A Research Of Ma Rong's Confucian Classics

Ma Rong was a famous Confucian scholar in the eastern Han dynasty.Due to his luxurious lifestyle,arrogant teaching attitude and a false charge with murdering his student,his academic status has been underestimated.By delving further into the historical materials,I disclosed that the superior conditions of Ma Rong' s family and his way of 'students teaching each other'which was unique and effective disproved those defamation mentioned above.And also he respected others and enjoyed his life,Therefore we should reevaluate him as a person and his undervalued academic status and influence.With respect to his academic contribution,Ma Rong was well-read in the classics,and he annotated most of them.He learned from different scholars,so self-study and family education was his source of knowledge.In his specific academic research,Ma Rong abandoned JiaFa to break the parochial prejudice.and he combined the old text Confucianism with the new text Confucianism.He mastered the art of annotation by solely using small ZhangJu to explain the text.His way of doing research reflected different Confucian thoughts,such as worshiping sage and classics,simplifying annotation,paying attention to social issues.In the history of the development of Confucian classics in Han Dynasty,the way how Ma Rong combined the old text Confucianism with the new text Confucianism,and how he merged Confucianism and Taoism in annotation showed that the Confucianism had changed from the dominated position to a trivial status,and also it indicated that the Confucianism was developing into WeiJin metaphysics.In addition,Ma Rong deviated from Confucian etiquette to Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi's thoughts also confirmed the advent of WeiJin metaphysics.so Ma Rong was one of the typical representative of this academic transformation.