The purpose of this piece is primarily to extol the virtue of the Daoxue (Neo-Confucianism in the West), which was the culminating synthesis of Confucian ethics, Taoist metaphysics, and a few concepts from Buddhism. I wish to express its living pattern, and to thereby perhaps awaken the reader to an interest in a tradition which is luckily not yet dead even if in China and its cultural diaspora in South East Asia it remains a minority. To any who have sympathies with Hegelianism, this is a call to pay attention to something of utmost importance. Nearly two billion human beings live with the objective and subjective legacy of this thought, and if in it we spy the Spirit of freedom, here is a most important ally to lock arms with and intertwine into the project of human emancipation.
The Empyrean Trail 