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The Song Confucians' View of History

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Description: Outlines the role of historical inquiry in the Confucian thought of the Chinese Song dynasty.
The Song Confucians' view of history Earlier, we talked about the Song Dynasty Confucians' preoccupation with practical matters.  Throughout Chinese history, one sees a pendulum effect in Confucian scholars' emphasis on practical matters and on a strict adherence to rituals and other aspects of tradition.  In the late Tang Dynasty that preceded the Song Dynasty, scholars talked about going back to the ancient classics to adhere to the true messages of Confucius.  The Song Confucian scholars' emphasis on interpretation rather than word by word adherence was a reaction to the Tang trend and their way to combine Confucian learning with practical matters of the day.  The Song emphasis on intuitive understanding received further development in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), a Chinese dynasty after the Song, but by late Ming, and early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), many Confucian scholars believed that the Song and Ming Confucian emphasis on interpretation led to often "vacuous" talk that had little connection with the true preaching of Confucius.  They then started a strict adherence to Confucian rituals and a very careful study of the meaning of each word in the ancient classics.  This trend would go well into the 20th century, when many of such Confucian scholars would become China's first generation of philologists and historians in the modern university or secondary schools in the modern educational system patterned after the West in 1905.  On the other hand, in the late 19th century, following China's defeat in the hands of Western powers, there was a revival of Song-Ming Confucian learning that called for applying the meaning of Confucian teachings to practical affairs of life.  Followers of this school constituted the core of the Neo-Confucian revival of the 20th century.
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