A Confucian Life In America Analysis

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Allison Lee RELI 1002 Liu Xuewen 2/17/2012 This video is an interview between Bill Moyers and Tu Wei-Ming. The topic is about “A Confucian Life in America”. Bill Moyers interviews Tu Wei-Ming who is a leading expert on Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism. A proponent of the idea of “Cultural China,” which attempts to understand what it means to be Chinese within a world context. Tu is currently interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource for the emerging global community. He also is an active voice in the dialogue on comparative religion. He indicates that the humanism of the old sage can help us sort out some contemporary ethical problems. Tu Wei-Ming has written numerous books on Confucian learning, humanism…show more content…
In the interview, Tu Wei-Ming has mentioned about the notation of a good man in Confucian thought. A good man always learn to become better, is always in the process of self-perfection or self-transformation. It is to train oneself to become more sympathetic, more open to other possibilities. On the other hand, a good man is able to experience the suffering of others and the joy of others, to know that one is not a loner, one is always in connection, not only on connection with other human being, but with an ever-extending network of nature, with the ecosystem. On the class lecturer, we have learned the virtues of Confucius. The idea what Tu Wei-Ming mentioned about in the interview is similar to the “Ren/Benevolence”. This is probably best expressed in the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you do not wish yourself. The most interesting I have learned from this interview is what kind of message did Tiananmen Massacre bring to us. How to use Confucian ideas of ethics to develop a stable society has been the concern of those who are power in East Asia. The students who involved in the Tiananmen massacre were the voice of the people. They were on behalf of most people’s benefits. The tragedy in this issue was the students overwhelmed by the irresponsibility of the regime. At that time, there were a lot of illiterates in China; they didn’t understand why the students did that. Even though the workers, and the peasants, they couldn’t fully appreciate the students strived for liberty. People could hear the kind of inauthentic but still persuasive “politicized "Confucian voce, which is obedience, duty, commitment to the goal of socialism and so forth. Therefore a fruitful interaction, which is a fusion, needs to become possible between liberal democratic
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