The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)

Nonetheless, the entrenched pathways as well as the continuing plurality of these ideas and practices in local and popular society have managed to sustain alternative visions of life, the world and transcendence in these societies, frequently in conversation with other circulatory fragments.

in the first millennium, the founders of the Sui and the Tang dynasties sought to respond to these popular yearnings for the sage-ruler by enlisting the rituals and symbolisms of the by-now interfluent Buddhist and Daoist religions to establish themselves as such.

For the most part, these cosmologies recognized powers and goals higher than those of mortal humans and the physical world. The disenchantment of the world may have led to a more scientific view of reality, but it also promoted the hubris of a human-centric – mediated by a nation-centric – view of the world

The necessity of recognizing the multiplicity of the sources of our subjecthood is increasingly urgent because of the yawning mismatch between the nation as a sovereign unit and the global forces that shape the destinies of people in those nations.

strongly towards the side of pluralism but acknowledges the importance of shared cosmological notions which both influenced and were in turn shaped by plural religions, most notably Manichaeism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. These cosmological ideas hold that the universe is a dynamic, organic unity of humans, earthly nature and Heaven…

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Together with these pluralistic and quite immanent expressions of cosmological power, the conception of Heaven (Tian) was widely understood as the dominant and encompassing cosmological…

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For the heart/mind (xinxue) or Wang Yangming school of neo-Confucianism, the Ultimate can only be realized through the self, which has a fundamental, though often unrealized, unity with the universe. Self-realization takes place through the purification of the egotistic desires and moral resolve of the inner subject to act upon the world.

Thus, for the neo-Confucianists, the principle is both immanent and transcendent.

But I cannot help noting that the structure of hope is not dissimilar to dialogical transcendence. Hope by itself is based on reasonable expectations and efforts made to realize them. In its pragmatic character, it is more open to reason than faith and belief.