Before explaining the matter,
Professor Xu went off on a tangent.
He first branched out to lay some groundwork.
He talked about cultural identity.
Lin Feng: [Right, right, right. You're absolutely right, Professor Xu.]
After all, Professor Xu's opening words had been, "Young man, you need to understand that something like 'borrowing yin lifespan' could never have existed in ancient times."
Lin Feng: [Why not?]
Professor Xu said that cultural inheritance was a fairly serious matter. It was the character of a civilization, expressed in every aspect of its customs, surrounding people through their food, clothing, housing, and travel, gradually assimilating them.
Beauty lay in the bones, not the skin, and the same held true for essence, energy, and God. A shared culture was the backbone of that essence, energy, and God.
Confucian thought in particular had a profound, subtle influence on people's thinking.
Ever since Emperor Wu of Han's policy of "Dismiss the Hundred Schools and Venerate Confucianism," successive imperial courts had promoted Confucianism and advocated moral education. Then came the rise of Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, with treasures such as Wang Yangming's School of Mind emerging along the way. Traces of them remained even today.
Buddhism and Daoism had developed alongside Confucianism.
They all continually borrowed from and absorbed one another, changing from top to bottom in an effort to expand.
To spread more effectively and survive,
they all worked hard to change.
Natural selection, survival of the fittest.
When Buddhism first entered the Central Plains, it came under fierce attack from the scholar-officials.
One reason the scholar-officials disliked Buddhism was that, once monks left home to enter religious life, they recognized neither father nor mother. They were neither loyal nor filial.
Confucianism placed great importance on loyalty and filial piety. When you became a monk, in the narrow sense,