Neo-Confucian self-cultivation
By: Barry C. Keenan
Series: Dimensions of Asian spirituality
Publisher: University of Hawaiʻi Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Honolulu
Language: eng
Number of pages: 132
ISBN-13: 9780824834968; 9780824835484
Subjects: Confucian ethics; Confucian education; Neo-Confucianism; History
Description: Approximately fifteen hundred years after Confucius, his ideas reasserted themselves in the formulation of a sophisticated program of personal self-cultivation. Neo-Confucians argued that humans are endowed with empathy and goodness at birth, an assumption now confirmed by evolutionary biologists. By following the Great Learning--eight steps in the process of personal development--Neo-Confucians showed how this innate endowment could provide the foundation for living morally. Neo-Confucian students did not follow a single manual elaborating each step of the Great Learning; instead they were exposed to age-appropriate texts, commentaries, and anthologies of Neo-Confucian thinkers, which gradually made clear the sequential process of personal development and its connection to social order. Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation opens up in accessible prose the content of the eight-step process for today's reader as it examines the source of mainstream Neo-Confucian self-cultivation and its major crosscurrents from 1000 to 1900.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism; title: Neo-Confucian education; title: The first five steps of personal cultivation; title: The three steps of social development; title: Reforms in Neo-Confucianism : the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries; title: The nineteenth-century synthesis in Confucian learning.