Sacralizing and Secularizing a Shared Confucian Inheritance: An Jung-geun, Sun Yat-sen, and the Religious–Secular Boundary in East Asian Peace Thought

At the turn of the twentieth century the Confucian order under Heaven, with its reverence for Heaven (jing tian 敬天), its obligation of righteousness (yi 義), and its ideal of a peace under Heaven, remained a shared inheritance across East Asia as the political world it described came apart. This article asks how two figures carried that inheritance across the religious–secular boundary to imagine regional peace: the Korean Catholic An Jung-geun and the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. It argues that the religious–secular boundary is not given in advance by a tradition but drawn by historical actors in crisis, and that An and Sun drew it with different emphases. An bound the reverence for Heaven to his Catholic faith and sealed it in martyrdom, grounding an Eastern peace in a transcendent authority and asking that the Pope crown the three rulers, though he argued in the languages of international law as well. Sun recast the Great Way (datong 大同) through national liberation, popular sovereignty, and international equality, grounding regional order primarily in civic ethics. These differences concern modes of legitimation, not degrees of moral commitment. Read together they move the debate over the religionization of Confucianism from classification to agency.