Jesus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138203990
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Ma Yifu (1883–1967)

Ma Yifu is an erudite of Western and Eastern cultures and a skilled harmoniser of Confucianist and Buddhist concepts. Defender of ideals of socialist equality – it seems he was the first to bring Karl Marx’s Capital to China – he came to the conclusion, after the fall of the imperial regime, that the application of Western political paradigms did not lead to achieving these ideals and decided that what China needed was to rediscover its spiritual roots. Thus, the force that unleashed Ma’s cooperation in the construction of the New Confucianist discourse was the conviction that the evils of current China came from ignoring the essential values of its culture.

After years of studying Taoism and Buddhism, he begins to seek these essential values in the Confucianist classics and the commentaries of Song Neo-Confucianism. The result of his research, and the synthesis of his thought, is the so-called Six Arts theory. To Ma, ‘the six arts’ are the essence of Chinese culture, the six branches of knowledge in the Six Classics and other Confucianist texts,59 where all knowledge, even Western knowledge, is contained – he holds that in spite of all that is good in the Western cultural tradition, it was already present, at least in essence, in Chinese culture. As a follower of Wang Yangming, he believes that the six arts furnish all the knowledge of humanity and are important because their essence derives from the moral self (daode ziwo 道德自我) while its wisdom arises from human nature (xing 性). The value of the Confucianist Classics lies in the fact that they comprise and transmit what the wise have understood. However, this process of understanding – according to Ma, in full harmony with Xiong’s metaphysics – is not the exclusive patrimony of the wise, but is something that has been generated in the mind of each human being uninterruptedly throughout history. Thus, all teaching that comes from the past only has value if it is discovered inside each of us and if it is integrated into one’s behaviour. The essence of the six arts consists of innate values existing in the deepest corners of the human heart, the main value of which is the virtue of ren 仁. Therefore, knowing is striving to understand and unfold the inner self, and discover and recover one’s nature (xing).

Ma’s philosophical system is centred on human behaviour; in other words, it is an ethical philosophy, substantially equivalent to the ethical metaphysics of Xiong Shili. However Ma Yifu’s cooperation with the construction of the New Confucianist discourse can be identified, in brief, in the following contributions: (1) the doctrine of the Six Arts, their universal value being the essence of Chinese culture; (2) the idea that any teaching must be revealed in the moral self and integrated into one’s own behaviour; (3) the idea that China must rediscover its spiritual roots, with which it will be qualified to lead the world culturally.

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