From Fantasy To Practice,Advocating Good And Forbidding Evil

In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties,a special cultural phenomenon appeared in Chinese society,that is,a large number of The Perception of Loftiness(?????),Ledgers of Merits and Demerits(???),Yinzhi(???)scripts and other morality books(??)with strong religious and moral colors,appeared in the market.The ledgers of Merits and Demerits1 is a kind of booklet that records the merits and deeds,and is the tool used by the Taoist priests to record their merits during cultivation.The concept behind the design of Merit and demerit is: the existence of God,the rebirth of life and death,and the retribution will surely come.As far as the thought itself is concerned,the viewpoint of retribution behind the merits and demerits is obviously contrary to the Confucian ethic thought.However,in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties,a large number of Confucians began to pursue and reform their own ledgers of Merits and Demerits,so that Confucian Records of Good and Evil appeared.The purpose of this paper is to explore the historical phenomenon of Confucian Records of Good and Evil and the Confucianism behind it.Their self-cultivation and enlightenment qualities were noticed by Confucianists and turned into Confucianism.The term of " Confucian Records of Good and Evil " used in this paper mainly refers to the merit and demerit of Confucianism,which was reformed and compiled by Confucians in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties,and has a certain degree of Confucian connotation.The transformation of meritorious Confucianism is not a smooth process,which is full of struggle and compromise.The concrete reform method is that Confucians remove the contents of Buddhism and Taoism into merit and demerit,weaken the religious color of it,and add Confucian ethics.We can see the purpose of Confucianism from the process of transformation.The Confucian Records of Good and Evil went through several stages from its emergence to its extinction.It reached maturity in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties and became a tool for Confucianism to cultivate itself and educate the society.And it shows two tendencies of "self-cultivation" and "enlightenment" in concrete practice.This article takes Liu Zongzhou's Human Morality(??) and Chen Xiduo's Compilation of Ledgers of Merits and Demerit(?????) as examples to discuss the similarities and differences between them.The special space-time background in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties created the characteristics of the pluralistic development of Confucianism.This paper focuses on how Confucians demonstrated the characteristics of Confucianism practice through the merits and demerits of Confucianism.At the same time,puts it into the overall context of the transformation of Confucianism in the Ming and Qing Dynasties,and discusses the secularization trend of Confucianism in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.In this turbulent era,from a micro perspective,from small to large,tries to observe the struggle,compromise,ideal and persistence of the Confucian scholars under the predicament of The Times.