scholarly journals A Vietnamese Reading of the Master’s Classic: Pha .m Nguyê ˜n Du’s Humble Comments on the Analects as an Example of Transformative Learning

Asian Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-199
Author(s):  
Nam NGUYEN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Analects ◽  
Contemporary Education ◽  
Original Reading

Phạm Nguyễn Du’s influential text Humble Comments on the Analects (Luận Ngữ Ngu Án 論語愚按) is an outstanding example of a Vietnamese adaptation and reworking of an East Asian intellectual tradition. In organizing his work, Phạm departed from convention by rearranging the extant chapters of the Analects into four “books”: “Sage” (Thánh 聖), “Learning” (Học 學), “Official” (Sĩ 仕), and “Politics” (Chính 政). Moreover, Phạm placed particular emphasis on the “Learning” book, and thus underscored his contention that the classic text was especially relevant and meaningful to eighteenth-century Vietnam. This paper attempts to read Phạm’s work in the contexts of both Confucian tradition and contemporary education. First, it examines Phạm’s composition of the Humble Comments based on Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning. Phạm’s writing process in this work presents a fascinating case of transformative learning, in which the author questions received assumptions about the world and himself, puts forward new propositions, and elaborates these via an original reading of a classic. Through the analysis of Phạm Nguyễn Du’s life and his preface to the Humble Comments, one can also gain a better view of the Vietnamese reception of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, and more particularly, of Zhu’s dictum of “learning for the sake of one’s self” (weiji zhi xue 為己 之學). Lastly, this dictum will be reappraised to show its validity in contemporary educational contexts.

Daxue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tu Wei-Ming
Keyword(s):  
Civil Service ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
Zhu Xi ◽  
Great Learning ◽  
Doctrine Of The Mean ◽  
The Status ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Civil Service Examinations

Originally a chapter in the Liji (Book of Rites), one of the Five Classics in the Confucian tradition, the Daxue (Great Learning) has for centuries attained the status of a canon, arguably the most influential foundational text in East Asian Confucian humanism. When the great neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi grouped the Daxue with the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), another chapter in the Liji, the Confucian Analects and the Mengzi as the Four Books, its prominence in the Confucian scriptural tradition was assured. Since the Four Books with Master Zhu’s commentaries became the required readings for the civil service examinations in 1313, and since Master Zhu insisted that the Daxue must be studied first among the Four, it has been widely acknowledged as the quintessential Confucian text.

Gentle Labour: Jesuit Georgic in the Age of Louis XIV

Loyola's Bees ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Annabel Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Classical Style

René Rapin, the father of Jesuit georgic poetry, manoeuvred his intellectual life between the ancients and the moderns with an instinct for conciliation and compromise that made him an effective apostle to the world. He is best remembered for his Horti, a classical-style didactic poem in four books that celebrated the victory of the moderns over the ancients in horticultural art. His poem, which is secular in appearance, is motivated by (mildly concealed) religion and Jesuito-political impulses, and cultural and literary impulses, particularly those of Virgil. This chapter discusses some of the developments in the Italian Renaissance georgic poetry to better understand Rapin's contribution to the early modern Latin georgic. It considers the latter Latin poems on horticulture and sericulture, which bear resemblance to the ancient model yet are considerably shorter than Virgil's. These latter georgic poems predicated on a Nature that is mild and marvellous, and centred on the artistic manipulation of Nature. In the Italian Renaissance, the ‘recreational georgics’ were dominated by pastoral ease, which is ironic, given the prominent thematic of labour in the original georgics. While the georgics were poems that celebrated nature and labour in gardens, by the turn of the eighteenth century, French Jesuits had identified the didactic genre of georgics as a flexible medium for exhibiting their modern Latinity and advertising their honnêteté.

East Asian Exceptionalism to Western Populism and Migration Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 196-210
Author(s):  
John Lie
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
East Asia ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
The World ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
And Migration

In the 2010s, the world is seemingly awash with waves of populism and anti-immigration movements. Yet virtually all discussions, owing to the prevailing Eurocentric perspective, bypass East Asia (more accurately, Northeast Asia) and the absence of strong populist or anti-immigration discourses or politics. This chapter presents a comparative and historical account of East Asian exceptionalism in the matter of migration crisis, especially given the West’s embrace of an insider-outsider dichotomy superseding the class- and nation-based divisions of the post–World War II era. The chapter also discusses some nascent articulations of Western-style populist discourses in Northeast Asia, and concludes with the potential for migration crisis in the region.

The Wasteland of William Blake

1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Frank O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Blake ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.

Across the Western Sea (1783-1845)

1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Native Land ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.IA Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.

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