Sitting In Meditation Of The Neo-Confucianism And Its Modern Educational Enlightenment

Confucianism always takes the primary role in Traditional Chinese Culture.Confucius,the founder of Confucianism,made his theories which compiling from the ancient wisdom become the backbone of our traditional culture.After its golden age in Han Dynasty and the period of paralleling with Buddhism and Taoism in Tang Dynasty,Confucianism experienced the time of gradual decrease in Song dynasty. Fortunately,Chu Hsi,the excellent representative of Neo-Confucianism,incorporated the strong points of various schools,and revived the Cnofucian failing situation into a new thriving stage.The distinct feature of Neo-Confucianism is taking sitting in meditation as the special method for learning and cultivating one's mind. Sitting in meditation is the most common way applied by the Confucians of idealistic philosophy of the Song and Ming Dynasties to cultivate their moral character .The positive effects of sitting in meditation made itself become a new easy way for people to perfect themselves both in moral,wisdom and health.Such feature was the wonderful landscape in the long and tortuous developing history of the Confucianism.In this thesis,sitting in meditation of Neo-Confucianism was reinspected with a new angle of view:the modern educational view.To analyze it in a more scientific way,the theories of philosophy,brain science,health care medicine and other relevant subjects have been introduced in this thesis.In the hope of injecting new vitality into educational researches,opening up new horizon for education,analysing the scientific connotation within it,and finding its meaningful enlightenment for modern education,sitting in meditation has been worked to build a new theory form.Therefrom,we can establish the role and position of the theory of the sitting in meditation, make firm the possibilities of practice,and provide some useful references and enlightenment for our modern education.This thesis begins with the brief introduction of the practices and theories of sitting in meditation of the Neo-Confucianism.Then the five main characters of sitting in meditation have been elaborated,including the special way to perfect one's moral,the different method to enlighten one's wisdom, the fashionable type to preserve one's health,the precondition of joinning societies and dealing with people and situations,the principle of practicing in an easy way.After analysing sitting in meditation with the theories of philosophy and modern sciences, the affirmative effects and functions in cultivating moral,enlightening wisdom,perserving health,were confirmed as the most important part in the thesis.And finally some helpful inspirations provided for our modern education.