Chapter 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity

Lauren F. Pfister

1 Approaching Zhu Xi Through Modern and Contemporary Christian Scholars

Historically speaking, it is a fact that Zhu Xi never encountered during his life any person that he would have been able to identify as a Christian intellectual or scholar. Nevertheless, because his interpretive influences in Ruist traditions were so immense after his death, and especially during the Qing dynasty (as other chapters in this volume document so clearly), nineteenth century foreign and indigenous missionary- scholars as well as twentieth century Chinese and foreign Christian scholars from a relatively wide range of backgrounds had to come to grips with the nature of his immense corpus and the claims that were associated with his mature positions. That process did not occur spontaneously, but involved several centuries of inchoate engagement with Zhu Xi’s works that did not display self-conscious awareness of his influences, lasting till the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this article, then, the major discussions will focus on those who self-consciously engaged Zhu Xi’s philosophical system and its claims, usu- ally involving some specific portion of his works. Due to the nature of this general topic and the limits of my own linguistic abili- ties, I have chosen to highlight studies that explicitly apply Zhu Xi’s teachings to particular Christian issues or explore Zhu Xi’s claims from specific Christian perspectives. In addition, I have chosen to include studies of those who present Zhu Xi’s claims by means of the translation and interpretation of Ruist canonical literature, even though they may not offer a systematic study of Zhu Xi’s works in-and- of-themselves. Thirdly, I have divided the study of sources dealt with in two

L. F. Pfister *( ) Department of Religion and Philosophy, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 681 K.-c. Ng, Y. Huang (eds.), Dao Companion to ZHU Xi’s Philosophy, Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29175-4_30 682 L. F. Pfister historical categories, the first being “pre-WWII” and the second being “post-WWII,” based primarily on the shift from studies produced by a large number of foreign missionary-scholars, many of those works being translations of key texts, to the second period where those who engage Zhu Xi’s corpus are primarily Chinese Christian scholars and their concerns are not with translation of texts, but with the interpretation of Zhu’s system and its implications. This occurred in part due to the maturation of the Chinese Christian communities in Greater China during the twentieth century, and the development of a number of indigenous accounts and responses to Zhu Xi that did not exist in any systematic manner previous to WWII. Finally, I have sought to identify works in a relatively wider range of linguistic media that address these themes, primarily working with texts published in Chinese and European languages.

2 Zhu Xi’s Pre-WWII Foreign Christian Interpreters

Missionaries from three main traditions within Christianity lived in China at different periods and engaged teachings of Zhu Xi: they were foreign representatives of Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. All of these figures studied various aspects of the Chinese cultures they encountered, and published something about their learning that included reference to the works and teachings of Zhu Xi. Many other missionaries did not do such extensive study and publishing, and so in order to highlight the special character of these unusual missionaries, the term “missionary-scholar” was created (Pfister 2010; Fei 2016b: 18–38). Notably, the first among this group who dealt with teachings of Zhu Xi did not do so self- consciously, but near the end of the eighteenth century missionary-scholars produced translations and secondary works that did self-consciously present and evaluate aspects of Zhu Xi’s teachings.

2.1 The Italian Jesuit Missionary-Scholar, Matteo Ricci

Although Matteo Ricci 利瑪竇 (1552–1610) as one of the first Italian Jesuit missionary-scholars to live in China did put Chinese and “Western” scholars in dialogue within his major Chinese work, Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義 (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), he did not realize that a number of the interpretive positions adopted by his imagined Chinese scholar relied on or even glossed Zhu Xi’s claims. Recent scholarship has identified places where those claims can be linked to Zhu Xi’s teachings, but this was apparently not self-conscious on Ricci’s part (Ricci 2014). 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 683

2.2 The Seventeenth Century Jesuit Translation Project

Recent research has also clarified that the seventeenth century Jesuit translation project, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, that produced three of the Four Books in Latin (not attempting the Mengzi / Mencius 孟子) was also highly indebted to Zhu Xi’s commentaries to that seminal work. Still, as in the case of Ricci’s previous volume, Philip Couplet and his colleagues were not self-consciously employing Zhu Xi’s commentaries. They only integrated Zhu’s explanations into their Latin translation by means of the commentary that they did employ, Zhang Juzheng’s 張居正 (1525–1582) Sishu Zhijie 四書直解 (Straightforward Explanations of the Four Books), produced initially in the early 1570s. Because Zhang himself relied on Zhu Xi’s earlier commentaries for many of his own interpretations, but not consis- tently or without correction of the Song Ruist’s influential philosophical assertions, that impact on the Jesuits’ translations and interpretations was only selectively present in a complicated patchwork of Zhu Xi’s and other Ruists’ interpretations, sometimes also including Zhang’s own innovative elaborations (Meynard 2011, 2015).

2.3 The French Jesuit Scholar, François Noël

The first missionary-scholar to employ huZ Xi’s commentaries to the Four Books self-consciously was the French Jesuit, François Noël 衛方濟 (1651–1729), publishing Latin and later French renderings of the Four Books and two other works in Prague in 1711. This effort should be considered as part of the “old Jesuit mission” that was initiated by Ruggieri and Ricci in 1580, and lasted until the dismantling of the Jesuit order by the pope in the 1770s. While Noël set this precedent for Jesuit scholarship in his own day, he employed Zhu Xi’s commentaries as a major, but not the only, source for his Latin renderings (Wong 2013, 2015). Later Protestant missionary-scholars who also employed Zhu Xi’s commentaries in a similar fashion—as a recognized authority, but not their only source for their translations— include Legge, Faber, Wilhelm, and Guerra. With regard to translation precedents in rendering texts into Latin that reflect a specific Roman Catholic worldview, one precedent that is both problematic and influential among later Jesuit renderings completed by Zottoli (Latin), Couvreur (Latin and French), and Guerra (Portuguese) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, came with the rendering of the first two Chinese ideographs of theZhongyong 中庸 (the Doctrine of the Mean). Noël took tian ming 天命 there as a single noun, rather than a noun-verb or adjective-noun phrase, and gave it the translation of the Latin equivalent of “natural law” (Wong 2015). While there are good reasons to challenge this rendering from grammatical and conceptual explanations by many Chinese commentators, here we face an obvious eisegesis (“reading into the text”) of a prevailing worldview concept from Thomist theology that should be highlighted as a clever, but misguided and ultimately unjustified, translation of that passage. 684 L. F. Pfister

2.4 The Russian Orthodox Abbot and Missionary-Scholar, Iakinf

Unknown to most philosophers in Chinese, European, and North American contexts is that the first full European translation of Zhu Xi’s Sishu Jizhu 四書集注 (Collected Notes on the Four Books)—including not only the canonical texts of the Four Books, but also renderings and/or glosses of Zhu Xi’s commentaries—was produced initially in the period from 1814 to 1815 in old Russian by the Russian Orthodox abbot, Iakinf 雅金夫 (Nikita Y. Bichurin 比丘林, 1777–1853). A second version of the whole work was completed in 1820–1821, just before Iakinf and his ecclesiastical team returned to St. Petersburg after the chaos caused by the Napoleonic Wars. That later complete manuscript consists of two large handwritten volumes held in the Museum of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, while a more elegantly prepared version of only two of the four texts—the Daxue 大學 (the Great Learning) and Zhongyong with Zhu Xi’s commentaries—was prepared for publication in 1835. Very unfortunately for both Russian and other European sinologists, even those later tomes were never published. They are currently kept in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg (Fei 2016a). Notably, Iakinf was self- conscious of the radical reordering of the text of the Daxue and the addition of the fifth chapter by huZ Xi’s own hand. Surprisingly, he chose not to add that one chapter created by Zhu Xi to the canonical text, adding a translator’s note that the canonical text at this point was missing materials, and the creative alternative presented by Zhu Xi was not acceptable. This is a remarkably bold step taken by the Russian missionary-scholar, something not seen elsewhere among renderings of that passage in other missionary-scholars’ translations. Notably, Iakinf still apparently presented all the rest of the “new text” traditions for both the Daxue and the Zhongyong in his Russian rendering. In this light, then, we may count his critical rejection of that infamous fifth chapter in the commentarial section of theDaxue as the first explicit critical response to the reordering and restructuring of huZ Xi’s Daxue in any European language.

2.5 Watershed in Qing Dynasty Zhu Xi Studies by Foreign Christian Scholars

Before the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been only unselfconscious use of Zhu Xi’s commentaries, or a few relatively independent works that did apply his commentaries to their translations and interpretations of seminal Ruist scriptures, but they did not receive much public attention. By the 1850s, new efforts were taken in publicly accessible journals and independent works produced by both Protestants and Roman Catholic missionary-scholars that greatly advanced a more general awareness of the monumental stature and profound influences of Zhu Xi’s teachings. Chan Wing-tsit noted that already in 1849 the first American 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 685

Congregationalist missionary to China, Elijah Bridgman (1801–1861), produced an English version of a small portion of some of Zhu Xi’s teachings dealing with the nature of “the universe, heaven and earth, sun and moon, and man and animal” (Chan 1976: 555–56). Nearly two decades later the Scottish leader of the notable Guangxue Hui 廣學會 (the Society for the Dissemination of Christian Knowledge), Alexander Wylie 偉烈亞力 (1815–1887), provided the bibliographic grounding for a far more significant understanding of and appreciation for the importance of Zhu Xi’s corpus. In his well-informed annotated bibliography given the rather mundane title of Notes on Chinese Literature, Wylie cited Zhu Xi (by means of a French inspired transcription, “Choo He”), on 20 different pages within the bibliography, more than any other person or author within that work. He went on to refer to 13 of Zhu Xi’s publications by their titles (Wylie 1867: 84, 85, 87, 216, 219, 226, 231), but notably did not refer to Zhu Xi’s commentary to the Four Books where that important Song dynasty creation was addressed (Wylie 1867: 7–8). Wylie only dealt there with each of the four texts independently, but not as a whole four-tomes-in-one-volume text. Characterizing the impact of Zhu Xi’s intellectual work as having “a wonderful influence over the native mind” (Wylie1867 : xix), Wylie was fully aware of the cultural and intellectual impact of many of Zhu Xi’s publications. The titles of Zhu’s publications that he did identify and describe included not only Zhu Xi’s imperially authorized complete works, but also several works on rites for children and the family, his categorized sayings, the compendium of Song Ruist scholarship known as Jinsi lu 近思錄 (Reflections on Things at Hand), two commentaries on The Book of Changes, two works on Daoist texts, three texts on his studies of poetry in the ancient state of Chu (Chuci 楚辭), and his seminal teachings regarding the hermeneutics of reading. Here was the foundation on which a more wide-ranging Christian scholarly approach to Zhu Xi’s corpus could be based. From the Roman Catholic side, it was once again members of the Jesuit order who made their scholarly presence particularly noticeable, but this time in the “new Jesuit mission” that had been reignited in the 1850s after nearly 80 years of censor- ship by papal authorities. The main contributors came from the Xujiahui 徐家匯 Mission in the Shanghai area and the Southeast Zhili 直隸東南 Mission located in the district of Xian 獻 (near the city of Hejianfu 河間府) in what is now Hebei 河北 province: from the former, the Italian Angelo Zottoli and the Frenchman Stanislas Le Gall; from the latter, Séraphin Couvreur and Léon Wieger. As will be seen, most of these efforts reflected generally the traditional orientation of the early Jesuit mission, but they clearly also advanced textual access to Zhu Xi’s corpus through a number of translations and a far more self-conscious awareness of the importance and complexities involved in Zhu Xi’s life and works. Returning to the contributions of Protestant missionary-scholars, the first more substantial contributions in addressing Zhu Xi’s claims came from those who drew upon the legacy of employing, translating, and evaluating Zhu Xi’s commentaries to Ruist canonical literature. These involved, first of all, the original eight-tomes-in- five-volumes produced by James Legge 理雅各 (1815–1897) as The Chinese Classics (first edition, 1861–1872; second partially revised edition, 1893–1895). In 686 L. F. Pfister the “prolegomena” there are found interpretive textual and conceptual essays, and in the main body of the work a Chinese standard text on the top of most pages, followed in the middle of the page by an English translation, and subsequently including “copious” footnotes. The second collection of works in this style was the extensive Chinese–Latin corpus in five volumes, entitled Cursus litteraturæ sinicæ: neo-missionariis accommodatus (Course in the Literature of China: For the Use of New Missionaries, 1879–1882), produced by the Italian Jesuit, Angelo Zottoli 晁德蒞 (1826–1902) for ethnically Chinese and foreign novitiates in the Shanghai Xujiahui mission. Legge’s series was exceptionally influential as a prototype and exemplary model for cross-cultural translation and missionary-scholar engagement with Ruist traditions, and so has been republished in numerous versions even until the second decade of the twenty-first century. Zottoli’s series was far less influential publicly. That was due particularly because it was written in a terse and scholarly Latin, being prepared as a course for new missionaries to learn wide ranges of classical, medieval, and modern Chinese literary works. Knowing Zhu Xi’s status especially with regard to his commentaries to the Ruist canonical texts, Zottoli was explicit in following nineteenth century trends in Chinese Ruist scholarship that rejected the Song master’s interpretations due to their philosophical orientation and some of his anachronous hermeneutic choices (Zottoli 1879–1982, vol. 2: vi).

2.6 The Scottish Congregationalist Missionary-Scholar, James Legge

Though Legge never provided a translation of any full text published by Zhu Xi, he was informed about the Song Ruist’s status as an imperially authorized commentator to the Four Books, and studied those and other commentaries in a serious and critical manner. The earliest published indication that Legge was self-consciously reading and interpreting Zhu Xi’s works comes from his lengthy study published in 1852, Notions of the Chinese concerning God and Spirits. There in the midst of the discursive arguments that were involved in the “term controversy,” seeking to find a set of theological terms in Chinese to be applied in biblical translations, Legge refers directly to Zhu’s metaphysics of the taiji 太極 found in Explanations of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (Taijitu shuo 太極圖說) and his commentaries to both the Zhouli 周禮 (The Rites of Zhou) and the Zhongyong (Legge 1852: 15–19). Notably, while referring to Zhu Xi by means of an ancient Greek term for the leader of a school—“the coryphaeus of the Sung family”—Legge argued against an earlier Roman Catholic interpretation of Zhu Xi’s worldview as “Atheo-politique,” claiming that the Chinese scholar’s “good sense” led him at times to speak “like a true theist” (Legge 1852: 17, 19). Here Legge’s interpretive position reflects his Protestant rationalism drawn from Scottish Realism, taking already a more open religious account of Zhu Xi’s metaphysics. This is a general interpretive position 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 687 that has remained part of later controversies about his worldview even in the twenty- first century. While preparing his translations and interpretations of all the Ruist scriptures—a task started in the 1840s and ending in the 1890s—Legge dealt with many texts written and interpretive positions promoted by Zhu Xi. The two main set of Legge’s translations, now serving as canon-in-translation in their own right (Pfister 2011; Fei 2016a, b: 281), involved The Chinese Classics (1861–1872, first edition; 1893–1895 partially revised edition) and The Sacred Books of China (1879–1891) in the larger series called The Sacred Books of the East edited by Max Mueller. Even during the last decade of his life, Legge knew of those who claimed his translations “were modelled on the views of the great critic and philosopher of the Sung dynasty” or “the Old Man of the Cloudy Valley” (Legge 1893: x–xi), Legge’s way of extol- ling Zhu Xi. Since then others have repeated the claim (including Arthur Waley [1889–1966], see Fei 2016b: 294), but Legge himself knew that this was far too simplistic. A thorough reading and assessment of his translation works confirms Legge’s response to these claims. For example, already in the 1861 versions of the first and second volumes of The Chinese Classics, where Legge presented his first published versions of the Four Books, evidence of his complex engagement with Zhu Xi’s commentaries is manifest. The primary text referred to by Legge in his commentarial notes from Zhu Xi’s corpus was the Sishu Jizhu 四書集注 (Collected Notes on the Four Books), Zhu’s commentaries to the seminal canonical work that he himself is credited with creating and justifying. With regard to the commentators cited within the whole first volume—involving the Analects (Lunyu 論語), the Daxue, and the Zhongyong in that order—Legge cited over a hundred commentators by name or indirectly through naming their works. Among those commentators, only 21 were cited four or more times throughout that volume (Pfister2004 , vol. 2: 110). Zhu Xi’s commentarial notes along with those of the Han dynasty Ruist commentator, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200), were the most often cited among all of those commentaries most often referred to in the first volume of The Chinese Classics (Fei 2016a, b: 257 and 277). It was also one of the two most cited interpreters within Legge’s notes to the Mencius, sharing that status with the Han scholar, Zhao Qi 趙歧 (c. 108–201) (Fei 2016a, b: 294). Having completed his first translation and commentaries toThe Book of Poetry in 1871, Legge found Zhu Xi’s rationalistic approach to those ancient texts and his semi-ascetic moral position adopted in his interpretations to parallel much of what he himself held as a Victorian Scottish gentleman and trained Scottish Realist missionary-scholar (Pfister2004 , vol. 2: 211; FEI 2016a, b: 309). So, when he reflected on the qualities of Zhu’s commentarial interpretations in 1893, Legge mentioned the “beauty and strength” of his “style,” the “comprehen- sion and depth of his thought,” and even “the correctness of his analysis” (Legge 1893: x–xi). Nevertheless, this did not mean that he regularly or even generally agreed with Zhu Xi’s specific annotations and generalized assessments within the canonical works where he studied Zhu’s interpretations. The most notable departures from Zhu Xi’s precedents came in relationship to Legge’s presentation and evaluation of certain aspects of the Four Books. Neither 688 L. F. Pfister

Zhu’s order of publication in the Sishu Jizhu (Daxue, Zhongyong, the Analects, the Mencius) or his preferred order for their study (Daxue, the Analects, the Mencius, Zhongyong) were followed by Legge in his first volume ofThe Chinese Classics. Having become intensely concerned with the status of “Confucius” (Master Kong 孔子), Legge placed the Analects first, followed by the Daxue, Zhongyong, and in the subsequent volume, the Mencius. Other missionary-scholars who later presented their own versions of the Four Books in various languages did not repeat Legge’s lack of respect for the canonical order (Pfister2004 , vol. 2: 103; Fei 2016b: 253–54, 264–65). Notably, however, Legge still adopted the “new text” versions of the Daxue and Zhongyong for that first volume in hisChinese Classics, but he particularly assessed the former as an unjustified meddling with the original text (the “old text”) found in the Liji 禮記 (The Record of Rites) (Pfister 2004, vol. 2: 111 and 324; Fei 2016b: 257–58). Consistent with this concern, Legge later in 1885, when he published his rendering of the Liji, purposefully produced English versions of the “old text” versions of both works as Chapters 28 and 39 (Legge 1885: 300–351, 411–24). This precedent of presenting two versions—both the “old” and “new text” versions—of these canonical works was continued by all those other missionary- scholars who published both the Daxue and Zhongyong in the Four Books and the Liji in various other languages (see Couvreur’s French and Latin versions, as well as Guerra’s Portuguese versions). These missionary-scholar responses via translation to the textual controversy caused by Zhu Xi’s ascendency was an alternative to the standard way Qing dynasty authorized texts of the Liji were presented, because they would normally blank out those chapters, pointing readers to Zhu Xi’s imperially authorized “new text” version without any further explanation. Attracted to the critical textual comments on Ruist canonical works prepared by Mao Qiling 毛奇齡 (1623–1716), Jiang Yong 江永 (1681–1762), and Wang Yinzhi 王引之 (1766–1834) among others—all these belonging to the “Simple Learning” School (Puxue 樸學)—Legge found substantial linguistic and textual reasons at times for supporting interpretations of texts other than Zhu Xi’s (Fei 2016b: 251–52, 277). This is not to deny that Legge sometimes straightforwardly adopted the interpretations of Zhu Xi in his renderings of the Analects, for example, but there were only thirteen such cases in the whole of that work (Pfister1991 : 39–40; 2004, vol. 2: 111).

2.7 The British Anglican Pastor-Scholar, Thomas McClatchie

The first monograph in English devoted to the study of a specific text in Zhu Xi’s corpus was produced by the Anglican leader in the British colony of Hong Kong, the canon of St. John’s Cathedral there, the Rev. Thomas McClatchie. Being one of the first two Anglican missionaries sent to the Qing dyansty in 1844, McClatchie first published a smaller study in 1853 on The Book of Changes, and then focused his studies on Zhu Xi. For a priest who had a leading role in the Anglican mission within the colony of Hong Kong to choose to study works by the imperially 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 689

authorized interpreter of the key Ruist canonical literature manifested his sense of both his own authority within the British national church as well as that of Zhu Xi. In this regard he stood hermeneutically in a position very similar to Iakinf, but knew nothing of that unpublished precedent in Russian; there is no indication that he was aware of any other relevant works outside of those in Anglophone Protestant journals. Notably, McClatchie did not publish his study on the “cosmogeny” within one chapter of Zhu Xi’s complete works until 30 years after he had arrived in China (McClatchie 1874), suggesting that he had pursued adequate research and read widely in Zhu Xi’s corpus before publishing this annotated English translation. Without question, he knew of Legge’s scholarly precedents, and so followed the Scottish Congregationalist’s boldness by offering a Chinese–English bilingual text (McClatchie 1874: 2–124), the standard Chinese on the left side of each opening, and his English rendering on the right side. Preceding his translation with a brief biography of Zhu Xi (McClatchie 1874: iii–vii) and a general introduction to Ruist cosmological diagrams drawn from the Yijing 易經 (the Book of Changes) and Song history (McClatchie 1874: viii–xviii). He also added extensive explanatory notes after the translation (McClatchie 1874: 125–61). These were all formal elements of what appeared to be a substantial study. As in the case of Iakinf, this precedent in Anglophone sinological history remained the only study by a Protestant missionary in China not associated with a university, but it was inherently flawed. Problems appeared in its English translations of key terms and its simplistic generalizations about “pagan philosophers.” At points McClatchie’s text seemed logically incoherent, while also promoting an interpretive perspective that challenged Zhu Xi’s metaphysics. Generally speaking, McClatchie sustained a religiously antagonistic attitude throughout most of the text. From the angle of comparative philosophical analysis, it is worth considering these problems in detail in order to clarify as much as one can why McClatchie’s work could be so far off the mark. One suggestion about how McClatchie could skew the rendering and interpretation of this section of Zhu Xi’s work is that he held fast to a special intuition: he believed that Zhu Xi, and Confucianism at large, supported a vision of the cosmos that was “the same” as the ancient Mediterranean Stoics (McClatchie 1874: 126, 134, 137, 146). Since the Stoic references to the highest divine being included “Fate, Reason, Nature, etc.” (McClatchie 1874: 146), McClatchie apparently assumed that using the term “Fate” to refer to li 理 was justified. Yet that was not his only problematic translation. In addition, he chose to render qi 氣 as “air,” yang 陽 as “light,” yin 陰 as “darkness,” dao 道 as “reason,” shen 神 as “God.” He used these English renderings stringently and without any alternatives in most cases, so that the translation jars the mind of any reader. “In the whole Universe there is no such thing as Air without Fate, or Fate without Air.. .. Fate is Incorporeal, while the Air is coarse and has dregs” (McClatchie 1874: 3). So literalistic was his method of rendering, that the normal reference of guishen 鬼神 for “spirits” in general was made into a special noun, “Demon-God” (McClatchie 1874: 138). It would seem that McClatchie should have read more of Zhu Xi in order to refine and revise his renderings. Nevertheless, as seen in the several dozen pages of 690 L. F. Pfister endnotes, there are far more sources cited from ancient Mediterranean and modern European sources than references to Zhu Xi’s other works or even other Chinese scholarly texts. In all these ways, McClatchie’s approach to cross-cultural and inter-religious studies of this one chapter in Zhu Xi’s extensive corpus proved to be insensitive, uninformed, and crude. Only when other missionary-scholars avoided these problems could they produce far more justified renderings, so that their interpretations would be seriously considered.

2.8 The German Protestant Sinologist, Georg von der Gabelentz

Having benefited from growing up in the home of a Lutheran pastor-scholar who was an expert in Manchurian, Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) came to sinological studies only after completing legal studies and serving as a lawyer (Gabelentz 1876: 89–90). For his doctoral dissertation he rendered the Taijitu Shuo 太極圖說 (presented only as the Taijitu 太極圖 in the published version) into both Manchurian and German. These were located underneath the standard Chinese text on the same page. He continued this Chinese–Manchurian–German trilingual format also for Zhu Xi’s introduction, in the image of the diagram, and within the main body of the text. In the prolegomena (Vorbemerkungen), Gabelentz characterized Zhu Xi’s worldview as strictly a “monism” (Gabelentz 1876: 3–7). For Gabelentz, the taiji is the “original principle” (Urprinzip) of the universe, but as a result the wuji 無極 becomes “without principle” (Ohne Prinzip), something that is metaphysically hard to comprehend (Gabelentz 1876: 31). Most other key terms were rendered with a notable hermeneutic sensitivity. In his tome Gabelentz also included an appendix that provided discussions by Zhu Xi regarding the taiji from among the recordings on this topic within his Categorized Sayings (Gabelentz 1876: 82–88). In handling key terms, Yin 陰 (“Yen”) and Yang 陽 appeared only in Romanized transcription throughout the whole tome, while dao was always “the Norm.” The technical terms xingershang 形而上 and xingerxia 形而下 were rendered in a more literal manner as being “over” or “under” the “phenomena” (die Erscheinungen), and so not merely “incorporeal” or “corporeal” (Gabelentz 1876: 39). Otherwise, qi 氣 was rendered by the poetic German term, der Odem (the life- breath), de 德 by die Tugend (virtue), ming 命 as das Schicksal (fate or destiny), guishen 鬼神 as Dämonen und Geistern (demons and ghosts), and li 理 by either Vernuft (reason, rationality) or Vernuft-prinzip (the principle of rationality) (Gabelentz 1876: 36, 45, 54, 60, 65, 66). Though he argued that the concept of tian 天 was “for Chinese persons the deity [die Gottheit],” this did not affect his interpretive understanding that Zhu Xi was promoting some form of monism (Gabelentz 1876: 33). Taking up a rendering for shengren 聖人 that was already upheld in other German renderings, Gabelentz continued to translate this key term as der heilege 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 691

Mensch / die heilege Menschen, that is, “the holy human” / “the holy humans” (Gabelentz 1876: 63–65), making the term ring soundly with a religious character that does not appear in the original Chinese, nor in the English and European equivalents for “sage.” All this being so, Gabelentz’s work was a major advance over McClatchie’s distorted translation and crude interpretations.

2.9 The German Lutheran Missionary-Scholar, Ernst Faber

Having published more than ten works each in Chinese, German and English on various topics relevant to Protestant engagements in the Qing dynasty, Ernst Faber 花之安 (1839–1899) was a well-recognized scholarly missionary whose systematic efforts at exploring traditional Chinese culture earned him accolades from many sides among foreign missionaries, Chinese Christians, and European sinologists. Intending to make an advance on the already well-recognized contributions of Legge’s English translations, Faber produced a series of “systematical digests” to add to the understanding of various ancient Chinese works and their cultural influences. In one devoted to scriptures associated with the teachings of Master Kong, Faber added a synopsis of “the philosophical schools” in Ruist traditions, and so devoted three pages to the influence, complexity, and criticism of “Chu Fu-tzü” (Zhufuzi 朱夫子, Master Zhu) within Song, Ming and Qing dynasty Ruist traditions (Faber 1875: 32–34). He described the Principle-centered Learning School (lixue 理學) as “dualistic-naturalistic” and “Buddhist-Confucian,” even though in the end Zhu Xi’s teachings and his followers’ works were not at all “amicably inclined to Buddhism.” He was also very aware that Lu Jiuyuan 陸九淵 (s. Xiangshan 象山, 1134–1192) presented a substantial challenge to the “critical philosophical erudition of Chu-hsi,” arguing that the “commencement and aim” of Ruist learning should be the “rectification of heart and life.” In addition, he referred to a study of the critical differences between the lixue and xinxue 心學 (Heart-mind- centered Learning) by the Ming Ruist scholar, Chen Jian 陳健 (1497–1567) (wrongly referred to as a Qing scholar named Chen Qinglan 陳慶藍), as well as the textual challenges elaborated by Mao Qiling 毛奇齡 (styled Xihe 西河 [1623–1713]) and those found in the massive collectanea entitled Huang Qing Jingjie 皇清經解 (Canonical Interpretations by the August Qing), under the editorship of Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849). Without question, this kind of historical coverage and percep- tive critical awareness was largely unprecedented in any previous writing by Christian missionary-scholars, advancing beyond the bibliographic notes of Wylie. This informed critical sensitivity also was manifest in Faber’s subsequent works. So, for example, having recognized a strong tendency in Legge’s translation and interpretation of the Mencius (the Mengzi) to favor Zhu Xi’s interpretations, over- stated by claiming that “Dr. Legge follows only the explanation of Choo-fu-tsze” (Faber 1882: x; see also Pfister2013 ), Faber revised many of the Scotsman’s renderings from Qing scholarly criticisms of Zhu Xi’s interpretations of the Mengzi. Nevertheless, near the end of his life when Faber summarized his “Missionary View 692 L. F. Pfister of Confucianism,” he found several “points of similarity” between the teachings of “Chu-fu-tsze” and his preferred Lutheran expression of Christianity, mentioning no point of “antagonism” or “deficiency” in which he identifiedhu Z Xi as the source. Instead, he honored the lixue account of “divine providence” that was only different “in their explanation of it, not in the fact.” Also, their attitude when political and social conditions were unfavorable that drove them to emphasize “the moral self- culture and the practice of humanity” was considered noble and admirable (Faber 1897: 57, 59). Here we have a carefully articulated alliance between aspects of a Protestant Christian worldview and its attendant lifestyle with Zhu Xi’s, an alliance that was rarely made so explicit within nineteenth century missionary- scholars’ works.

2.10 The Belgian Jesuit Sinologist, Charles de Harlez

Though Chan Wing-tsit noted that the “French missionary” Charles de Harlez had published several important translations of Zhu Xi’s works within the last two decades of the nineteenth century (Chan 1976: 556–57), several qualifications of Chan’s descriptions and claims need to be made. Charles-Joseph de Harlez de Deulin (1832–1899) was a Jesuit and a scholar, but not a missionary. Though he wrote in French, he was Belgian in nationality, and was a polyglot by gift and training. After working in old Persian and Sanskrit texts, he began to work with Chinese texts as late as the 1880s, and published his first extensive work related to huZ Xi in 1888 in a notable European journal. All this being stated, because he probably did not have any concrete experience in China—as was the case for many sinologues in the French Academy earlier in the century—his handling of Chinese texts was not always precise. Still, the effort he put into that first publication was notable: it involved a rendering in contemporary French of the preface and four chapters from the “selected essentials” (jie yao 節要) of Zhu Xi’s teachings prepared by the late Ming Ruist, Gao Panglong 高攀龍 (1562–1626). Out of the fourteen chapters of the original work de Harlez reproduced the majority of the content in chapters 1, 6, 9 and 13, dealing respectively with themes related to the nature of the dao, the way of living well at home (jiadao 家道), methods of governance, and distinguishing strange sects (yiduan 異端, particularly Buddhist teachings). The text appears only in the French rendering, without the standard text in Chinese, and including only a few Chinese characters. If reference to a particular ideograph was needed, including the names of Chinese persons mentioned, these were presented only in a contemporary French transcription. Another matter that makes the French text difficult to follow (when comparing it to the original Chinese text) is that whenever de Harlez skipped passages, he did not indicate it by means of an ellipsis or any other means. Still, the fact is that most of each of the four chapters is given a French rendering. The lack of a standard Chinese text or even direct reference to most Chinese names and terms may not always indicate that someone has something to hide, but in de Harlez’s case there were in fact significant problems within his French 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 693

translation. Where there are direct repetitions in the Chinese text, to emphasize particular sequences of thought (as found in the preface), de Harlez purposefully employed other wording in French, apparently because mere repetition, though being literal and direct in the rendering, would not necessarily be considered stylish in French (de Harley 1888: 220–21). More significantly, though he recognized the names of persons, he did not appear to recognize some passages that came from canonical sources, so that he glossed over or misread passages that came from the Mengzi in the preface and the Daxue in the title of the third chapter. Sometimes those glosses or quotations from canonical texts were identified in the main body of his translation, but it is disconcerting to find that the famous phrase at the beginning of the Taijitu Shuo is not identified in a footnote, and the phrase wuji er taiji 無極而太極 is presented as meaning that the “original principle” is “without origin” (de Harley 1888: 226). In general, his rendering was more liberal than literal, to the point that misdirections in his translations exist for a number of key terms. At other points of the text de Harlez missed subtleties in the text, such as realiz- ing that negligence in the home would mean that some matters of importance would not be realized (a matter explicitly stated in the Chinese standard text); instead, he claimed absolutely that “the decree of heaven could not be executed” instead of claiming that some facets of the decree of heaven would not be realized (de Harley 1888: 246). In another case he simply misunderstood the criticism of Buddhist teachings, where it was claimed that their understanding of reincarnation had nothing to do with the principle of the creative generation of all things; instead, he rendered the passage as saying that the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation “does not certainly follow reason” (where the term li 理 is rendered as “reason”) (de Harley 1888: 260). Such imprecision occurs in a number of places, but if one is not comparing it to the Chinese original, de Harlez’s fluent French glosses over those details would not make it easy to discern the misdirections or misunderstandings hidden beneath the flowing prose. Notably, it also shows that some renderings by nineteenth century academics who had never been to China fell below expected standards of accuracy that were more generally understood and sometimes attained by missionary-scholars who lived out their lives in Chinese environments. From a hermeneutic point of view sensitive to a Roman Catholic translator’s orientation, it is significant to point out that de Harlez rendereddao as “doctrine” and shengren as “saint/saints.” Consequently, his French translation rings with strong Roman Catholic echoes (as in de Harley 1888: 221, 270). While his rendering of qi 氣 is more perceptively given as “the vital principle” or “the vital element,” and the complementary elements yin and yang are generally left transcribed and not translated (as in de Harley 1888: 222, 224, 240–41), there are infelicities in the rendering that made his many translation efforts in this article less than satisfying for academic purposes. Whether these problems remained in his later works including the Xiaoxue 小學 (Elementary Learning), Jiali 家禮 (Home Rituals), and The Western Inscription (Ximing 西銘) (de Harley 1889a, b, 1890) should be considered as well. 694 L. F. Pfister

2.11 The French Jesuit Missionary-Scholar, Stanislas Le Gall

The work that set a new standard for interpretations of Zhu Xi in the nineteenth century was produced by a French Jesuit residing in the Xujiahui Mission in Shanghai: Stanislas Le Gall (1858–1916). Unknown to Chan Wing-tsit, who was normally quite comprehensive, Le Gall produced a volume including a carefully documented biographical sketch of Zhu Xi along with a thorough account of his posthumous honors and influences (Le Gall 1894: 1–24), followed by relatively brief but articulate conceptual account of all major terms in Zhu Xi’s metaphysics and ethics (Le Gall 1894: 25–80). In the final section of his work Le Gall presented an informed French translation of most of the same text addressed by McClatchie 20 years earlier (Le Gall 1894: 81–125). In the earlier sections he summarized the positions of key Chinese opponents of Zhu Xi’s system, including Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) and Mao Qiling (Le Gall 1894: 15–17), and noted the failure of McClatchie’s previous work as well as the “inexact and incomplete” presentation of de Harlez in his 1890 account of Zhu Xi’s “modern school” (Le Gall 1894: 21–22, 45–46). Citing Legge often and Zottoli occasionally with critical appreciation, but not afraid to oppose them when necessary (Le Gall 1894: 40–43, 76–77), Le Gall summarized his basic account of Zhu Xi’s influences by calling the Song Ruist “the preserver of the pure orthodoxy,” the “founder” and “principle expositor and patron” of the prevailing “cosmogenic and psychological system” in traditional Chinese intellectual circles (Le Gall 1894: 24). This tour de force was not without its problems, but it was the most articulate summary of previous studies in European and Chinese languages that had been produced by any Christian scholar throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, whether they were living in the Qing dynasty or overseas. Unlike previous Jesuit writers and James Legge, Le Gall argued that the ancient Ruist scriptures could not have an explicit and fully developed concept of God or a Supreme Deity, but goes on to indicate that in Zhu Xi’s case tian 天 had several meanings including one of “sovereignty” (Le Gall 1894: 39–40), making the concept shangdi 上帝 within his corpus as only “the active virtue of the material heaven” (Le Gall 1894: 41). Nevertheless, he agrees with both Legge and Zottoli that a superstitious belief in “souls and spirits” (guishen 鬼神) had not been stifled by modern Ruists’ teachings, and that these were detrimental to their other cultured goals (Le Gall 1894: 76–77). In addition, he offers a subtler account of the many meanings of the phrase wuji er taiji, and carefully delineates a Platonic reading of wu 無 and you 有 from their phenomenologically-oriented meaning as found in the Laozi and elsewhere (Le Gall 1894: 33–34). While he offers a reasonably flexible conception of qi as “the gaseous mass, made of air, indispensable to its co-principle Li,” he offers an ambiguous conception of li 理 as “the principle of activity, of movement, of order within the nature,” suggesting that this concept is itself active and creative, something that was not the case within Zhu Xi’s system (Le Gall 1894: 29–30). He insists on this reading, arguing that etymologically the concept of li is related to verbal actions of “directing” and “ordering” things (Le Gall 1894: 34). Notably, though Le Gall 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 695 tended to provide only transcriptions for all the main metaphysical and key concepts in his translation, because it was placed immediately above the standard Chinese text for all to see, he entitled the section on li and qi as “forme et matière,” giving it a very strong Platonic or Aristotelian connotation that cannot but be misguided (Le Gall 1894: 83ff). It seems also odd that he refers to the correlated concepts of “Yn” (where “y” is the vowel “i”) and Yang as the latter being the “perfect” and the former the “imperfect” portions of matter (Le Gall 1894: 33). Where Le Gall generally does not fall into other problems of inaccuracy or forced readings that occurred in earlier studies, he is inconsistent in his use of sheng-ren 聖人 as “saint” or “sage,” a matter of great importance particularly for Roman Catholic scholars who regularly support the former rendering rather than the latter. In fact, Le Gall gives a resounding account of the “perfectibility of humans” within Zhu Xi’s system, and in that context renders the term only as “saint” (Le Gall 1894: 59–70). Following other Roman Catholic precedents, he prefers to translate xian 賢 or junzi 君子 as “sage” instead (Le Gall 1894: 60–61). Nevertheless, it seems that Le Gall cannot fully accept the ancient Ruist sages as equivalents to Christian saints, and so once within his conceptual analysis as well as once within his translation, he refers to Masters Kong and Meng as “sages,” and in another place shengren as “sage,” and not “saints” (Le Gall 1894: 38, 103). In spite of some questionable interpretations and inconsistencies, it must be underscored that Le Gall’s work was a profound advance in the historical, philosophical and exegetical study of Zhu Xi’s worldview and claims. It set a new standard for comprehensive coverage of past studies in both Chinese and European languages, while also providing careful analyses of key terms within Zhu Xi’s general system.

2.12 Further Exegetical Uses of Zhu Xi’s Corpus in Missionary-Scholars’ Works

Since James Legge set a high standard for canonical translations in his Chinese Classics, many missionary-scholars living in China were very aware of the multi- faceted precedents that his canon-in-translation set (Pfister 2011: 434–50). Consequently, they sought to emulate many of those facets of his work. One solid example of this phenomenon appeared in the similarly vast series of translations produced by the French Jesuit living in the city of Xian 獻 in Hebei province, Séraphin Couvreur 顧賽芬 (1835–1919) (Fei 2016a; Pfister 2015a). Couvreur’s corpus included both modern French and church Latin renderings of all of the Ruist scriptures except for the Yijing, including instead a version of the semi-canonical text of the Yi Li 儀禮 (the Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial). Nevertheless, the most obvious presence of his reliance on Zhu Xi’s commentaries occurs in his first publication ofLes Quatres Livres in 1895. In each opening of that work, Couvreur provided the standard Chinese text at the top, followed underneath 696 L. F. Pfister by his own idiosyncratic French transcription of each ideograph (an innovation on Legge’s format), and at the bottom of each page renderings of that text in French and Latin, the former in the left column, and the latter on the right. Notably, though at first glance there seems to be no commentarial notes at all in this format, Couvreur did something innovative. In order to present the specific details of the imperially authorized commentary of Zhu Xi for these works, he added within the Chinese text at the top of the page excerpts of Zhu Xi’s descriptive and commentarial notes. These notes were subsequently also included in the two translations at the bottom, normally appearing as parenthetical comments. More detailed accounts of some of these matters will indicate just how much Couvreur relied on Zhu Xi’s commentaries. In his preface Couvreur indicated that the commentator who was “most in vogue” even at the end of the nineteenth century was “Tchou Hi” [i.e., Zhu Xi in his French transcription] (Couvreur 1895: v). In the same location he clarified that he employed theSishu Zhangju 四書章句 ([Commentaries to] Chapters and Verses in the Four Books) as a basis for his work, a work “divided into chapters and annotated by Tchou Hi.” These claims are thoroughly manifested throughout the four translations that appear in the order of the Daxue, Zhongyong, Lunyu, and the Mengzi. They appear as “notes” extensively in the first three of Couvreur’s versions of the Four Books, but less obviously in the last lengthy text. Since the imperially authorized forms of the Daxue (La Grande Science) and Zhongyong (L’Invariable Milieu) were reorganized by Zhu Xi and introduced by sectional headings and other comments, Couvreur added all those comments in both the Chinese text above as well as the French and Latin renderings below. Introductory and sectional notes provided by Zhu Xi were presented in full sized Chinese characters, but dropped down one line from the top of the page, following Chinese traditions related to commentarial texts; Zhu Xi’s explanatory notes were put into half-sized characters, and placed either beside the canonical text or in two columns underneath and beside the large columns of the scripture that ran from the top to the bottom and from the right side of the page to the left side. As a consequence of these conventions, there are notes on almost every page in the first 15 pages of the Daxue, and then they occur less frequently toward the end (see Couvreur 1895: 18, 23–25). A very similar situation appears in Couvreur’s presentation of the Zhongyong, with every page among the first ten pages bearing textual guidelines or commentarial notes prepared originally by Zhu Xi, but appearing less frequently in the latter part of the text (see Couvreur 1895: 39, 44, 53, 67). What is important about all of these facets of Couvreur’s sinological text is that the presence of Zhu Xi is literally ubiquitous. No other commentary is referred to by name, and the form of these texts is based strictly on the authorized version that Zhu Xi had created seven centuries earlier. Many times in Couvreur’s version of the Lunyu the notes took up at least half of the Chinese text at the top of the page, and sometimes the whole of it (see for examples, Couvreur 1895: 85, 88, 91–94, 116–18, 125–27, 133–35, 140–42, and 211, 250, 260, 263, 275). Those notes of this sort in the Mengzi were less numerous, but still can be easily found (for example Couvreur 1895: 383, 406, 605, 607). No similar set of conventions was adopted for any of the other Ruist 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 697 scriptures that Couvreur rendered, highlighting once again the importance and impact of Zhu Xi’s commentaries to the Four Books. Another influential translator and interpreter of Ruist scriptures, as well as writer of a history of Chinese philosophy, was the unusual German missionary-scholar residing in Qingdao 青島, Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930). He was known initially in Chinese as Wei Lixian 尉禮賢, and then from 1924 (and by most Chinese persons) as Wei Lixian 衛禮賢. Though he was undoubtedly a modern sympathizer of both Ruist and Daoist traditions, he was also an innovator in translation, willing to shift texts and to offer both “literal” and “modern” renderings of classical passages in order to attract his German readership (Fei 2005; Pfister 2011). That form of “double translation” was done particularly in his first major German “canon-in- translation,” Konfuzius Gespräche, the Lunyu in modern German (Wilhelm 1910). As in the case of James Legge and Séraphin Couvreur, in preparing his translations of the Lunyu and the Mengzi, Wilhelm could not avoid the authoritative presence of Zhu Xi’s commentaries to those texts. Nevertheless, much like Legge, Wilhelm’s use of Zhu’s commentaries shows an active intellectual engagement with the Song Ruist’s textual explanations. From the briefly annotated bibliographic list found in the back of Konfuzius Gespräche one finds three Chinese texts (put into Wilhelm’s own German transcription) that are either explicitly using or promoting Zhu Xi’s explanations (Wilhelm 1910: 220–21). Within the footnotes found at the bottom of the page of Wilhelm’s Lunyu citations of “Dschu Hi” were made 21 times, more than any other set of commentaries (the closest being Japanese commentaries that he referred to 13 times). Still, the notable diversity of reasons for doing so are manifest as well. Among those more than 20 references by Wilhelm to Zhu Xi’s commentaries in the Lunyu, he supported the Song Ruist’s renderings only four times (Wilhelm 1910: 81–82, 144, 207), and explicitly opposed them ten times (Wilhelm 1910: 62–63, 92, 99, 126, 146, 148–49, 161–62, 208, 210). In addition, there were times he characterized Zhu Xi’s alternative renderings or explanations, but without any direct evaluative comment (Wilhelm 1910: 71, 100, 102, 118, 138). A similar situation appears in the less numerous footnotes of his German Mengzi, even though he clearly preferred the commentaries of the Han Ruist, Zhao Qi, to those of Zhu Xi, citing the former 17 times, and the latter only 11 times in the footnotes. Once again, explicit support for Zhu Xi’s explanations appears only three times (Wilhelm 1916: 141, 177, 181), but opposition only occurs twice (Wilhelm 1916: 46, 91); references for the sake of historical explanation occur twice (Wilhelm 1916: 131, 137), and recordings of Zhu Xi’s alternative interpretations without further evaluations occur the other four times (Wilhelm 1916: 89, 119, 168, 173). Another indication that Wilhelm in his later years no longer felt obliged to adhere to Zhu Xi’s precedents is the fact that the two renderings of the Zhongyong and the Daxue in his posthumously published version of the Liji followed the old text tradition, and not those reorganized and commented on by Zhu Xi (Wilhelm 1930: 3–29). With all this having been clarified, it is still notable that a copy of the numerous volumes of Zhu Xi’s Complete Works was found in the Chinese library Wilhelm created and maintained in Frankfurt (Walravens 2008). More significantly, in a very 698 L. F. Pfister brief synopsis of some of the main streams of the cultural history of “Chinese philosophy,” Wilhelm referred to “Dschu Hi” as “a systematic spirit of the first order,” and explicitly compared his rationalized presentations positively with those of Aristotle (Wilhelm 1929: 104). In subsequent summary statements regarding Zhu Xi’s worldview (Wilhelm 1929: 106–7), Wilhelm referred to Zhu Xi’s “dualism” based on “the law of rationality” or “rational law” and “matter,” that is, li and qi. The “Original Pole” (Urpol, taiji) is identical with “the rational law,” and generates the “polar-powers” of “Darkness and Light.” He recognized that it was the “rational law” that brought unity into the cosmos, while “matter” was the “principle of diversity.” While his account of the nature of humans followed general accounts in their understanding of humans’ moral orientation—the nature being good, but matter making many humans more or less bad—it was Wilhelm’s account of two dimensions of whole person cultivation and tendencies within the general nature of his philosophical system that bears out some important insight. The rationalistic tendencies that are manifest in Zhu Xi’s works are relying on teachings of Cheng Yi, and emphasize gewu 格物, the cultivation of one’s person indirectly by means of searching for li in the external phenomena in ways that promote natural scientific study; the intuitive tendencies within Zhu’s teachings are linked to the teachings of Cheng Hao, promoting “still sitting” and direct contact with one’s inwardness. These two tendencies within Zhu Xi’s teachings on whole person cultivation (xiushen 修身) prompted the response of Lu Jiuyuan 陸九淵 (1139–1192) to challenge Zhu Xi’s rationalistic and externalized alternatives, and became the basis for Wang Yangming’s criticisms, according to Wilhelm (Wilhelm 1929: 107–11).

2.13 The French Jesuit Missionary-Scholar, Léon Wieger

A far more radical account of Zhu Xi’s life and works was offered by another French Jesuit living in the city of Xian, a younger colleague of Couvreur, Léon Wieger 戴遂良 (1856–1933). Having first earned a degree in medicine, Wieger only joined the Jesuits in 1881, and was made a priest in 1887. He had an intense character, quite distinct from the quiet and more subdued Couvreur, but he also worked hard and systematically in learning many facets of Chinese language and literature, earning the Stanislas Julien Prize in 1905 for a volume related to Chinese language study. A prolific writer, Wieger dealt with huZ Xi’s life and works in the context of his effort to give a summary account of the religious beliefs and philosophical claims of Chinese intellectuals. This volume he published first in 1917 in French, and then later in an English rendering in 1927. Though he was aware of Le Gall’s solid precedent and de Harlez’s questionable efforts in French (Wieger 1969: 671), he employed original Chinese sources by and about Zhu Xi to write up a seven- page synopsis of his account of the impact of Zhu Xi’s life and works. This formed about half of the 71st lesson in that volume of 77 lessons, and so was a significant though brief historical summary and evaluation of selected points he wanted to emphasize regarding Zhu Xi. After characterizing the philosophical works of his 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 699

Song Ruist predecessors, Wieger took another perspective to initiate his discussion of Zhu Xi, focusing on the political dialectic that developed within the Song empire due to the intense debates between political conservatives represented in part by Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107) and political innovators represented to a large degree by Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086) (Wieger 1969: 664–67). Wieger held nothing back in demonstrating that his sympathies lay with the political innovators, and not with the conservative school that developed around the works and debates in which Zhu Xi was intimately involved. He noted that Zhu Xi was “the soul” of the new “School of the Way,” representing the conservative side of the political pendulum of his day, and that his influences through that school remained firm for the remaining dynasties of the Chinese empire till 1905 (Wieger 1969: 667–68). Wieger does not mince words in his criticism of “the arrogance” that he found situated within Zhu Xi’s claims, noting that in terms of character he “had an extraordinary gift for estranging and alienating whomever came in contact with him” (Wieger 1969: 667). The “Chuhsi-ism” that went on to prevail particularly in the Qing dynasty is typified by Wieger as being atheistic, “a dynamic materialism” that is “not even a pantheism,” and one that borrowed significantly from doctrines found in Nagarjuna’s teachings and Tiantai 天台 Buddhism (Wieger 1969: 669, 671). In this way he considered lixue to be an admixture of teachings that “poisoned China until 1905” (Wieger 1969: 668). All these claims are justified by both the political history that Wieger summarized and his account of the key ideas within Zhu Xi’s system. Those included an interactive dualism between li and qi that was ultimately materialistic. According to Wieger, li 理, or “the norm,” is “one, infinite, eternal, unchangeable, unalterable, homogenous, necessary, blind, fatal, unconscious, unintelligent” (Wieger 1969: 668). Typifying “the norm” in this very unconventional manner, one that is particularly problematic in claiming li is “blind” and “unintelligent,” Wieger also criticized Zhu Xi’s account of human death because it did not provide for a surviving soul (Wieger 1969: 668–69). Oddly, however, he did not develop any account of “nature” (xing 性) or human nature, but saw the human “mind” as having gained its intelligence only from active matter. Willing to portray aspects of Zhu Xi’s work by providing translations of a collection of sayings near the end of this section, Wieger chose passages from Zhu Xi’s recorded sayings and other writings that supported his general claims. In this way, Wieger presented a very contentious and post-traditional Roman Catholic critique of Zhu Xi’s political and philosophical heritage.

2.14 New Comprehensive Studies by the British Baptist Missionary-Scholar, J. Percy Bruce

With the advent of the post-traditional creation of the Republic of China there had come an increase of interest and developments in the varied Protestant Christian presence in the late Qing and the early Republican period. The English Baptist 700 L. F. Pfister missionary-scholar, Joseph Percy Bruce (1861–1934), had a distinctive part in that process, having helped to create the Qilu University 齊魯大學 (earlier known as Shandong Protestant University and then Shandong Christian University). Serving as the president of the university in the heyday of Chinese modernization, from 1916 to 1920, Bruce completed a dissertation on Zhu Xi and had the main body of the translation (amounting to just over 440 pages in length) published in 1922, followed the next year by a historical, conceptual, comparative philosophical and comparative religious study of both Zhu Xi’s predecessors, as well as his own life and his main intellectual contributions. Both volumes provided new standards in their day for studies of Zhu Xi. In particular, the second volume demonstrated a general awareness of most of the previous studies and a sincere effort at creating a new and informed vocabulary for Zhu Xi studies. Bruce believed that “Chu Hsi ranks, not only as one of China’s master minds, but also as one of the world’s great thinkers” (Bruce 1922: xi). How Bruce proceeded to justify this claim in his two tomes, and how well he succeeded in doing so, will be the guidelines for our following discussion. Choosing to render into English the 42nd through 48th “books” of Zhu Xi’s Complete Works, and so avoiding the contentions that had surrounded McClatchie’s and Le Gall’s renderings of the 49th book, Bruce provided a thorough overview of Zhu Xi’s account of humans in the midst of the phenomenal world and their ability to attune their lives to moral values and realizable virtues that could be applied uni- versally to all human persons. When reading through these voluminous translations, one appreciates that in this modern English rendering of so many passages drawn from Zhu Xi’s works, Bruce numbered all the passages in sequences and sub- sequences within each book, unlike the unwieldly French text of Charles de Harlez. One finds boldness in his choice to translatedao as “Moral Law” (Bruce 1922: 269ff); many more skeptical questions arise when one finds that li 理 is rendered as “Law” (Bruce 1922: 290ff), ren 仁 as “Love” (Bruce 1922: 311ff), and li 禮 as “Reverence” (Bruce 1922: 397ff), all capitalized in order to indicate their technical usage. Obviously, then, the network of terms become clearer as one reads along. One learns, for example, that tianli becomes either “Heaven’s Law” or “Divine Law” (Bruce 1922: 11, 301–2). The contentious debates over renderings for taiji are responded to by a neologism, the “Supreme Ultimate,” a phrase that has continued to be employed by some scholars of Zhu Xi in English into the twenty-first century (first seen in Bruce 1922: 158). Significantly, the phrase “saints and sages” is found in the text very rarely (Bruce 1922: 166), with the general term “sage” in the singular and plural used for shengren 聖人 and shengxian 聖賢. This kind of rendering is certainly easier for a Baptist to accept than for a Roman Catholic or Anglican, where the latter traditions honor “saints” as persons of earned virtuosi status. Hints of Bruce’s comparative philosophical interest are found in one of the few footnotes to the translation, where he compares the outcome of “entering into” the li 理 of an object as parallel to Henri Bergson’s concept of “intuitive sympathy” (Bruce 1922: 180). Notably with regard to various of these renderings, Chan Wing-tsit found Bruce’s translation of jing 敬 as “seriousness” to fit better than the prevailing term, 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 701

“reverence,” because it reflected the Song Ruist technical development of this term as strictly referring to an inner state of the heart-mind (Chan 1976: 557). This being so, Chan did not suggest any alternative for li 禮 (such as “ritual propriety”). One can add here that it was Chan himself that also noted that in the development of the concept of ren, later understandings of it (including the work by Tan Sitong 譚嗣同 [1865–1898] called Renxue 仁學 [A Study of Love]) are clearly equivalent to the Christian idea of “love.” Whether this is also the case for Zhu Xi’s understanding of the term, however, would require more research and elaboration. In this light, then, Bruce provides another footnote to explain his understanding of this matter in Zhu Xi’s conception: ai 愛 is “the emotion of love,” while ren 仁 is “the disposition love” itself (Bruce 1922: 312). The subtitle of the second volume produced by Bruce is a more accurate description of the content of that volume: “An Introduction to Chu Hsi and the Sung School of Chinese Philosophy.” Out of the fourteen chapters in the volume, nine have to do with the tenets of Zhu Xi’s system, one with his biography, and one with the concluding claims addressed by Bruce. It is in the conclusion that the major concerns that motivated Bruce to pursue this extensive study are articulated. Initially, according to Bruce’s own claims, he understood Zhu Xi’s philosophy to be “both materialistic and atheistic,” based on selective reading and “the prevailing impression” he had received from others. Only when he began and continued to read Zhu Xi’s works directly, and thought about them for several years, did he become convinced, first of all, that his worldview could not be considered materialistic, and much later, that he was also not an atheist (Bruce 1923: 315). While the metaphysical dimensions of his philosophical system based on li 理 and taiji were relatively manifest, and could never be simply reduced to singular “matter” or any specific material presence, the personality of the Divine was an issue that taxed Bruce extensively. It was his reflections based upon a third denotation of the meaning of tian which included personality that convinced Bruce that a theism was in fact present, because tian also had its own “mind” (Bruce 1923: 294–300). From an angle of existential experience, Bruce added that Zhu Xi believed that the cosmos and especially the sovereign Heaven was animated by nothing other than ren 仁, the highest and comprehensive virtue that animates the best of humans as well. So, rather than founding his system on a rational ideal or an act of a strong will, Zhu Xi chose to establish his claims on an ontologically enriched understanding of ren as “Love.” Bruce argues for the profundity of this position on the basis of the justifications provided by a contemporary Anglophone philosopher who had given the well-known Gifford Lectures, James Ward (Bruce 1922: 317–19). By using this method, then, Bruce begins to assert and justify the claim that Zhu Xi is truly a world-class philosopher. In order to reach that interpretive goal, he had first of all to deal with all the Christian scholarly precedents that had set out accounts by studying Zhu Xi’s commentaries, summarizing his claims, or rendering part of his corpus into a foreign language. These he did briefly in reference to Charles de Harlez and Ernst Faber (Bruce 1923: 14, 163, 263), but also at much greater length and detail in reference to Thomas McClatchie, Le Gall, and Legge. In addition, he justified his own 702 L. F. Pfister

renderings and interpretations against positions held by other notable missionary- scholars and sinologists, including Herbert and Lionel Giles, J. J. M. de Groot, Walter Medhurst, William Soothill, D. J. Suzuki, and Samuel Wells Williams (Bruce 1923: 101, 141, 142, 149, 169, 263, 287). While these smaller discussions in themselves manifest adequate concern for alternative interpretations, an even stronger step was made by Bruce to compare various elements of Zhu Xi’s systems to aspects of the works of Aristotle (Bruce 1923: 48–49), numerous Buddhist and Daoist tenets, as well as the claims of early and later modern European intellectuals that included Henri Bergson, William Knight, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz [sic], Sir Oliver Lodge, Herbert Spenser, Baruch Spinoza, and as has been mentioned already, James Ward (Bruce 1923: 53, 104–6, 110–113, 115, 145, 148, 150–51, 177, 201, 212, 241, 284, 310, 317). Whether or not Bruce succeeded in convincing his readers about the profundity of Zhu Xi’s philosophical system might still be debated, but no one can doubt the seriousness and personal commitment displayed in his effort to do so.

3 Influential Works on Zhu Xi by Non-Christian Scholars in the Twentieth Century

During the post-traditional developments in mainland China after the 1911 revolution, there were also many new efforts at seeking to understand the impact of what were then being referred to as “Chinese philosophers” in different eras of the pre- imperial and imperial age. Among those addressed were Zhu Xi. As a consequence, many Christian scholars who began to study Zhu’s corpus in the twentieth century had access to a wide range of new studies that influenced their interpretations and evaluations of his life and claims. For this reason, then, it is valuable to note some of the most influential among these non-Christian studies produced during this period, in order to understand what the foreign and indigenous Christian scholars who continued to advance in their studies of Zhu Xi had the opportunity to understand and respond to in these new research works, unlike those in previous eras. In the first part of this study dealing with the pre-WWII period, the dominant figures writing about Zhu Xi were foreign Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary-scholars, most of whom had lived in traditional China during the Qing dynasty for extensive periods of time. Among the former, Jesuit missionary-scholars from Italian and French cultural backgrounds predominated, and among the latter were primarily British and American Protestant missionary-scholars. As was demonstrated above, their Christian worldviews often informed their hermeneutic orientations to the texts in Zhu Xi’s corpus that they addressed, guiding their interpretive choices in not only the translations of key terms, but also in how they addressed the major questions about the status of Zhu Xi’s systematic philosophy and its worldview. 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 703

Nevertheless, as I have read through many later studies of Zhu Xi by over a dozen Christian intellectuals after WWII, it was necessary to recognize the broader cultural transformations they had to address due to the impacts of the 1911 “demo- cratic” revolution, the modernization of Chinese institutions, and the subsequent victory of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949 (Pfister2015b ). Anticipating and accompanying those post-traditional developments in Chinese cultural and political contexts were the secularizing tendencies within Chinese academic settings as well as in international contexts of university-level academic institutions. All of the Christian scholars and intellectuals mentioned in this portion of our study were trained completely or in part within educational institutions that reflected these modernizing and secularizing trends. With regard to post-traditional studies of Chinese “teachings”—whether put into the disciplinary matrices of “Chinese philosophy” or “Chinese religion”—secular worldviews and their attendant methodologies were much more manifest in those publications than in works by missionary-scholars within the pre-WWII setting. Indeed, after 1950 it was basically impossible for Christian missionaries to operate in any normal vocational compacity as missionaries within mainland China, so that Christian philosophers and other intellectuals had to find other ways to engage Zhu Xi studies than as explicit missionary-scholars. From the angle of the secularization of tertiary level institutions internationally during the twentieth century and in the PRC specifically after 1949, it is notable that this trend had begun to wane in the light of new scholarly justifications supporting de-secularization. So it is significant that in 2003 two major works were published in English that underscored that de-secularization: Confucian Spirituality (Tu and Tucker 2003–2004) and the RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism (Yao 2003). Both works were published in two tomes, and so were lengthy and thorough in their considerations. In the latter case, there were numerous critically-informed articles describing and discussing religious themes, values, and institutions within various texts and contexts of Ruism over a vast historical period spanning three millennia. Previous to 2003, it was not at all so easy to publish works with these kinds of orientations, since before the 1980s there was an ideological resistance in mainland China of any discussion of this sort on the basis of a principled Marxist critique of religion. Though this principled opposition to religious studies within philosophical settings in mainland China had been overcome in the mid-1990s (Pfister2012 ), there were still within each of those two major works a diversity of interpretive positions and many significant conflicts related to nature of those spiritual and religious claims. These undoubtedly had their own cultural and interpretive impacts on all of the post-WWII Christian scholars mentioned in this study. Other important developments in the modern study of Chinese philosophy and its history had also taken place before WWII that had significant impact on studies of Zhu Xi’s corpus as well as of Chinese philosophical traditions in general after WWII. Notably, a number of these studies were produced by German sinologists during the pre-WWII period, signifying a move away from reliance on publications by missionary-scholars in China to those produced by university faculty members in the discipline of sinology or by modern Chinese scholars as philosophers or 704 L. F. Pfister

historians of Chinese philosophy. For example, four major studies on the history of Chinese philosophy were published in German in the late 1920s, during the Weimar Republic period, and only one of these was produced by a person who formerly had been a missionary-scholar and then had become an academic sinologist. Among these works were two entitled simply as volumes on “Chinese philosophy”: a work of over 400 pages produced by the well-recognized Buddhist scholar and sinologist, Heinrich Friedrich Hackmann (1864–1935) (Hackmann 1927), and a much smaller work by Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930), who had taught for 2 years at Beijing University in the Foreign Languages Department (1922–1924), and was a former missionary in the colony of Qingdao, as it was ruled first by Germans, and subsequently by Japanese (Wilhelm 1929). Two more substantial works in German dealing with the history of Chinese philosophy were also produced during the latter part of the 1920s. Ernst Viktor Zenker’s (1865–1940) two volume work dealing with the period from the “classical” works to the Han dynasty in the first tome, and the longer period from the Han dynasty to the beginning of the twentieth century in the second tome (Zenker 1926, 1927). In addition, a massive three volume set on the history of Chinese philosophy in German was produced by Alfred Forke (1867–1944) dealing with the “old,” “medieval,” and “newer” stages of Chinese philosophy, where Zhu Xi’s works were discussed within the historical context of the “newer” stage (Forke 1927, 1934, 1938). Naturally, all of these works were also responding to developments in the new academic institutions related to philosophy in general and Chinese philosophy in particular within Republican China at the time, including the important precedent set by the post-traditional philosophical and literary scholar, Hu Shi 胡適 (Hu Shih, 1891–1962), when he published his critically reconsidered modern “grand outline” of Chinese philosophy in 1919. Just over a decade later the first volume in a two-volume work in Chinese entitledZhongguo Zhexue Shi 中國哲學史 (A History of Chinese Philosophy) was produced by Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (Fung Yu-lan, 1895–1990) in 1931, and was so significant that it was later rendered into English by Derke Bodde and published by Princeton University Press (Fung 1952–1953). Feng was also notable because of his attempt to produce a modern philosophical system of his own reliant on some basic concepts and metaphysical claims drawn from Zhu Xi’s philosophical system, mani- festing that reliance by referring to that system as the Xin Lixue 新理學 or New Principle-centered Learning (produced in six small volumes from 1937 to 1946). Whether those overseas studying Zhu Xi’s works were aware of this precedent by Feng Youlan was an issue to consider, primarily because the chaos created by WWII prevented some from obtaining materials from China during those same years. Nevertheless, as will be seen below, those who read German and wrote in German had some significant advantages in having substantial scholarly works to rely on that developed modern interpretations of Chinese philosophical themes and their history. The cultural and military chaos that descended upon the Chinese mainland in the 1930s, and was extended by international involvement in various areas once WWII was initiated, created very unstable conditions for the development of modern philosophical studies in general and Chinese philosophical contributions to philosophical 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 705 studies in particular. Interpretations of Zhu Xi’s corpus was consequently sub- merged within a broader set of concerns to modernize China, and in the case of revolutionary ideologies and their related forces, to reject China’s traditional teachings as anachronous. It was under these conditions, then, that new accounts of the history of Chinese philosophical traditions were written in the post WWII setting. Subsequently, Chinese Marxist philosophers in mainland China such as Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978), Xiao Jiefu 蕭萐父 (1924–2008), Zhang Dainian 張岱年 (1909–2004) and the later Feng Youlan (during the period from 1975 to 1990) recast the history of Chinese philosophical traditions along lines that either anticipated aspects of dialectical historical materialism or was castigated as being “ideal- istic” and anachronous; Zhu Xi’s li/qi metaphysics qualified him for their straightforward ideological criticism. When these discursive influences are com- bined with the Marxist principled critique of “religion,” it made it almost practically impossible for Chinese Christian thinkers to study and publish works on Zhu Xi in mainland China during the balance of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, along with the wars that ravaged mainland China during the 1930s and 1940s there was an exodus of Chinese citizens to various places outside of China, including some notable intellectual refugees who set up residence in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. Among those was the well-recognized historian, Qian Mu 錢穆 (Ch’ien Mu, 1895–1990), a scholar of Zhu Xi in his own right (Qian 1971), and the notable Ruist scholars who refused to adopt either the secularist reading of Chinese Ruist traditions or their status as anachronous teachings irrelevant to post-traditional modern Chinese cultural circles. The prolific nature of the works of several of those key “New Ruist” intellectuals—particularly Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (T’ang Chün-I, 1909–1978), Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (Mou Tsung-san, 1909–1995), and Xu Fuguan 徐復觀 (Hsü Fu-kwan, 1904–1982)—marked them out as notable counter-cultural advocates for Ruist traditions in general, and their own particular interpretations regarding Zhu Xi’s status (Pfister1995 ; Wang 2015: 92). Subsequently, some notable Taiwanese and Hong Kong scholars studied for the final degrees in philosophy overseas, and went on to argue for the relevance of various Chinese philosophical and religious traditions. Among these were Liu Shu-hsien (Liu Shuxian 劉述先, 1934–2016) and Chung-ying Cheng (Cheng Zhongying 成中英, 1932–). Liu, having been trained in the philosophy of religion at Southern Illinois University in the USA, became known also as a major scholar of Zhu Xi’s corpus, producing a volume on Zhu Xi’s philosophical system that was republished numerous times (Liu 1982); Cheng completed his doctoral work at Harvard in American philosophical traditions, but was simultaneously concerned about the complexities involved in modernizing and articulating a contemporary synthesis of major Chinese philosophical traditions. Having established The Journal of Chinese Philosophy in 1973, and the International Society for Chinese Philosophy soon afterwards, he pursued many themes in comparative philosophical and Chinese philosophical modes, producing nearly two decades later a volume of his mature thought in English where he sought to indicate the directions of philosophical themes that could embrace selective aspects of Zhu Xi’s philosophical concepts within a new Chinese philosophical framework appealing to an onto-hermeneutic (or onto-generative hermeneutic) 706 L. F. Pfister insight into the nature of reality and human experience (Cheng 1991). Unlike the earlier intellectual refugees that formed New Ruist schools in Hong Kong and Taiwan, who published almost exclusively in Chinese (the notable exception being Tang Junyi), Liu and Cheng published extensively in both Chinese and English language media, and travelled extensively within mainland China after the political reform movements in the early 1980s within the PRC allowed them to be involved in numerous conferences and invited lecture series there. To this can be added the unusual contributions in both English and Chinese by Tu Wei-ming, whose expertise was in historical studies, but who became a well-recognized modern Ruist advocate during this same period. Consequently, the international impact of these three notable “Contemporary Ruist” Chinese intellectuals during the last four decades had an immense impact also in studies of Chinese philosophy in general, and in offering alternative perspectives that influenced huZ Xi Studies in particular. Notably, many of the Chinese Christian scholars to be discussed below knew these major Chinese intellectual figures personally, and studied with one or more of them during their formative years; all of them had to become engaged in the intellectual turmoil that accompanied the cultural Angst that continued to be written about and exposited by those major Chinese philosophical figures outside of mainland China during the last half of the twentieth century. Though discussions of the various influences of these scholars’ works on each of the Chinese Christian scholars’ writings cannot be elaborated at length, the shifts in orientation that they adopted and developed clearly reflected their engagements with the works, teachings and influences of many of them, and obviously affected how they themselves would read, evaluate, and readdress themes that were drawn out of Zhu Xi’s corpus. One event of immense significance for this study should be mentioned: there was a major international conference focusing on the studies of Zhu Xi held in 1982 in Honolulu, Hawai’i, coordinated by both the Philosophy Department of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa as well as certain institutions within the East–West Center located next to that campus. It was notable because it was the first time that some major mainland Chinese philosophers, including Feng Youlan, could attend such an international gathering after the tumultuous end of the Cultural Revolution and the assertion of the beginning of a new “reform and opening up” period in Chinese Communist ideological circles. In addition, there were a good number of the major figures present in that gathering that came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and places where some Chinese philosophers had obtained academic positions elsewhere in the USA, including Cheng Chung-ying at the University of Hawai’i itself, as well as Tu Wei-ming from the University of California at Berkeley. Also among those attending was the Taiwanese Roman Catholic archbishop and president of the Roman Catholic Fu Jen University in Taipei, Lo Kuang 羅光, who reflected on his experiences in that meeting in significantly critical ways, as will be seen below. One of the key organizers of that meeting was the prolific scholar of Chinese religious and philosophical traditions, Chan Wing-tsit, who had written numerous articles in Chinese on various topics related to Zhu Xi’s philosophical corpus, and subsequently would publish two more major works on Zhu Xi studies (Chan 1986, 1989). The stimulus for Zhu Xi Studies that came from this conference and the later 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 707

publications by Chan Wing-tsit in English, among other publications that might be mentioned, was multiform and internationally significant. Finally, the persons chosen to be discussed below are Roman Catholic scholars and Chinese Protestant scholars. There are, in fact, a good number of living Chinese and foreign Christian scholars who could also be mentioned, but our space is limited, so that it is not possible to address their very rich offerings here. Consequently, all of those studied in this section are those who have died before the time of the writing of this work.

4 Zhu Xi’s Post-WWII Christian Interpreters

In this period there are six major and minor Christian interpreters of Zhu Xi who have contributed to further discussions of Zhu’s life and corpus, and who passed away either before or just after the advent of the twenty-first century. A good number of other living Chinese and foreign Christian philosophers and scholars have engaged Zhu Xi’s works as well, but they are not a few, and their works are numerous, so that they will not be included in this discussion. Among the six, three are particularly significant: Princeton S. Hsü, Stanislas oL Kuang, and Julia Ching, and so more of the following discussion will focus on their contributions. The other three include two foreign Catholic intellectuals, the German Benedictine Olaf Graf and the Portuguese Jesuit Joaquim Guerra, and one Chinese Anglican priest, the Anglican priest, Simon Ho Sai-ming.

4.1 The Baptist Pastor-Scholar in Hong Kong, Princeton S. Hsü (Xu Songshi)

Though I have characterized the Baptist intellectual here as a pastor-scholar from Hong Kong, this is a far too simple description of this major Chinese Protestant educator, pastor, writer, and editor. In fact, Xu Songshi 徐松石 (1900–1999), who took the name in English, Princeton S. Hsü (Leung and Chu 2012: 42), grew up under the tutelage of a Cantonese-speaking Hakka father who had achieved the initial educational degree of xiucai 秀才 in the late Qing period. Consequently, he was oriented toward a literary career from a very early age, even in spite of the revolution that brought an end to traditional dynastic governance. Like the two Chinese Christian intellectuals already described above, his life spanned nearly the whole of the twentieth century, experiencing all the intensity of the emergence of a post- traditional modern China. Having completed his undergraduate career in Shanghai at what was then called Hujiang University 滬江大學, Hsü became a Baptist convert at the age of 19 during his first year of university life, even as the May Fourth Movement was taking place in Shanghai. Being quickly recognized for his literary 708 L. F. Pfister style and intellectual creativity, he was ordained as a deacon within a Cantonese- speaking Baptist congregation in Shanghai at the age of 22, and soon afterward was named the principal of a high school for girls (Chongde Nü Zhong 崇德女中) in that region. An activist and Christian advocate, Hsü wrote much in Chinese about the modern value and historical worth of a Ruist-based vision of “Chinese culture” and the civilizational values of a biblically-based Protestant Christian worldview, believing that these two major streams of cultural life could be brought together in a modern expression of Chinese Christianity (Leung and Chu 2012: 46–51). Having worked in Shanghai in educational, writing, and editing jobs from a relatively early age, he was able to travel overseas to George Peabody College in the USA to obtain a master in education there when he was about 30 years old. Subsequently, he returned to Shanghai in order to continue his literary and educational work in the midst of the turbulent 1930s, becoming editor of a well-known Chinese Protestant magazine named Zhenguang zazhi 真光雜誌 (The True Light Magazine) (Leung and Chu 2012: 42). Unusually, then, Princeton Hsü did not take formal training in theology, but was a self-learned Baptist intellectual, and addressed questions in a number of books related to the indigenization (bensehua 本色化) of Chinese Protestant communities. According to one study (Leung and Chu 2012: 45), his life should be separated into four stages, but the last two stages involve the longest and most sustained efforts during his prolific life at discussing the possibilities for the indigenization of Christianity from two different perspectives: the first of those periods lasted from 1929 to 1957, and focused on the Chinese indigenization of Protestant theology; the second of those periods enveloped the rest of his life, from 1958 to 1999, and was reoriented toward “Christianizing” (Jiduhua 基督化, more literally, “transformed by Christ”) his particular vision of “Chinese culture.” It is during this latter period that he addressed specific questions related to Zhu Xi’s philosophical system. Because he wrote in a popular fashion, addressing questions in a relatively informed but also self-consciously evangelistic manner, Princeton Hsü did not add a scholarly apparatus including footnotes and indices. What distinguished his approach is that he sought to identify substantial questions and answer them from a perspective that regularly involved a significant amount of ethnographic and cultural knowledge. Most often, as a result, he referred to “Christianity” (Jidujiao 基督教) and “Chinese culture” in very general terms, but his form of Christianity was unswervingly centered on a biblically-based Protestant expression of Christianity, and his vision of “Chinese culture,” though enriched extensively by his ethnological studies and including Chinese Buddhism in the earlier phase of his discussions of indigenization, was oriented and justified as taking Ruist traditions as their major expression. With regard to Christianity, the one text he regularly cited was the Chinese Bible, using references to both the Old Testament (and particularly the wisdom literature there) and the New Testament, focusing on the culturally transformative significance of the Christian gospel (Leung and Chu 2012: 51–55). With regard to the Ruist tradition, his sanguine attitude about its teachings and traditions was based upon a comparative civilizational analysis of what he considered to be the four main cultural influences in the world: ancient Greek and Romancivilization, 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 709

Buddhism, Ruism, and Christianity; among these, Ruism is closest and most amenable to Christianity according to Hsü (Leung and Chu 2012: 47–49). Nevertheless, his discussion of Ruist traditions focused primarily on the classical period, with Masters Kong and Meng being the main proponents. Only in one major work that he published under slightly different names and at different times, developing his main concern for the modern relevance and universal value of Christian civilization in contemporary Chinese cultural settings, did Princeton Hsü directly address matters related to Zhu Xi and “Song Ruism.” That work was given the later title of Christianity and Chinese Culture (Hsü 1971), and in its mature form with 23 chapter and just over 400 pages, it was republished numerous times for Chinese reading audiences in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I have had access to versions published under this title from 1962 and 1971, and found that their pagination was precisely the same, the only difference being that a special set of appendices of just over a dozen pages was added in the latter edition. In Chapters 9–14 Hsü discussed matters related to Ruist traditions, focusing first on “the Way of [Master] Kong” (Hsü 1971: 135–44), and offering a single page summary of his vision of ancient Ruism that includes the Supreme Lord (shangdi 上帝) (Hsü 1971: 144). It is this expression of theistic Ruism that Hsü finds to be most compatible with his Protestant vision of Christianity, especially as it is expressed in the “Six Classics” (Hsü 1971: 155–81, a summary chart found on 138), one interestingly including a strong affirmation of the value ofThe Book of Changes and its advocacy of a “proper reverence” (zheng jing 正敬) (Hsü 1971: 171–74). As a consequence, when he addresses “Song Ruism,” the position he adopts as most amenable to Christianity is “the Six Classics are our foonotes (liujing jie wo zhujiao 六經皆我註腳),” a position adopted by Lu Xiangshan 陸象山 (Hsü 1971: 184) with a moral vision that he finds so compatible with Christianity that he elaborates it in a section entitled “Christianity and the Persons who are Footnoted by the Six Classics” (Hsü 1971: 188–90). It is this perspective, augmented by Wang Yangming’s elaboration of this position (Hsü 1971: 204–8) that colors all that he has to explore in relationship to Zhu Xi’s teachings and the lixue tradition. Within his discussion of the Song Ruist teachings, Princeton Hsü tends to tie together teachings from all of Zhu Xi’s predecessors (Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Shao Yong, but no mention of Zhou Dunyi) on three basic themes (Hsü 1971: 184–86), contrasting these generally with the moral focus of Lu Xiangshan’s xinxue. First, there is the claim that the relationship between tianli and humans’ heart-mind is such that principle/pattern produces a very rational vision (lixing 理性). It is for this reason, then, that Zhu Xi promotes learning and questioning (xuewen 學問) in order to discover the principle/pattern in all things. But how does this become involved with moral matters, according to Hsü? It is built out of a claim that Heaven’s heart-mind (tianxin 天心) ultimately is also humans’ heart- mind (renxin 人心), so that once this is understood, a rational approach to manifest- ing the tianxin within one’s human consciousness is the key concern. It is done without any help from that heavenly source. As a consequence, as the third basic theme, the human heart-mind must be “completely good” (quan shan de 全善的). While other Song Ruists are quoted to confirm this claim, Hsü underscores that this 710 L. F. Pfister claim is not so simply answered by Zhu Xi. In Zhu’s teaching, according to Hsü, one needs to discern the difference between the [human] nature (xing 性) which is completely good, and can be reached by the heart-mind that has not been dominated by feelings (qing 情), and the heart-mind itself that is a mixture of both nature and feelings. Though Hsü recognizes this is a way that Zhu Xi answers questions about the emergence of evil within humans who should be inherently good, he takes these answers to be inadequate for several reasons. First of all, Hsü argues that the cosmic vision of a harmonious union between the heavenly and human realms is more influenced by Daoism than the Way of Master Kong, and the understanding of the heart-mind and its connection with the Heavenly heart-mind is ultimately influenced by Buddhist teachings rather than the Way of Master Kong (Hsü 1971: 186). This skews the general teachings of the Song Ruists in a manner that promote a self-rectifying method for dealing with the issues of the human heart-mind, an issue that later on in the volume Hsü rejects as unable to overcome the weaknesses and evil tendencies of the conscience and heart-mind within humans (Hsü 1971: 191–92, 195). Here the second reason for questioning this approach to moral rectification rests on the Christian concern about humans’ sins and sinfulness, suggesting that the issues of the goodness and evil of human beings is more basic than the emergence of feelings within the heart-mind (Hsü 1971: 190–91). Because this is not recognized, then there is a strong tendency among Song Ruists, according to Hsü, to promote self-rectification without any understanding of the existence and involvement of a divine source of rectification (Hsü 1971: 195). Indeed, for Hsü, the greatest shortcoming within “Song Ruism” is the fact that they have set aside the ancient Ruist vision of shangdi, one that could point them toward the alternatives of divine sources of rectification (Hsü 1971: 196–200). Notably, throughout this whole discussion, Hsü refers to and quotes from Zhu Xi’s writings only three times, but always without citing any source for the quota- tion (Hsü 1971: 184–85). This cannot be seen, then, as a well-studied and articulate engagement with Zhu Xi’s philosophical system, even though Hsü himself admits that there are many aspects of a general Ruist worldview that help one to accom- plish what the biblical Proverbs call “the guarding of the heart-mind” (Hsü 1971: 195, including a chart to indicate these connections on 213). Ultimately, his primary preference for the Lu–Wang teachings cause his account of Zhu Xi’s claims to be relatively superficial, even though this orientation has also been preferred by other Chinese Christian intellectuals after a more thorough study of all the relevant texts.

4.2 The German Benedictine in Japan, Olaf Graf

It is of no little consequence philosophically that in the post WWII context the most substantial academic studies of Zhu Xi’s writings in Chinese by Christian scholars have been accomplished by Roman Catholic intellectuals situated within modern university settings, at times also from universities inspired by some form of Roman 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 711

Catholic spirituality. Having lived initially in a monastic setting in Korea and then initiated his academic career by completing a dissertation in Leiden in 1941 on a Japanese Ruist scholar, Kaibara Ekiken 貝原益軒 (1630–1714), Olaf Graf (Otterspeer 1989: 373) was subsequently associated with Sophia University in Tokyo, and turned his attention to providing the first European language rendering of what he considered to be the “summa” of Zhu Xi’s studies, the work entitled Jinsi Lu 近思錄, the tome Chan Wing-tsit in his later English translation referred to as Reflections on Things at Hand (Chan 1967). In addition, nearly two decades later, he produced a hefty volume arguing for the permanent value of Zhu Xi’s philosophical system, couched within a larger project of a comparative philosophical and comparative cultural framework that advanced some unusual claims related to Song and Ming dynasty Ruist traditions, the Xingli School (Nature and Principle/ Pattern School), and subsequently also highlighting once again Zhu Xi’s notable intellectual contributions, primarily focused on the Jinsi Lu, but also referring occasionally to other works of Zhu Xi as found in translations done by other scholars. These two volumes set new multiform standards for research into Zhu Xi’s philosophical contributions, having taken up a major text within Zhu Xi’s corpus for careful translation and thorough interpretative assessments. In the first work, consisting of a complete German rendering and annotated explanations of the Jinsi Lu, was produced as a typescript involving an octavo sized set of four-tomes-in-three-volumes, and published by Monumenta Nipponica in this unusual format. The main body of this first rendering of the Jinsi Lu in any European language appeared in the second volume constituted as two-tomes-in-one-volume. In the first volume was a monographic length collection of seven essays providing a description, historical account, and conceptual interpretation of the Jinsi Lu as well as a final chapter on huZ Xi’s worldview, while the final thick third volume was filled with explanatory notes related to the fourteen chapters of the German rendering of the original Chinese text. From a hermeneutic perspective that takes his Roman Catholic background seriously, it is important to note that Graf recognized the style of this work by Zhu Xi as a “summa,” paralleling it self-consciously to the theological compendium produced by Thomas Aquinas during the thirteenth century in Europe. It is also of interest to note also that most of the secondary sources Graf relied on for producing the renderings of the translation and commentaries, as well as his own extensive annotations in the third volume that came to nearly 550 pages in length, came from related Chinese and German studies. Notably, he focused on the continuing debate regarding the nature of Zhu Xi’s worldview, arguing in the final chapter of the first volume that the worldview described in the Jinsi Lu should be identified as being somewhere “between theism and monism.” What he meant by this is that Zhu Xi’s worldview had likenesses to Aquinas’ synthetic vision of reality (Graf 1953, vol. 1: 246–78) as well as to Spinoza’s monistic alternative (Graf 1953, vol. 1: 278–86), but could not be delim- ited by either general worldview, because it possessed its own unique claims as well (Graf 1953, vol. 1: 286–97). Graf summarized seventeenth century Japanese followers of Zhu Xi’s school as declaring that a personal understanding of tian was 712 L. F. Pfister

“senseless” (Graf 1953, vol. 1: 288), and then took extensive efforts to study Hölderin’s vision of an impersonal deified natural order (Graf1953 , vol. 1: 290–93) in order to draw up some of his own unusual conclusions. Graf continued the trajectory of his studies in 1970 by collecting and analyzing accounts of Zhu Xi’s and other Sung and Ming Ruist scholars’ worldviews— referred to under the rubric of slightly misleading “Song Confucianism”—relying heavily on analyses offered by “the latest generation of Sinology” (Graf 1970: 36) in Europe as well as a few scholars’ works from Korea, Italy, the USA, and Japan (for example, Graf 1970: 22–23, 212, 224–25,307–8). Among those he explicitly counted to be in that “latest generation” of sinologically-minded scholars were all academics in their later lives, if not earlier: Heinrich Hackmann (1864–1935), Alfred Forke (1867–1944), Fung Yu-lan (Feng Youlan 馮友蘭, 1895–1990) and Joseph Needham (1900–1995). Though Graf did not explicitly clarify the interpretive import of these commitments, what had been transformed by these interpretive orientations was a shift from reliance on studies produced by early modern and pre- WWII missionary-scholars toward a generally secularized hermeneutic orientation of early twentieth century academic studies of Zhu Xi by university-based sinologists. Their accounts of Zhu Xi and the “Neo-Confucianism” they studied and assessed were shaped by critical historical and cultural methodologies as well as modern disciplinary boundaries that often (but not always) did not exist in traditional Chinese studies. From the title of the whole volume a new account of Zhu Xi’s worldview is offered: Tao (Dao) and Jen (Ren): Sein und Sollen im sungchinesischen Monismus. In terms of the breadth of its intra-cultural and cross-cultural metaphysical, religious, and philosophical discussions—even though Graf relied exclusively on secondary sinological, European and Anglophone studies in the latter major portion of his monograph in order to make his arguments and underscore his basic claims— Tao und Jen was truly an unprecedented and adventurous philosophical effort. Nevertheless, Graf never directly read or analyzed any other original texts in Chinese or the European languages that he employed in his comparative studies. As one works through the whole text, one can be shocked by some overgeneral- izations that appear, even though on the whole many significant parallels and a few contrasts between key figures, their works, and major movements in Mediterranean/ European and Chinese imperial contexts are also found. For example, one demurs at the following summary judgment (translated by this author from the German original): “Plato’s Agathon [“the Good’] is Zhu Xi’s jen [ren 仁]!” (Graf 1970: 251). It also seems highly problematic to suggest that the Aquinian virtues of religio and pietas are equivalent to ren and yi 義 in Zhu Xi’s accounts (Graf 1970: 336). Such problematic comparisons require much more systematic study in Greek and Latin original sources than Graf provides, and suggests places where further work could still be done. 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 713

4.3 The Hong Kong Anglican Canon Priest, Simon Ho Sai-Ming

Born during the year of the 1911 Revolution, He Shiming 何世明 (Cantonese Ho Sai-ming, 1911–1996) was a Cantonese speaking Chinese student trained both in modern public schools as well as at home tutorials in traditional Ruist literature and Christian biblical studies. Later in the instable political context of the 1930s he attended Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, earning his undergraduate degree in English literature (Leung and Chu 2012: 3–4). Leaving the Chinese mainland for other countries during WWII, he settled with his family in Hong Kong in 1946, and remained there for the rest of his life. His Christian orientation linked him during most of his adult life to Chinese Christians from Presbyterian and Baptist traditions, so that he was teaching in the Hong Kong Baptist College for some time before his retirement. Notably, he was only ordained as an Anglican priest in 1957 (Leung and Chu 2012: 5), when he was 46 years old, and took on commitments to live according to religious disciplines—and so a “canon priest”—that included a life-long interest in seeking to provide an intellectual and spiritual foundation for what he referred to as Rongguan shenxue 融貫神學, what could be described as a thorough- going Protestant expression of Chinese theology selectively synthesized with multi- dimensional Ruist and some ancient Daoist teachings (Leung and Chu 2012: 12–15). Among the more than 30 volumes that have been published in a series of handbook-sized volumes related to the Rev. Ho’s lectures and essays, about half of those volumes within his collected works deal with his concerns related to developing an authentic Chinese theology (guoxuehua de shenxue 國學化的神學) and an insightful Christian-inspired form of Chinese studies (shenxuehua de guoxue 神學化的國學) (Leung and Chu 2012: 11, 23). In relation to the later dimension of his rongguan methodology—an intellectual process moving through mutual understanding toward a critically received set of Ruist traditions confirmed and fulfilled by means of Christian special revelation—the Rev. Ho in some ways steps beyond his own Anglican convictions by insisting that only biblical texts, especially those drawn from the New Testament, can provide a culturally transformative “way” / dao to guide the synthetic movement toward a Christian-inspired form of Chinese studies. While Anglican traditions of orthopraxy and worship have certainly produced numerous theological works of note, the Rev. Ho is willing to eschew them all for an exclusive biblical (and primarily New Testament) focus (Ho 1986: 111), to the point that one might indicate that there is a distorted “Biblicism” at work here (Leung and Chu 2012: 16). In this light, it is worth asking whether his preference for taking the Kong-Meng traditions as the mainstay of Ruist traditions is in fact a parallel way of viewing Ruism, a kind of “Kong-Meng-ism” working in similar ways to the Rev. Ho’s “Biblicism.” Since the Rev. Ho’s writings are presented in an informed but popular mode, rather than a scholarly and technical mode, this intellectual search for consistency within his works are sometimes frustrated by changes in his principled positions and the content of his discussions. 714 L. F. Pfister

So, then, how did the Rev. Ho address matters related to Zhu Xi’s works and philosophical claims? On the one hand, he rarely did so in any direct manner, in spite of writing numerous books about various themes in “Ruism and Christianity.” This came about primarily because his preferred form of religio-cultural synthesis was one that was grounded on biblical (and Chinese expressions of) Christian teachings as the dao “above forms” (xingershang 形而上, citing a passage from the commentary to the Yijing 易經), and Ruist teachings including those of Zhu Xi were employed to elaborate those Christian teachings as the means (qi 器 and yong 用) that is expressed “within forms” (xingerxia 形而下, Ho 1986: 110–11). While arguing that there were critical points of disjuncture that could not be acceptable to his rongguan theological perspective within Zhu Xi’s teachings, he also specified particular doctrines that could be integrated within it (Ho 1986: 89–103, 109–18), while clearly preferring to Zhu Xi’s rationalistic interpretations a methodology reliant on a more intuitive approach that he located in Wang Yangming’s teachings (Ho 1986: 104–9, 119–44). Here the details regarding both aspects of Zhu Xi’s teachings are important, and are written out only within one volume published in 1986 when he was 75 years old. The Rev. Ho addressed two major problems that he identified within huZ Xi’s philosophical system. First of all, he argued that Zhu Xi’s own systematic approach to the cosmos and human cultivation links together features of the ontic realm with the sources of deep reality, creating what he called a “natural philosophy” (ziran zhexue 自然哲學) that had nothing explicit to do with what Christian intellectuals refer to as “natural theology” (ziran shenxue 自然神學). That is to say, from the rev. Ho’s perspective, Zhu Xi rarely offered any affirmation of the reality of a personal God from within his reflections on the nature of reality. Consequently, Zhu Xi’s philosophical system tended toward affirming a rationalized secular vision of both prime reality and human nature, both of which the Rev. Ho found to be unsuitable from his Protestant perspective (Ho 1986: 102–3, 110, 112). The second problem within Zhu Xi’s metaphysics that the Rev. Ho explicitly mentioned was also inherent within Zhu Xi’s systematic approach: Zhu’s account of the nature of li 理 (principle/pattern) is that it is inherently passive, but the Rev. Ho finds this problematic in providing any cosmic or ontological account of persons—whether divine or human—that have an active will, express themselves by means of creative intellects, and manifest forms of moral courage that energize transformative actions within reality (Ho 1986: 113). According to his assessment, Zhu Xi’s philosophical system would have to be qualified by a vital theism that included a creative metaphysical power in order to offer a more suitable account of prime reality and its connections with divine and human persons. 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 715

4.4 The Portuguese Jesuit Translator, Joaquim Angélico de Jesus Guerra

The only twentieth century Christian intellectual who continued in the line of the great missionary-scholar translators of Ruist canonical literature, and so by that means necessarily encountered the impact of Zhu Xi’s interpretations and reorgani- zation of those texts, was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, theologian, and translator who spent nearly half of his life in Macau and Guangdong province, Joaquim Angélico de Jesus Guerra 戈振東 (1909–1993) (Pfister 2015a: 25). His efforts in rendering the “Chinese Classics” of the Ruist tradition from Chinese into a foreign language—in his case, Portuguese—put him into a rare class of diligent translators, all being missionary-scholars, who produced this vast amount of classical Ruist literature into one or more target languages (Pfister2015a : 41): James Legge (1815–1897) in English, Angelo Zottoli (1826–1904) in archaic Latin, Séraphin Couvreur (1835–1919) in both contemporary church Latin and French, and Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) in German. What marks off Guerra’s efforts in this realm are various factors (Pfister2015a : 26–31): first, his choice to use a language that was not considered to be a major international language within the late twentieth century; secondly, his preference for honoring Master Kong (“Confúcio”) rather than other Ruist masters and scholars; and finally, his self-conscious effort to employ a post-Vatican II theological approach to alternative religious and cultural traditions in order to distinguish his own translations and interpretations from those of his Jesuit and other missionary-scholar predecessors. Precisely in these ways the feisty Portuguese Jesuit can be described as “working in a post-traditional Chinese context as a Post-Vatican II advocate of a traditionalist assessment of the ancient Ruist traditions as a whole, and Master Kong (‘Confúcio’) in particular” (Pfister 2015a: 30). Hints that Guerra had a very different approach to Zhu Xi’s corpus appear directly in his choice to produce a “Four Books” (Quatro-Livros) (Guerra 1984b: 42) that did not follow Zhu Xi’s standard. He replaced the Mengzi with The Book of Reverence to Elders (Xiaojing 孝經) (Guerra 1984a), and renamed the union of those four tomes as “The Four Volumes of Confucius” (Quadrivolume de Confúcio). Subsequently, in the same year he published the Mengzi in a separate volume (Guerra 1984b). In his relatively lengthy introductory notes to each volume, he underscored how most of those previous to himself—including especially Legge, Couvreur, and Zottoli—had been influenced significantly in their various translations of the texts denominated by Zhu Xi as the Four Books, so that “the presence of Tjur-Xe [Zhu Xi]” was constantly seen or discerned (Guerra 1984a: 60–64). As a consequence, Guerra noted many times in his annotations to his renderings where either Legge and Couvreur (in particular) followed Zhu Xi’s commentaries, diverted from them to one degree or another, and whether (in any case) he agreed or dis- agreed with Zhu Xi’s authorized commentaries. While all of this could be noted in detail, the most significant interpretation of huZ Xi and his works that Guerra highlighted was with a light very different than most of his Jesuit predecessors, except 716 L. F. Pfister for Léon Wieger, and the vast majority of other Christian intellectuals engaged in studies of Zhu Xi. Guerra recognized Zhu Xi as one who seemed to be “a prophet of Confucian orthodoxy,” and was its “principle exponent” as well as its “co-founder” (Guerra 1984b: 16–17; see also Guerra 1984a: 673), being taken by many to be “a major pioneer” in the “School of Neo-Confucianism” (Guerra 1984b: 41–42) and “the incontestable Corypheus of Neo-Confucianism” (Guerra 1984a: 664–65). His writing style was “fluent and clear,” so that he became the main proponent of the “New School” of Ruism (Guerra 1984a: 662), one who was generally admired and vener- ated by many in his own day (Guerra 1984a: 666). Over the centuries Zhu Xi’s status grew to the point that Guerra cites his Jesuit predecessor, Le Gall, in summarizing Zhu Xi’s influence as being second only to Master Kong (Confucius) (Guerra 1984a: 661). Still, having documented all these praises of this seminal Song Ruist scholar, Guerra goes on to claim poignantly that Zhu Xi is “a sinister star” possessing a “pernicious influence” within the subsequent history of Ruism (Guerra 1984a: 64, 677 respectively), considering him to be the “second great heretic” of Ruism, next to the “first great heretic,” who was “Seontsi” [Xunzi荀子 ] (Guerra 1984b: 17). Startling as this sounds, Guerra offers an extensive historical account and critical evaluation of Zhu Xi’s life and works to justify these harsh claims, appearing as part of his introduction to the text of The Great Learning (Guerra 1984a: 656–71, 674–77). Having noted how Zhu Xi had reorganized the text of the Daxue in a manner that was radically different from what had been provided in the “old edition” that stood as a chapter in The Record of Rites, Guerra quotes from Zhu Xi’s preface to the Daxue, and then argues that in fact by that means he had only brought greater confu- sion to that seminal classic text (Guerra 1984a: 657). To offer further justification of these claims, he cites the extensive criticisms of Zhu Xi’s “fanatical” reconstruction of the Daxue published by the Ming Ruist, Wang Yangming [“Wão Yão Meq”] and the Qing Ruist, Mao Qiling 毛奇齡 [“Maov Ge−leq,” also known as Mao Xihe 毛西河, “Maov Sej-hao”] (Guerra 1984a: 657–58, 667, 674–75). This is to say, Zhu Xi’s positions were not incontrovertible, and there were some good textual and interpretive reasons noted by significant Ruist scholars in later centuries to challenge his textual emendations and interpretations. A second reason why Guerra took up such a strong antagonism to Zhu Xi’s canonical interpretations had less to do with the Daxue than with the general cultural trends of his predecessors and his own works in adapting many ideas from Buddhist and Daoist traditions (Guerra 1984a: 659, 661, 664). Guerra took this to be a distortion of the original teachings of Master Kong, a corruption of the spirit of Ruism that earned Zhu Xi the title of being “a heretical reformer of Confucianism,” one who actually promoted an “Anti-Confucianism” that masqueraded as “Neo- Confucianism” (Guerra 1984a: 665). His final condemnation of Zhu Xi’s claims is a straightforward rejection of the Song Ruist’s worldview. Guerra cites passages from Zhu Xi’s writings and Categorical Sayings to indicate that he had no commitment to a theistic worldview (Guerra 1984a: 667–70), but to the contrary, promoted a worldview that was 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 717

“materialistic” and “deterministic” (Guerra 1984a: 659, 665, 667–68), following claims made by his Jesuit predecessors, Le Gall and Wieger. For Guerra, who wanted to promote a new religious reawakening in the period just following the excesses of the “Great Cultural Revolution” (1966–1976), the non-theistic worldview that he associated with Zhu Xi was an anathema. Why Guerra also took his worldview to be both materialistic and deterministic is never explained or justified in any detail, and so these severe criticisms would require much more elaboration from Guerra if they were to be taken as seriously as he would want them to be. Perhaps it is ironic that in his Post-Vatican II expression of a Ruist traditionalist worldview, Guerra was actually following the trends of twentieth century Chinese Protestant intellectuals in focusing on the vitality of the teachings of Master Kong, and raising up the ancient sage as a “saint” worthy of veneration internationally (Pfister 2015a: 31). What has been demonstrated above is that Guerra took an extremely strong antagonistic stand against Zhu Xi’s teachings and writings, something that he clearly understood to be consistent with the positions of Matteo Ricci and first major Roman Catholic Ruist convert, Xu Guangqi (Guerra 1984a: 674–75). Yet even this claim must be seen as controversial, and heightened in its controversial status by Guerra’s irascible personality and polemical writing style.

4.5 The Roman Catholic Arch-Bishop in Taiwan, Stanislaus Lo Kuang (Luo Guang)

The most high-ranking Roman Catholic intellectual who produced the largest amount of scholarship related to Zhu Xi among Post-WWII Christian intellectuals was the archbishop and prolific theological-philosopher, Stanislaus Lo Kuang 羅光 (1911–2004). Notably, his association with the re-established Fu Jen University 輔仁大學 in Taipei is undeniably significant. Both Graf and Lo wrote voluminously about many aspects of Zhu Xi’s works, and though there are likenesses in what they produced, especially in the historical comparative mode of paralleling what Zhu Xi published with the systematic theological-philosophical corpus of Thomas Aquinas, their motivations and ultimately also their output were significantly different. With regard to academic credentials among the various kinds of Chinese Christian intellectuals identified in this study, oL Kuang is unrivalled in having obtained three doctoral degrees in philosophy, canon law, and theology, from extensive studies pursued in Rome, and then subsequently served as the president of Fu Jen University for more than a dozen years (from 1978 to 1992) (Pan H. 2016: 97–99). During this period he also served as the archbishop (zongzhujiao 總主教) of Taipei, a position of authority within international Roman Catholic structures that was simultaneously a politically-loaded problem that prevented him from having direct contact with Chinese intellectuals from the PRC for the vast majority of his life. Nevertheless, having published nearly 70 volumes of works produced mostly in Chinese and primarily pursuing studies in the areas of Chinese philosophy and its history, European 718 L. F. Pfister and Chinese Scholastic philosophy and their histories (including his creative contributions to the Taiwanese Neo-scholasticism (Taiwan Xinshilin zhexue 臺灣新士林哲學), and Roman Catholic theology (Pan H. 2015), his works have received significant attention in Taiwanese Roman Catholic philosophical circles and even some recent attention from mainland Chinese philosophers (Wu 2010; Wang 2015; Liao 2017). So, when the first international conference on huZ Xi studies took place in Honolulu in 1982, President Lo was invited, attended, lectured, and gave his own reflective assessment of the whole event subsequently (Luo1982 , 1983: 421–27). Undoubtedly, then, his philosophical and theological concerns related to Zhu Xi’s corpus and philosophical system are of great interest. Lo was obviously working with very different philosophical motivations than those that animated the Benedictine missionary-scholar in Japan, Olaf Graf. In fact, Lo Kuang’s varying approaches to Zhu Xi studies depended on whether he was writing with purposes that related to summaries of the history of Chinese philosophy, general reflections on human experience under the rubric of rensheng zhexue 人生哲學 (“life philosophy,” or more directly, “philosophy of human life”), or specific ways that he critically reinvested certain claims within huZ Xi’s corpus within different aspects of New Scholasticism. The most direct and recent study of Lo Kuang’s published works dealing with Zhu Xi’s corpus regularly refers to how these various aspects of the Chinese Roman Catholic archbishop’s writings are “interlinked” (jiaocuo 交錯), even though the majority of his writings related to Zhu Xi’s works employ historical methodologies rather than philosophical or theological approaches (Wang 2015: 92–95). Perhaps one of the better ways to approach Lo Kuang’s interpretations of Zhu Xi’s claims, particularly as they confirmed, added to, and required supplementary support from Thomist scholastic philosophy, is to describe and evaluate what he wrote for the 1982 international conference on Zhu Xi studies held in Honolulu (Luo 1982). Ironically, the one major work in Chinese that does focus on Lo Kuang’s account of Zhu Xi studies (Wang 2015), does not apparently know of that major essay. Yet this essay portrays much about Lo Kuang’s Roman Catholic Neo- Scholastic philosophical account of Zhu Xi’s major contributions as well as his philosophical shortcomings, so it is particularly worth considering. The published version of Lo Kuang’s presentation in Honolulu in 1982 includes a Chinese version of the paper (Luo 1982: C1–28) with an appendix promoting the emphatic affirmation of the value of human life in concept of life (shengming guan- nian 生命觀念) in the writings of Xiong Shili 熊十力 (also Hsiung Shih-li, 1885–1968), Fang Dongmei 方東美 (also Thomé H. Fang, 1899–1977) and Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (also T’ang Chün-I 1909–1978), an emphasis within Chinese philosophical circles which the archbishop also supported (Luo 1982: C29–36). Following that version of the paper, an English translation of the main presentation without the appendix was presented under the name “Stanislaus Lokuang” (Luo 1982: E1–43). Both versions will be referred to in what follows. From the table of contents for both versions as well as from the relatively short conclusion to the article (Luo 1982: C27–28/E41–43), this piece seemingly is a descriptive work arguing that Zhu Xi linked together his cosmological and moral 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 719 claims in a manner that set up a “metaphysical foundation” (xingshang jichu 形上基礎) for humans’ moral life. This clearly anticipated what Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (also Mou Tsung-san, 1909–1995) would promote as “moral metaphysics” (daode xingershangxue 道德形而上學) within his own modern Ruist writings, but was developed by Lo Kuang especially in this piece from a focused attention on Zhu Xi’s works, mentioning a wide range of quoted materials that included the Song Ruist’s commentaries to The Yijing, The Four Books, and numerous elaborations from his Categorized Sayings (Zhuzi Yulei 朱子語類). Nevertheless, throughout the main body of the paper Lo Kuang regularly compared and analyzed Zhu Xi’s claims in their relationship to the philosophical positions of Aristotle and “St. Thomas Aquinas” (indicating by this form of reference his reverence for that late medieval Italian Dominican as a Roman Catholic saint as well as a theologian and philosopher, along lines promoted by Pope Pius X). Within those analyses Lo sought to highlight both points of significant overlap and conceptual distinction that indicated where further critical assessments from a Thomist viewpoint could be raised, and in fact often were offered within the article briefly and poignantly. From an internal comparative philosophical perspective within this seminal paper related to different Song dynasty Ruist philosophers’ positions in relationship to Zhu Xi’s interpretations, two major points should be addressed and elaborated. First of all, Lo argues that there is a significant tension created by huZ Xi’s dualistic tendencies, so that the doctrine he adopts from Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription 西銘 as li yi fen shu 理一分殊 (“the principle/pattern is singular, but its manifestations are diverse”), and from Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107) as li yi er shu 理一而殊 (“the principle/pattern is singular, but diversified”) requires him to develop a strong position that there can ultimately only be one principle/pattern (Luo 1982: C8/E13 and C14/E20). Nevertheless, this leads to the problem of explaining the diversification of ontic beings, a matter Zhu Xi resolves by reference to the different degrees of purity and coarseness in the vital energy possessed by each thing (Luo 1982: C15–16/E22–24). Whether this dualistic-tending explanation can provide a satisfac- tory justification for Zhu’s metaphysical commitments remains an issue oL Kuang suggests cannot be easily resolved within Zhu’s own philosophical system (as developed in Wang 2015: 100–104). Secondly, Lo Kuang argues that Zhu Xi’s conception of taiji 太極 (the “Great Ultimate” or “Supreme Ultimate”) is too passive, being described as only principle/ pattern, and not a dynamic and productive force as in his Song Ruist predecessor Zhou Dunyi’s 周敦頤 (1017–1073) writings (Luo 1982: C18/E27). In this case he criticizes the interpretive position of Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990), who was also at the conference in Honolulu at that time, that Zhu Xi’s conception of the taiji was distinct from the normal principle-pattern. For Lo, this is not possible within Zhu Xi’s system, because the principle-pattern had to be singular within his worldview (Luo 1982: C14–15/E21–22). As will be seen later on, this concern reflected a problem related to the ultimate nature of reality for Lo, and so was central also to one of his major criticisms of Zhu Xi’s metaphysical position. 720 L. F. Pfister

Three insights that are arrived at through more detailed discussions in Lo Kuang’s article should be noted; sometimes they are not elaborated to an extent that might have been more preferable for a monograph than in a shorter article, but they still underscore important points that he felt needed to be highlighted. One of the more briefly noted points that bears out a significant insight is the claim that whathu Z Xi discussed in terms of principle/pattern (li) and vital energy (qi) actually belonged to “Western” discussions of cosmology, and not to what would be more strictly related to ontology (Luo 1982: C10–11/E15). The point made here is not that Zhu Xi had no metaphysical interests, but that he employed metaphysical concepts to emphasize their cosmological and cosmogenic functions, rather than to explore what Lo Kuang recognized in Aristotelian terms was the discussion of the nature of “Being.” If this perspective is seen as justified, then oL Kuang’s claims that there are ways to supplement Song Ruist worldview discussions with Christian-inspired philosophical metaphysics would carry more weight and also be seen as reasonable (Wang 2015: 100–104; Liao 2017). Another important philosophical insight that challenges any simple comparison between Zhu Xi’s and Aquinas’ metaphysical systems is that vital energy or qi, though certainly involved in the generation of sentient and non-sentient beings, is not limited to the explanations involved in understanding the nature of material things. In this light, then, it is inherently part of the discussion of the substance of anything, and so it must also be included in what is metaphysical, and, perhaps ironically for Zhu Xi and other Ruist scholars who follow his dualistic-tending metaphysics, part of what is discussed as belonging to xingshang (as well as xingxia). Put in other words, there is no simple parallel or identity between the nature and relationship of forma and materia and that of li and qi (Luo 1982: C11/ E16 and C12/E18). That more reductionistic claim leads to many other problems that Lo Kuang wanted to avoid, but has not always been understood or appreciated by philosophers who work in Ruist-European or so-called “Chinese–Western” comparative philosophical studies. An even more complicated set of concerns are bound up in Zhu Xi’s account of cosmogeny, especially within the discussions of the first sentence of The Explanations of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (Taijitu Shuo 太極圖說): “wuji er taiji 無極而太極.” Part of the complexity involved here is whether wuji is prior to and the origin of taiji, explaining by means of that ambiguous connective term, er 而, a cosmological relationship that would qualify the taiji as both “supreme” but not “the highest” or “the origin” of the cosmos. On the one hand, Lo argues that Zhu Xi does not have a conception of an “absolute action” or “actus purus” that sovereignly and creatively engaged the cosmological order (Luo 1982: C/E16). This is a critical element within Lo’s own worldview, one not so clearly worked out in secondary literature (Wang 2015: 104; Liao 2017: 89–92), because it is not understood by some that the supreme deity in Aquinas’ philosophy was described as “pure activity.” This being so, to have a concept of something “supreme” that is essentially passive and inactive because it is inherently constituted as the principle/pattern (li) of things points to a metaphysical quandary that cannot be solved even by having some other kind of deity (such as tian 天 in Zhu Xi’s 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 721

metaphysical system [see Zhong 2014]). This interpretive tension is heightened by the fact that Lo renders the key phrase seen above as “The Ultimate of Non-Being begot the Supreme Ultimate” (Luo 1982: C/E27). Here there appears to be a Christian twist to the Song Ruist cosmogeny that distorts the phrase both in how the connective particle er is rendered, as well as in the basic way to understand the relationship between wu 無 and you 有 (Luo 1982: C/E3). On the one hand, Lo’s specific use of the old English term “begot” suggests a presumed creatio ex nihilo influence within his rendering of that phrase, one that seems forced and questionable; on the other hand, his portrayal of wu as “non-being” points to an ancient Mediterranean and later European philosophical conception of “nothingness” that may not properly portray what Zhu Xi intended by the concept of wuji. So, while there are some important questions that can be raised regarding Lo’s presentation of these matters related to the nature of taiji, his discussion points to some important systematic questions within Zhu Xi’s metaphysical system that he as a Roman Catholic New Scholastic philosopher discerned were highly problematic. Another issue requiring conceptual clarification has to deal with analogies that can be drawn from the statement that the shengren 聖人 (which Lo Kuang always translates as “the saint” or “saints”) as a large root or “great origin” (daben 大本) for many principles (daoli 道理) (Luo 1982: C24/E35–36). Here Zhu Xi is clearly setting up a hierarchy of humans and knowledge for which the sage serves as a cultural reservoir of immense proportions, a function that Zhu Xi believed his Ruist predecessors served for more than two millennia previously. If there can be such a civilizational origin particularly for whole person cultivation and the nurture of the myriad things, why should there not be a cosmic or ontological origin as well? It would seem that this kind of intuitive induction from human experience into cosmic and ontological orders is very much behind much of Lo Kuang’s philosophical explorations within this article and across the many decades of his prolific work. The most pronounced (and for some, the most egregious) renderings that suggest there is a specifically Roman Catholic pre-judgment at work within Lo’s consciousness is his inconsistent English renderings for the virtue of humane cultivation (ren 仁). In the vast majority of cases, the noun is rendered as “charity” (as found perva- sively in Luo 1982: C20–27/E31–40), and only occasionally as “humanity” (Luo 1982: C19–20/E30–31, C26–27/E39–40), both having their roots in the Latin virtues of charitas (the Latin equivalent for agape love in koiné Greek) and humanitas (suggesting “humaneness”). Once again there is a recognition of a parallel located sixty years earlier in the English renderings of the British Baptist missionary- scholar, J. Percy Bruce, who translated the term as “Love.” Yet here there is a sub- tlety in Lo Kuang’s English phrasing, because he reserves the term “love” only for the character ai 愛, making it possible for him to render Zhu Xi’s claim that “charity is the principle of love” (ren wei ai zhi li 仁為愛之理) (Luo 1982: C23/E33), while Bruce distinguished the former as “the emotion” and the latter as “the disposition” of love (Bruce 1922: 312). Nevertheless, exactly what this phrase would mean within Lo Kuang’s own modern New Scholastic philosophy remains a serious inquiry, but he does not offer any further elaboration. 722 L. F. Pfister

The implication that Lo Kuang has aligned various aspects of Zhu Xi’s writings to his New Scholastic Christian philosophical orientation by means of a method of “generous translation”—or what some secularistic philosophers would insist is an unjustified cultural imposition of his Christian worldview within huZ Xi’s 700 year old texts—raises up as an issue nurturing a hermeneutic skepticism regarding his basic understanding of Zhu Xi’s claims in those realms. Here again, details about the specific renderings and reminders about oL Kuang’s primary concern to produce a Chinese Roman Catholic New Scholastic philosophical system need to be considered, because the suggestions portrayed in his English renderings that are directly related to his Chinese original suggest that Lo Kuang was undoubtedly reading the Chinese texts of Zhu Xi from within his New Scholastic philosophical and theological orientation. From this account of Lo Kuang’s 1982 presentation on Zhu Xi’s metaphysical structure it is possible to characterize summarily a number of his other works that developed themes related to different aspects of Zhu Xi’s philosophical system. The complicated nature of Lo Kuang’s approach to Zhu Xi’s various philosophical claims have been revealed by others from different angles (Pan H. 2015; Wang 2015), but more can be explained and clarified about the way Lo has interlinked and reconceived some of Zhu Xi’s perspectives. Put in other words, Lo Kuang relied on Zhu Xi’s philosophical writings to garnish his Song Ruist insights into the nature of reality and the development of moral character in order to construct a new expression of Thomist philosophy for contemporary Chinese Roman Catholic communities and anyone else in Chinese cultural contexts who would be willing to consider them. It is important to note that Lo Kuang’s affirmations of Ruist traditions was selective, a fact that is rarely underscored in secondary literature. For example, in his later works on Ruist life philosophy and the metaphysical underpinnings of his own Chinese expression of New Scholastic life philosophy, Lo Kuang regularly dealt with Masters Kong and Meng, and then Han dynasty Ruists, and subsequently those involved with the Principle-centered Learning (lixue) School, including at the end of this historical sequence reflections on the works of angW Chuanshan 王船山 (1619–1692), also known as Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (for example, see Luo 1995: 83–100, 149–66; 2001: 27–34, 99–101, 128–34). Why did Lo Kuang so systematically avoid the works and teachings of those associated with Zhu Xi’s main rival tradition, the Heart-centered Learning (xinxue 心學) School? On reviewing the systematic and rationalized philosophical training that he received when studying Thomistic Scholastic traditions, Lo Kuang undoubtedly had a rational orientation that would appreciate Zhu Xi’s systematic reconstructions and rational analyses, rejecting what may be seen as a more intuitive and less systematic presentation of ideas, whether in writings or in dialogues, by those such as Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529). From another perspective, it is important to emphasize the innovative nature of Lo Kuang’s philosophical interests: his concern was not simply to repeat and elaborate former positions, but to integrate them into a Roman Catholic vision of reality. For example, the five facets of his intellectual/spiritual cultivation (Pan H. 2015: 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 723

67) are summarized as (1) “setting the heart-mind right and committing the will” (zhengxin lizhi 正心立志), (2) “maintaining reverence with the Lord as one” (shoujing zhuyi 守敬主一); (3) “purifying the heart-mind and lessening desires” (jingxin guayu 淨心寡慾); (4) “possessing an authentic and sincere heart-mind before the Lord” (chengxin dui zhu 誠心對主); and (5) “strengthening oneself unceasingly” (ziqiang buxi 自強不息). Within these five facets or steps of intellectual/spiritual cultivation there are phrases drawn from the classical text of the Daxue 大學 that were also promoted by Zhu Xi, including zhengxin and chengxin; other phrases resonate with Zhu Xi’s own regulations for whole person cultivation, especially shoujing, but also jingxin and guayu. Though the second and fourth steps clearly identify “the Lord” as the focus of those steps, there is no further discussion of sanctification or the role of the Holy Spirit as would normally be expected in any general Christian theological discussions of these matters. One can imagine that Zhu Xi’s own semi-ascetic lifestyle also paralleled many aspects of the forms of spiritual formation that Lo Kuang had adopted as a Roman Catholic priest.

4.6 The Canadian Roman Catholic Historian and Sinologist, Julia Ching

In approaching the work related to Zhu Xi that was produced by the Chinese Canadian scholar at the University of Toronto, Julia Ching 秦家懿 (1934–2001), we face a person who stands out as unusual in many facets of her life and work. Notably, she is the only female Christian scholar identified among those discussed here, a reality that was very prominent in her own self-consciousness due to her extensive work and achievements in a male-dominated international academic setting, particularly in the realm of Asian studies, as elaborated in her autobiography (Ching 1998). Her life has been shaped profoundly by geographical, political, religious, physical, and academic transitions (Pan F. 2013): born in Shanghai, she fled to Taiwan with family members in the late 1940s when she was in her early teens, and did not return to mainland China until 1979. Joining the Ursuline Order of Roman Catholic nuns before she was 20 years old, she spent two decades as a practicing nun, and then left the order, was married, and took up a stellar academic career. Three times she battled with cancer and its threats, first when 28 years old, then again ten years later, and subsequently in the illness that ended her life. Though she took academic training in “Asian studies,” working on Chinese figures of note, her academic work has regularly straddled methodologies and topics that fit into religious, philosophical, and historico-cultural disciplines. Additionally, distinctive is the fact that having lived in Chinese and English, she later learned French, German, and Japanese languages in order to advance her spheres of academic access (Pan F. 2013: 221–22). Due to all these factors in her life, she was honored in 1994 as a “university professor” at the University of Toronto (Pan F. 2013: 223), meaning not only that she was an exemplary scholar, but also that she was understood to employ 724 L. F. Pfister an inter-disciplinary approach to her fields of expertise in Song through early Qing dynasty (10th—17th centuries) historical spheres. Unlike many Roman Catholic intellectuals and scholars that have been reviewed already, she took a vital interest in the Ming Ruist, Wang Yangming, and produced a Ph.D. dissertation for the Australian National University as well as books in English and Chinese on his life and works (Pan F. 2013: 210–11, 222). While many of her very notable monographs deal with matters related to religious themes (Ching 1978, 1993), she seldom dealt with Zhu Xi’s undeniable cultural impact, producing her single volume on his religious interests the year before she passed away (Ching 2000). Only in her volume on Chinese Religions did she address certain themes in Zhu Xi’s corpus, making evocative comparisons of his methodology, worldview, and synthetic coverage with the works of Nicolas of Cusa, Alfred North Whitehead, and Paul Tillich (Ching 1993: 158–60). Here again, it should be noted, she was standing against a long line of criticisms of Zhu Xi’s non-theistic worldview underscored by many Roman Catholic missionary-scholars and intellectuals before her, and standing instead more near to the relatively open, subtle, and creatively-worked out positions adopted by the British Baptist missionary-scholar, J. Percy Bruce, and the Taiwanese New Scholastic philosopher and priest, Lo Kuang. Certainly, then, her account of Zhu Xi’s “religious thought” in 2000 was the result of her own maturing ideas regarding his works and philosophical system. For all of these reasons, then, more details about this final published monograph by Ching will be provided below. First and foremost, it is important to recognize that the categorization of “religious thought” itself is a modern disciplinary rubric, and not something that was distinctly and self-consciously applied by Zhu Xi to his own readings and writings. What is relatively new about this approach—and paralleled to what has been noticed already in the works of J. Percy Bruce and Lo Kuang—is that it affirms the religious significance of all those realms of huZ Xi’s philosophical system, that is, the metaphysical as well as the mundane. Notably, issues related to his approach to Daoism and Buddhism are included, but only in the later chapters (Ching 2000: 152–89). What this suggests, then, is that Ching is not merely employing a Christian theological standard for assessing Zhu Xi’s religious thought, but is also probing a wide range of issues related to a broader conception of “spirituality” as expressed religiously in both metaphysical and mundane realms. Further hints that these alternative standards are being employed are suggested within her third appendix, one exploring at some length a comparison of Zhu Xi’s and Whitehead’s conceptions of “God and the world,” a theme only briefly mentioned by her in 1993 (Ching 2000: 243–58). The fact that Ching also does not discuss virtue ethics as a primary mode of spiritual life places her approach to Zhu Xi in contrast to the approach of the venerable Lo Kuang. Instead, she insists on revisiting the troubled question of the nature of the taiji, and the problem of the metaphysical meaning of the first sentence of theTaijitu Shuo (the interpretive conflicts being elaborated in her second appendix [Ching 2000: 235–42]), arguing along lines that Bruce had taken up nearly eighty years earlier (though he is not mentioned in her work): that is, that there is a distinctive 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 725 and subtle theistic trend to Zhu Xi’s thought that should not be overlooked. Beyond this, however, she moves quickly from the metaphysical to the rituals of worship and reverence, in order to explore the practical and cultural ways in which Zhu Xi expressed his religious orientation. This linking of metaphysics to ritual propriety is prompted by her methodological concerns drawn from religious studies, but has also become a theme of philosophical awareness in realms of philosophy of religion and philosophy of culture as an inherent part of spirituality. Ritual life includes sacrifices and worship, and for a good number of philosophers, they will be sur- prised to know how much Zhu Xi participated in acts of reverence that included worshipful rituals (Ching 2000: 72–90). Another facet of her approach to Zhu Xi’s “religious thought” is to highlight his claims in the light of his “philosophical disputes” with his contemporary, Lu Xiangshan (Lu Jiuyuan), the person considered to be the historical source of the xinxue tradition (Ching 2000: 132–151). Of course, this brings us back to the fact that her dissertation dealt thoroughly with Wang Yangming’s own version of xinxue, and so in this light, Ching employs that alternative vision of spirituality to highlight the special features of Zhu Xi’s own religious orientation. She even devotes a further chapter near the end of the book to Zhu’s critics (Ching 2000: 190–208), so that the delimitation of his own religious claims and actions can be qualified even further through the critical lens of those who found reasons to disagree with his approach. All of these features in her study of Zhu Xi’s “religious thought” underscore the unusual nature of her methodological concerns as she applies them to many topics that have previously been discussed at great length, and a few topics that have either been avoided, or have been used to challenge Zhu Xi’s spiritual relevance. Consequently, it is notable that her final chapter addresses specifically the “relevance” of Zhu Xi’s “religious thought” for persons in the beginning of the twenty- first century (Ching2000 : 209–29). Methodologically speaking, most of the 125 endnotes provided for this one chapter cite numerous original Chinese sources, the vast majority being those that Ching herself rendered into English (Ching 2000: 273–77). Within these endnotes there are cited works from 13 authors in English, 27 in Chinese, and 6 in Japanese, 9 works among all of those being cited more than three times. The most often cited text of Zhu Xi is his Categorized Sayings (Zhuzi Yulei), which is cited 67 times alone in this single chapter. Unlike many scholars who refer to Zhu Xi’s works, Ching also cites a number of poems and records of his and others’ ritual participa- tion in order to reveal more about Zhu Xi’s “religious thought” (Ching 2000: 54, 56–57, 61, 62, 66–69, 71). What is doubly interesting about these references to rituals is that she devotes the next full chapter to discussion Zhu Xi’s interests in ritual propriety, so that this serves as a linkage to other chapters in the volume that manifest a thorough interconnectedness with related themes throughout her work. She does so as well with reference to discussions of human nature, personal cultivation, and his evaluation of Buddhist claims. Unquestionably, the scholarly effort involved in such work is impressive, and gives credence to the level of justification of her conclusions. 726 L. F. Pfister

Self-consciously she adopted an approach to the question of “spiritual beings” that did not follow Zhu Xi’s order in his Categorized Sayings, but employed a logical order influenced by her own religious studies background. To begin, she discussed three aspects of Zhu Xi’s conception of tian on the basis of three specific accounts of that term within Zhu’s writings, starting with the strictly physical reference to an environing Nature, and then moving to a religiously resonant term (“Lord and Master,” zhuzai 主宰), and finally developing his philosophical account in relationship to “Heavenly Principle” (tianli 天理) and “the Heavenly mind” (tianxin 天心) (Ching 2000: 55–60). Subsequently, she discusses the general category of guishen in six subcategories, so that she can address among those topics whether or not Zhu Xi believed that they actually existed (Ching 2000: 61–63), how he rationalized their existence in metaphysical terms (Ching 2000: 64–66), and how he dealt with “spirit possession,” a topic she notes that the Cheng brothers considered to be a waste of time (Ching 2000: 68–69). While this approach may seem so complicated as to make the whole discussion too difficult to follow, in fact, Ching regularly provides at the end of each section a concluding assessment that reveals subtle distinctions and a balanced evaluation of relevant features, increasing one’s respect for her discernments. For example, she argues that Zhu Xi “is trying to avoid anthropomorphism while admitting a creator—a power and intention in Heaven that directs the creative forces of the universe”; this leads her to conclude that Zhu “falls back on a nonanthropomorphic, somewhat pantheistic explanation of Heaven as ruler and master” (Ching 2000: 58). With regard to the distinction of tianli and tianxin, she points out that Zhu Xi “prefers generally to speak of [tianli] in a supreme and ultimate sense[,] but uses tianxin whenever he wishes to underscore the all-embracing and dynamic creativity of Heaven.” Subsequently, she “suggests” that tianli “is a philosophical term representing Heaven qua Heaven, referring there- fore to the great Li-in-itself that is manifest in [qi] as Heaven’s mind,” or tianxin (Ching 2000: 60). In order to show where Zhu Xi’s own efforts to clarify reach their rational limits at times, so that a response is considered to be “cryptic,” “ambiguous,” or so indirect as to not provide any positive answer, Ching also leaves readers with questions and issues that remain for Zhu Xi and those who seek to refine his systematic reflections (as seen in Ching 2000: 58–59, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70). Avoiding any simple account of his claims from all the sources she has at her disposal, Ching comes to a relatively interesting account of Zhu Xi’s philosophical acumen: he is “unable to be a complete rationalist because of his desire to accommodate ancient beliefs in the Lord- on-High or Heaven, which he obviously respects and to which he gives serious reflective attention” (Ching 2000: 70–71). In this vein, then, Ching adopts methodologies that are more like Lo Kuang and J. Percy Bruce, but comes to conclusions that challenge the earlier claims of Le Gall and Olaf Graf, aligning her own interpretative conclusions unexpectedly more with the British Baptist missionary- scholar, Bruce, more than her Roman Catholic predecessors. 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 727

5 Conclusion

On the basis of materials published by Christian intellectuals starting in the seventeenth century and leading up to the period before WWII, I have reviewed a process of engagement across more than three centuries, involving missionary-scholars, modern sinologists, pastor-scholars, and philosophers. Over the centuries there was a gradually increasing awareness of the extent, complexity, and challenges of understanding various aspects of Zhu Xi’s worldview and metaphysics. Many among them came to convictions that his system was inherently atheistic, and some even argued that the obvious metaphysical elements were ultimately reduced into a monism or a more or less homogenous materialism. At least one, Wieger, rejected Zhu’s political conservativism as well, while others took his worldview claims to be either pantheistic or monistic. Before the initiation of WWII, a broader consensus was being built upon claims that Zhu Xi was ultimately monistic in orientation, had a very high standard for virtuous living and intellectual fulfillment, and asserted that human nature was perfectible. Most agreed that if there was any hint of theism, it would have to be teased out of his metaphors related to the meaning of tian that included a strong sense of sovereignty, but not all agreed that this was the case. Only in the latest of the works in the pre-WWII historical context, the two volumes produced by Bruce, was there also the indication that the highest virtue promoted by Zhu Xi could be largely confirmed by Christians worldwide as the parallel, if not equivalent, of Christian agapē or love. Taken from the broader ranges of historical coverage that the two parts of this essay have involved, the initial engagement with teachings of Zhu Xi by Jesuit missionary-scholars in the seventeenth century was unselfconscious of who the Song Ruist was and what the influence of his writings and teachings has been by that time in Chinese dynastic history. That situation changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when foreign missionary-scholars form both Protestant and Roman Catholic missionary organizations located primarily in China provided translations of some of Zhu Xi’s writings, as well as some initial critical analyses of various aspects of Zhu Xi’s metaphysical and moral claims. Only by the end of the nineteenth century were monographic studies in European languages devoted to Zhu Xi produced in French and German, some by sinologically-trained scholars, and one set of volumes on Zhu Xi’s life and teachings produced in English during the early 1920s by the thoughtful British Baptist missionary-scholar, J. Percy Bruce. What had been produced up to the period before WWII, then, was a series of studies and a number of translations that included commentarial analyses related to Zhu Xi’s writings that gave educated readers both a general sense of Zhu Xi’s worldview and, in some cases, various scholarly accounts of the status of what would be counted at that time as his religious and philosophical claims. The situation following WWII changed significantly for Christian intellectuals who became interested in Zhu Xi, not only because of the traumatic political and bellicose events that influenced so much of the twentieth century, but also because writings in Chinese by Chinese Christian intellectuals could also be counted as 728 L. F. Pfister contributing to the popular and scholarly understanding of Zhu Xi’s metaphysics, moral philosophy, practical philosophy, educational hermeneutics, ritual teachings and practices, as well as a renewed interest in the Ruist religious claims that could also be identified from within his vast corpus. Key contributions came in the pro- duction of the Jinsi lu in both German and English, the former produced by the Benedictine missionary-scholar in Japan, Olaf Graf (Graf 1953), and the scholarly renderings into European languages of many of Zhu Xi’s sayings. There were also technical discussions and philosophical assessments made by well-trained Christian philosophers and intellectuals, including volumes produced by Princeton S. Hsü, Stanislas Lo Kuang, and Julia Ching. Along with access to Zhu Xi’s writings in other languages that was accessible to wider reading audiences in European and Anglophone contexts, there came a new set of perspectives drawn from Chinese intellectual and philosophical histories that added to critical perspectives applied to Zhu Xi’s life and writings, particularly among Chinese Protestant pastor-scholars such as Ho Sai-ming (Ho 1986) and Princeton Hsü (Hsü 1971), but also from a very different set of perspectives by the Portuguese Jesuit, Joaquim Guerra, and the Chinese Roman Catholic scholars such as Lo Kuang and Julia Ching. Here the questions that arose had to do with whether or not Zhu Xi’s worldview, his understanding of human nature, and his promotion of particular accounts of whole person cultivation, were amenable to and adaptable within various Christian accounts of sanctification and their practical expressions in different kinds of spiritual formation. Though there are voices of dissent that have not been explored in depth due to limits of space—especially the claims of the French Jesuit, Wieger (Wieger 1969) and those of the Portuguese Jesuit translator and missionary-scholar, Guerra (Guerra 1984a, b)—there were some substantial affirmations made by oL Kuang, aligning the rational or even rationalistic philosophical reflections of Zhu Xi with his New Scholastic philosophy that was informed by both Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophical systems. Added to this diversity of interpretive positions, then, was the religious studies approach of Julia Ching, that sought to provide a new and more subtle account of a particular form of Ruist theism Zhu supported. As was elaborated above, Ching’s position paralleled the account provided eighty years earlier by J. Percy Bruce, but added suggestions that one of the ways to reveal the relevance of Zhu Xi studies is to align it with various doctrines promoted by Process Philosophy and Process Theology. Intriguingly, where twentieth century academic studies of Zhu Xi were deeply influenced by modernizing and secularizing trends in scholarship, there has been no strong and sustained voice in the twenty-first century opposing the de-secularlizing trends of Zhu Xi studies as found in Julia Ching’s and other contemporary Chinese Christian philosophers’ claims. Several matters that appear to remain issues for further philosophical studies could be highlighted at the end of this study. First, there are questions related to the dualistic-tending metaphysics of Zhu Xi’s worldview. How does his li–qi metaphysics align itself with modern scientific theories of the world and reality, particularly among Christian scientists who are involved in theoretical physics and the concerns generated by the inhumane features of a highly technological form of social life? Are Zhu Xi’s claims related to astronomy and the cosmos simply matters 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 729 of being a “man of his own times,” as Julia Ching claims, or do they have any relevance for these facets of modern life that Christian intellectuals in Chinese contexts and elsewhere continue to engage? Some Christian intellectuals reviewed here above have argued that Zhu Xi’s metaphysics leads to many unresolvable problems, some of which he was aware, and may even be seen as detrimental to his philosophical system because they lead to outright contradictions. These claims justify those who take Zhu Xi’s philosophical system to task, partly because they are also concerned as Christian scholars to offer alternative philosophical systems of their own making, whether from the angle of an indigenized Chinese theology, or a Chinese Roman Catholic New Scholastic philosophical system, or from a process theology perspective. Another realm of Zhu Xi studies that may prove of interest to future scholarship by Christian philosophers and intellectuals could be categorized under the rubric of a philosophy of culture. Has Zhu Xi achieved a philosophical synthesis that reveals more about the needed cultural orientations of human beings in general? Are his moral claims and his ritual practices insightful for integrating into a modern twenty- first century vision of “Chinese culture”? These matters have appeared to be quite controversial among twentieth century Chinese scholars, and so may deserve further work in future explorations of his worldview. Though more questions could be raised here, a final issue that appears to remain seminal for Christian philosophers and intellectuals is the question of the nature of Zhu Xi’s religiousness. When we become self-conscious of the fact that what we in the twenty-first century refer to as “philosophy” and “religion” were not categories of thought that Zhu Xi applied to his own writings, it may be all the more appropri- ate to ask if a special Song Ruist form of theism might be amenable to a Christian vision of deity. For example, Mediterranean philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle had their own conceptions of a supreme being, but they were seen as conceptually helpful in articulating Christian understandings of the deity, even though they were not the same in content or justification. Could a similar way of approaching an indigenized expression of Christianity in Chinese contexts—whether Roman Catholic or Protestant—be worked out on the basis of approaching the nature of deity by means of reflections that have been initiated by huZ Xi in some of his metaphysical reflections? Due to the limits of the translations of Zhu Xi’s corpus in non-Asian languages, there would be much to do in order to make his whole set of writings known to a European and/or Anglophone set of audiences. Much more of this sort has been done in Japanese and Korean languages, but due to my own linguistic limitations, I have not been able to identify Japanese or Korean Christian scholars who have also worked through Zhu Xi’s writings and produced other works reflecting their Christian interpretations of his claims. My suspicion is that they do exist, and my understanding of the developments of Korean Ruist traditions suggests to me that there may be much more in these realms than I have been able to identify and discuss in this essay. 730 L. F. Pfister

References

Bruce, J. Percy, trans. and comm. 1922. The Philosophy of Human Nature (Hsing Li) by Chu Hsi. London: Probsthain and Company. (Based on studies of seven juan from Zhu Xi’s Complete Works [juan 42–48], this is a serious effort to present Zhu Xi’s position on human nature in the form of an annotated scholarly translation.) ———. 1923. Chu Hsi and His Masters: An Introduction to Chu Hsi and the Sung School of Chinese Philosophy. London: Probsthain and Company. (Nine of the fourteen chapters of this book deal directly with Zhu Xi. This volume provides historical, conceptual, philosophical and religious accounts of many aspects of his life and works.) Chan, Wing-tsit, trans. 1967. Chu Hsi: Reflections on Things at Hand, The Neo-Confucian Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press. (The first English translation of this early compendium of Song Ruist teachings by Zhu Xi). ———. 1976. “The Study of Chu Hsi in the West.” The Journal of Asian Studies 35.4(August 1976): 555–77. (A major study focusing on how Zhu Xi’s metaphysics, religiousness, scientific studies, philosophical positions, debates, and biographical details have been handled in translations and secondary studies of Zhu Xi’s works produced in French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and English, starting from the late 1840s and extending to the publication of the author’s own renderings in the 1960s). ———. 1986. Chu Hsi and Neo-Confucianism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. (A collection of new studies on Zhu Xi largely inspired by the 1982 international conference held in Honolulu). ———. 1989. Chu Hsi: New Studies. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. (This is a new volume on various themes about Zhu Xi written by the author, a seasoned scholar in this realm.) Cheng, Chung-ying. 1991. New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. (A collection of essays dealing with themes involving Ruist teachings from more than 2000 years across its vast traditions, and approached from angles that reflect questions drawn from late 20th century philosophical disciplines). Ching, Julia. 1978. Confucianism and Christianity: A Comparative Study. Tokyo: Kodansha International. (Here the focus of discussion is on the early Jesuit mission as representatives of “Christianity,” with only occasional references to Zhu Xi, because details about “Confucianism” range across a much broader historical spectrum of writings and figures.) ———. 1993. Chinese Religions. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. (An original overview by this Chinese Roman Catholic intellectual, starting from ancient expressions to the late 20th century.) ———. 1998. The Butterfly Healing: A Life between East and West. New York: Maryknoll. (This is an autobiography published three years before the author’s death, recounting her life as a young girl escaping mainland China to Taiwan, taking up disciplines as an Ursuline nun for two decades, before establishing herself as a specialist in Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties Chinese history and culture.) ———. 2000. The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A seminal study that carefully affirms the theistic and other spiritual dimensions of huZ Xi’s worldview, contrasting them with Daoist and Chinese Buddhist claims, while also exploring comparisons with aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysics). Couvreur, Séraphin. 1895. Les Quatre Livres avec un commentaire abrégé en Chinois, une double traduction en Français et en Latin, et un vocabulaire des lettres et des noms propres. Ho Kien Fu: [Mission Imprimaire]. (These modern French and Latin translations rely heavily on Zhu Xi’s commentaries to the Four Books.) de Harley, Charles. 1888. “Zhuzi Jie Yaozuan 朱子節要纂 / Tsieh-Yao-Tchuen de Tchou-hi.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 20.2: 219–271. (This Jesuit scholar provides the first modern French version of the preface to this work and selections from chapters 1, 6, 9, and 13 [dealing with metaphysical concepts, home rituals, governance, and false doctrines] from among the fourteen chapters of the original 17th century Chinese text.) 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 731

———. 1889a. “Learning for Children, or Morality for Youth, with the Commentary by Chen Xuan/La Siao Hio, ou morale de jeunesse, avec le commentaire de Tschen-Siuen.” Annales du Musée Guimet 15. (The first modern French translation of the Elementary Learning, one of Zhu Xi’s noted textual creations). ———. 1889b. Jiali, Book of Chinese Domestic Rites of Zhu Xi/Ka-li, Livre des rites domes- tiques chinois de Tchou-hi. Paris. (The first modern French translation of this text in Zhu Xi’s corpus). ———. 1890. “The Western Inscription (Ximing)/L’Inscription de l’ouest (Si-ming).” In Records of the Congress/Actes du Congrès. Leyden. (The first modern French translation of this text originally by Zhang Zai, including renderings of the related commentary by Zhu Xi). Faber, Ernst. 1875. A Systematical Digest of the Doctrines of Confucius According to the Analects, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean, with an Introduction on the Authorities upon Confucius and Confucianism. Hongkong [sic]: China Mail Office. (An English translation of the German original, this German missionary-scholar from Shanghai provides a lengthy presentation of the basic concepts and key doctrines found in the three works associated with the teachings of “Confucius” or Master Kong.) ———, trans. and comm. 1882. The Mind of Mencius or Political Economy founded upon Moral Philosophy. A Systematic Digest of the Doctrines of the Chinese Philosopher Mencius, B. C. 325. Translated by Arthur B. Hutchinson. London: Trübner and Company. (This is a major digest of Mengzian ideas, divided into three “books” and 21 chapters, dealing with Master Meng’s conception of morality based on virtue ethics, its related practices, and its implications for governance.) ———. 1897. China in the Light of History. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press. (After a general thesis dealing with many aspects of 19th century Qing cultural life, Faber adds an appendix entitled “Missionary View of Confucianism,” where he enumerates “points of similarity,” “points of antagonism,” and “points of deficiency.”) Fei, Leren 費樂仁 (Lauren F. Pfister). 2005. “Scaling the Sinological Himalayas: Insights Drawn from Comparisons of James Legge’s (1815–1897) and Richard Wilhelm’s (1873–1930) Translations and Interpretations of Ruist Canonical Literature 攀登漢學中喜瑪拉雅山的巨擘——從比較理雅各(1815–1897)和尉禮賢(1873–1930)翻譯及詮釋儒教古典經文中所得之啟迪.” In The Newsletter of the Institute for Chinese Literature and Philosophy of Academia Sinica 中央研究院中國文哲研究所通訊 15.2(June 2005): 21–57. (A systematic comparison of Legge’s and Wilhelm’s renderings of the Yijing and Liji in English and German respectively). Fei, Leren. 2016a. “Three New Peaks in the Sinological Himalayas—Iakinf, Séraphin Couvreur, and Joaquim Guerra, Their Lives and Their Works 漢學喜馬拉雅山脈的三座新峰雅金甫, 顧賽芬, 戈振東的生平及作品.” World Sinology 世界漢學 16: 113–145. (Introducing three relatively unknown but significant missionary-scholars working within Chinese contexts during the 19th and 20th centuries from Russia, France, and Portugal). ———. 2016b. Methodology in Interdisciplinary Studies of Translation—Selected Essays from Lauren F. Pfister’s Sinological Studies 翻譯的跨學科研究方法論——費樂仁漢學家研究選論. Translated and edited by Yue Feng 岳峰 et al. Xiamen 廈門: Xiamen University Press 廈門大學出版社. (This volume is made up of thirteen chapters, some not previously appearing in Chinese, and many dealing with the sinological achievements and questions related to the corpora of James Legge, Richard Wilhelm, and other missionary-scholars.) Forke, Alfred. 1927. History of Ancient Chinese Philosophy/Geschichte der alten chinesischen Philosophie. Hamburg: Friedrichsen. (A detailed account in German of the classical pre- imperial period of Chinese philosophical traditions). ———. 1934. History of Chinese Philosophy in the Middle Ages/Geschichte der mittelalterlichen chinesischen Philosophie. Hamburg: Friedrichsen, De Grutyer and Company. (The second volume in Forke’s German account of the history of Chinese philosophical traditions, covering in detail the relevant movements in the three teachings from the Han dynasty till the end of the Tang dynasty). 732 L. F. Pfister

———. 1938. History of the Newer Chinese Philosophy / Geschichte der neuren mittelalterlichen chinesischen Philosophie. Hamburg: Friedrichsen, De Grutyer and Company. (In this third and last large volume in a series on the history of Chinese philosophy prepared by Forke, he covers the major “new” developments within Ruist traditions during the Song dynasty and continues to offer accounts of various schools that developed subsequently until the end of the Qing dynasty.) Fung, Yu-lan. 1952–1953. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Translated by Derke Bodde. New Haven: Princeton University Press. 2 vols. (One of the most influential works published outside of China, an English translation based on the two-volume work produced by the young Feng between 1931 and 1934). Graf, Olaf, trans. and comm. 1953. Record of Things Close at Hand: The Song Ruist Summa with the Commentary by Yu Zai/Djin-Si Lu: Die sungkonfuzianishce Summa mit dem Kommentar des Yä Tsai. Tokyo: Sophia University Press. (A three-volume work in four tomes (the second volume in two tomes), typed manuscripts including in the second volume a full German translation of the Jinsi Lu, the first rendering of this work in any European language. The first smaller volume includes historical introductions and conceptual essays, while the last and largest volume includes commentarial and explanatory notes to the whole text prepared by the translator.) ———. 1970. Dao and Ren: Being and Ought in Song Ruist Monism/Tao und Jen: Sein und Sollen in sungchinesischen Monismus. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrossowitz. (Though discussing many other Song dynasty Ru scholars as well, this work mainly addresses the writings of Zhu Xi by means of summary discussions dealing with many topics including the Great Ultimate, li and qi, Dao, Heaven, destiny, ren and the four Mengzian virtues [ren, yi, li, zhi or humane cultivation, rightness/duty, ritual propriety, and wisdom], among others.) Guerra, Joaquim Angélico de Jesus, S. J. 1984a. The School of Confucius: The Four Books of Confucius—Original Text, Transcription [in Portuguese], Translation [in Portuguese] and Critical Notes/Na Escola de Confúcio: Quadrivolume de Confúcio 論語, 大學, 中庸, 孝經— Texto Original, Leitura Alfabética, Tradução e Notas Críticas. Macau: Jesuítas Portugeses. (The first modern Portuguese translation of these canonical works by a Portuguese Jesuit who resided at various times in Macau and Guangdong province, including a searing criticism of Zhu Xi (“Tjur-Xe”) as the “second greatest heretic” in Ruist history within the long introduction to his version of the Great Learning). ———. 1984b. The School of Confucius: The Works of Mencius—Original Text, Transcription [in Portuguese], Translation [in Portuguese] and Critical Notes/Na Escola de Confúcio: As Obras de Mãncio 孟子—Texto Original, Leitura Alfabética, Tradução e Notas Críticas. Macau: Jesuítas Portugeses. (The first modern Portuguese rendering of the Mengzi, accompanied by extensive annotations where Zhu Xi, Legge, Couvreur, and Waley are referenced and evaluated in their commentaries on this work). Hackmann, Heinrich F. 1927. Chinese Philosophy/Chinesische Philosophie. München: Verlag Ernst Reinhardt. (An overview of Chinese philosophical themes by a scholar who studied Daoist religious traditions and was considered to be an expert in Chinese and East Asian Buddhism.) Ho, Sai Ming Simon 何世明. 1986. Dialogue between Christianity and Confucianism 基督教與儒學對談. Hong Kong 香港: Chinese Christian Literature Council, Ltd. 基督教文化學會編譯組. (This is a work produced by a key Anglican leader in Hong Kong, one in which his account of Zhu Xi’s teachings is addressed.) Hsü, Sung-shi Princeton 徐松石. 1971. Christianity and Chinese Culture 基督教與中國文化. Hong Kong 香港: Baptist Press 浸信會出版部. (This popular book written by a scholarly Chinese Baptist pastor, ranging over themes including teachings from Ruism, Chinese Buddhism, and Daoism, deals critically and negatively with Zhu Xi’s metaphysics and philosophical system.) Le Gall, Stanislas. 1894. The Philosopher Zhu Xi: His Doctrine, His Influence/Le Philosophe Tchou Hi: Sa Doctrine, Son Influence. Chang-hai: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique a 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 733

L’Orphelinat de T’ou-Se-We. (A work in three parts, this study by a French Jesuit presents a summary and critical evaluation of previously produced relevant studies and advances its own position, supporting claims that Zhu Xi was not a theist, and was the premier Chinese intellectual of the Song dynasty, and remained so in the 19th century.) Legge, James. 1852. The Notions of the Chinese concerning God and Spirits. Hongkong [sic]: Hongkong Register. (Within this final work of the classical period of the “term controversy” (1848–1852), the author refers to Zhu Xi’s metaphysics as found in his commentary to The Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate and his explanation of the nature of spiritual beings from his commentary on the 16th chapter of the Zhongyong.) Legge, James. 1885. The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism. Parts 3 and 4. The Li Ki. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (In these volumes Legge presented his rendering of the whole of the standard work, The Record of Rites [Liji], and included within them renderings of the “old version” of both the Zhongyong and the Daxue.) ———. 1893. The Chinese Classics with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes. Volume 1: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (This significantly revised version of the 1861 first edition provides renderings of three of the Four Books, using the critical texts [“new texts”] and commentaries prepared by Zhu Xi.) Leung, In-sing (Liang, Yancheng) Thomas 梁燕城, and Chu Chai-sei (Xu Jishi) Jeremiah 徐濟時. 2012. Theological Reflections in the Context of Chinese Culture: A Study of Christian Scholars toward their Evangelical Theologies 中國問哈處境的神學反思:中華福音神學人物研究. Burnaby: Culture Regeneration Research Society 文化更新研究中心. (An informed study of thirteen major Chinese Protestant scholars’ lives and works, regularly quoting seminal passages from selected works, and summarizing their contributions to broader themes related to Chinese cultural concerns.) Liao, Xiaowei 廖曉煒. 2017. “Lo Kuang and Mou Zongsan’s Different Interpretations of Ruist Metaphyics 羅光, 牟宗三對儒學形上學的不同詮釋.” The Hall of [Master] Kong’s Learning 孔學堂 10: 87–97. (A lengthy study comparing Lo and Mou in their metaphysical claims, written by a young Ruist scholar from the PRC.) Liu, Shuxian 劉述先. 1982. The Development and Completion of Master Zhu [Xi]’s Philosophical Thought 朱子哲學思想的發展與完成. Taipei 臺北: Taiwan Student Bookstore 臺灣學生書局. (A thorough study of the development of Zhu Xi’s thought during his lifetime, reprinted numerous times). Luo, Guang 羅光. 1982. On the Metaphysical Structure of Zhu Xi 朱熹的形上結構論. Honolulu: independently published. (Chinese and English versions of the author’s presentation at the International Conference on Zhu Xi Studies held in Honolulu at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, reflecting the author’s mature position in critically receiving huZ Xi’s philosophical system within his Roman Catholic New Scholastic philosophical system.) ———. 1983. The System of Ruist Philosophy 儒家哲學的體系. Taipei 臺北: Taiwan Student Bookstore 臺灣學生書局. (Constituted by a series of 25 essays on various topics that include thorough studies of Zhu Xi’s metaphysics and other claims, this special volume includes at the end his reflections on the international status of huZ Xi studies as seen at meetings held in Honolulu in 1982.) ———. 1995. Ruist Life Philosophy 儒家生命哲學. Taipei 臺北: Taiwan Student Bookstore 臺灣學生書局. (Here we have the Roman Catholic Archbishop’s extensive and systematic effort at providing an overview of Ruist classical and historical traditions, integrated into his Roman Catholic worldview shaped substantially by Thomist philosophical theology.) ———. 2001. Metaphysical Life Philosophy 形上生命哲學. Taipei 臺北: Taiwan Student Bookstore 臺灣學生書局. (Here we have a systematic summary of “life philosophy” by the 90 year old Roman Catholic Archbishop of Taipei, one that provides a clear overview of how he sought to synthesize Ruist classical and historical traditions [including quite a bit drawn from Zhu Xi’s teachings] with his Aquinian-inspired Roman Catholic worldview as it related to philosophical anthropology, whole person development and spiritual sanctification.) 734 L. F. Pfister

McClatchie, Thomas. 1874. Confucian Cosmogony. A Translation of Section Forty-nine of the “Complete Works” of the Philosopher Choo-Foo-tze, with Explanatory Notes. (This is the earliest modern English rendering of a substantial section of Zhu Xi’s works, presented in a Chinese–English bilingual format, accompanied by substantial annotations, and promoting a highly problematic translation and interpretation of the whole text.) Meynard, Thierry S. J. 2011. Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687): The First Translation of the Confucian Classics. Roma: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu. (The author identifies and explains how the 17th century Jesuit translation team that produced this work in 1687 did receive an influence from huZ Xi’s commentaries, but only indirectly and unselfconsciously through reliance on a commentary written by a Ming dynasty imperial tutor, Zhang Juzheng 張居正.) Meynard, Thierry S. J. 2015. The Jesuit Reading of Confucius: The First Translation of the Lunyu (1687) Published in the West. Leiden: Brill. (As in the previous work, this careful interpretive study in multiple languages [Latin, Chinese and English] indicates how this initial rendering of the Lunyu into Latin, by relying on Zhang Juzheng’s commentary and their own preferences, was at times promoting, at times neglecting, and at times opposing Zhu Xi’s commentaries on this seminal Ruist scripture.) Otterspeer, Willem, ed. 1989. Leiden Oriental Connections: 1850–1940. Leiden: E. J. Brill. (Listing and describing in some detail those who studied at Leiden University and then later lived, worked, and produced in oriental locations). Pan, Feng-chuan 潘鳳娟. 2013. “Writing Home from Afar: Julia Ching’s Nostalgic Writing and Her Identity as a Confucian Christian in Diaspora 他鄉遙記:秦家懿的鄉愁書寫與儒家基督徒的離散.” Sinological Studies 漢學研究 31.2: 203–226. (This Taiwanese female scholar assesses her older Taiwanese predecessor in her journey as a Roman Catholic nun, a scholar of 10th to 17th century Chinese intellectual history, and a cancer survivor, as she reflects on her identity as a female Chinese scholar in American and Canadian settings.) Pan, Hsiao Huei 潘小慧. 2015. “The Development of the Ethics of Taiwan Neo-Scholasticism: In the Light of Kao Si-chien, Lo Kuang and Chou Ke-chin 臺灣新士林哲學的倫理學發展:從高思家謙, 羅光, 周克勤談起.” In Universitas 哲學與文化 42.7: 91–108. (Here is a lengthy and informed summary of the development of contemporary New Scholasticism in Taiwan, involving eight major figures, but focusing on the published writings of the three figures mentioned above.) ———. 2016. “Is Chinese Roman Catholic Philosophy Possible? A Discussion Based on The Complete Works of Lo Kuang and [His Work,] The Metaphysical Philosophy of Life 一種中國天主教哲學是否可能?以《羅光全書》和《形上生命哲學》為據的討論.” Universitas 哲學與文化 43.1: 97–112. (Reflecting on Lo Kuang’s heritage as a Chinese Roman Catholic philosopher, this study argues that the New Scholasticism in which he served as a proponent is both feasible and realized within the works Lo published.) Pfister, Lauren F. 1991. “Some New Dimensions in the Study of the Works of James Legge (1815– 1897): Part II.” Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 13: 33–48. (An early detailed discussion of James Legge’s “inheritance” from “China’s Orthodox Traditions,” including his diversified handling of many interpretive issues drawn from Zhu Xi’s works, but also indicating his interest in and reliance on various aspects of the works by two Qing Ruist scholars opposed to Zhu’s interpretaions: Mao Qiling 毛奇齡 (s. Xihe 西河) and Luo Zhongfan 羅仲藩.) ———. 1995. “The Different Faces of Contemporary Religious Confucianism: An Account of the Diverse Approaches of Some Major 20th Century Chinese Confucian Scholars.” The Journal of Chinese Philosophy 22.1: 5–79. (This extensive article argues that there was no singular approach to “religious Confucianism” from the period of the 1958 “Confucian manifesto” produced in Hong Kong till the last decade of the 20th century.) ———. 2004. Striving for “The Whole Duty of Man”: James Legge and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (A lengthy study of the life and works of this fulcrum figure among Protestant missionary-scholars in 19th century China, one 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 735

also significantly influenced by and engaged with Zhu Xi’s commentarial texts, though differ- ing in his metaphysical and religious commitments.) ———. 2010. “China’s Missionary-Scholars.” In Handbook of Christianity in China. Volume Two: 1800 to the Present, edited by R. G. Tiedemann, 742–765. Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill. (In this article the neologized term “missionary-scholar” is defined and illustrated by means of just over 20 specific case studies, also suggesting that there may be as many as 200 missionary- scholars who lived and served in China between 1850 to 1950.) ———. 2011. “Classics or Sacred Books? Grammatological and Interpretive Problems of Ruist and Daoist Scriptures in the Translation Corpora of James Legge (1815–1897) and Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930).” In Max Deeg, Oliver Frieberger, and Christoph Kline, eds., Canonization and Canon Formation in the History of Asian Religions l Kanonizierung und Kanon-bildung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte, 421–63. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. (This is primarily a comparison of Legge’s and Wilhelm’s overall presentation of Ruist scriptures, sometime referring to Zhu Xi, and illustrating the major differences between this Scottish missionary-scholar’s English renderings and the German Lutheran’s controversial German renderings.) ———. 2012. “Post-Secularity within Contemporary Chinese Philosophical Contexts,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39.1: 121–38. (After characterizing de-secularization from an international perspective, this article discusses four ways contemporary Chinese philosophers position themselves in relationship to this de-secularization process, and illustrates them with contemporary examples.) ———. 2013. “Evaluating James Legge’s (1815–1897) Assessment of Master Meng’s Theory of the Goodness of Human Nature: Comparative Philosophical and Cultural Explorations.” Universitas: Monthly Review of Philosophy and Culture 哲學與文化 40.3(March 2013): 107– 130. (The author explains how Legge justified adopting a theory of “human nature able to become good” as a proper understanding of Master Meng’s position, revealing how this was distinct from other approaches traditionally associated with Master Meng’s teachings.) ———. 2015a. “Joaquim Angélico de Jesus Guerra (1906–1993): A Brief Biography and Overview of His Portuguese Chinese Classics.” In Mechthild Leutner and Hauke Neddermann, eds., Challenging Narratives: Blind Spots of Sinology, in Berliner China Heft/Chinese History and Society 46: 25–41. (An introductory overview to the life and sinological works of the Portuguese missionary-scholar, Jaoquim Guerra, the first translator of Chinese classical literature into Portuguese.) ———. 2015b. “The Dynamic and Multi-cultural Disciplinary Crucible in which Chinese Philosophy was Formed.” Minima sinica 1: 33–90. (The article presents the multiform and deeply contested international and national cultural influences that framed the development of the modern disciplines of “Chinese philosophy” during the late Qing and Republican periods.) Qian, Mu 錢穆. 1971. Thematic Outline of the Study of Master Zhu [Xi] 朱子學提綱. Taipei 臺北: Three People’s Book Store 三民書局. (This is a seminal work seeking to organize systematically Zhu Xi’s teachings along thematic lines, constituted on the basis of quotations from his multiform corpus.) Ricci, Matteo 利瑪竇. 2014. Contemporary Annotations to The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven 天主實義今注. Annotated by Thierry Meynard 梅謙立, edited by Tan Jie 譚傑. Beijing 北京: The Commercial Press 商務印書館. (This modern annotated version of the classic text produced by Ricci helps to reveal how Ricci was basically supported an understanding of “ancient Chinese theism” against the alternative metaphysical claims of Zhu Xi and other later Ruists.) Tu, Weiming, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds. 2003–2004. Confucian Spirituality. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. 2 vols. (One of the key works representing the wide variety of claims related to “Confucian Spirituality,” with an attempt by the editors to unite them all under a single, but complex, conception of its theme.) von der Gabelentz, Georg. 1876. Taiji tu of Master Zhou [Dunyi]: The Diagram of the Original Principle with Commentary by Zhu Xi/Thai-kih-thu, des Tscheu-tsi: Tafel des Urprinzips mit 736 L. F. Pfister

Tschu-Hi Kommentare. Dresden. (Originally a doctoral dissertation, this volume presents Zhu Xi’s worldview expressed in the Taijitu shuo and various Categorized Sayings.) Walravens, Hartmut, ed. 2008. Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930): Missionary in China and Advocate for the Good of Chinese Cultured Life / Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930): Mirrionar in China und Vermittler chinesischen Geistesguts. Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica. (Written by a prolific German sinological bibliographer, this study includes both a rediscovered bibliography of the library of the China Institute in Frankfurt that Richard Wilhelm created in the mid-1920s, and a biographical essay on Wilhelm’s life in Beijing [1922–1924] by the German sinologist, Thomas Zimmer.) Wang, Qiu 王秋. 2015. “The Horizons of Scholasticism and Lo Kuang’s Research in Studies of Master Zhu [Xi] 士林哲學視域與羅光的朱子學研究.” In Universitas 哲學與文化 42.7: 91–108. (This is the one article in any language that deals with Lo’s extensive interests in the teachings of Zhu Xi, and indicates a number of key interpretive themes that are culled from many of Lo’s relevant works.) Wieger, Léon 1969. A History of the Religious Beliefs and Philosophical Opinions in China from the Beginning to the Present Time. Trans. Edward Chalmers Werner. New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corporation. (Presented in 77 chapters, this general summary of Chinese philosophical and religious beliefs is written in a lively style, promoting provocative assessments and bibliographic references for each section.) Wilhelm, Richard, trans. and comm. 1910. Confucius Analects [Lunyu] / Kung-Futse Gespräche [Lun Yü]. Jena: Eugen Diederich. (This is the first in a series of classical translations of Ruist and Daoist scriptures into German by a noted missionary-educator from Qingdao, presenting both a “literal” and a “modernized” version of most passages.) ———, trans. and comm. 1916. Mencius (Meng Ke) / Mong Dsi (Mong Ko). Jena: Eugen Diederich. (This was the second volume of the Four Books rendered into German by this noted missionary-educator from Qingdao.) ———. 1929. Chinese Philosophy/Chinesische Philosophie. Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt. (Within this thin volume that covers historical figures from ancient times up to the end of the Qing dynasty, Wilhelm devoted a section to the teachings of Zhu Xi (“Dschu Hi”) and his opponents, describing Zhu as a “systematic spirit of the first order” comparable to Aristotle.) ———. 1930. Li Gi: Das Buch der Sitte der Älteren und Jüngeren Tai. Jena: Eugen Diederich. (This posthumously published volume includes German versions of just over 40 chapters from the Liji, including the “old text” versions of the Zhongyong and Daxue.) Wong, Ching Him Felix 黃正謙. 2013. “On the Latin Translation of Mencius of François Noël, SJ. 論耶穌會士衛方濟的拉丁孟子翻譯.” Journal of Chinese Studies 57 (July 2013): 133–72. (The author clarifies that the 18th century Belgian Jesuit, Noël, did self-consciously employ Zhu Xi’s commentaries in rendering this first modern translation of the whole of the Mengzi in any European language.) ———. 2015. “The Unalterable Mean: Some Observations on the Presentation and Interpretation of Zhongyong of François Noël, SJ.” Journal of Chinese Studies 60 (July 2015): 197–224. (From this study of the Belgian Jesuit’s translation and interpretation of the Zhongyong, the author proves that he did cite Zhu Xi’s commentaries explicitly and regularly, along with commentaries written by Zhang Juzheng and others.) Wu, Qin 吳倩. 2010. “A Comparative Study of the Account of Pre-Qin Ruism in the Works of Lo Kuang and Mou Zongsan 羅光, 牟宗三先秦儒學觀比較研究.” The History of Chinese Philosophy 中國哲學史 1: 93–97. (In this article the account and importance of the pre- imperial Ruist traditions in the works of Lo and Mou are described and compared.) Wylie, Alexander. 1867. Notes on Chinese Literature: With Introductory Remarks on the Progressive Advancement of the Art; and a List of Translations from the Chinese into Various European Languages. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press. (This seminal writing provided a bibliographical introduction to traditional Chinese culture based on over 140 Chinese and dozens of European works [in English, Latin, French, German, Dutch, and Russian] categorized into the four major categories and many subcategories of the 18th cen- 30 Zhu Xi and Christianity 737

tury Qing imperial library [i.e., jing 經, shi 史, zi 子, ji 集, or “classics,” “histories,” “masters,” and “belles-lettres”].) Yao, Xinzhong, ed. 2003. RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism. London: Routledge. Two volumes. (A major contribution to the international and multi-disciplinary study of Ruism, including articles on persons, works, historical schools and related institutions drawn from the histories of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese Ruist schools.) Zenker, Ernst Viktor. 1926. History of Chinese Philosophy: Vol. 1. From the Classical Period to the Han Dynasty/Geschichte der Chinesischen Philosophie: I. Bd. Das klassische Zeitalter bis zu Han Dynastie. Reidenberg: Verlag Gebrüder Stiepel. (The first volume of one of the earliest modern histories of Chinese philosophy in European languages.) ———. 1927. History of Chinese Philosophy: Vol. 2. From the Han Dynasty to the Present/ Geschichte der Chinesischen Philosophie: II. Bd. Von der Han Dynastie bis zur Gegenwart. Reidenberg: Verlag Gebrüder Stiepel. (The second volume of one of the earliest modern histories of Chinese philosophy in European languages.) Zhong, Xinzi. 2014. “A Reconstruction of Zhu Xi’s Religious Philosophy Inspired by Leibniz: The Natural Theology of Heaven.” Ph.D. dissertation, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong. (A comparative philosophical project that argues that Leibniz, while not recognizing Zhu Xi as a distinct intellectual, employed many concepts within Zhu Xi’s metaphysical system that not only anticipated some of Leibniz’s monadic metaphysics, but also justifies a particular panentheistic understanding of tian 天 that qualifies that deity as a distinctive Song Ruist understanding of metaphysical reality.) Zottoli, Angelo. 1879–1882. Course in the Literature of China: For the Use of New Missionaries / Cursus litteraturae sinicae: neo-missionariis accommodates. Chang-hai: ex Typographia Missionis Catholicae in Orphanotrophio Tou-se-we. (Presented in a bilingual Chinese–Latin text in five volumes, with the whole of the Four Books [Volume 2], major selections from the Five Classics [Volume 3], and renderings of numerous works from ancient, older, and more modern literature and poetry [Volumes 4 and 5].)

Lauren F. Pfister is a professor emeritus of the Department of Religion and Philosophy of Hong Kong Baptist University, a life-time member of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, and founder of the Hephzibah Mountain Aster Academy天星花書院 in Colorado, USA. His research and writing have focused on nineteenth and twentieth century Ruist (“Confucian”) philosophy and related texts, including studies of and contributions to the histories of Chinese philosophical traditions. His works have included studies of the history of sinology especially with regard to the lives and works of Christian missionary-scholars, various themes in philosophical, theological, peda- gogical and translation hermeneutics, as well as a fairly wide range of topics in comparative philosophical and comparative religious studies.