Education for a World Community by Wm. Theodore de Bary

Author:Wm. Theodore de Bary
Format: epub
Tags: EDU007000, Education/Curricula, LIT008010, Literary Criticism/Asian/Chinese
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

What is important here is not Huang’s evident hostility to Buddhism. It is true that his survey is motivated by a desire to uphold the orthodox Confucian tradition, but for the most part it is not marked by an unreasoning rejection of all things Buddhist, and in later life his attitude grew increasingly tolerant of heterodox thought. What stands out is his claim that Ming thought came to grips with the challenge of Buddhism by a more precise clarification of issues rather than by simply rejecting it out of hand. It acknowledges that Ming thinkers were concerned with the subtleties and refinements that his contemporary Gu Yanwu had so little use for but affirms that these enabled a more precise analysis of the fundamental problems at issue in the encounter of Confucianism and Buddhism. For ourselves, likewise, the mere fact that Qing scholars took little interest in such questions is not a sufficient basis for regarding the Ming attempt as vain. We must try to understand, rather, why and how these questions assumed such importance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China.

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