Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation / / Barry C. Keenan; ed. by Henry Rosemont.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Keenan, Barry C.,
• HerausgeberIn: Rosemont, Henry,
• Place / Publishing House: Honolulu : : University of Hawaii Press, , [2011]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Series: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality ; 19
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.) :; 6 illus.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Editor's Preface -- Dynastic Periods in Chinese History -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. Neo-Confucianism, 1000-1400 -- CHAPTER 1. Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism -- CHAPTER 2. Neo-Confucian Education -- Part II. The Great Learning and the Eight Steps to Personal Cultivation -- CHAPTER 3. The First Five Steps of Personal Cultivation -- CHAPTER 4. The Three Steps of Social Development -- Part III. Self-Cultivation Upgrades: The Fifteenth Century through the Nineteenth Century -- CHAPTER 5. Reforms in Neo-Confucianism: The Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries -- CHAPTER 6. The Nineteenth-Century Synthesis in Confucian Learning -- Legacies -- Appendix: Chronology of Works and Thinkers with the Sequence for Reading the Four Books Indicated -- Notes -- Further Readings -- Index -- About the Author