Yuan Dynasty Temple Schools: An Indissociable Chain of Confucian Education -- A Series of Theses on Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism

Author: Hu Wu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: Today, many people, including some historians, might ask: What is a temple school? If we sweep away the dust of history, we will find that the "temple" here refers to the Confucian Temple, and the "school" refers to Confucianism. Confucianism depends on the Confucian Temple, and the temple and Confucianism are built together, complementing each other. Since the medieval period, this has become a custom. The study of temple schools can not only reflect the development of social education and Confucian thought, but also reveal many fields such as cultural forms. The temple schools of the Yuan Dynasty have been a relatively neglected area of research by scholars. The reason is actually quite simple: previous scholars were often busy with the study of Yuan Dynasty politics, economy, and military affairs, leaving little time for examining education and culture; additionally, the Yuan Dynasty was considered the realm of the Mongols, and tradition held that Confucian thought and education during this period were "dark" and regressive; while research on institutional issues yields results relatively quickly, compiling and analyzing temple schools across various regions was time-consuming and yielded slow results. While reviewing a large number of Yuan Dynasty documents, I gained a strong impression that the situation of temple schools during the Yuan Dynasty was not what tradition had long assumed, which sparked the idea of conducting specialized research on the topic. After painstaking and time-consuming data collection and analysis, I discovered that the temple schools of the Yuan Dynasty not only did not decline but, on the contrary, experienced unprecedented prosperity and development. During this period, the architecture, rituals, and many management systems of temple schools inherited the past while also showcasing their own unique characteristics.