ABSTRACT
The twentieth century has been cruel to the Confucian tradition throughout East Asia. At the beginning of the century it was painfully obvious that traditional China was in terminal dynastic decline as well as being under persistent attack by the powerful Western colonial powers. Confucianism became an essential part of Korean and Japanese intellectual life. The contemporary Confucian scholar Tu Wei-ming describes the New Confucianism as the third wave of the Confucian tradition. Confucianism shows signs of rejoining the history of East Asia and is expanding rapidly into the larger global community of nations. One constant feature of the Confucian tradition is the lack of any formal or enforced systematic list of official teachings or dogmas as is the case for the great West Asian religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and even various well-defined Buddhist schools.
