In the dream, Zhou Tieyi looked down at his fingers, stained with black ink yet glowing with a shimmering, righteous light, and fell into a silence of his own.
Confucianism regards its own path as the only righteous one. This is not necessarily wrong. After all, the Confucian ideal is to save the world and its people, which requires turning one's own path into a universal value system that gains the acknowledgment of the masses. Yet, the one thing Zhou feared in this process was that Confucianism would become increasingly extreme and radical. It might eventually evolve into the Cheng-Zhu school of Neo-Confucianism, which, while preaching benevolence and righteousness, would in reality use the strictures of ritual to kill.
It is not to say that the Cheng-Zhu school is devoid of merit, but its moral requirements for individuals are simply too high. If everyone were truly a sage, the Cheng-Zhu school could certainly govern the world with great success. But the reality is that the vast majority of people will never become sages in their entire lives, nor would they ever aspire to, and thus, this school of thought would merely become a sharp sword used to eliminate dissent.
Chapter 184