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| Sattue of Confucius at Ni Shan Academy |
Of the three main pillars of Chinese civilisation, I liked Daoism at first sight. Believe it or not, my first introduction to Daoism was Alan Watts’ The Way of Tao, a book I picked up in a secondhand bookstore in Canada. I found out much later that my late father was actually lifetime president of a Daoism Association in Hong Kong. He never discussed his spiritual practice with us. Typical Daoist.
With age, I have become a belated student of Buddhist wisdoms at a respectable distance.
But until recently, Confucius was to me an archaic sage whose ideas had long putrefied. Had I lived in the tumultuous moments of May Fourth in early 20th century, or the Cultural Revolution, I would have chanted for its uprooting. Enough is enough. China had been struggling desperately for a century. Nothing seemed to work. Confucius was to blame. Time to get out of the two-thousand-year-old straight jacket. His ideas, so deeply engrained in Chinese society, was fettering progress, cutting China off from the modern age.
