[ { "id": 212094, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 36, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "13\n\neven keel over the centuries.\n\n3. Grounded in Education by Rote\n\nEducation in these concerns began in the schoolroom and at home. This indoctrination was rendered the more effective because of the memorization process that was such a central feature of the Chinese teaching method. Looking back on his schooldays in San Ning Country, Kwantung, Dr. Ng Poon-chew wrote:\n\n\"In the old method when I was a boy, we were compelled to study, but we were not required to know what we were studying about. We were simply set to memorize the Confucian classics, endeavouring hard to transform our heads into first-class phonographic records.\n\n--21\n\nThe feats of memorization, in a country which relied heavily on this method of teaching, often bordered on the phenomenal.\" In 1914, after fifty years' experience of China, Archdeacon Moule not only testified to the positive qualities of memorization but deplored its likely fate at the hands of the new Republican educators in their haste for change.22\n\n4. Extended by Copying Teachers' Handbooks\n\nApart from memorization of the classical books and the moral lessons imparted thereby, there was other work to be done in the classroom. For the smarter village boys who became the educated village elders of their generation, the process of absorption and indoctrination had been intensified by their teachers' practice of making them copy their own manuscript guides to social etiquette, useful exemplars and local traditions.\n\nTsuen Wan fully exemplifies the old system of education (in the broad sense of ethical teaching), and its lingering force into practically our own time. Several of my friends among the indigenous population had told me about this copying before I came to realize its full importance and significance; and over a period, as the more educated elderly villagers produced their own handbooks and spoke of their education and the copying work their teachers had given them to do, the pattern became very clear to me. These men were the type of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214821, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 236, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "202\n\nTo this day, services for the departed, whether as newly-deceased souls or as wandering spirits, command the greater part of the time of practitioners from the two religions. Apart from the varied religious services carried out in the homes of the deceased, or in the temples and monasteries where similar rites were held for the departed, both Buddhists and Taoists are prominent in the rituals carried out in public places at the Hungry Ghost Festival.23 This, the most important ritualistic pacification of wandering souls and spirits during the lunar year, is still performed throughout Hong Kong on behalf of the general public by priests of the two religions, hired by local committees and associations.\n\nWhat People Want: Individual Expectations from Acts of Worship\n\nIn approaching the gods, whether in the temples and monasteries, or at the earth god shrines on the street or in the fields, the worshippers had specific requirements in view. Then as now, worshipping itself was principally devoted to obtaining divine assistance in time of trouble or to attain the object of one's desire or supplication. These usually concerned health and wealth, as well as general preservation from all ills, for oneself and for family members, deceased as well as living. There was also the need to obtain protection (because of their great potential for harm) from the general body of those many departed souls without living male descendants to care for them.\n\nUnlike the ritual services, worshipping was not carried out with the help of intermediaries from the two religions. It is a personal act, usually conducted by the individual before the altars in temples, monasteries or nunneries, or at the tombs of deceased family members and ancestors at certain fixed times of the lunar year.\n\nAs Archdeacon Moule says - and it bears repeating because it is so basic to an understanding of how Chinese people think and act - the prayers of the worshippers one sees in the temples are being \"addressed to images representing deities of living and present power.\n\n24 In Hong Kong, a visit to a large city temple like the Wong Tai Sin Temple in New Kowloon at a major festival leaves one in no doubt that the people believe in the ability of the god to grant their requests. Nor is satisfaction kept to oneself. The word soon gets around, and since the worship", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214824, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 239, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "205\n\nphilosophy and ethics among the Chinese\", p.298.\n\n2 A convenient modern summary of all Chinese religions, past and present, is provided by D. Howard Smith in his Chinese Religions (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968). Useful summaries are also contained in the relevant sections of Trevor Ling's A History of Religion: East and West; An Introduction and Interpretation (London, Macmillan, 1968).\n\n3 Arthur H. Smith, The Uplift of China (London, Church Missionary Society, 1908 and revised new edition 1914). Both are used in this paragraph, pp.83-4 and 41 respectively.\n\n4 Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934), p.79.\n\n5 Smith, op.cit., 1908, p.84. Professor Latourette adds one more element: \"The average Chinese has long been and still is an animist, a Buddhist, a Confucianist and a Taoist with no sense of incongruity or inconsistency\", he wrote, in the first edition of his survey The Chinese, Their History and Culture (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1934), Vol.II, p.125.\n\n6 However, this \"intertwining\", as Smith called it, did not extend to the temples and monasteries of the three religions. As the 19th century English missionary cleric Archdeacon Moule observed, they were each characterized by a different atmosphere and possessed a different significance, which he summarized as follows: \"Confucian and ancestral temples generally are for the commemoration and reverence and cultus of the great departed. Buddhist and Taoist temples and monasteries are open for the worship singly or in company of the people generally, addressed to images representing deities of living and present power\". Ven. Arthur Evans Moule, The Chinese People, A Handbook on China (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1914), p.212. Rev. F.W.S. O'Neill, The Quest for God in China (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1925), p.33.\n\n7 This was a truly enormous field of endeavour, as practically every woman in every household in China and its Dependencies would have recourse to Taoist magic in one form or another to ward off evil from the home. The propensity was so marked that it could extend to converts to Christianity who, used to pasting up protective words and phrases, could include “Emmanuel” and “Trust in God” above the doorways and windows where hitherto Taoist charms had", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 } ]