Abstract

This dissertation presents a new viewpoint regarding the problem of understanding the nature of religious belief, based on examining apparent contradictions in Confucian religious texts and their implications on the life of the believer. The approach is demonstrated primarily by focusing on a pioneering Neo-Confucian text from the 11th century AD, the Tongshu by Zhou Dunyi. The approach is also used in new readings of a few classical Confucian and Neo-Confucian texts. It is suggested that the main concepts appear in the texts as paradoxical since they belong to a form of life that demands daily confrontations of the practitioner with practical dilemmas. It is essential for the religious form of life that only through living by it, one can see that the text is not simply contradictory; rather, it talks in riddles of a special kind: riddles which are introduced--and answered--by the religious form of life. ;In order to show the significance of the paradoxical language of Tongshu, the thesis is developed in two directions: historical-religious and philosophical-methodological. The first chapter presents a new translation of the text and its commentary. The second chapter suggests an understanding of major ideas in the text, that is of propriety, sincerity, and sagehood, by means of reference to other works of the era. The third chapter presents the method and terminology used in the thesis which are based on later Wittgenstein's ideas on understanding, particularly regarding understanding religious belief and practice. The fourth chapter concludes the thesis by presenting a new understanding of the above ideas as riddles that are responded to in practice. ;The contributions of the proposed dissertation are three-fold: First, from the Confucian perspective, the dissertation contains a new translation of the Tongshu, and a first translation of its commentary, as well as a new method to deal with texts. From the philosophical perspective, the thesis offers an application of later Wittgenstein to a field not commonly discussed in this context. From the perspective of the study of religion, it may serve as both a method and an implication of the question "what is religion about?"