Searching for the "God's" Compassion: Review on the History of "the Dialogue" between Mozi and Jesus
Author: CHU Lijuan, Postdoctor, the Institute for Global History, Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Abstract:
<span font-size:17.5px;background-color:#dfeef7;"="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Since the Late Qing, Christian scholars have conducted deep comparative studies into the potential correlation between Jesus and Mozi represented by questions like: “Is jian’ai 兼爱 a Chinese version of Christian compassion ?”“Is Mozi the ‘Jesus of the East’?”Although the questions have been debated for over 150 years, they have attracted little attention in wider academia. This paper attempts to vitalize these discussions by a detailed review of their history, while also exploring their significance for contemporary studies in the field. Missionaries of the Late Qing, intelligentsia of the early Republican period and Christian Taiwanese scholars have all offered studies on the question of the potential comparability of the concepts ofjian’ai ,compassion andTian (as Heaven or God) represented by Jesus and Mozi. This review explores the reason why scholars of Chinese and foreign backgrounds engaged in such an academic dialog, while also discussing the question of how this dialog has contributed to contemporary Chinese academic discourse. The paper also illuminates the related question of how these scholars evaluated the different concepts within Christian and Mohist thought and their potential relation to each other.
Keywords:
Mozi, Jian’ai , Jesus, God’s compassion , “the dialog between Mozi and Jesus”
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