I deeply appreciate the great honor of being asked to make one of the opening speeches of this Conference. But I must say that the subject assigned to me is a very difficult one: "The Chinese Tradition and the Future." What is the Chinese Tradition? And what of its Future? Either one of the two questions will be a sufficient challenge to our thinking. And here I am asked to answer both questions in a brief ceremonial opening speech! I am certain of my failure. I can only hope that my failure may provoke the best minds of the Conference to do further and more thorough thinking on this important question.
I
The Chinese Tradition
I propose today to view the Chinese tradition, not as something ready made and static, but as the culminating product of a long series of important historical changes or evolutions. This historical approach may turn out to be a fruitful way to achieve a better understanding of the Chinese tradition, —of its nature, its merits and defects, all in the light of the historical changes that have made it what it is.
The Chinese cultural tradition, it seems to me, is the end-product of these significant periods of historical evolution:
(1) The Sinitic Age of antiquity, —which, as archeological evidences have abundantly shown, had already developed in the Yin-Shang period a highly advanced civilization with its fully developed stone sculpture and bone carving, its beautiful workmanship in the bronze vessels, its well advanced picto-ideographic language as shown in the many thousands of oracular bone inscriptions, and its extravagant state religion of ancestral worship which apparently included human sacrifice on a fairly big scale. Later, in the great Chou period, civilization continued to develop in all directions. Many feudal principalities grew into great nations, and the co-existence and rivalry of powerful independent states tended to promote the flowering of the arts of war and of peace. Statecraft flourished and talents were encouraged. The Book of Three Hundred Poems was becoming the common textbook of language education. The age of' poetry was leading to the age of philosophy.
(2) The Classical Age of indigenous philosophical thought, which was the age of tao-tzu, Confucius and Mo Ti, and their disciples. This age left to posterity the great heritage of Lao-tzu's naturalistic conception of the universe and his political philosophy of non-interference or laissez-faire; the heritage of Confucius' humanism, his conception of the dignity and worth of man, his teaching of the love of knowledge and the importance of intellectual honesty, and his educational philosophy that "with education, there will be no classes"; and the heritage of the great religious leader Mo Ti, who opposed all wars and preached peace, and who defended and elevated the popular religion by preaching the Will of God which he conceived to be the love of all men without distinction.
There is no doubt that the ancient civilization of China underwent a fundamental transformation through those centuries (600-220 B.C.) which constituted the Classical Age of Chinese Thought. The basic characteristics of the Chinese cultural tradition were more or less shaped and formed by the major philosophical teachings of the Classical Age. In subsequent periods, whenever China had sunk deep into irrationality, superstition and other-worldliness, as she actually did several times in her long history, it was always the humanism of Confucius, or the naturalism of Lao-tzu and the philosophical Taoists, or a combination of both naturalism and humanism, that would rise up and try to rescue her out of her sluggish slumbers.
(3) The third important historical evolution was the unification of the warring nations by the militaristic state of Ch'in in 221 B.C., the founding of the second or the Han Empire in 206 B.C., and the subsequent more than twenty centuries of Chinese life and experience under a huge unified empire, —with no neighboring countries having any civilization comparable to the Chinese. This long and rather unique political experience of an isolated empire life, removed from the lively rivalry and competition of the independent and contending nations which had produced the Classical Age of Chinese thought, —was another important formative factor in the make-up of the Chinese tradition.
A few resulting features may be cited here.
(a) China never succeeded in solving the problem of the unlimited power of the hereditary monarch in a huge unified empire.
(b) A redeeming feature was the conscious adoption of the political theory of Wu-wei (non-interference) in the early decades of' the Han Empire (200 B.C. - 220 A.D.), thus establishing the political tradition of leaving much laissez faire, freedom, and local self-government in the administration of an immense empire without a huge standing army and without benefit of an immense empire without a huge police force.
(c) Another redeeming feature was the gradual development of a system of open and competitive examinations for the selection of men for the civil service, thus inaugurating the first civil service examination system in the world.
(d) A uniform code of law was worked out in the Han Empire, and that code was revised from time to time throughout the later dynasties. The Chinese legal system, however, was defective in its failure to permit public pleading and to develop the profession of lawyers.
(e) Another important feature of empire life was the long continued use of the dead classical language as the language of the civil service examinations, and as the common written medium of communication within the large unified empire. For over two thousand years, the dead classical language of ancient China was maintained as the recognized tool of education and as the respectable medium for all poetry and prose.
(4) The fourth important historical evolution actually amounted to a revolution in the form of' a mass conversion of the Chinese people to the alien religion of Buddhism. The indigenous religion of ancient China which had neither the conception of Heaven in the sense of Paradise, nor that of Hell as the place of Last Day Judgment, was easily overwhelmed and conquered by the great religion of the Buddha with all its rich imagery, its beautiful ritualism, and its bold cosmology and metaphysics. Buddhism gave to China not only one paradise, but tens of paradises, not only one Hell, but many hells, each varying in severity and horror from the others. The old simple idea of retribution of good and evil was soon replaced by the idea of transmigration of the soul and the iron law of karma which runs through all past, present and future existences. The ideas of the world as unreal, of life as painful and empty, of sex as unclean, of the family as an impediment to spiritual attainment, of celibacy and mendicancy as necessary to the Buddhist life, of alms-giving as a supreme form of merit, of love extended to all sentient beings, of vegetarianism, of the most severe forms of asceticism, of words and spells as having miraculous power, —these and many other items of un-Chinese beliefs and practices poured from India by land and by sea into China, and were soon accepted and made into parts of the cultural life of the Chinese people.
It was a real revolution. The Confucianist Book of Filial Piety, for instance, had taught that the human body is inherited from the parents, and must not be annihilated or degraded. And ancient Chinese thinkers had said that life is of the highest value. Now Buddhism taught that life is an illusion and that to live is pain. Such doctrines led to practices which were definitely opposed to the Chinese tradition. It soon became a form of "merit" for a Buddhist monk to burn his own thumb, or his own finger or fingers, or even his whole arm, as a sacrifice to one of the Buddhist deities! And sometimes, a monk would publicly announce the date of his self-destruction, and, on that day, would light his own faggot pyre with a torch in his own hand, and would go on mumbling the sacred names of the Buddhas until he was completely overpowered by the flames.
China was being Indianized, and was going mad in one of her strange periods of religious fanaticism.
(5) The next important historical evolution may be described as a series of China's revolts against Buddhism. One of these re volts took the form of the founding and the spread of the medieval religion of Taoism. Religious Taoism was originally a consolidated form of the native beliefs and practices, freshly inspired by a nationalistic desire to supersede and kill the foreign religion of Buddhism by imitating every feature of it. The Taoists accepted the heavens and hells from Buddhism, gave them Chinese names, and invented Chinese gods to preside over them! A Taoist canon was consciously forged after the model of the Buddhist sutras. Many Buddhist ideas, such as the transmigration of the soul and the causal chain running through past and future lives, were bodily appropriated as their own. Orders of priests and priestesses were established after the fashion of the Buddhist Brotherhoods of monks and nuns. In short, Taoism was a nationalistic movement to boycott Buddhism by manufacturing an imitation product to take over its market. Its real motive was to kill this invading religion, and it was well known that Taoist influence played an important part in all the governmental persecutions of Buddhism, notably in those of 446 and 845.
Other Chinese revolts against Buddhism took place within Buddhism itself. A common feature in all such revolts was the discarding of what the Chinese people could not swallow and digest in Buddhism. As early as the fourth century A.D., Chinese Buddhists had begun to realize that the essence of Buddhism lies in Meditation and Insight, both of which are combined in dhyana or ch'an (zen in Japanese pronunciation, which means meditation but which also relies on philosophical insight.) From A.D. 400 to 700, the various Chinese schools of Buddhism (such as the Lanka School founded by Bodhidharma and the T'ien-t'ai School) were mostly schools of Ch'an (Zen).
What came to be known as the "Southern School" of Ch'an (Zen), —which after the 8th century has come to monopolize the name Ch'an (Zen) to itself, —went even farther and declared, as did the monk Shen-hui (670-762) (who, according to my researches, was the real founder of this school), that insight alone was enough, and meditation could be discarded.
The entire movement of the so-called "Southern School" was founded on a series of successful lies and forgeries. Its story of Budhidharma was a lie; its story of the 28 Indian patriarchs was a forgery; its story of the apostolic succession through the transmission of an apostolic robe was a fraud; its life-story of the "Sixth (Chinese) Patriarch" was largely pure fiction. But the greatest of all its fabrications was the story of the origin of Ch'an (Zen), which runs as follows: The Buddha was preaching on the Mount of the Holy Vulture. He simply lifted a flower before the assembly, and said nothing. Nobody under stood him. But the wise Mahakasyapa understood him, and smiled a smile at the Master. That was supposed to be the origin and the beginning of Zen!
The historical significance of this Zen movement lies in the war cry that "It relies on no words, spoken or written, but points direct to the heart." It has no use for the voluminous and never-ending scriptures, which, by the 8th century, must have amounted to 50,000,000 words in preserved Chinese translations (not counting the tens of millions of words in the Chinese commentaries)! What a wonderful revolution! Blessed be those wonderful liars and forgers whose ingenious lies and forgeries could achieve a revolution that discarded a sacred canon in 50 million words!
(6) The next great historical evolution in the Chinese tradition may be described as "The Age of Chinese Renaissance," or "The Age of Chinese Renaissances." For there was more than one renaissance or rebirth.
First, there was the Renaissance in Chinese literature which began in earnest in the 8th and 9th centuries, and which has been continued to our own times. The great poets of the T'ang Dynasty, —Li Po and Tu Fu in the 8th century, and Po Chu-i in the 9th, —opened up a new age of Chinese poetry. Han Yu (d. 824) succeeded in revitalizing the "classical prose" (ku-wen) and made it a useful and fairly effective tool for prose literature for the next 800 years.
It was the Zen monks of the 8th and 9th centuries who first made use of the living, spoken tongue in their recorded discourses and discussions. This use of living prose was continued by the great Zen masters of the 11th century and was taken up by the Neo-Confucianist philosophers of the 12th century whose conversations were often recorded as they were actually spoken.
The common man and woman always sang their songs and told their tales in the only language they knew, namely, their own spoken tongue. With the development of the art of block-printing in the 9th century and of printing with movable type in the 11th century, it became possible to have the popular or "vulgar" tales, stories, dramas, and songs printed for a wider audience. Some of the popular tales and great novels of the 16th and 17th centuries became best sellers for centuries. These novels and tales became the standardizers of the written form of the living spoken tongue. They have been the teachers and the popularizers of the vulgar tongue, —the pai hua. Without those great tales and novels it would have been impossible for the modern movement for a literary renaissance to succeed in the brief space of a few years.
Second, there was the Renaissance in Chinese philosophy which attained its maturity in the 11th and 12th centuries and which gave rise to the various schools and movements of Neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism was a conscious movement for the revival of the pre-Buddhist culture of indigenous China to take the place of the medieval religions of Buddhism and Taoism. Its main object was to restore and re-interpret moral and political philosophy of Confucius and Mencius as a substitute for the selfish, anti-social and otherworldly philosophy of the Buddhist religion. Some Zen monk had remarked that the teachings of the school of Confucius were too simple and insipid to attract the best minds of the nation. The task of the Neo-Confucianists, therefore, was to make the secular thought of a pre-Buddhist China as interesting and attractive as Buddhism or Zen. And those Chinese philosophers did succeed in working out a secular and rational philosophy of Neo-Confucianism with a cosmology, a theory or theories of the nature and method of knowledge, and a moral and political philosophy.
Various schools grew up largely because of the different viewpoints about the nature and method of knowledge. All that made matters more interesting and exciting. In the course of time, the schools of Neo-Confucian philosophy were able to attract to themselves the best minds of the nation, which no longer flocked to the Zen Masters in the Buddhist monasteries. And, when the best minds ceased to be interested in Buddhism, that once great religion gradually faded into nonentity and died an almost unmourned death.
And third, there was the third phase of the Chinese Renaissance which can be characterized as The Revival of Learning under the impetus of a Scientific method—the method of "evidential investigation."
"No belief without evidence" (wu cheng tse pu hsin) is a well-known quotation from an early post-Confucian work. And Confucius himself emphatically said: "To say that you know a thing when you know it, and to say that you do not know when you do not know it: that is knowledge." But such injunctions on veracity and evidence seemed to have been easily swept away by the powerful tides of religious fanaticism and pious credulity which overwhelmed medieval China. The method and habit of thinking in terms of evidences, which barely survived in the wisest judges of the law courts, were fortunately kept up in some of the best schools of classical scholarship. With the spread of the printed book, it became easy for the Chinese scholar to compare references, collate texts, and collect and evaluate evidences. Within the first two or three centuries of book-printing, the spirit and method of evidential thinking and evidential investigation could already be discerned in the founding of Chinese archeology, in the writing of a great history on the basis of carefully compared and evaluated sources and evidences, and in the rise of a new classical scholarship which was courageous enough to apply that spirit and methodology to the examination of a few of the sacred books of the Confucianist Canon. One of the founders of this new classical scholarship was Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the greatest of the Neo-Confucian philosophers.
The method of evidential investigation (k'ao-cheng or k'ao-chü) was consciously developed in the 17th century, when one scholar would cite 160 evidences to establish the ancient pronunciation of a single word, and another would devote decades of his life to collecting evidences to prove that almost half of a major Classic of the Confucian Canon was a fairly late forgery. The method proved to be so efficacious and fruitful that it became the intellectual fashion of the scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries. The whole era of three hundred years (1600-1900) has often been labeled the age of evidential investigation.
II
The Great Confrontation and the Future
The above historical account brings the Chinese traditional culture to the eve of the last period of historical change, —the era of confrontation and conflict of the Chinese and Western civilizations. The West's first contacts with China and the Chinese civilization had already begun in the 16th century. But the era of real confrontation and conflict did not begin until the 19th century. In this one century and a half, the Chinese tradition has undergone a real test of strength, indeed the most severe test of strength and survival in her entire cultural history.
From our historical sketch, we have seen that the indigenous civilization of ancient China, having been richly nourished and properly inoculated by the Classical Age, was sufficiently competent to meet the cultural crisis brought about by the invading religion of Buddhism. Because of the extreme simplicity of the native religion, however, the Chinese people were for a time overwhelmed and conquered by the highly complicated and attractive religion of Buddhism. And, for nearly a thousand years, China accepted almost everything that came from India and her cultural life in general became "Indianized." But China soon came to her senses and began to rebel against Buddhism. Buddhism was persecuted, boycotted and serious attempts were made to domesticate it. And, with the rise of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, an internal revolution was achieved by openly discarding the entire canon of Buddhist scripture of over 50 million words. So, in the end, China was able to achieve her own cultural survival and rebirth by a series of literary, philosophical and intellectual renaissances. So, although she was never able entirely to free herself from the 2,000 years of Buddhist Conversion and Indianization, China did succeed in working out her own cultural problems and continuing to build up a secular and essentially Chinese culture.
As early as the last years of the 16th century and the early decades of the 17th, a strange but highly advanced culture was knocking on the gates of the Chinese Empire. The first Jesuit missionaries to China were carefully selected and prepared for the first introduction of the European civilization and the Christian religion to the most civilized nation of the age outside of Europe. The first encounters were friendly and successful. In the course of time, those great missionaries were able to offer to the best minds of China, not only the best and latest achievements of European mathematical and astronomical science, but also the Christian religion as best exemplified in the saintly lives of those men.
The period of forceful confrontation and conflict between China and the West began about 150 years ago. To this learned assembly, pre-eminently learned in modern history, I need not retell the story of China's tragic humiliations resulting from her ignorance, arrogance and self-complacency. Nor do I need to recount the long tale of China's numerous failures in her clumsy and always too late efforts to bring about reforms in the various aspects of her national life. Nor do I have to tell the more recent story of China's serious endeavors, especially in the republican period, to critically study her own civilization, and to propose reforms in the more basic aspects of her cultural tradition such as the language, literature, thought, and education. You and I have all been eyewitnesses of such recent efforts and events, and most of the senior members of the Chinese delegation have been participants in those activities.
My task today is to call your attention to a few considerations directly or indirectly connected to our question as to the future of the Chinese tradition. Before we can speculate about its future, should we not first take an inventory of the present status of that tradition after one hundred and fifty years of confrontation with the West? Should we not first make a general estimate of how much of the Chinese tradition has been definitely destroyed or dropped as a result of this contact with the West; how much of the Western culture has been definitely accepted by the Chinese people; and, lastly, how much is still left of the Chinese tradition? How much of the Chinese tradition has survived the great confrontation?
Many years ago, I said publicly that China had made truly earnest efforts to rid herself of many of the worst features on her cultural tradition: "In the brief space of a few decades, the Chinese people have abolished bodily torture in the courts, which must have been in practice for thousands of years; they have abolished foot-binding, which has existed over a thousand years; they have abolished the so-called 'eight-legged' balanced prose composition which had been required in all stages of civil service examinations throughout the last five hundred years ..... " And we must remember that the Chinese people were the first non-European people to abolish the institution of hereditary monarchy which must have existed in China for more than 5,000 years. The mere fact that "even the emperor must go" must have had tremendous psychological effect upon the vast majority of the people.
These and hundreds of other items of quick collapse or slow disintegration have been the natural casual ties of this period of cultural impact and collision.
No tear needs be shed on these cultural casualties. Their abolition or disintegration should be considered as a part of China's emancipation from the shackles of her old and isolated civilization. For thousands of years, Chinese political thinkers could not solve the problem of how to check the unlimited power of the hereditary monarch in a huge unified empire. But a few decades of contact with the democratic countries of the West were enough to give the solution: "Get rid of the monarch and abolish the hereditary monarchy altogether." The same is true of many of the other voluntary abolitions. Eight centuries of Neo-Confucianist philosophy had failed to voice a protest against the inhumanity and barbarity of foot-binding, but a few missionaries with a fresh point of view were enough to awaken the moral sense of the Chinese people, and abolish foot-binding forever.
How much has China voluntarily accepted or adopted from the Western civilization? The inventory list will never be complete. For there must have been literally many thousands of items which have been voluntarily accepted by the Chinese people either because they never had them or their counterparts before, or because they were superior or more useful than their Chinese counterparts. Quinine, corn, peanuts, tobacco, the lenses for eyeglasses, and thousands of others were accepted because the Chinese never had such things before and they wanted to have them. The mechanical clock was early accepted and in no time completely replaced the Chinese water-clock. That is the best example of one superior gadget replacing its inferior counterpart. From the mechanical clock to the airplane and the radio, thousands of products of the scientific and technological civilization of the West can be listed in our inventory. In the intellectual and artistic world, the inventory list will have to begin with Euclid and end with our contemporary scientists, musicians and movie stars. The list will be endless.
Now the question, —After all the discardings and erosions from the old civilization, and after the many thousands of voluntary adoptions from the modern Western civilization, how much is left of the Chinese tradition?
More than a quarter of a century ago, in 1933, I was speaking on the different types of cultural response in Japan and China. I pointed out that the modernization in Japan might be called the type of "centralized control," while China, because of the absence of a ruling class, was becoming modernized through a different kind of cultural response which might be described as "cultural change through long exposure and slow permeation." I went on to say:
In this way practically all of our ideas and beliefs and institutions have been freely allowed to come under the slow contact, contagion, and influence of the Western civilization, and undergo sometimes gradual modifications and sometimes fairly rapid and radical changes….. We have not concealed anything, nor have we dogmatically withheld anything from this contact and change..... "
Years later, I again spoke more or less in the same vein:
"All westernization in China has come as a result of gradual diffusion and permeation of ideas, usually initiating from a few individuals, gradually winning a following, and finally achieving significant changes when a sufficient number of people is convinced of their superior convenience or efficacy. From the footwear to the literary revolution, from the lipstick to the overthrow of the monarchy, all has been voluntary and in a broad sense 'reasoned'. Nothing in China is too sacred to be protected from this exposure and contact; and no man, nor any class, was powerful enough to protect any institution from the contagious and disintegrating influence of the invading culture."
What I was saying in those bygone days amounts to this: I had considered the numerous slow but voluntary changes as constituting a rather democratic and rather likable type of cultural change through long exposure and voluntary acceptance. I meant to imply that neither the voluntary discardings, nor the numerous voluntary acceptances, would tend to destroy the character and worth of the recipient civilization. On the contrary, the discarding of the undesirable elements should have the effect of a great liberation; and the new cultural elements accepted should only enrich and vitalize the older culture. I was never afraid that the recipient Chinese civilization might disintegrate and disappear after so much is thrown away and so much is taken in. I actually said:
"Slowly, quietly, but unmistakably, the Chinese Renaissance is becoming a reality. The product of this rebirth looks suspiciously occidental. But scratch its surface and you will find that the stuff of which it is made is essentially the Chinese bed rock which much weathering and corrosion only made stand out more clearly—the humanistic and rationalistic China resurrected by the touch of the scientific and democratic civilization of the new world.
This I said in 1933. Was lover-optimistic then? Have I been disproved by the events of the intervening decades?
And what of the future? What has become of the "Chinese bedrock—the humanistic and rationalistic China"? And what will become of it now that the whole of the Chinese mainland has been under the totalitarian control of the Chinese Communists for the last eleven years? And will "the humanistic and rationalistic China" be strong enough to survive the long years of "Iron Curtain" rule which permits no contact with, no contagion of, and certainly no "long exposure" to the poisonous influence of the free world?
Prediction of the future is always hazardous. I have in recent years read over four million words of "purge literature" published in Communist China. Every piece of "purge literature" tells us what the Chinese Communist Party and Government are afraid of and what they are anxious to uproot and destroy. Judging from this vast amount of "purge literature," I believe I am justified to conclude that the men now in control of the Chinese mainland are still afraid of the spirit of freedom, the spirit of independent thinking, the courage to doubt, and the spirit and method of evidential thinking, and evidential investigation. The writer Hu Feng was condemned because he and his followers had shown the spirit of freedom and of independent thinking and had dared to oppose Party control of literature and the arts. My friend and former colleague Liang Shu-ming had to be purged because he had exemplified the dangerous spirit of doubt. And "the ghost of Hu Shih" has deserved three million words of condemnation because Hu Shih had been largely responsible for the popularization of the traditional classical scholar's spirit and method of evidential investigation, and because Hu Shih had the unpardonable audacity to describe that spirit and method as the essence of the method of science!
Judging from these purge documents, I am inclined to believe that what I had glorified as "the humanistic and rationalistic China" still survives on the Chinese mainland, and that the same spirit of courageous doubt and independent thinking and questioning which had played important roles in the Chinese revolts against the great medieval religions and in their final overthrow may yet live long and spread even under the most impossible conditions of totalitarian control and suppression. In short, I believe the tradition of "the humanistic and rationalistic China" has not been destroyed and in all probability cannot be destroyed.
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*Dr. Hu's opening address at the Sino-American Conference on Intellectual Cooperation held at Seattle, July 10-15.