The Plight Of Acceptance Of "Sheng Meng Ge" In China

"Sheng Meng Ge"has been translated into Chinese by Jesuit Giulio Aleni in 1937, but the academics didn't pay much attention to it for a long time. Li shixue's paper named was the first one that found out the text's source in west. This paper will focus on the acceptance situation of Sheng Meng Ge among Confucian--Christians from the Chinese perspective."Sheng Meng Ge"is a typical religious poem. Giulio Aleni's intention was to use this poem to promote the faith of Christianity, persuade more Chinese people to be converted. However, Confucian--Christians interpreted it from the perspective of Chinese "Dream" culture, Taoism, Buddhism, thus deviated from the Giulio Aleni's intention. In order to find out the reasons for this deviation, I'll analyze it in three respects: the form, use of vocabulary and the fundamental differences between the Chinese and Western cultures. Although "Sheng Meng Ge" adopted the Chinese traditional form"Qi Yan"(seven words), it hardly prevented itself from conveying the faith of Christianity. It integrated the words from Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. This brought problems to the acceptance of Confucian—Christians. But the main reason lies in the dual concepts of Christianity couldn't be accepted by the Chinese people.In terms of the acceptance situation and the reasons for this, it reveals the mergence of Christianity and Confucianism is superficial, which remains in the period of"shape like". While the Confucian--Christians were confronted with the different cultures, they are unable to cross the traditional Confucian concept and the way they absorbed the different culture is the absolutely Chinese way called The Doctrine of the Mean.