Confucianism In East Asia

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The first scholar paper that I’ve gone through talks about the status of Confucianism in nowadays east Asia. Confucianism was one of the most influential and representative thoughts of East Asian culture. However, the status of Confucianism is declining today, even in East Asia, it is regarded as “an anachronistic thought” since the end of the 19th century. The author points out that the two main reasons why Confucianism losing its influence – the lack of democratic and industrial spirit, which are the two core axes of “modernity”. For instance, Confucianism divides the social classes – the noble, middle classes and low classes; it also discriminates between legitimate and illegitimate children; between man and woman; and also among occupation …show more content…
Through introducing different religious culture in the world, the author Yohan Cho compared the art, music and paths to aesthetic among the East and West. He cited a lecture given by Arnold Toynbee at McGill University in 1961, to point out the border that distinguishes the East and the West. Toynbee divides the major religions in two parts. In the former group are the three religions that originated in Southwest Asia, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; the other group includes religions rooted in China and India, which are Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. Following the flow of history, the three religions from the Southwest Asia widely spread to the West, while those originated from China and India spread to the East. The westbound religions defined by exclusion and intolerance, the eastbound religions are characterized in an opposite way, which convey values of coexistence and tolerance. Even until today, the different religious values still lead to bloody wars, the former three religious claims only their religion lead people to truth, while the latter four suggest there is no one road to truth but each road could complement others in coexistence. The contrastive analysis on the different religious groups has broadly defined the characteristics of Eastern and Western aesthetics. According to a major art history contributor Dagobert Frey said: “all observation begins with the act of comparison”, there are two fundamental methods to compare art mentioned in this paper. The first is an “origin-based”, historical method, other is a “form-based”, systematic method. The pictorial art in the East and West both reflected the attitudes of life and the historical development among the area. In the East, people focused on landscape paintings that convey their idea through symbolic motifs, whereas people in the West tended to focus on portraits. In the

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