The Penetration of the Copernican Theory into Feudal Japan

Western science began to penetrate to the Far East at the end of the sixteenth century, along with the Christian faith spread by Portuguese Jesuits. Astrology was important in both China and Japan. It included not only a limited knowledge of astronomy, but some philosophy and logic. The advent of astronomical knowledge as understood in Europe was the beginning of a new kind of science, which did not affect the East's traditional view of the universe; although at first information from Europe about medicine, physics, and astronomy reached the Far East along with the doctrines of Christianity, as a means of attracting converts to what the Chinese termed a new philosophy of life. An early propagator of Western civilization in China was the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1553–1610), who taught medicine and astrology together with the principles of Catholicism. Another Jesuit, Francis Xavier, advised his superiors to send a mission consisting not only of the devout but also of the cultured

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• Notes on the Penetration of the Copernican Theory into China (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

  Open Access•Boleslaw Szczesniak•Journal of the Royal Asiatic…•1945

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