The Humanistic Turn of the Early Chou Religion- the Formations, Correlations and Functions of the View of "Heaven's Destiny" and the Value-Ration of "Respecting Virtue"

• Main Authors: Huang Zuei-Jane, 黃瑞珍
• Other Authors: 曾春海
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/13503097388947725363

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 哲學學系 === 90 === The relations between the religious and political beliefs are complementary either in the eastern or eastern society which beliefs, authorities, organization, systems were combined into a whole especially during the Ying-Chou period of the ancient China. The writer’s interests and concerns are rightly focused on “the humanistic turn of the early Chou religion”. The Chou empire inherited the religious, cultural tradition from Ying authority, starting out from the phenomena of worshiping the heaven deity, earth deity, ghosts, ancestral spirits and expressed an unique understanding, belief for the cosmos and the living world through the interpretative way of a set of symbolic system. Whereas, that the examples of Shia, Ying authorities went just ahead made Chou empire realized that only relying on the worshiping, divining activities was insufficient to “appealing to the heaven for the eternal life of nation”; hence, they proclaimed further the subjective deed― “respecting virtue” ―for supplementing the deficiency of religious activities; given that, the Chou turned its outwardly respecting and searching for the transcendent back to the inwardly subjective awareness and introspection on self, grounded on the inherited belief system, by way of the introspective work “respecting” of self that resulted in the transformation from the mystic, religious characters into the arising of the value-ration of “respecting value”. Thus, there was connection between “respecting virtue” and “obeying the heaven’s destiny”, “accepting the heaven’s destiny”; the former the cause, the later the effect. The close causation occurred within them that effectively explained the legitimacy of the bestowed destiny from heaven on Chou. At this time, “the heaven bestowing destiny on those who have virtue→respecting virtue for the purpose of protecting people→appealing to the heaven for the eternal nation” these three nodes were rightly strung into a firm rope so that “respecting virtue” became the necessary condition of the eternal nation that discovered the wholly new, moral, ethical and humanistic aspects. The key point of the humanistic turn of the early Chou religion was Chou-Kong and others, based on people’s emotions rooted in the worshiping, divining activities for the transcendent, ingeniously turned people’s inherited religious sentiments to the “virtue” itself. Under the function of Chou-Kong’s self-consciousness, the religious sentiment of relations between gods and men smoothly transformed into the moral sentiment that made the religious spirit in the early Chou pushed a giant leap and opened a fully new religious spirit that directed to its moral and ethical dimensions. The religion-ration and humanity-ration were thus combined and melted; from this on, the humanistic meanings and values were acknowledged and regarded with esteem. On the grounded of that, the writer tries to make a systematic explication for its reason of unity by describing separately the historical process of the humanization of the early Chou religion from the aspects of formations, correlations and functions of both the view of “heaven’s destiny” and the value-ration of “respecting virtue” among which the inter-dialectical relations used as an approach in this text.