We China people are far away from God. How can we repent?
Even famous representatives of Neo-Confucianism (such as Mou Zongsan and Xu) believe that although there is no independent religious and cultural tradition in the whole culture of ancient China, there is no independent tradition of priests and monks, but the Chinese nation is not born without religious spirit. It is obvious that China attaches importance to the belief of God or Heaven in his poetry books, and this Heaven is also a personified God. At the same time, the rituals of offering sacrifices to heaven, land and country have always been valued by later Confucian scholars (see the Declaration of Chinese Culture Informing the World).
This observation is really insightful.
Like other great nations in the world, our ancestors, especially the sages who created Chinese culture, were all people who feared heaven. They feel a kind of power, a kind of existence in their own lives, which dominates the world and everything in life. These sages tried their best to discover and understand this existence and summed it up in a simple and profound word: "God." Or "Emperor", "Heaven", "God" and "God". Folk sayings are: "God", "God" and "God".
The central issue of China's philosophy is the relationship between man and nature, so it can also be called "the study of man and nature", just as Sima Qian said: It is time to understand the changes from ancient times to modern times. .
According to Feng Youlan's textual research, China people's outlook on heaven in the Spring and Autumn Period probably has five meanings, namely, the sky of material, the sky of domination (or will), the sky of fate, the sky of nature and the sky of righteousness (or morality). Feng Yue said, "Poetry, calligraphy and Zuo Zhuan, the so-called Heaven in Mandarin, except material space, seems to mean dominating Heaven. The day that Confucius said in The Analects of Confucius is also the day of domination. "
In an Analects of Confucius, "Tian" is the highest category, and the word "Tian" is used as many as 18 times, among which Confucius himself said it twelve and a half times. Confucius' "heaven" is basically a "dominant heaven".
In the face of such a "dominant heaven", our basic attitude of respecting the ancestors of heaven is: respecting heaven, "fearing heaven" and never "deceiving heaven". The scripture says, "Fear God and dare not be unjust." Confucius said: "A gentleman has three fears: fear of fate, fear of adults, and fear of the words of saints" (Ji Shi).
It is precisely because people should be afraid of heaven and not bully it that Confucius' famous saying: "If you commit a crime against heaven, you can pray in vain". The point of that sentence is definitely not that prayer is useless, but that people should not offend God. If a man has sinned against God and does not correct his behavior, it is useless to please God with whatever words he uses.
However, the sages in China are different from Jewish prophets and disciples of Christ. The experience of the latter is: in the beginning, there was the word of God, and the word of God came to me; The same experience of the former is: "Heaven says nothing". "Heaven" did not speak directly to the sage. Heaven didn't say anything, but as Mencius said, "it is manifested by actions and things (Zhang Wan)". This has created such a situation that people are eager to know God, but God is speechless. Therefore, people have to settle for the second best, trying to understand "heaven" from the "behavior and things" of "heaven". Of course, this kind of understanding can't be biased, flawed, wrong or truly understood.
The tragedy of history lies in that, since the Qin Dynasty, on the one hand, in China, although the people still maintain the heart of worshipping heaven, they worship everything and do not offend all immortals. And one person-the emperor (the son of heaven) monopolizes the right to worship heaven, and only he can worship heaven. Yuan Zhiming put it well in Shenzhou Collection: "People of China, you are miserable. Sitting on the throne in the center of Beijing is not God, but a mortal like you, born with profound sins and limitations, but holds unlimited power and acts as the role of "God on earth".
On the other hand, the concept of personification of God (Heaven) has been gradually abstracted and blurred in the long history, which has become the "reason" of benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom in Neo-Confucianism of Song and Ming Dynasties. The so-called "reason is also metaphysical" (Zhu Xiyu). And in modern times, even this dry "reason" has been swept away, saying that it is an idealistic whore. What is the sky? It is just a form of existence of matter.
Today, "Tian" has disappeared in the minds of China people for a long time.
People nowadays are really fearless. As for conscience, don't be afraid. As the saying goes, conscience is valuable.
If a person does not fear God, where does repentance begin?
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