Adapting Catholicism to Confucianism: Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi / Yu Liu.
Extract: The European Legacy, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 1, 43–59.
DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2013.860718.
Includes bibliographical notes (p.56-59.

ABSTRACT: Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) is the single most important proselytizing work of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the legendary founder of the early modern Jesuit China mission. Controversial since the early seventeenth century, it has been both praised and condemned for Ricci’s claim of a monotheistic affinity between Catholicism and Confucianism. Ricci’s gesture of friendship to Confucianism won him many Chinese friends and posthumously made him famous or notorious in Europe, but as this essay contends, it was never more than a tactical cover for him during his lifetime. Since the real purpose of his cultural adaptation was his unobtrusive engagement with the ancient Chinese philosophical idea of tianren heyi (humanity’s unity with heaven), what is ultimately so instructive about Tianzhu Shiyi is the light cast on Ricci’s intricate relationship with his Chinese friends and on the ironic twists and turns of his complex legacy.

The European legacy, toward new paradigms : journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas / sponsored by the European Cultural Foundation.

Local access dig.pdf  [Liu-Adapting Catholicism to Confucianism.pdf]

Introduction. Aim ; Sources ; Method ; Previous research ; Motivation ; Structure and notational convention -- The preconditions for the dialogue. The legacy of Matteo Ricci for the Confucian-Christian dialogue ; Confucianism ; The Confucians who have mostly commented on the Christian doctrine of salvation ; The Christian concept of God in Chinese terms -- Confucian ideas of the Saviour in Christianity : the assimilation of God to the Chinese concepts of shangdi and tian. The neo-Confucian ideas of the assimilation; Cultural nationalist Confucian ideas of the assimilation; Modern Confucian ideas of the assimilation -- Confucian ideas of the object of salvation in Christianity : created humanity and its status. Human beings as part of creation; The status of human beings -- Confucian ideas of the means of salvation in Christianity. The existence of transcendence in Confucianism; The transcendece of the Christian God and that of the Chinese heaven; The superiority of the internal transcendence to the external transcendence -- Basic problems in the Confucian-Christian dialogue. The hidden differences between Confucian and Christian ways of thinking; Four obstacles in the Confucian-Christian dialogue; Affirmative elements in the Confucian-Christian dialogue.

Available online via USF Gleeson Library.
Local access dig.pdf. [Huang-Confronting Confucian Christian 2009.pdf]
See also Huang's 2006 work based on his dissertation.

Introduction: Confucius, Kongzi and the modern imagination.
Part One. The Manufacture of Confucius and Confucianism:
The Jesuits, Confucius, and the Chinese -- There and back again: the Jesuits and their texts in China and Europe -- Interlude: the meaning and end of Confucianism: a meditation on conceptual dependence.
Part Two. Making sense of Ru and making up Kongzi:
Ancient texts, modern narratives: nationalism, archaism, and the reinvention of Ru -- Particular is universal: Hu Shi, Ru, and the Chinese transcendence of nationalism.
Epilogue: At century’s end: ecumenical nativism and the economy of delight.

Ricci, the Chinese, and the Toolkits of Textualists / Howard L. Goodman and Anthony Grafton.
Offprint from Asia Major: THIRD SERIES, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1990), pp. 95-148.
Published by: Academia Sinica.
Running title: Ricci and the Chinese.
Includes bibliographical references.

Topics: Society of Jesus, Memory, Chinese culture, Confucianism, Palaces, Christian history, Literary criticism, Philology, Stoicism

Local access dig. pdf. [Ricci Toolkits.pdf].
Access Asia Major via BC Libraries

Confucianism and Buddhism in the late Ming / Araki Kengo -- The spiritual autobiography of Te-ch'ing / Pei-yi Wu -- Chu-hung and lay Buddhism in the late Ming / Kristin Yü Greenblatt -- Neo-Confucian cultivation and the seventeenth-century "Enlightenment" / Wm. Theodore de Bary -- Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Wang Shih-chen's theory of poetry and its antecedents / Richard John Lynn -- Chiao Hung and the revolt against Ch'eng-chu orthodoxy / Edward T. Ch'ien -- Liu Tsung-chou's Doctrine of moral mind and practice and his critique of Wang Yang-ming / Tang Chun-I -- From education to politics: the Fu She / William S. Atwell -- Fang I-chih: Western learning and the "investigation of things" / Willard J. Peterson -- Wang Fu-chih and the Neo-Confucian tradition / Ian McMorran -- Reason, substance, and human desires in seventeenth-century neo-Confucianism / Chung-ying Cheng -- Yen-yüan: from inner experience to lived concreteness / Wei-ming Tu -- The Hsing-li ching-i and the Ch'eng-chu school of the seventeenth century / Wing-tsit Chan.

Local access dig.pdf. [De Bary-Unfolding.pdf]