Suchergebnisse

This research, in the first half, provides an outline of Confucian cultural practices as evidence of the promotion of Confucianism and national tradition in South Vietnam in 1955–1975, in the context of East Asian Confucianism from the 1950s to 1970s. The second half focuses on Nguyễn Đăng Thục, a leading scholar in South Vietnam, in order to investigate the motivation for his promotion of Confucianism as a national tradition of Vietnam. Influenced by the decolonization movement in Asian countries after World War II, and particularly by the 1947 Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, Nguyễn Đăng Thục arguably assumed nationalistic and decolonizing approaches to his examination of Vietnamese culture and the traditional cultures of Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Asia as a whole. By analyzing his Confucian activities and research, this paper also argues that, to a certain extent, Nguyễn Đăng Thục should be labeled a "New Confucian" scholar of Vietnam.

This essay is a study of the woodblock print culture at Khê Hồi temple in Thường Tín district, Hà Tây province (belonging to present day Hà Nội), a temple that is located in the same area as two other temples addressed in this volume (Thắng Nghiêm temple and Phổ Nhân temple). After describing the temple's history and the various Buddhist schools that have influenced Khê Hồi temple, this essay proceeds to describe and analyze the temple's extant woodblock collection (over 700 plates, and many books), which was discovered in 2001. The essay goes on to examine the circulation of books printed from the temple's woodblock collection by means of: (1) comparing the temple's woodblocks with Buddhist texts in the collection of the Institute of Sino-Nôm Studies and (2) examining neighboring temples to determine whether or not they have preserved books printed from Khê Hồi temple's woodblocks. Through analyzing the history of woodblocks and their circulation pertaining to Khê Hồi temple in the context of nineteenth-century Buddhist woodblocks and texts in Northern Vietnam, this essay argues that Buddhism played a preponderant role in the creation and dissemination of printed texts in nineteenth-century Vietnam. During this period, although Buddhist print culture was already quite developed, the circulation of printed texts was largely limited to temples, and had not yet become widespread in secular society or the "public sphere" at large. This would later change during the "Buddhist Revival" of 1920–1945, when printing and print culture had already taken on their modern form.