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what it says to readers today. This is not a purely academic exercise that appeals to scholarly minded people alone; it is also an engagement with all those who feel poignantly about existential predicaments.
In my existential reading of the Analects, I take Paul Tillich as an omnipresent dialogical partner because his existential theology was at one time very influential in the West and is currently highly popular in Chinese academia. His analysis of the ontological structure of humankind is also generally valid, even for the Analects. Myconceptual analysis reveals that this foundational text has three organically connected levels of thought, proceeding from personal cultivation, through the mediation of the community, to the metaphysical level of ultimate reality. The personal level of thought is embodied in the key concepts of xue (learning), zhi (wisdom), and yong (courage). The social level is expressed through the concepts of ren (benevolence), li (the rites), yi (moral rightness), and junzi (exemplary people). The metaphysical level finds its expressions in Dao (the Way), tian (heaven), de (virtue), and shengren (the sage). It is through these three levels—personal cultivation, communal participation, and immanent transcendence—that human predicaments are resolved in the Analects as I interpret it.
An existential reading of the Analects carries with it a theological implication. Studying Confucian theology is a legitimate line of inquiry and the meaning of this text could be greatly informed by theological constructs developed in the West. If one follows the traditional division of a systematic theology, one will find that the Analects also has anthropological, ethical, and theological dimensions, which correspond to the three levels of thought mentioned in the preceding paragraph. If soteriology is understood broadly, the Analects also has a soteriological dimension. The Analects points to the goal of complete harmony in which harmony within oneself as well as with the society and cosmos is ensured. If one is to construct a theology of the Analects, an existential reading allows certain contrasts with Paul Tillich’s existential theology. For example, the Confucian idea of straying from the Way differs from the symbol of the fall. Likewise, the Confucian reality of social entanglement differs from the reality of estrangement, and the Confucian paradoxical nature of Heaven differs from the Trinitarian construction of God.