Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c7.s9.t2.18

v1.c7.s9.t2.18

Confucius’ thoughts have been enriched and modified ceaselessly through the ages since the Han Dynasty, to the period of the Tang Dynasty and Song Dynasty, his thoughts were fused with Indian Buddhism and gave birth to now schools of learning of “Neo-Confucianism” and “the Philosophy of the Mind”, thus raising the Chinese philosophical intellectual enquiries into a new high. That is because of the fact that in the process of replacement of Sanskrit by Chinese language in the Buddhism Classics, the logical thinking assimilated from the language also gradually intrudes into the men of learning who took Confucian classic as basic language context, and even further, the Buddhism concept translated from Sanskrit directly became core concept of the theoretical construct of Neo-Confucian classics, for instance, “the Subject and Object of Knowledge”, and “Body And Function”, etc. Such a linguistic and ideological blending is possible as Confucius’ thoughts already contain potential possibilities. Xu Fancheng, a modern scholar, is thus able to recount Confucius’ thoughts represented by Lu-wang philosophical school of the Ming Dynasty, by basing on the philosophical thought of Sri Aurobindo, a thinker in the Indian modern times.