Iconoclasm, Holistic Vision, and Patient Watchfulness: A Personal Reflection on the Modern Chinese Intellectual Quest Author(s): Tu Wei-ming Source: Daedalus, Vol. 116, No. 2, Past and Present (Spring, 1987), pp. 75-94 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025097 Accessed: 10-05-2019 02:46 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Academy of Arts & Sciences, The MIT Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Daedalus This content downloaded from 222.29.122.77 on Fri, 10 May 2019 02:46:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Tu Wei-ming Iconoclasm, Holistic Vision, and Patient Watchfulness: A Personal Reflection on the Modern Chinese Intellectual Quest Joseph R. Levenson, in his thought-provoking interpretation of Confucian China and its modern fate, lamented that "there has been so much forgetting in modern Chinese history" and that "the current urge to preserve, the historical mood, does not bely it." To underscore "the forgetting," he thought fit to conclude a story of China with a tale of the Hasidim: When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer?and what he had set out to perform was done.