Confucian Tradition & Early Chou Political Order

To properly position the Confucian response to li, it is essential to follow Bodde's declaration that the Chou dynasty was the seat of Chinese culture, "the creative age of China's great classical and philosophical literature" (Bodde, 1961, p. 378). In other words, early Chou is the source of the framework of Chinese civilization as it is commonly understood. Bodde's discussion focuses on a mythic personification of Li as a vague demigod who "pressed the earth down" (1961, p. 391) while Ch'ung lifted Heaven up. This is a metaphorical way of saying that li dealt with practical things of the earth, or the vicissitudes of life as envisioned to be enacted by the people of the earth, a fact confirmed by Bodde's reference to Eliade's famous explanation of the intersection of cosmic and historical time. It follows logicall

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say that Confucianism is as basic to Chinese thought as Hinduism is to Indian thought, that is only a statement of the obvious. The content of that remark is that Confucius inflected most of the issues basic to a culture through a few key principles, and those principles gradually developed a form, which the term li most adequately covered. In turn li was the mark of one who followed the Way, or tao, which was the name given to the moral system as a whole (Mote, 1989; Hucker, 1975). Systematic application in the Confucian period appears to have been the linchpin of transformation. What in the West would be called a "good system" overarches Confucian thought as a whole. What comprises li are the ceremonies of appropriate behavior in any social setting, but the sincere purpose that informs such behavior reaches beyond ceremony per se and into the moral realm. Undoubtedly, the codification of li starts with the family, then extends to public life in its many forms. By Mencius and the Neo-Confucians, the codification was further stratified into prescribed activity (Mote, 1989); however, even at the Confucian period, the roles that one assumed had some moral content. Consider the role of learning in the realization of a good so
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Approximate Word count = 2117
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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