The Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove
Although Shan Tao, Ruan Ji, Xiang Xiu, Liu Ling, Ji Kang, Ruan Xian, and Wang Rong were historical figures, their identity as a group of like-minded iconoclasts who flouted Confucian ideology and norms of behavior has been questioned in modern scholarship. Even their epithet Zhulin qixian (The Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove), as some scholars argued, was retrospectively coined. This chapter argues that not only were the Seven Worthies historical figures in the third century, but they were also famously known by their epithet in their own time. Further, the political significance of their domicile in Shanyang District is explained. Yet the Seven Worthies were not a homogenous group because their political aspirations and philosophical inclinations were quite diverse and dissimilar, as the analysis of the philosophical thinking of Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, and Xiang Xiu in this chapter demonstrates.
Les Sept Sages De La Forêt Des Bambous Et La Société De Leur Temps
I1 est peu de figures dans l'histoire de la Chine qui soient aussi universellement connues que les Sept Sages de la Foret des Bambous Pj j4 , ce club d'amis qui se reunissaient pour boire et bavarder vers la fin de la courte dynastie des Wei, soit aux environs de l'an 260 de notre ere. J'ai dej'a parle de leur role dans la vie de Hi K'ang et des doutes qu' on a pu avoir sur l'historicite de certaines des traditions qui les concernent 1). II n'est pas sans interet d'examiner leur place dans la societe de leur temps 2).
Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey
Buddhism occupies a central place in the history of Chinese thought, as the system that attracted some of the best minds in the millennium between the Han and the Song (second to twelfth centuries). However, integrating Buddhist thought into Chinese philosophy poses some problems, because Buddhists worked from a different set of texts and spoke what seems to be a different language. Christianity began as a hellenized biblical faith whose theology combined theos and logos from the start; by contrast, long before Buddhism found its way into China there was an extensive history of reflection by Indians on the Buddhist dharma—so that Chinese Buddhists had to think through an inherited tradition before they could embark on their own Sinitic reading. As a result, much of the convoluted scholastic detail in Buddhism remains alien to most Chinese. The fact that the neo-Confucian Zhuxi (1130–1200) openly advised his students against debating with Buddhists (lest they be seduced into the Buddhists’ mind-boggling dialectics and thus defeated) also means that there was a calculated break between the two traditions. To this day, Chinese Buddhism remains isolated and is often left to Buddhologists. Also, because of the way the field has developed, Chinese Buddhism is often treated as an interim in a pan-Asian development beginning in India and ending in Japan. Integrating Chinese Buddhist thought into the history of Chinese philosophy did not begin until Fung Yu-lan. It is a formidable challenge to attempt