A new battle for Confucius

In the 17th century, when Western Jesuits embarked on the daring task of spreading Catholicism in China, they found in Mozi some cultural basis for belief in a Christian God. Mozi's religious faith in a "will of Heaven" lent some grounds to the Jesuits to argue that Christianity was not totally alien to Chinese culture. Centuries later, the Jesuits' efforts helped Chinese who were willing to modernize without giving up all of their traditions to confront Western culture with a piece of their own philosophy - Mozi.

Furthermore, Mozi's doctrine of "universal love" sounded like the idea of Christian love propagated in the 17th century, as well as like the drive to egalitarianism by the communists in the 20th century.

In contrast to those of Confucius, Mozi's moral teachings emphasized self-reflection and authenticity rather than obedience to ritual. He observed that we often learn about the world through adversity ("Embracing Scholars" in Mozi). By reflecting on one's own successes and failures, one attains true self-knowledge rather than mere conformity with ritual. ("Refining Self" in Mozi) Mozi exhorted the gentleman to lead a life of asceticism and self-restraint, renouncing both material and spiritual extravagance.

Mozi tried to replace what he considered to be the long-entrenched Chinese over-attachment to family and clan structures with the concept of "impartial caring" or "universal love" (兼愛, jiān ài). In this, he argued directly against Confucians who had argued that it was natural and correct for people to care about different people in different degrees.

While Europe put more emphasis on the particular (cities, kingdoms, nation-states), China aimed at the universal, the rich notion of "tianxia", "all-under-Heaven", whose political expression has been the empire or the dynasty (wangchao). As the great Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao (1873–1929) remarked:
The Chinese people have never recognized the nation (guojia) as the highest form of mankind's organization, claiming always that a higher form must exist, a suzerain (zongzhu) of all nations, that which we call all-under-Heaven (tianxia)… This type of broad-minded cosmopolitanism (shijiezhuyi) has been the nucleus of Chinese political thinking for the past several thousand years. [8]

seeker401 wrote:tianxia is the NWO?

Major Disappointment wrote:The INGENEZA hypothesis.

Read something interesting, and thought you might like it.

http://www.ingeneza.com/e_ingeneza.html