Early Neo-Confucian View of Chinese Buddhism

Abstract

<p>The introduction of this thesis gives the cultural background of the thousand-year old confrontation between a well sinicized India-born religion, Chinese Buddhism, and the<br />reviving Chinese orthodoxy of the Sung period, Neo-Confucianism. Early Neo-Confucianist philosophers, namely Ch'eng Hao, Ch'eng I and Chu Hsi, attacked Buddhism on four main groilllds: historical and textual formulations, cosmology, metaphysics, and ethics -- both social and personal. The point of the thesis is to give a critical account and a tentative appraisal of their criticism, by examining both their rejection and their assimilations of Buddhist views, and in so doing to propose an answer to why Neo-Confucianism finally succeeded in permanently defeating the still powerful Chinese Buddhism of the time.</p>