-Caveat Lector- >From The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99apr/9904confucius.htm A P R I L 1 9 9 9 East Asian technocrats and modernists in Beijing, among others, are eagerly embracing an updated Confucianism -- even as scholars in the West ask some eyebrow-raising questions. Did the Chinese sage really exist? If so, did he have much to do with the religious and ethical system that bears his name? Could Confucianiam have been invented by Jesuit missionaries? by Charlotte Allen TO many educated Westerners, Confucius is the very emblem of Chinese civilization and religious belief. If the dates that historians have assigned to him -- 551-479 B.C. -- are correct, he was a contemporary of the Greek poet Pindar, the tragedian Aeschylus, and the philosopher Heraclitus. According to tradition, Confucius was easily their equal. In addition to having written or edited parts of a diverse body of literature that includes the I Ching (Book of Changes) and the Book of Poems, classics to this day, he was a scholar, a minister of state, and an accomplished horseman and archer. Confucius is said to have taught his disciples the cultivation of personal virtue (ren, usually translated as "goodness" or "humaneness"), veneration of one's parents, love of learning, loyalty to one's superiors, kindness to one's subordinates, and a high regard for all of the customs, institutions, and rituals that make for civility. Discuss this article in Post & Riposte. So appealing is Confucius that his Lunyu, or Analects, a collection of 497 sayings and short dialogues written down by his disciples after his death, has been translated again and again, especially during this century. Ezra Pound tried his hand at the manuscript; Arthur Waley published a famous English translation in 1938; and two years ago Simon Leys (the pen name of the Australian Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans) translated it into strikingly spare and elegant English prose. One reason Confucius has resonated with twentieth-century intellectuals is that his religiosity -- or lack thereof -- is remarkably congruent with our time. He appeared to encourage obedience to the will of "heaven" and reverent observance of religious rites -- the ancient Chinese practice of offering sacrifices to the spirits of one's ancestors, for example -- while remaining agnostic on the question of whether a supernatural world actually exists. One of the analects declares (in Leys's translation), "The Master never talked of: miracles; violence; disorders; spirits." The Analects contains a version of the Golden Rule ("I would not want to do to others what I do not want them to do to me"), but Confucius' real concern seems to have been the Golden Mean: all things in moderation, even moderation itself. According to another of the analects, "Lord Ji Wen thought thrice before acting. Hearing this, the Master said: 'Twice is enough.'" Such anecdotes prompted the novelist Elias Canetti to observe, "The Analects of Confucius are the oldest complete intellectual and spiritual portrait of a man. It strikes one as a modern book." In short, ever since the Enlightenment, Confucius has been widely regarded in the West as a Chinese personification of humane, tolerant, and universal ethical principles. In his Age of Reason, Thomas Paine listed Confucius with Jesus and the Greek philosophers as the world's great moral teachers. A figure of Confucius in flowing sleeves joins Moses, Hammurabi, and Solon among the lawgivers in the marble frieze encircling the Supreme Court's hearing room in Washington, D.C. But what if this familiar image is completely untrue? The answer to this question is of more than academic significance. The portrait of Confucius as the leading Chinese sage, together with the traditional holistic and moralistic reading of the Analects that Leys's translation exemplifies, has an important ideological constituency: intellectuals of the Chinese diaspora and their Western admirers, who have used Confucianism to assert a non-Maoist but thoroughly Chinese identity. For several decades these self-described New Confucians -- a group consisting mostly of university professors -- have been promoting "Confucian values" as the driving force of the non-Communist Chinese cultures of East Asia. Behind the recent economic boom in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere, they contend, lay a "Confucian ethic" of respect for family, hard work, and the social order equivalent to the Protestant ethic that Max Weber postulated as being responsible for the rise of capitalism in Northern Europe. The New Confucians have been promoting an updated Confucianism -- minus such atavistic features as the ancestor cult and an offhand attitude toward women -- as the underpinnings of both the human-rights movement in China and a communitarian version of modernity that affords individual liberty without encouraging the libertine excesses that, as they see it, plague America and Europe. If the New Confucians are wrong about Confucius -- if, that is, he never was the humane sage and ethicist of popular imagination, and Confucianism as commonly perceived is largely a mythical concoction -- their theories and platform would suddenly rest on a shakier base. THAT is precisely the premise of a new strain of Confucian scholarship that has stirred excitement and controversy. The scholarship takes on traditional understandings of Confucianism in two ways: by questioning its origins and by questioning its Chineseness. The first issue has been powerfully addressed by E. Bruce Brooks, a research professor of Chinese at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and A. Taeko Brooks, his wife and co-researcher. They argue that the "historical" Confucius, far from being a scholar, was a warrior of noble birth but slender means who had the misfortune to live at a time -- toward the end of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1123-221 B.C.), which saw the collapse of feudalism and the rise of mass-conscripted armies -- when his skills as a charioteer and bowman were becoming obsolete. Although he was not a teacher in any formal sense, his forceful personality attracted followers among younger warriors, the Brookses hypothesize. The Brookses hold that only sixteen of the sayings attributed to Confucius in the Analects actually came from his mouth, and that only a few more came from his direct prot�g�s. Today's image of Confucius as a learned man, they maintain, did not start to emerge until after his death, when groups of his disciples organized themselves into formal schools for the purpose of perpetuating his ethos. In the Brookses' view, Confucius, whose ipsissima verba they claim to have isolated in a portion of Chapter 4 of the Analects, probably had a bit of education as a member of the nobility, but he did not write any of the other classical texts attributed to him. The Brookses believe that those texts were not even in final form until the fourth century B.C. Nor did Confucius concern himself with many of the values conventionally attributed to him, according to the Brookses. When he spoke of ren (or rvn, as they spell it in the idiosyncratic romanization system that Bruce Brooks invented in an attempt to transcribe Mandarin Chinese phonetically), he probably was referring not to the cultivation of moral virtue but to loyalty to one's comrades and other traits desirable in a gentleman soldier. Only in later layers of tradition, the Brookses say, was Confucius "civilianized'' -- turned into a savant and high minister -- and made an expounder of "the systematic structures of Imperial philosophies." As Bruce Brooks told me recently, "His disciples and successors more or less hived off into their own movements. They all had a nominal connection with Confucius, and they were all trying to define the culture in the Warring States period" -- a turbulent two centuries during which feudal lords battled one another incessantly in the absence of a strong central government. The Brookses' arguments are laid out in their book The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (1998). The second big issue -- the Chineseness of Confucianism -- is the focus of Lionel M. Jensen, an associate professor of history and the director of Chinese studies at the University of Colorado at Denver. Jensen contends that there was no such thing as Confucianism until Jesuit missionaries entered China in the late sixteenth century. Until their arrival there were merely the spiritual and ethical traditions of the ru, China's elite scholarly class, who, thanks to the off-and-on patronage of emperors over the years, enjoyed a monopoly on education and on the staffing of bureaucratic posts, by means of the civil-service examinations they administered. The ru claimed to be carrying on the tradition of Confucius, and he certainly enjoyed pride of place in their veneration as the leading propagator of ru values. However, as Jensen points out in his book Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (1997), the Analects was only one of several literary classics esteemed and taught by the ru (the others are attributed to Mencius and other early ru teachers). Using the model of Christian theology, which centers on the person of Jesus Christ, the Jesuits recast the ru tradition as a full-fledged religion centered on the person of its supposed founder, Confucius, who they believed had providentially stumbled across monotheism (in his references to "heaven") and Christian morality (in his version of the Golden Rule). Jensen says that in exalting Confucius, the Jesuits tended to ignore any Chinese philosophical writings other than the Analects, and they did not value China's other, far more widely practiced religious traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, and the omnipresent folk cults of gods and ghosts. The missionaries promoted their Christianized version of ru doctrine to the West when they returned home. And then, Jensen theorizes, it was only a matter of time before the Enlightenment philosophes adopted Confucius, savoring his apparent reasonableness and his skepticism about the supernatural. The philosophes in turn created and popularized the image of C onfucius that persists among Westerners to this day, and in the process spread the misapprehension that Confucianism is the baseline religion of China in the way that Roman Catholicism is the baseline religion of Spain. In fact, almost no one practices Confucianism in China today, and even in premodern times only scholars, bureaucrats, and occasionally emperors followed the ru tradition. If China can be said to have a baseline religion, it is a mixture of popular Taoism and folk beliefs. According to Jensen, the Jesuits invented the very word "Confucius," a Latinization of Kongfuzi ("Very Reverend Master Kong") -- itself an appellation not found in ru literature (which called the sage simply Kongzi, or "Master Kong"), although it is occasionally found on the "spirit tablets" honoring him in ru temples. Jensen does not believe that Kongzi even existed. "I think he's a literary trope," Jensen says. "He's a figure who came to stand for certain things." Jensen is currently researching the possibility that Kongzi -- whose birth, like that of Jesus, is the subject of many miraculous tales -- had his origins as a mythological figure of ancient Chinese fertility cults. On the surface, the theories of the Brookses and Jensen would seem contradictory, because the Brookses believe that Confucius was a real person who was born and died in the years ascribed to him. The two theories are, however, quite complementary, both contending that the Confucian tradition had no single founder but grew incrementally over many centuries, changing as cultural circumstances changed. For the Brookses, the powerful personality of a gentleman soldier lies at the bottom of the tradition, whereas Jensen sees that place occupied by a powerful mental construct. And both theories, though iconoclastic in many particulars, have some common ground with the work of other specialists. Most Sinologists these days would agree that Confucius, if he existed at all, has left little concrete evidence of what he was like, and that the traditional biographical material associated with him is largely legend. It is also accepted academic wisdom that the Analects was put together over several generations -- although few argue that it took quite the length of time the Brookses postulate. As early as the seventeenth century, for example, scholars in China began noticing that the second half of the Analects seemed stylistically and thematically different from the first half, probably reflecting influences other than Confucius' own. "We've known for a long time that some of the later parts of the book are suspect," John E. Wills Jr., a professor of Chinese history at the University of Southern California, says. "After Chapter Ten or Twelve you get a lot of fishy Taoist stuff in there." Last year the American Academy of Religion awarded Jensen's Manufacturing Confucianism its prize for the best first book in religious history. And the solid scholarship evident in the Brookses' The Original Analects (though not necessarily the book's conclusions) has been endorsed by two of America's leading experts on classical China, David S. Nivison, of Stanford, and Frederick W. Mote, of Princeton. John S. Major, a Sinologist who taught for many years at Dartmouth, explains that some of the evidence that the Analects was composed over a long time takes the form of changes over the centuries in Chinese characters used to denote grammatical markers -- but he takes issue with some of the Brookses' methodology. "[Bruce Brooks] likes to assign precise dates to the Analects' layers, and that's where I think he's stretching it," Major says. "He tends to assume that the evidence we have of a certain period is all the evidence there is. For example, there's a passage that refers to a battle, and we know that in this year there was this battle -- so as far as Brooks is concerned, the passage must have been written that year. But it might have referred to a different battle that we don't know about. He also removes passages that don't fit his theories." For instance, in reconstructing Chapter 4 of the Analects (the only chapter that the Brookses say contains Confucius' own words) the Brookses have moved more than a third of the text to another section, including sayings that extol filial piety, self-control, moderation, and other virtues they believe Confucius never espoused. They contend that these sayings do not match the other material in Chapter 4 thematically. Major rejects this reasoning, arguing that the Brookses simply lopped off those portions of the chapter that do not jibe with their picture of Confucius. Such issues are likely to spark intense debate in the profession for some time to come. EVEN during its heyday the ru tradition was never much practiced outside educated circles, although the ru teachings of respect for elders and education were widely disseminated at the popular level through proverbs, folk tales, and instructions for weddings and other ceremonies. When the Chinese government abolished the old civil-service examinations in 1905 and began to Westernize the education system, the ru class became obsolete, and anything resembling institutionalized Confucianism disappeared. The Nationalist revolutionaries who overthrew the imperial government in 1912 went further, equating Confucius with despotism and technological backwardness; and both Mao Zedong's ascendancy, in 1949, and his Cultural Revolution, in 1966-1976, included a methodical attack on all remnants of classical Chinese civilization. However, as early as the 1930s, when Mao was consolidating his Red Army in northern China, some non-Marxist academics and even Nationalist politicians began to take an interest in Confucius, hoping to find a "third way" that was neither Communist nor derivative of Western thought. They were the first New Confucians, and their aim was to recast Confucius' teachings as being fully compatible with modern technological training and liberal democracy, using the Confucian reverence for learning and the Confucian emphasis on merit rather than birth. After Mao came to power, a second generation of New Confucians fled to university positions in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Some of their students eventually emigrated to the United States and became professors themselves. The best known of the North American New Confucians is Tu Wei-ming, a professor of Chinese history and philosophy at Harvard and the director of the prestigious Harvard-Yenching Institute. The mainland-born, Taiwan-educated Tu has made it his mission to re-Confucianize East Asia and to promulgate Confucianism as a universal religion perfectly suited to Asian modernity. Tu works in the tradition of Zhu Xi, a twelfth-century ru scholar who was heavily influenced by Buddhism. Zhu developed Kongzi's teachings into a full-blown metaphysical system based on the cultivation of harmony between oneself and the cosmos. This system was much more like a religion than the earlier Confucian tradition had been, and it became imperial orthodoxy and later spread to Korea and Japan. "Confucianism so conceived is a way of life which demands an existential commitment on the part of Confucians no less intensive and comprehensive than that demanded of the followers of other spiritual traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism," Tu wrote in 1976. Tu's campaign has made some inroads. During the 1980s Lee Kuan Yew, then Singapore's Prime Minister, invited Tu and others to help set up a high school curriculum that included Confucian principles (the project fizzled amid vigorous protests from Singapore's non-Chinese population). And post-Mao China has begun to reappropriate Confucius, hosting symposia in Beijing every five years to celebrate his birth. In the main, however, the university-based New Confucians -- a new ru class, so to speak -- are theologians without a flock. Even on Taiwan, where religious observance is prevalent and where a man who claims to be Confucius' seventy-eighth lineal descendant lives, few residents identify their spiritual beliefs with the teachings of Master Kong. "Confucian values are very pervasive among the Chinese, but they're so diffuse that people don't recognize them as Confucian," Hoyt Tillman, a professor of Chinese cultural history at Arizona State University, explains. "They just say, 'That's the way we Chinese do it.'" The upstart theories of the Brookses and Jensen only make the New Confucians' re-Confucianizing project more problematic -- for reasons that go beyond what they say about Confucius himself. The Brookses argue that the ru tradition, and even Chinese literary civilization, are not nearly so ancient and time-honored as is often maintained. And Jensen contends that New Confucianism is itself a largely Western product. At the turn of the century, he says, two Chinese intellectuals who were widely read in Western ideas grafted some of them onto the Chinese image of Kongzi and his legacy. Zhang Binglin used the cultural-evolutionary theories of Weber and Herbert Spencer to recast Kongzi as a secular quasi-modern, China's first rationalizer of a superstitious indigenous tradition; Hu Shi, who had converted briefly to Christianity, interpreted him as a revolutionary like Jesus who had taken a stand against hidebound religious authority. Jensen believes that the New Confucians are following Zhang and Hu's lead in viewing the ru tradition through the lenses of Western progressivism. As might be expected, such views are vastly irritating to the New Confucians and other admirers of Chinese tradition. "I think that Lionel Jensen wants to be a little outrageous," says Tu, who was among Jensen's teachers. Wm. Theodore de Bary, a Sinologist at Columbia University who has written prolifically and sympathetically on Zhu Xi and his followers, says, "Confucianism is based on the study of Confucian texts, and the historical development of Confucianism doesn't depend on the theories of the Jesuits or other Western writers. That mistake was precisely what I wanted to avoid when I started studying the texts, back in the 1940s. So I started reading what the Chinese -- not Westerners -- said about Confucianism." If it turns out that Confucius never existed, or that the Analects was composed over several centuries, the faith of many New Confucians is likely to be rattled a bit but not destroyed. As they like to remind their listeners, most of them have invested not in a long-dead historical figure but in a tradition that is still alive, and in a haunting body of literature that remains susceptible of holistic reading and continues to reveal, whatever the identities and intentions of its authors, a vivid portrait of an arresting man. "It's like Christianity -- Christianity isn't monolithic, and it has changed over the centuries to accommodate changes in society," Robert Neville, the dean of Boston University's school of theology, says. As Neville, a United Methodist minister and a Confucian who meets regularly with Tu and other academics in a group called the Boston Confucians, puts it, "The authority doesn't rest with the person but with the teaching." Still, among younger Chinese-born scholars who have no ideological stake in Confucianism as a counterweight to Maoism, efforts like those of Jensen and the Brookses to place the reputed sage in the historical context of the culture that produced him come as a relief. "There's a myth about Chinese culture -- that it's different from Western culture in its static nature and durability," says Aihe Wang, an assistant professor of ancient Chinese history at Purdue University. "It's a kind of Orientalist myth. Anything that contributes to demythifying this point of view is very healthy." The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go to part one. Charlotte Allen, a contributing editor of Lingua Franca, is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (1998). Illustration by Joan Hall Copyright � 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; April 1999; Confucius and the Scholars; Volume 283, No. 4; pages 78 - 83. >From http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/analects.txt <<Only the first is provided ... go to the site for the rest of them (LONG)>> Kung tzu Confucius 500 BC CONFUCIAN ANALECTS The Analects, [Lun Yu Lun y�] attrib. to Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley, (New York: Macmillan, 1938; repr. Vintage, 1989), pb. This comes with a very useful introcuction and commentary. this version available on the Internet, via World Wide Web at gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/11/66/1 1 The Master "Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? "Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters? "Is he not a man of complete virtue, who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him?" The philosopher Yu said, "They are few who, being filial and fraternal, are fond of offending against their superiors. There have been none, who, not liking to offend against their superiors, have been fond of stirring up confusion. "The superior man bends his attention to what is radical. That being established, all practical courses naturally grow up. Filial piety and fraternal submission,-are they not the root of all benevolent actions?" The Master said, "Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue." The philosopher Tsang said, "I daily examine myself on three points:-whether, in transacting business for others, I may have been not faithful;-whether, in intercourse with friends, I may have been not sincere;-whether I may have not mastered and practiced the instructions of my teacher." The Master said, "To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons." The Master said, "A youth, when at home, should be filial, and, abroad, respectful to his elders. He should be earnest and truthful. He should overflow in love to all, and cultivate the friendship of the good. When he has time and opportunity, after the performance of these things, he should employ them in polite studies." Tsze-hsia said, "If a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty, and applies it as sincerely to the love of the virtuous; if, in serving his parents, he can exert his utmost strength; if, in serving his prince, he can devote his life; if, in his intercourse with his friends, his words are sincere:-although men say that he has not learned, I will certainly say that he has. The Master said, "If the scholar be not grave, he will not call forth any veneration, and his learning will not be solid. "Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles. "Have no friends not equal to yourself. "When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them." The philosopher Tsang said, "Let there be a careful attention to perform the funeral rites to parents, and let them be followed when long gone with the ceremonies of sacrifice;-then the virtue of the people will resume its proper excellence." Tsze-ch'in asked Tsze-kung saying, "When our master comes to any country, he does not fail to learn all about its government. Does he ask his information? or is it given to him?" Tsze-kung said, "Our master is benign, upright, courteous, temperate, and complaisant and thus he gets his information. The master's mode of asking information,-is it not different from that of other men?" The Master said, "While a man's father is alive, look at the bent of his will; when his father is dead, look at his conduct. If for three years he does not alter from the way of his father, he may be called filial." The philosopher Yu said, "In practicing the rules of propriety, a natural ease is to be prized. In the ways prescribed by the ancient kings, this is the excellent quality, and in things small and great we follow them. "Yet it is not to be observed in all cases. If one, knowing how such ease should be prized, manifests it, without regulating it by the rules of propriety, this likewise is not to be done." The philosopher Yu said, "When agreements are made according to what is right, what is spoken can be made good. When respect is shown according to what is pro." The Master said, "He who aims to be a man of complete virtue in his food does not seek to gratify his appetite, nor in his dwelling place does he seek the appliances of ease; he is earnest in what he is doing, and careful in his speech; he frequents the company of men of principle that he may be rectified:-such a person may be said indeed to love to learn." Tsze-kung said, "What do you pronounce concerning the poor man who yet does not flatter, and the rich man who is not proud?" The Master replied, "They will do; but they are not equal to him, who, though poor, is yet cheerful, and to him, who, though rich, loves the rules of propriety." Tsze-kung replied, "It is said in the Book of Poetry, 'As you cut and then file, as you carve and then polish.'-The meaning is the same, I apprehend, as that which you have just expressed." The Master said, "With one like Ts'ze, I can begin to talk about the odes. I told him one point, and he knew its proper sequence." The Master said, "I will not be afflicted at men's not knowing me; I will be afflicted that I do not know men." >From http://www.sevenbridgespress.com/lf/9712/ip.html DAZED & CONFUCIUS Confucius is a homegrown chinese icon-- one of few to survive centuries of dynastic and communist rule--and a unifying symbol of the country's past. Peddlers hawk his sayings; restaurateurs name establishments after him; the communist government puts his likeness on a postage stamp. But, in an upcoming book on the ancient sage, Lionel M. Jensen, a historian at the University of Colorado in Denver, reveals that Confucian philosophy may not be quite as Chinese as we've thought. While in graduate school, Jensen was struck that "Kong Fuzi," the Chinese term Jesuit missionaries transliterated as Confucius in the sixteenth century, never appeared in the writings of the ru, China's educated and bureaucratic class. "There was literally nothing in ru literature that ever used the term 'Kong Fuzi,'" Jensen says. Instead, there existed a cult around a great, ancestral teacher called Kongzi (551?�479? b.c.), whose followers had collected his sayings. This teacher was revered simply as a wise philosopher, not a prophet. When Italian Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri established their mission in Zhaoqing, China, in 1583, all that began to change. In Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions & Universal Civilization (Duke), Jensen argues that the Jesuits, looking for a way to penetrate the closed corridors of China's intellectual elite, discovered in Kongzi both a reassuringly familiar figure and an irresistible opportunity. At the time, Kongzi's teachings on how to live a proper life had been virtually obscured by centuries of voluminous ru commentary. By focusing on the particular precepts attributed to Kongzi (such as: "To regard knowing something as knowing it, to regard not knowing as not knowing--this is knowing"), the Jesuits began the process of remaking Kongzi through Christian eyes. After all, the Old Testament was littered with the words of prophets that foreshadowed the coming of Christ. Why couldn't Kongzi be comparable to, say, Isaiah? But the Jesuits' mission was not simply an instance of Western cultural imperialism. Indeed, as they mastered the language and habits of the ru, the Jesuits were accepted as members of that intellectual elite. Practicing what has been termed "accommodationism" by modern scholars, the Jesuits adopted indigenous dress and learned the local Chinese dialects--a sharp departure from the behavior of Western missionaries elsewhere in the world. (While Ricci and Ruggieri were donning the regal garb of the ru, Jensen writes, missionaries at the Jesuit headquarters in nearby Macao were trying to "Portugalize" the natives, insisting the converts assume Western names, clothes, and customs.) Along with a half dozen fellow Jesuits, Ricci and Ruggieri (the latter left the mission in the late 1590s) began to interpret ru doctrine as a kind of revealed theology, a divine light that prefigured the eventual embrace of Christianity by the Chinese. "Ricci and his fellow missionaries began to sermonize a Christianized ru advocating the resurrection of the true teaching of Kongzi," Jensen writes. In reports of their work that they sent back to Europe, they identified the ancient progenitor of the ru as "Kong Fuzi," a rare honorific for Kongzi that could be found on the spirit tablets of certain regional temples but nowhere in ru literature. This Kong Fuzi--or Confucius, as the Latinization read--was the avatar of a proto-Christian natural theology. Surprisingly, the Jesuits' Confucius was enthusiastically received by Chinese of all classes, including, ultimately, some of the ru. Their message reached the unlettered peasants through sermons delivered in the countryside, while the literate classes, inspired by the Jesuits' teachings, printed books devoted to the Heavenly Master. (Envious of the Jesuits' success, one ru scholar complained, "Their poison is spreading everywhere and threatens to contaminate myriad generations.") Apparently, the Jesuits' triumph was due to their talent for cultural assimilation and their skill at respecting indigenous ways of thinking. "Rather than arguing that Chinese difference from Christianity constituted falsehood, as would later Catholic and Protestant missionaries," Jensen writes, "Ricci presumed their complementarity and drew the metaphysical presumptions of contemporary ru into dialogue with his own faith." The enthusiasm was mutual. Reading the Jesuits' letters in the 1590s, European intelligentsia were taken with reports of this pre-Christian philosophy. Enlightenment philosophers, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu praised Confucius in their work. In 1690 Fran�ois F�nelon wrote a philosophical dialogue between Confucius and Socrates, and in 1700 Leibniz offered this eulogy to the Jesuits: "I praise the foresight of Matteo Ricci, a great man, for following the example of the church fathers who interpreted Plato and other philosophers in a Christian fashion." Contemporary scholars might want to be less hasty with their accolades. "We can't know for sure that the Jesuits were the first to use the term 'Kong Fuzi' in ru literature," cautions Haun Saussy, chairman of the department of Asian languages at Stanford University. " Jensen is asserting a negative. Someone may get mad enough to dig up a previous reference to Kong Fuzi." Indeed, there are already indications that Jensen's revisionist look at Confucius won't sit easily with everyone. At a Columbia University conference last year, a fellow historian accused him of "making fun of Confucianism." Overall, however, Saussy praises Jensen's approach: "If we cut the Jesuits loose from the moorings of both Eastern and Western traditions, and see them as creating their own eclectic school, they become much more interesting." Skeptical Sinologists are likely to be reassured by the second half of Jensen's book, in which he applies his theory of cultural accommodation to the work of two Chinese scholars central to the Confucianist revival in this century. By 1900, he writes, the Jesuits' ecumenical vision of Confucius had largely disappeared, supplanted by a set of highly parochial, narrowly religious practices. With the hope of resurrecting a more cosmopolitan ideal, Zhang Binglin published The Etiology of Ru in 1910, which was followed by Hu Shi's An Elaboration on Ru in 1934. Both men turned to Western sources to accomplish their task. Zhang, an aficionado of British evolutionary theorist Herbert Spencer, gave Kongzi a determinist spin, arguing that his contribution marked the ru's transition from primitive shamanism to a more sophisticated intellectual vocation. Hu's work, on the other hand, was influenced by the years he spent at Cornell, when he briefly converted to Christianity. Relying in part on the work of Ricci and Ruggieri, Hu argued that Confucius and Jesus, who lived within a few centuries of each other, represented the Eastern and Western teachers who brought religion into its modern phase. Relations between China and the West have long been strained. (Witness the recent contretemps over the making of the new Brad Pitt movie Seven Years in Tibet.) If Lionel Jensen is right, cooperation between the hemispheres has an equally proud history; not all of it has been told. MARK OPPENHEIMER ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Copyright � 1997 Lingua Franca,Inc. All rights reserved. >From http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/docmean.txt <<Only the very first part is provided ... go to the site for the rest>> Kung tzu Confucius 500 BC THE DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN The Doctrine of the the Mean [Zhong Yong Chung Yung], attrib. to Confucius, trans. In Wing-Tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 95-115 this version available on the Internet via World Wide Web at gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/11/66/3 What Heaven has conferred is called The Nature; an accordance with this nature is called The Path of duty; the regulation of this path is called Instruction. The path may not be left for an instant. If it could be left, it would not be the path. On this account, the superior man does not wait till he sees things, to be cautious, nor till he hears things, to be apprehensive. There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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