Fang Dongmei China Yan Zongzhe Modern Interpretations

Modern China's cultural crisis forces objectively Chinese intellectuals to comprehensively check and deeply reconsider the traditional culture when they are confronted with the impact of western powerful culture. They hope to show traditional culture's eternal and remarkable pervasive values through the interpretation and reconstruction of it. Because of Chinese traditional culture's peculiarity which is with Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism as its main contents, when practicing concretely, unifying and reconstructing Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism from the inside becomes an important aspect to realize the traditional culture transition and revival, in which the most outstanding one is "introducing Buddhism into Confucianism" that begins in late Qing Dynasty and origins from modern new Confucianism. Because Thome H. Fang's philosophical system, who is the representative of modern new Confucianism, is based on the interpretation and absorption of Ganda School's philosophy, the features of "introducing Buddhism into Confucianism" in his philosophical thoughts are more distinctive. On account of this, this thesis will set Thome H. Fang's modern interpretation to Ganda School's philosophy as research object and by the research of individual cases, provide useful clues and reasonable views for further study of Thome H. Fang, modern new Confucianism, Ganda School's philosophy and the relationship between modern new Confucianism and Buddhism. The content of the thesis is as follows.The introduction is an overall summary of the topic's academic background, literature review, research significant and methods. The first chapter will mainly discusses the philosophical spirits of Ganda School and Thome H. Fang separately and the relationship between them. Three aspects will be discussed in this chapter, that is, Ganda School's philosophical spirits, Thome H. Fang's affirmation and succession to these spirits, and in the new historical conditions, Thome H. Fang's development of them to a brand-new theoretical ideology. In Chapter Two, the study will transit from Ganda School and Thome H. Fang's philosophical spirits to their philosophical bases, that is, ontology, and their relationship will also be studied. The main content in this chapter is Ganda School's ontology, Thome H. Fang's interpretation and reconstruction of Ganda School's ontology from the view of traditional Confucianism. Ganda School sets his philosophy by classification; Thome H. Fang shows traditional culture's spiritual values by culture classification, but they also have internal correlation. Thus, Ganda School's classification, Thome H. Fang's view to classification and his cultural classification will be studied in Chapter Three. In Conclusion, this thesis will reveal Thome H. Fang's interpretation to Ganda School's philosophy from the angle of philosophical spirits, ontology and classification, from which Thome H. Fang's self-conscious interpretation methods and theoretical clues will be clearly showed. The methods adopted by Thome H. Fang in the process of interpreting Ganda School's philosophy and influence caused by Fang's interpretation itself on the development of modern new Confucianism and Ganda School philosophy in modern times will also be summarized in conclusion part.