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The Reception of Western Culture in the Orient
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# : |
11113 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1986 |
8,762 Words |
| Author
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Sae Won Yoon
Dr. Sae Won Yoon is a doctor of physics and president of Sung
Hwa Theological Seminary I Seoul, Korea. This paper was
originally presented at the 14th International Conference on
the Unity of the Sciences in August 1985. It is reprinted by
permission. |
History records the long cultural contact and exchange between East and West. As we are faced at this time with a far greater cultural turning point than any ever experienced in the past centuries, it may be useful to consider how the three major Oriental countries have received Western culture.
The historical environment of a certain community plays a determining role in giving birth to the new culture that begins to form when heterogeneous cultures meet each other. Values, especially absolute values, should be given full consideration in dealing with the new cultural revolution that is our present concern. A basis for the harmonious development and cohesion of many different cultures can be found by examining the variability in the contact between the countries of China, Japan, and Korea with Western culture for the past several centuries.
Among those three countries, China represented to Japan and Korea both the window and the model for receiving Western Culture. But on the other hand, China, due to certain peculiar characteristics of the Chinese people (especially the Han people, the majority race of China), shows many differences from the other two countries.
At the end of the Ming dynasty, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), an Italian, came to China as a Jesuit missionary. He found that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism coexisted not only in one country and in one community, but also in each individual's value-consciousness. He learned that there was a difference between the monochromatic Western value system and the polychromatic Eastern value
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