A believer in the teachings of Confucius

Usage examples of confucian.

Japanese was an emotional, Shinto nature, and that Buddhist metaphysics and Confucian rationality should be rejected as alien.

Japan before it was altered by Confucian rationalism and the complex religious doctrines of Buddhism.

Japanese thus created an exalted emperor figure on the Chinese model, they did not adopt the key Chinese Confucian theory of the emperor ruling through a mandate from heaven.

In his famous Seventeen-Article Constitution of 604, Prince Shotoku, in addition to calling for the reverence of Buddhism, sought also to propagate Confucian values among the Japanese.

Constitution, in characteristic Confucian fashion, offers general principles of guidance for rule by moral suasion rather than compulsion, which requires detailed laws with specified punishments.

This concept had evolved from Confucian egalitarianism, which held that the equal division of land would render the people content and harmonious.

In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confu-cianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future.

Drawing on his Confucian tradition, he sought to portray in nature the kind of harmony and overall agreement of parts that ideally ought to prevail in human society.

The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millennium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention.

With the advent of the Tokugawa period, this reaction spread to the intellectual field and stimulated a great Confucian revival.

And from this standpoint Neo-Confucianism, in keeping with all other Confucian schools, was primarily concerned with the conduct and affairs of people in the here and now.

Razan, both of whom started their careers as Buddhist priests and only later were allowed to become independent Confucian teachers.

In the process, the Hayashi family, in the generations after Razan, became securely fixed as the official Confucian advisers to the shogunate and the hereditary heads of a Confucian academy in Edo.

But perhaps the most telling example of how the Confucian sense of propriety and reserve stifled artistic creativity in the Tokugawa period can be observed in the history of the distinguished Kano school of painters.

In philosophy, too, scholars expressed much diversity of opinion, often in opposition to Chu Hsi Neo-Confucianism, which, as we have seen, was officially championed as an orthodoxy by the shogunate from at least the late seventeenth century through its patronage of the Hayashi family of Confucian scholars.