Is anybody on this nigga's level?

This is your lucky day cause there is: Guanzi's Nei Yeh.

Also, liezi is a good companion to chuangtzu and laozi. And confucius is underrated.

this whole post is underrated

also i feel like ranting

i actually think confucianism is pretty similar to christian monasticism at the bottom. the west had a real good time during the renaissance & enlightenment & modernity & postmodernity but all signs today to me at least point back to The Old Ways Are Best or disaster at the hands of islam, which is compromised af b/c they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. love god, export oil. it won't work for them either

laozi is the esoteric nondual core and confucianism is the theory & practice of a larger thing. dostoevsky identifies this in the GI passage and westerns have been fucked up about it ever since

fact is the GI was only the GI because christ is an impossible paradox & the tao is infinitely more subtle. depends on how you like your suffering, collectively or alone, with a thousand people who look just like you or a thousand people who are all different

could just be me tho

>sorry sir i'll have your cheeseburger in just a second

Going through the Tao Te Ching, pretty good but how can I digest it properly? It's just a translation and no commentaries or notes, but I didn't just want to accept someone else's interpretation of it.

>no yangchu itt

youre missing the best one lads

read as many translations and studies as you can find.

your average Stoic. they're basically the same.
>dude chill lol
>i'm at one with the harmony of the universe

>Confucius is overrated
>His precepts lived by more than 1.5 billion people

Make some sense, please. Confucius is fallacy of authority all over the place. Laozi is god-tier. Confucius is dictator handmaiden.

well i meant underrated in the western conception. but it could be said that even in chine what has actually survived is confucianism which is not necessarily what is in confucius' texts.

and yes laozi is great, but it is not in opposition to confucianism. it is complementary and in harmony as a whole in the chinese way of life with confucianism.

Korea and Japan are culturally Confucian as well. The Xin Emporer was laughing at Confucius behind his back every day tho.

one has also to remember that the laotse has been also used as a justification of the empire.

Can anyone recommend a good general introduction/history of Confucianism?

>mfw the last chapter of the Zhuangzi

Eastern philosophers never developed rationality or aesthetics.

thats what makes them superior you dunce
take the white pills

>Eastern philosophers never had the gall to tell logicians or artists how to do their jobs
Life ain't a school King Kong.

thank you for proving his point

i just re-read this now. the world? holy shit

>the white pill
never heard that before, that's pretty good

cheers to anons for making me re-read the zhuangzhi, it's pretty hard to argue with

hg creel has two books on chinese philosophy, one dedicated to confucius

pic related is good, i'd recommend this

Where do I read this Zhuangzi? I am familiar with Tao te Ching

thank you, user

Yeah, he was ideologically the same as every DUDE WEED hipster today. That doesn't discredit him though.

indiana.edu/~p374/Zhuangzi.pdf

no prob

This could only have been written by someone who didn't understand the philosophy of Confucius.

The way governments have construed Confucian learning is totally different from the original Analects. Confucian societies, now, view it as the mere gaining of knowledge pragmatically, and while knowledge is important to society, Confucius was talking more about the virtue of restraint and self-knowledge. And one of those precepts happens to be admitting to what you understand and don't understand. Something which many people in Confucian societies don't do. Rather than being based around Confucius, these societies are based more around Legalist variants of it.

He knew that ritual was more important to the structure of society than anything else, but his ideas on rituals can be applied to any ritual in general, and not just the specific Chinese rites of propriety he was talking about. No matter how you think about it, every single subculture or society has their own mode of stasis and tradition that they must endure. The Virtuous Man is a person who accepts that and can carry out what he intends while navigating through that maze of ritual and propriety. His idea of respecting elders can be seen as an appeal to authority, and that's the part that I have a bit of contest with, but, more likely, he was also talking about how you can never escape the burden of the past and you still have to deal with facing those who have been rooted into society itself as the traditional authority.

A good analysis of how to apply Confucian thought to current societies can be seen in the concept of Orthodoxy vs Orthopraxy highlighted over here:

neojaponisme.com/2005/02/11/orthodoxy-vs-orthopraxy/

But people who think that being Confucius means being a stiff authoritarian are merely misreading him. Confucius warned against corrupt authorities and countries who have lost insight into Virtue over here:

"Uphold the faith, love learning, defend the good Way with your life. Enter not into a country that is unstable; dwell not in a country that is in turmoil. Shine in a world that follows the Way; hide when the world loses the Way. In a country where the Way prevails, it is shameful to remain poor and obscure; in a country which has lost the Way, it is shameful to become rich and honored"

Personally, I view Taoism and Confucianism as two parts of the same coin. You must have a Taoist mind, but in your daily activities and approach to external life, you must have a Confucian sense of duty, love of learning, and willing to bear the rituals of your current society. Even if those rituals are wrong, they are still necessary for stability. It doesn't matter whether a person has talent, or is a genius, but the one who lives in the world is the one who is stable.

Yeah, the dissertations on Mozi and Huizi are heartwrecking.

The internet? A bookstore? Just make sure you get a version that translates the whole book and not the inner chapters. Mine was by Victor Mair.

good post user

thanks based user

I haven't read it yet, but I heard that this 3 volume history called Confucian China & It's Modern Fate is one of the most comprehensive looks into the history.

ucsdmodernchinesehistory.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/confucian-china-and-its-modern-fate/

>Even if those rituals are wrong, they are still necessary for stability.
Isn't this pretty much opposite to Laozi's stance?

A lot of philosophical texts and schools (the hundred schools) were destroyed during the burning of books, so no one has any true idea how much philosophical progress people had in that field at the time. But one of the remnants from those schools would be the 'white horse text':

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_horse

Even then, there was also the influence of the Buddhist Logical schools when Buddhism came over.

Confucius was all about quoting and reading the Classic of Poetry, and there are tons of analyses and commentaries of various famous poets like Du Fu and Li Bai, even way back then. Japan also has its Zen poetic concepts and all those guidelines about how to perform specific arts like Noh and Kabuki. Whether they had something called 'Aesthetics' in the same vein as the type of thorough analysis that Aristotle did in his Poetics etc... I myself haven't really read up on, but most likely they did. There's tons of Chinese Classics out there that haven't even been touched by the academia yet because of how many texts were passed down from back then.

Taoists were definitely against Confucianism, which is why you see Zhuangzi make fun of Confucius several times in his own book. But that doesn't mean that later schools of thought couldn't combine elements from both to create new things altogether.

For example, see the syncretic thinker Shizi:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shizi_(book)

Of course, the ideal figures for Laozi and Confucius are both different. Laozi believes in the Sage (聖人) who is separate from worldly affairs while Confucius believes in the Virtuous Man/Prince (君子) who is directly involved in worldly affairs.

You can see an analysis of the 聖人 over here, which goes into how the concept changes in different texts:

haquelebac.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/3502/

Yeah, but what ı was talking about was that the Laozi specifically makes it a point that the sage always deals with problems when they arise (chapter 63 of the DDJ for example).

63 reads more like doing what you can in the midst of your limits:

是以聖人終不為大,故能成其大。

Although the sage finally does not do anything large, he achieves what is large.

And the later section doesn't necessarily mean that he must deal with the problems immediately, but he must treat them as if they were of importance.

夫輕諾必寡信,多易必多難。是以聖人猶難之,故終無難矣。

A man who lightly promises creates little faith, and more easiness must become more difficulty. The Sage treats it as difficult, and thus has no difficulty.

Fair enough. Also that blog you linked is fascinating; is there any specific bibliography like it that you can direct me to?

Actually, I myself came across that blog by chance, and I haven't found anything else that deals with the same kind of thing. I think you can probably just check his references.

Based yang zhu

is confucionism possible in a nonhomogenous society

it seems impossible to apply to western nations which are being torn apart in a race to the bottom of pandering to difference instead of unifying around a goal as one people

You assume China is or ever was a homogenous society.

Levenson's pretty old and now often criticised.

On the other hand, he's the best writer I can think of among historians of China- his prose is legitimately good and enjoyable to read, which is a rare gift for a historian. His Liang Qichao intellectual biography is also really good.

Same load of unprovable crap. He's about ten levels below Sextus Empiricus.

I'd recommend starting with Schwartz's The World of Thought in Ancient China. Good historical context and introduction to wider ideas, including Confucius and Mencius- which is important, because a lot of what commonly gets called 'Confucianism' is actually older and wider than a single school- things like ancestor worship, sage-kings, the Five Classics.

...then for 'Confucianism' itself (some scholars don't like the term as it's a modern invention) I'd recommend something that takes account of how hugely the tradition(s) changed over time- IIRC Transformations of the Confucian Way is good for this.

...actually I'll add that Nylan's The Five 'Confucian' Classics is also a good intro to early Chinese thought and to issues that were important to Confucius and his followers. Obviously more focused on specific texts, but in some ways that's a good thing- brings in some nice concrete detail.

Literally proved his point

it sure seemed that way to me, from a behavioral perspective

>unifying around a goal as one people
Heh. A lot of Chinese writers spent a lot of the twentieth century complaining that the Chinese couldn't 'unify around a goal as one people'.

Thank you for this.

start with the chinese, friend

I'm not one to discredit the merit of the Dao De Jing, but Laozi is severely overrated within the sphere of modern pop-Daoism.

For starters, Daoism is not a unified school of thought but a vague umbrella term encompassing several sects; The Celestial Masters, Shangqing, Lingbao, Nanzong, Zhengyi and Quanzhen are just some examples of very different vareties of Daoism who have their own take on philosophy and praxis. Within each sect, you will find writings that are much more prominent than either Laozi or Zhuangzi.

Confucianism should also be given proper credit for infusing Daoism with much of it's mystical dimension - in particular, the Guanzi and Mencius. On the whole, let us not forget the overwhelming impact the Yijing have had on Chinese cosmology and civilization.

The East/West dichotomy is a distinct product of Victorian Colonialism, meant to justify it's racial, moral, religious and civilizational superiority - in very soft terms, the West is considered rational and organized, whereas the East is seen as strange and mystical. This cultural meme is still enduring with New Agers and pseudo-philosophers who consider the East as the zenith of sublime mysticism.

Either way, these fickle minded feel-good chasers are free to bash the Western Traditions as they please. It simply shows their sloppy scholarship and with such an attitude I doubt they'd fare very far in the Eastern Traditions anyway.

good post user, thanks

We also need to get rid of the myth of the Greeks as the solitary originators of pure thought in a Mediterranean that had complex societies over 6000 years before their writings. Not only is it ignorant of anything outside Europe, it also takes away any nuance and charm our image of their culture has.

Literally every Western philosopher.

Agreed - travel, missionary work, migration, immigration, diaspora, war, famine and conquest are just some factors that the blur the geographical lines, which are rarely static anyways.

"The Greek Miracle" is an academic myth, a convenient fabrication based on Enlightenment polemics that champions the Western world as the originator of coherent thought and rationality.

Should these eggheads step out of the Cartesian dualism they're boiling in and cease to downplay the factual sources - namely, that Greek thought borrowed extensively from the Assyrians, Egyptians and Persians, not to mention it's own local milleu of ecstatic Orphics and strange Goens - then the picture painted would be quite different.

For example, Thales of Miletus is widely considered to have been the first "scientific philosopher." Now, when Thales postulated water as the primordial substance, one could well draw a parrallel to the Egyptian conception of Nun, since we know that Thales was educated in Egypt and that he likewise adviced Pythagoras to seek the tutelage of the Egyptian priesthood for their wisdom.

Heraclitus would very conviently scorn Pythagoras later for veiling the true origin of his philosophy; and how would Heraclitus know that in the first place? Could Heraclitus have taken inspiration for his conception of fire and logos from the Memphite theology, with Ptah as the primordial fire, creating the world through speech?

The same kind of cross cultural comparison could be drawn satisfactory for Homer, Parmenides, Empedocles, Plato, Justin Martyr and so forth. Most of it is there, black on white, while some of it is speculation based on eering similarities and following the progressional line of historical development.

The only fallacy in this is fancying some exotic country as the sole originator of all wisdom.