East Asian and Indian philosophy
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From Confucius to Zhu Xi
The First Treatise on God in François Noël’s Chinese Philosophy (1711)
On 25 September 1710 Pope Clement XI finally promulgated the 1704 decree Cum Deus optimus which condemned the toleration of certain Confucian rituals among Chinese Catholic converts and the use of the Chinese terms tian and Shangdi to refer to the Christian God. This papal decision antagonised the Kangxi Emperor and devastated the Jesuit China mission. Although the Jesuits were prohibited from publicly refuting the decree the Flemish Jesuit François Noël sought to defend the Jesuit position by publishing his voluminous scholarship on the Chinese classics. Among other works in 1711 Noël published two seminal contributions to the history of Sinology: the Sinensis imperii libri classici sex or Libri sex and the Philosophia Sinica a sophisticated treatment of Chinese metaphysics ritual and ethics. While the Libri sex achieved some degree of influence in the Enlightenment through the French translation of the French Jesuit historian Du Halde and the writings of the philosopher Christian Wolff the Philosophia Sinica was actively suppressed by the Superior-General of the Jesuit order. Yet it is in this latter work where the full breadth of Noël’s originality and intellectual contribution can be found. Noël reinterprets the Jesuits’ position through the lens of Neo-Confucianism integrating concepts such as li taiji yin and yang in his reading of Chinese philosophy. With contributions from Sinologists and intellectual historians this book offers the first systematic study of this pioneering work.
Lieux saints et pèlerinages : la tradition taoïste vivante
Holy Sites and Pilgrimages : The Daoist Living Tradition
The Chinese territory is densely meshed with holy sites (mountains caves springs...) where the gods manifest themselves and where pilgrims come to meet them. The present volume the result of a Franco-Japanese conference held in Paris in 2017 includes fifteen chapters in French and English exploring the conceptions and practices at these holy sites; they build the analysis around the Daoist notion of “grotto-heavens and blessed lands” (dongtian fudi) and its long historical continuity for two millennia while addressing hybridizations with Buddhist and folk practices and comparing with Japanese holy sites. These case studies cover both the ascetic practices of religious virtuosos and the popular associations whose members dance for the gods on the mountains.