Ritual and Ren in Confucius’s World

At the very beginning of Chinese moral-political philosophy stood Confucius, who attempted to maintain a continuum between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice in his articulation of ideal personhood, family, and polity. This is reflected in the way two core concepts, i.e., ritual (li) and the virtue of ren, in his philosophy are formulated. In his effort to rescue the collapsing ritual order, Confucius formulated the virtue of ren, usually translated as the Good, humaneness, humanity, human-heartedness, authoritative or consummate conduct, or benevolence, and touted this newly formulated virtue as the new moral foundation for the ritual order that used to be grounded in the Zhou kings’ claim of the Mandate of Heaven. Confucius’s ren contains both a partialist element favoring one’s family and an impartialist element when dealing with others. Confucius’s effort set the parameters for the mainstream moral-political project during the classical period, but his vision would be seriously challenged and significantly reformulated.

The Role of Astronomy and Feng Shui in the Planning of Ming Beijing

Present day Beijing developed on the urban layout of the Ming capital, founded in 1420 over the former city of Dadu, the Yuan dynasty capital. The planning of Ming Beijing aimed at conveying a key political message, namely that the ruling dynasty was in charge of the Mandate of Heaven, so that Beijing was the true cosmic centre of the world. We explore here, using satellite imagery and palaeomagnetic data analysys, symbolic aspects of the planning of the city related to astronomical alignments and to the feng shui doctrine, both in its “form” and “compass” schools. In particular, we show that orientations of the axes of the “cosmic” temples and of the Forbidden City were most likely magnetic, while astronomy was used in topographical connections between the temples and in the plan of the Forbidden City in itself.