9. Family Values: Confucian Role Ethics

…but this joke can finally pay off.

This gets ahead of the series, as I know you are ending before the advent of Buddhism in China, but this episode on role-based ethics, combined with your discussion in your history of Indian philosophy of the concept of skandhas or "heaps" makes me wonder whether followers of Confucianism were inclined to be early adopters of Buddhist thought.  If you already believe that you are merely the different roles  you play, are you predisposed to accept the idea that there is no "self," merely a set of "skandhas?"  If correct behavior and thought is defined in different circumstances as dictated by my roles as "father," "son," or "citizen" it seems to me it would be more intuitively acceptable that there is no core "self," merely a set of aggregated attributes that go into "me," that might shift over time.   The two concepts seem in some sense similar to me, and I wonder if the preexistence of this kind of role ethics predisposed Chinese thought in some sense towards the later acceptance of Buddhism and its flourishing in China.  Certainly Buddhism spread more successfully North and East than West, despite the Himalaya seeming a greater barrier to the spread of ideas than the terrain of Persia or even the Indian Ocean, which has supported  traffic from India to the Middle East and Africa, as well as Southeast Asia, for millennia.  However, to the West people had a very different set of ideas available, so perhaps something about Chinese thought made this idea more acceptable there?