• 대순사상과 동아시아종교
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.87-108
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• 2023

From the time it was propagated to Vietnam until it was forced to relinquish its leadership position in both politics and philosophy, Confucianism in Vietnam was never orthodox Confucianism. This study employs the theory of invented tradition to examine how Confucianism penetrated the ethnic Vietnamese community at the turn of the first millennium and points out its vital requirement: the construction of a Chinese-style centralized administrative government based on Neo-Confucianism. This requirement unfolded during the Le So Dynasty in the fifteenth century. Moreover, the theory of invented tradition can also be applied to discover the motivation behind Neo-Confucianism's process of manufacturing orthodoxy to speed up the goal of Sinicization. Somehow, the launching of the imperial examination system, meant to fulfill a system of bureaucracy, ended up resolving one of the greatest challenges of medieval times. It is to seek the ruler's uncritical submission to the ruled. This article applies hauntology to analyze two forms of Confucianism discourse in Vietnam. In doing so, this study determined that Confucianism evolved into its own unique system of thought in Vietnam and in the end, was not even recognizable as Confucianism. Throughout Vietnam's turbulent history, Confucianism shifted from a symbol of progress to one of backwardness. This culminated Vietnam's preoccupation with the de-Sinicization during the early twenty-first century.

• 대순사상과 동아시아종교
• /
• 제2권2호
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• pp.123-139
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• 2023

Quân sư phụ (君師父) is a concept of respectfulness derived from the Chinese Confucian concepts of sān gāng wǔ cháng (三綱五常, the Three Principles and Five Constant Virtues) and sān cóng sì dé (三從四德, the Four Virtues Applied to the Three Male Figures) that is applied to Vietnamese Confucianism in regards to not only kings but also Chinese Emperors, as well as Chinese culture generally. In his famous literary work Vàng lửa (Golden Fire), Nguyễn Huy Thiệp revealed the Vietnamese attitude to Chinese civilization: "Our country could be characterized as nhược tiểu (弱小, small and weak). Vietnam was like a maiden forcibly deflowered by Chinese civilization. 'She' enjoyed it, but also came to hate it and feel disgraced by it" (Nguyễn 1988). This is a special sentiment or psychological complex of the Vietnamese in relation to Chinese civilization. The research findings are that the Nguyễn Huy Thiệp complex is the rationale behind which the symbol of the ancestral King Lạc Long Quân (貉龍君) was altered via SinoVietnamese motifs in order to develop Vietnamese Confucian thought.