Yan Yuan Quotes on Knowledge
Yan Yuan (1635–1704), the seventeenth-century Chinese Confucian whose unsystematic but vigorous writings gave early-Qing thought one of its sharpest critiques of the dominant Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucian textualism, defended the case that the genuine knowledge transmitted by the classical Confucian tradition is irreducibly practical — knowledge of how to perform the rituals, master the six arts, govern a state, and cultivate the body and the moral life — rather than the textual scholarship and metaphysical speculation to which the Song-Ming tradition had reduced it. The framework presses the recovery of embodied practice (xi) as the indispensable medium through which the cognitive and moral content of the classical tradition is alone transmitted.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Yan Yuan:
“Sitting in quiet meditation is not yet the work of a Confucian; the work is in the practice of the six arts.”
-
Attributed to Yan Yuan:
“Books are servants of practice; when they take the place of practice, they have ceased to be books in any useful sense.”
-
Attributed to Yan Yuan:
“What we cannot do, we cannot rightly understand.”
-
Attributed to Yan Yuan:
“Cheng-Zhu Confucianism has emptied the school in the name of preserving it.”
-
Attributed to Yan Yuan:
“The sage Confucius taught archery before he taught metaphysics; we should learn from his order.”
-
“China's censorship is not as rigorous as everyone thinks. The self-censorship of the authors is much worse.”
Wikiquote -
“Reality is much more absurd and complex than any fiction.”
Wikiquote