Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 21 June 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter discusses how one becomes a Confucian in Chinese society. Unlike the conversion process in religious traditions that have a clear initiation ritual such as baptism, there is no clear step in Confucianism that marks such transformation. The process of becoming a Confucian in most cases is a gradual process that involves social and religious rituals, education in the Confucian canon, moral self-cultivation, as well as participation in certain Confucian social institutions. Historically, to become a Confucian in China is not about the renunciation of other religious beliefs or the exclusion of other religious practices but rather a deepening of one’s bonds in a given community, and a consolidation of one’s multiple religious, social, and cultural identities. This chapter proposes a typology that identifies Confucian practices, including Confucius worship, ancestral rites, and what can be called “cultural Confucianism.”

Keywords: Confucianism, Confucian, China, self-cultivation, ritual practice, ancestral rites, cultural Confucianism

Anna Sun

Anna Sun is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon College, Gamblier, Ohio.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.