Ricci Similarities And Differences Compared With Wang Daiyu Will Pass Confucianism

Currently, the communication and peaceful coexistence between different religions have drawn heated discussions in the world. The localization of religions plays an important role in the foreign religions’survival and development when they enter into a new cultural environment and also connects the dialogue, communication and fusion of different religious cultures. Christianity and Islam, the two most influential religions of Abraham’s family, has been developing in China for over1000years. They showed new evolution in Ming and Qing dynasty. A group of people who mastered both the oriental and occidental knowledge attempted to integrate these two religious doctrines with the traditional Chinese culture so as to localize dogmatic theology. Among them, the Italian Catholic Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and the scholar Wang Daiyu of Chinese Hui Minority are two outstanding figures, who exert a profound and inspiring influence on the religious localization. They advocated "interpreting the foreign religious doctrines by way of Confucianism","drawing an analogy between foreign religions and Confucianism","supplementing Confucianism" and "beyond Confucianism" and all these broke a new and inspiring ground of religious communication and localization.The recent studies on Matteo Ricci and Wang Daiyu mostly focus on their works respective; some achievements have been gained at home and abroad in the comparative studies on Catholic Confucianism and Hui Confucianism. However, the comparative studies on Matteo Ricci and Wang Daiyu have seldom been done yet. This thesis, focusing on Matteo Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven and Wang Daiyu’s University of halal" and "The Real Commentary", attempts to make a comparative research on their own efforts to localize the foreign religions with Confucianism.This thesis consists of five parts. The first part is the introduction dealing with the origins and significances of this research, and the literature review. The second part, from the perspective of ontology and based on Matteo Ricci’s and Wang Daiyu’s thoughts of composition, discusses their ontological differences in localizing foreign religions with Confucianism; the third part, from the cosmological perspective, contrasts their different means of integrating cosmology with Confucianism. The fourth part, from the perspective of human being’s status and human nature, discusses their differences. The last part deals with the reasons and influences of their differences in detail, analyses their similarities and differences in the meaning system of localization, and considers the guiding significance of localization and religious communication in China. It points out that it is necessary to deal with ontological issues of culture consciousness and the issues of interpreting meaning systems and the relations between faith and reason.