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Sunday, December 7, 2014

錢穆 and 天人合一

This post has only tangential relevance to our project, but I thought I would share it anyway.

When I was in Taiwan last spring, a member of the group I'm working on (the 天帝教) gave me a copy of Yu Yingshi's latest book:  余英時,論天人之際:  中國古代思想起源是談 (Taibei:  Liangjing, 2014).  This is because the unity of heaven and man was one of Tiandijiao founder/leader Li Yujie's 李玉階 major teachings.  In fact, Li first named his group 天人教 in 1943; 天帝教 came along in 1979/1980.  The practitioner who gave me that book was fairly typical for the group:  she is a well-educated young lawyer, who did at least one degree in London, England.  She joined the Tiandijiao in large measure because she felt that she never learned anything about Chinese culture while growing up, and for various reasons felt an emotional, spiritual need to connect with the tradition.  At the group's request, she enrolled to do a PhD in Chinese philosophy on the mainland (I think at Beida, but I'm not sure), even as she continued to work full-time in her law firm.  This is how she would have happened upon Yu Yingshi.  I was intrigued by this because it once again confirmed my suspicion that groups like Li's (we in the sub-field call them "redemptive societies," the best known representative of which is 一貫道) are not marginal "cults" peddling some variety of "heterodoxy" but instead perfectly "normal" groups whose constituencies are made up of the rather large numbers of Chinese who never really embraced the secularism preached by the CCP and/or GMD and who continue to value traditional Chinese culture.

The question of what "traditional Chinese culture" means in the early twentieth-first century is harder (for me) to answer.  Of course it means different things to different people, as traditions are reinvented by various people and groups in various contexts for various reasons.  In any event, I finally looked at Yu Yingshi's book in the hopes of learning more about the "unity of heaven and man" and the links between this concept and Li Yujie.  In the preface, Yu mentions an essay that his teacher, Qian Mu 錢穆, wrote in 1990, when he was 96 years old.  The essay is about the unity of heaven and man.  I tracked this essay down in about 15 seconds and translated it yesterday morning, just for fun.  Here's the translation, and here's the Chinese original.  The essay apparently kicked off an internet debate, on Taiwan and the mainland, that lasted for several weeks or months.  I haven't tried to find these rejoinders to Qian, but I might.

My question is:  what are we to make of Qian's essay?  On the one hand it seems trite.  He insists that man is part of nature and part of "heaven's will" and insists that this insight is the touch stone of traditional Chinese culture.  Furthermore, this belief will save mankind from European, scientific civilization, which has entered a period of inevitable decline.  So one the one hand, Qian seems thoroughly unoriginal as he channels Wang Yangming and Liang Shuming.  The Westerner in me is irritated by this kind of assertion:  how do you know, after all, that our lives unfold as part of heaven's will?  What kind of proof can we offer?  What kind of research test can we design?  And the way Qian talks about Confucius reminds me of how the Southern Baptist preachers of my youth talked about Jesus Christ--whose life and death on earth were indeed presented as the working out of heaven's will.

On the other hand, I think we should try to take Qian Mu seriously.  After all, this man knew more about Chinese traditional culture (among other things) than I ever will.  If this is where his thoughts took him as he reflected on a life of scholarship at the ripe old age of 96, why not indulge him?  And indeed, completely by chance I had been reading a few days before Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind:  The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self  (2011).   I knew about Robinson because she published a novel this year that made a huge splash in the Anglophone world.  The novel is called Lila and is the third in a trilogy (the first two are Giliad (2004) and Home (2008)) in which Robinson explores themes of faith and grace in a way that is--to me--deeply engaging.  The books are quietly astonishing and well worth reading.   In any event, in Absence of Mind, Robinson offers what might be taken as a sophisticated, Westernized version of Qian Mu's argument.  She attacks modern, positivist forms of thought such as sociobiology and Freudian psychology because they provide no space for a healthy, reflecting mind.  She insists that subjectivity "is the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and long, long thoughts. And the literatures that would dispel such things refuse to acknowledge subjectivity, perhaps because inability has evolved into principle and method."  Consequently "it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses."  She is asking for respect for intuition, much as did Wang Yangming and Qian Mu.  And writing best-selling novels that explore those themes.

Enough for a Sunday morning.  But I remain intrigued.  Timothy:  where do thoughts like Qian Mu's fit in your history of Chinese intellectuals?  Alex:  do your Shandong Confucians talk about stuff like this?  Xue:  what do you make of Qian's essay?  Josh:  what do Japanese sinologists make of Qian Mu?  His textbook, 國史大綱, was widely read in the 1940s...


10 comments:

  1. Qian Mu is at least as big in Japan as he is in the Anglophone world, but (this is mostly a guess) as an intellectual historian, not as a provider of a soft-landing for retrograde religiophiles. If we think this an avenue worth pursuing, I could run the question by some of my Japanese Sinologist friends.

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  2. As for the first question, regarding Chinese Traditional, local groups I've encountered in Shandong are fairly clear on the matter as in ''Confucianism is Chinese traditional Culture" with the exception of the City of Weifang (潍坊). The 3 groups I meet there talked about Confucianism being the representative of 传统文化 but also included Buddhism, and Daoism in the equation.

    As for the teaching per se, it's very much about structure rather than intuition. It's about structuring the young in accordance with tradition i.e Confucianism.

    As for the essay, I will read it, and get back later on it.

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  3. One more thing, as for the issue of Chinese traditional culture, there is a very interesting paper by 干春松 on the notion of 国学 and its tension with 传统文化

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02529200903342636#.VISX0cloXak

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  4. Hi David, this is the first piece of writing I read of Qian Mu. I agree with you that his idea is not original. On a more critical note, I think he is quite Sino-centric and his first two arguments are not all that convincing to me. Based on my understanding of Western and Indian philosophy, 天人合一 is not necessarily only a Chinese invention. On a more pedantic note, I am not quite sure of what he means by "天" and "天命", or "人" and "人生". Does Tian mean heaven, God, the Creator, nature? Are they fundamentally the same? What is Ren and Ren Ming? Human being? Human bodies? Human spirit? Human fate?

    His thoughts about the "Western separation of heaven and man" reminds me of an essay I read of Feng Youlan's called Why China Has No Science, which talks about traditional Chinese culture prioritizes the unity/union of man and nature and was looking too much inward to care about developing natural sciences - that's why China lagged behind.

    The fact that both Qian Mu and Feng Youlan were born and deceased in same years is also interesting.

    Being such prolific writers, I guess for both Qian Mu and Feng Youlan, I think it is worth exploring them. I would be interested to read more of Qian Mu and Feng Youlan.

    Absence of Mind looks interesting. I will try to read it. I don't know if any of you are into meditation, I have just started reading A Course in Miracles and it is phenomenal.

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  5. Thanks to everyone for their comments! I think I will try to follow up on the "debate" that Qian Mu's little essay gave rise to. I will also read more of Yu Yingshi's book, which is surely meatier than Xian's essay. Josh--if an occasion arises for you to ask your Japanese colleagues, then great, but this is not really a priority. A fair question would be the extent to which Qian's "religious" beliefs guided his scholarship. All I know about his work is that he emphasized "enduring values" in this construction of his narrative of Chinese intellectual history. I'm sure I checked out Jerry Dennerline's book on Qian when I was reading for my general exams, but I have no recollection of what he said.

    I remain interested in the "search for sagehood" in the Confucian tradition, which for many people has had what can only be called "religious" dimensions. Of course, this exists alongside structure and discipline, Unguided intuition is generally mistrusted. Sébastien Billioud covers a broad range of religious and non religious responses in his recent excellent treatment of China's current religious revival (Le sage et le peuple, 2014). I haven't read the piece Alex sent on guoxue--I suspect guoxue's emphasis is more scholarly, more self consciously intellectuel?

    Xue--if you're interested in Marilynne Robinson, you might have more fun starting with Giliad, the first novel in the trilogy. It is the best exploration I have read in fictional form of the sort of Protestantism that is at the center of how many Americans see themselves and their history. It captures much about the small-town church culture of my youth--which I hated then.

    I have meditated off and on for years. It always seems to be the first thing to go when I get busy.

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  6. Gan provides a very nice analysis of the notion of Guoxue and what it encompasses (e.g from the New Culture movement, National essence, school, National Heritage, etc.). The underlying critique Gan makes, although maybe not clear in this article alone, is the contemporary tendency to equate ''Guoxue'' and Confucianism, leaving aside lots of other traditions. I've also read a very interesting book on this subject written by 牟钟鉴 called "在国学的路上" (2011).

    Also speaking of Le Sage et le peuple, I just got it today ! Just a small ''bémol'' though, it looks like an enlarged version of their previous article on the subject matter, am I wrong ?

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  7. Another thing (yet again), I remember, as David was talking about Qian's ''discovery'' of Confucianism on his deathbed, someone else made the same observation about 牟宗三's admittance of Confucianism as a religion only at the end of his career (unless I'm mistaken). I'm not sure whether its Makeham (in: Lost Spirit [2008]) or Billioud (2011).....

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  8. This came in early today from my friend Ishikawa Yoshihiro in Kyoto. Translation follows--reading from the bottom:


    フォーゲルさん:

     銭穆ですか……、最近はほとんど名前を聞きませんね。昔、島田先生はご自身が
    思想史を研究していただけに、時折銭のことを尊敬を込めて語ることがありまし
    たが、近年の日本では時折その名が出ることがあるだけで、もう充分に古くなっ
    ていると思います。少なくとも、戦後台湾に行ったこともあり、戦後日本の中国
    思想史学界では、充分な評価を受けないまま今日に至っていると思います。

    石川禎浩

    (2014/12/09 3:17), Josh Fogel wrote:
    > 石川さん、
    >
    > こんにちは!
    >
    > この間、アメリカの友達が日本に錢穆に評判はどうですかと聞いてくれました。
    > 実は分かりませんので、お聞きしたいです。ちょっと古臭い感じじゃな いですか?
    >
    > 以上
    >
    > フォーゲル

    Ishikawa-san,
    How are you? I friend recently asked me what Qian Mu's reputation was in Japan. I actually didn't know, so let me ask you. A little out of date?
    Fogel

    Fogel-san,
    Qian Mu, eh... I haven't heard name of late. In the past, Professor Shimada [Kenji] would say that, if you're going to study intellectual history, then on occasion you may find something of value in Qian's writings. At the vary least, having been to Taiwan in the postwar era and in the world of Chinese intellectual history in postwar Japan, he doesn't enjoy much of a reputation now.
    Ishikawa Yoshihiro

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  9. Just remembered something funny w.r.t. Qian Mu (vintage: 1979). Ginny Chan, long ago having left the field, once referred to Qian Mu's style of writing generally as "youyue." When I asked her what she meant, she emphasized the tones: 又曰. In other words, full of quotations from original sources but very short on any sort of analysis.

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  10. Yeah, I don't think I'll read too much of Qian. He is still a huge name in mainland history circles, for reasons that I don't quite understand. Yu Yingshi is much easier to read--has a very nice, fluid style, uncomplicated by too much "youyue". But I fear that I will end up photocopying his book instead of really reading it. The reverence of warming the hands, as it were.

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