Recovering the Nature: Ma Yifu’s New Confucian Thought and Its Intellectual Background

Numerous great Chinese thinkers attempted to realise a transcendent ontological foundation in order to live an ideal life informed by the Confucian way. To this end, they sought answers to how the unconditioned foundation could be realised through cognitive awareness that is circumscribed by the conditioned nature of human existence. Inspired by earlier Confucian and Buddhist thinkers, Ma Yifu attempted to offer more refined responses to these two questions. In addressing them, Ma and other modern thinkers also sought to justify the contemporary significance of the Confucian way in a modernising China. This book presents a rich landscape of these ideas. Many primary materials translated and analysed here are introduced in English for the first time.