Confucian Spirituality

Confucian Spirituality (Volume 1), edited by Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, 333 pages

Although Confucianism has traditionally been categorized as a religion by Western scholars, this has typically been qualified, especially in the past century, by an emphasis on the tradition's ethical, social, and political teachings.  The conventional view is that Confucius bracketed the rituals and beliefs of his own time, treating them as normative without assenting to their truth.  Yet, as these 16 essays exploring various aspects of Confucian spirituality demonstrate, a spiritual thread runs through Confucianism, if only in its assertion that there exist values worth sacrificing, suffering, and even dying for.  Indeed, a spiritual substratum is revealed in the concept of a transcendent harmony that embraces Heaven, Earth, and all the levels of human community, from the Middle Kingdom down to the individual family.

This first volume concentrates on historical perspectives, while contemporary developments are left for the sequel.  The essayists view Confucianism from a variety of perspectives, from Aristotelian virtue ethics to Nietzschean postmodernism, and likewise survey a range of sources, from focusing only on Confucius himself to considering the Confucian tradition as a whole to postulating a Chinese philosophia perennis of which Confucianism is one expression, and express a range of attitudes towards their subject, from admiration to skepticism.  Unfortunately, this very diversity precludes any unity among the essays, and the level of specialization makes it easy to become lost.