A COMPARATIVE STUDY
by Sampson C. Shen
Chino Publishing Co.,
Reviewed by Geraldine Fitch
This is a scholarly work prepared originally in manuscript form as the author's doctoral thesis in Benares University, India. Its bibliography indicates the scope of the research that makes it indeed a comprehensive study on Confucius and Tagore, two great teachers of two Asian countries. Practically all the books in English, French and Chinese on Confucius and Confucianism, and those by Rabindranath Tagore and those about him, besides books of general information about both India and China — 148 all told — were read or consulted.
The Introduction is practically a chapter in itself to show how Buddhism came to China, by what routes and when. It also explains how and why it was welcomed in China in a period of national disorder at the end of the Han Dynasty (220 A.D.) After extraordinary success, Buddhism declined in China, but not until it had ceased to be an alien religion, and had greatly influenced the culture and philosophy of the Chinese people. The early pilgrimages of Chinese scholars and Buddhist monks to India are also recorded.
The idea of comparing the two great teachers of China and India, which in reality compares Chinese and Indian philosophy, was a brilliant one. The Chinese are known as pragmatists, realists, almost materialists, whereas the Indian people are called otherworldly, impractical, actually mystics. This difference is due to climate, geography, race and religion, but the author has proved his basic thesis that the similarities between these two great peoples, separated by the world's highest mountain range, are more numerous than their differences.
Confucius for more than two thousand years has been hailed as China's greatest teacher and philosopher, and his memory is "enshrined in the hearts of hundreds of millions of living men." Of Tagore, the author says: "He is the inheritor of the works of all great Indian thinkers in the past. Moreover, he has added fresh blood to hoary Hinduism and become the symbol of the Indian Renaissance."
Tagore was born 2,340 years after the death of Confucius, in one of the most distinguished families of Bengal. He was the youngest of seven brothers in that family, reared—after his mother's untimely death—by his fourth brother's wife, of whom he wrote affectionately in his memoirs. His father was indeed a mystic who spent hours in meditation, communion with God, reciting the Upanisads. With every opportunity for formal education, the young Tagore was a rebel against the type of school then available, dull and dreary, short on sports and long on punishments. After an unhappy experience in the three schools, he was allowed to study at home with a tutor. He was then about 16, already a young poet and philosopher.
He wrote his first poem at the age of eight. At 22 he was considered the Shelley of Bengal. And at the apex of his prolific writing, he was awarded the Nobel Prize which established his international reputation. He devoted his prize of £8,000 to his school for boys, Santiniketan, which was everything that the schools he attended in his boyhood were not.
Tagore's prose, as well as his poetry, is unusual. Note this excerpt from his description of Calcutta:
"As soon as the day of sunlight is over, the day of electric light begins. There is not much work done, but there is no rest. The fire continues as it were to smoulder in the charcoal after the blazing wood has burnt itself out. The oil mills are still, the steamer sirens are silent, the laborers have left the factories, the buffaloes which pull the carts of jute bales are stabled in the tin-roofed sheds. But the nerves of the city are throbbing still with the fever of thought which has burned all day in her brain .... "
There is more — and any lover of vivid prose would like to go on.
As an introduction to the philosophy of Confucius and Tagore, the author briefly discusses humanism, which is common to both East and West, to show what these two minds of Asia added. Confucius advocated an elaborate system of rites for almost everyone from the King to the man-in-the-street, but always emphasized Love as the ethical law guiding the universe. Tagore (in contrast to Gandhi) held that science is not evil, but can serve a good cause only when in the hands of men of high spiritual status. In his own words, the humanism of Tagore was the Religion of Man. Dr. Shen calls the humanism of Confucius the Religion of Love.
As Confucius interpreted Love, it was not the same as Mind, but Love was the original excellence of the mind, which has now "become submerged in creaturely desire". The original excellence has been lost, and man must regain it by earnest endeavor. Love is the virtue of an unselfish mind. When a person is truly, and wholly, altruistic, union has been effected between the self and the virtue, and this is called Love, or (in Chinese) Jen.
To Tagore's way of thinking the world becomes full of meaning only after Man has appeared, and only when he feels unity with the Universe. In his own words, "before the chapter ended, Man appeared and turned the course of this evolution from an indefinite march of physical aggrandizement to a freedom of a more subtle perfection. This has made possible his progress to become unlimited, and has enabled him to realize the boundless in his power." Scientists can explain the dancing of stars and atoms, but not the sorrow and joy of Man.
The analysis of Tagore's philosophy is fascinating. "Strings were there before men, but they are used on the violin only after Man carne into the world. And men make music only because of its deep significance which was not perceived before men were born."
In a long discussion of Love as the paramount virtue, the question arises: Is it residing in the human soul or does it have to be achieved from without? If it is born with Man, then everyone has the ability to achieve salvation. Otherwise, only those who know how to get it from without can do so. Both Confucius and Tagore believe that the quality of Universal Love is born with Man. Evil arises if one fails to fulfill the Divine Law from within. This is closely allied to Christian thought and belief. And because Men fail in moral goodness, they think their national problems would be solved under a different system. Tagore said: "I do not put my faith in any new institutions, but in the individuals all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly and act rightly, thus becoming channels of moral truth."
All these ideas and principles, also the philosophy, poetry and art of the two countries are illustrated continually by excerpts from their works. Then the author comes to religion, and raises the question: Is Confucianism a religion? Most people (including most Chinese, it seems) say Confucius was a teacher and philosopher, not a religious leader and prophet; therefore Confucianism is a system of ethics, not a religion. Dr. Shen makes a case for including Confucianism among the religions of the world, but space forbids giving his reasons here.
When it comes to religion and theology, the author agrees with Tagore that reason and logic may actually weaken one's faith. Many Christians, perhaps most, would agree this is something to guard against. But few would go so far as to agree that studying theology, the science of religion, as one studies other sciences is a process which ceases to be faith. The great Christian liberals, both Catholic and Protestant, would feel that their clergy should be highly-trained in the knowledge and principles of their faith in order to instruct others.
The Asian distrusts the materialism of the West (though the Asian neutralist often seems unaware of the materialism in communism). The author says (and with this the Christian would agree): "The greatness and infiniteness of God need no proof, but should be understood by our mind." If the mind and spirit are one, this comes close to the essence of Christianity.
All that Dr. Shen has to say of altruism, universal love, getting rid of "I-hood" or self, applies equally to Christian concepts. The chief difference perhaps is that in Buddhism, Confucianism and humanism, man strives with his own weak will and wayward desires to attain his goal, while the Christian believes that God gave His Son for man's sins, so that through His sacrifice, once offered for all mankind, one may be freed from selfishness and desire. But it is like the failure of electricity if one loses contact with God or relies upon his own strength alone.
The author sounds a timely warning against sectarianism in religion, which carried to a nationalist extreme leads to a "superiority of religion", as in Japan's Shintoism. But his references to Christian missionaries seem confined to those of narrow, fundamentalist sects, who proselytize and "divide humanity into narrow groups, bitter and intolerant". This hardly applies to great liberals like Bishop Bashford, Bishop Herbert Welch, Robert Morrison, Matteo Ricci, Timothy Richards, Fletcher Brockman and J. Leighton Stewart to mention only a few, who founded schools through college and university, established hospitals and churches, orphanages and schools for the blind and deaf, to say nothing of those who stayed by their Chinese colleagues and suffered martyrdom by the Boxers, those who refugeed Westward with the Chinese during the Japanese occupation, or who stayed with their work when the Communists took over—to be deported, killed or to waste away in prison like Bishop James Walsh. Only the passing of time determines greatness (like a Hsuan Tsang or Chin Khai), but such spiritual Chinese Christians as David Z.T. Yui, T. Z. Koo, Judge John C. Wu, Beauson Tseng, or Cardinal Tien may be so remembered. It seems to this reviewer that every real religion and every spiritual individual has grasped much of Truth, but has no monopolyon it. Perhaps all paths of true seekers-after-Truth lead to God.
THE HIDDEN RUSSIA
by N. N. Krasnov, Jr.
Henry Holt and Company, New York,
1960. 341 pp. US$5.00
Reviewed by H. T. Lee
The Hidden Russia was written in blood and tears. It is a faithful and unadorned account of the hellish ordeals and countless tortures experienced and witnessed by the author while a slave laborer and political prisoner in various labor camps and prisons in Russia. The brutality and atrocities committed by the Kremlin against mankind, as presented in this book, are without parallel. It is the master stroke of the Kremlin to combine the ingenuity of man with scientific method to perpetuate the misery of the great masses of Russian people who are now struggling on the verge of death and starvation under the Communist yoke. The very thought of their tragic plight makes one's hair stand on end. Even in Dante's Inferno, one cannot find a comparison for such cruelties and misery to which thousands upon thousands of honest and patriotic Russian people have been and still are subjected.
"Murders, floggings, slow torture. Work that would kill an elephant, hunger that would destroy a camel... A prisoner sometimes had his wrists cut almost to the bone by special handcuffs, which eat into the flesh at the slightest movement of the hand ... " This is the lot of millions of Russian slave laborers and political prisoners whose hands the Soviet Union have used to build the so-called "Paradise of Socialism" where the Gods of the Communist cult rule supreme with an iron hand. They thrive on the misery of the great masses; they glory in the success of their conquests and exploits in terms of blood and tears shed by others. Their words are law; their frown spells disaster to millions of lives; their whims often touch off global conflicts resulting in unprecedented mass-killing and retrogression of the civilization of all mankind.
The fact that the story was told with marked sincerity and simplicity without frill and exaggeration lends much credulence to itself. Unlike other books of the same category, it does not savour of propaganda and affectation and therefore it has an unfailing appeal to the reading public.
As a literature, it may be classed with Odyssey for the poetic beauty of his narrative in which he treats himself as a central hero who battled through life against the oppression and torture of the Kremlin Gods with the same courage and tenacity as Dysseus struggled for survival under the evil spell of the whimsical Olympian Gods and Goddesses.
The reader will be struck with admiration at his unfailing sense of humor and his poetic appreciation of his Mother Russia which is woven in the fine texture of his beautiful narrative throughout the whole book despite the unbearable misery and distress in which he found himself. It is a convict's song, and he sang it with pathos and tears in his voice:
And when I die, I die,
They'll bury me.
And where I'll lie, I'll lie,
No one to see.
Yet in the early spring,
A nightingale will sing.
"We had listened to the song in night clubs, to the clink of a boxcar, to the rithym of the wheels over the tracks, carried away by the lyrical softness of the boy's voice so full of inevitable doom, we forget about the filth and stench, about the guards with their hammers, the hoarse barking of the dogs who had been converted from man's friends into blood-thirsty beasts ... "
For all his suffering and misery, he was still in a mood to give a poetic and humorous touch to the atrocities and brutality of the Kremlin, thereby awakening the reader's feelings of pity, sympathy and tender sorrow.
As the saying goes, there is a silver line in every cloud, from behind the grim prison walls, the author has seen gleams of light and hope which is looming up larger and larger before him as time goes by. Blood purges and mass-killing coupled with brainwashing cane only break the Russian people into abject submission. But the spark of human-nature inherent in them can never be stamped out by terrorism and persecutions:
"The audience was equally moved when the curtain had fallen and we were called out front to receive the applause, we saw tears in the eyes of people whose hearts, one might thought, were made of stone. The most inveterate bullies, bandits and secret police seemed to be turning back in thought to their own lives, their mothers. After the play I was told that no one applauded harder or wiped his eyes as frequently as our notorious Vaska, a deadful blackguard and murderer ... "
The author has a deep love for his country and people and a strong sentimental attachment to everything traditionally Russian. Despaired of the Soviet Government, he centers his hope on the strong, tough and honest Russian masses who, in his belief, will eventually free themselves from the shackle of the Kremlin to resume normal life under a rule of divine and human law.
"Still the shadow which the Kremlin throws cannot obscure for me the bright light of the mind of the Russian man, the shining quality of his soul, the goodness of his heart ... I had a painful longing to find my father's grave, to stop in Moscow, to stand and pray by the walls of Lefortovo Prison for souls of grandfather and Uncle Semyon and all those who perished with them ... Here I was going away to freedom, the freedom of another country, to people who spoke a foreign tongue, followed a different religion ... "
In this book, the author voices the grievance and sentiment of the great suffering masses of Russian people against the despotic and oppressive rule of the Kremlin. It is a prophet's message spelling out the doom of the so-called "Paradise of Socialism." It is an appeal to all mankind for material assistance and moral support to the life-and-death struggle against despotism and terrorism which is going on both behind and outside the Iron Curtain. It is a formidable indictment passed on the blood-thirsty slave masters.
While denouncing the Kremlin for its iniquity and atrocities, the author also takes the free nations to task for their follies in betraying millions of peace- and freedom-loving people to the Kremlin under the Yalta Pact.
"It is not my intention to rip up old wounds or stir up hatred. I wish only to use the truth to preclude the possibility of a repetition of the fateful and irreparable mistakes which were cleverly forced upon the West by Stalin, who was as adroit and vicious as evil itself.... "