宗教性——儒家式的思考

Taking Confucian Religiousness on Its Own Terms

问题的起源在儒学被介绍到西方学术的过程中,儒家宗教性的关键哲学词汇和用语艺术已经被亚伯拉罕宗教的价值所覆盖,并未呈现出其自身的价值。的确,在许多人眼中,儒家思想无非是一种毫无生气的、次等形式的基督教。

Because Confucianism was introduced into the Western academy by missionaries,the key terminology of this tradition was translated in a way that would syncretize it with an Abrahamic worldview.Tian天became(and still is)"Heaven,"li礼became(and still is)"ritual,"and dao道became(and still is)"the Way."It is for this reason that Confucian philosophy is shelved in the religion section of our libraries and taught in religion and Asian studies departments in our universities.Yet if we allow this tradition to speak on its own terms,it provides an alternative model of religiousness that takes family and human beings rather than a transcendent God as its core idea.In this essay,I want to use the canonical texts of the Confucian tradition itself to try to reconstruct a religious vocabulary that expresses a distinctively Confucian form of religiousness.