The fifteen exponents of New Ru Learning (supplement to chapter 9)

Table of contents

1. Additional text 2. Notes

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) in , Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 1. Additional text

In chapter 9, I explained how a major research project headed by Fang Keli eventually settled on 15 individuals said to be the prime representatives of New Ru Learning. I also mentioned that few of the 15 in fact closely conformed to the criteria being used to define the movement. This supplement offers brief intellectual biographies of each of these thinkers. This should further clarify my decision to focus on a few select individuals in chapter 9. There has been some debate over the ordering of ‘generations’. Besides their raw age, the generations as I present them correspond to Chinese political developments. The first generation’s most important philosophical works predate the formation of the PRC in 1949. Some of them remained to subsequently defend or revise their ideas under Mao while others left the country for Taiwan, Hong Kong and the USA. The second generation contains scholars who studied under mainland teachers but whose thinking came to maturity abroad. The second generation defines the core of New Ru Learning. Together with Zhang Junmai, they constitute the signatories of the Manifesto of 1958. It was the fact that they were all followers of Xiong Shili which subsequently saw him being identified as the patriarch of the movement. The third generation completed their education overseas. While they have not produced grand philosophical edifices like their predecessors their presence has redefined all that preceded them. Referring in particular to Tu Weiming and Liu Shuxian, John Makeham has observed: ‘It is [the so-called third generation New Confucians] that, together with post-1985 mainland scholars, retrospectively created the very idea of as a philosophical school with its own self-identity.’i * First Generation A. First generation who remained in the PRC. Liang Shuming (1893-1988) is discussed in chapter 8. He did not receive a classical education and only became a self-made scholar in adulthood. He was primarily attracted to and the Buddhist-influenced teachings of and his followers. His highly influential Dongxi wenhua ji zhexue (Eastern and Western Cultures and their

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC ) began a vogue for defining the fundamental differences between East and West and in that context he gave the impression that he saw Ru thought as embodying the ultimate philosophical stance. This was the position adopted by Xiong Shili, with whom Liang disagreed. Liang himself retained his allegiance to Buddhism and he is thus usually regarded as a precursor of Xin ruxue rather than an advocate of its tenets. While headstrong and outspoken, Liang was effectively silenced by Mao.

Xiong Shili (1885-1968) is usually considered the founder of Xin ruxue and is discussed in chapters 8 and 9. Although from a poor family and orphaned at a young age he nonetheless managed to study the Classics while also herding cows and eventually came to assist Liang Shuming teaching Buddhist . In his Xin weishi lun (New Treatise on Weishi) he draws heavily upon Consciousness Only (weishi) Buddhist thought but tries to show how it was superseded by authentic Ru Philosophy. Xiong managed to avoid being heavily monitored or persecuted when the Communists came to power, although he too suffered during the . His metaphysics changed very little in this period but he reworked the political implications of his ideas so that Kongzi was presented as a champion of socialist revolution. Xiong Shili’s direct influence on the three second generation exponents of Xin ruxue (Tang Junyi, and Mou Zongsan) provided the primary lineage which shaped and defined the movement.

Ma Yifu (1883-1967) had a traditional Ru education and had done exceptionally well in examinations. Although he lived in the USA for a year and poured himself into Western learning (from Aristotle to Darwin and Marx) he returned to China and never alluded to Western ideas thereafter. He was reclusive by temperament and established a short-lived academy to restore traditional education. He was unusually well treated by officials of the new PRC but was nonetheless persecuted by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, which probably hastened his death. While highly regarded, he was seen more as a quaint relic of Song-Ming scholarship than an active participant in the new synthetic ideas that distinguish Xin ruxue.

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Feng Youlan (1895-1990) studied at where he trained under Liang Shuming amongst others. Later, he took his doctorate at Columbia University where John Dewey was his mentor. Feng is primarily known, East and West, for his histories of . Although he developed some original ideas from concepts found in , he was hardly a champion of Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy. Indeed Feng later reflected that it was only on the eve of the Communist takeover that he ‘became dissatisfied with being a historian and became a philosopher’.ii As a historian, Feng had great enthusiasm for his subject matter, but as a philosopher he seemed to be - sometimes to a greater extent and at other times to a lesser degree - Marxist. Feng has been the most controversial inclusion amongst the New Ru.

He Lin (1902-1992) obtained some university education in China before going to the United States and studying under Alfred North Whitehead who inspired in him an interest in the resonance between Song-Ming Principle Learning and Spinoza’s philosophy. He subsequently became more engaged with Neo-Hegelian thought and so continued his education in Berlin, before returning to teach in China. Despite the fact that he first identified the emergence of ‘Xin rujia’ in twentieth century China and spoke highly of Liang Shuming and Xiong Shili, and notwithstanding his regard for Ru philosophical and ethical legacies, He was at heart primarily Hegelian. He chose to stay in mainland China when the Communists came to power and he soon renounced Hegelian to embrace dialectical materialism and he joined the campaigns to critique Liang Shuming and others.

B. First generation who departed the PRC. Zhang Junmai (Carson Chang, 1886-1869) was certainly closely affiliated with the core group who came to define Xin ruxue. A friend and with some reservations a follower of Liang Qichao who had in turn been a (not uncritical) follower of and collaborator with Kang Youwei, Zhang was first and foremost a frustrated politician who sought to introduce democracy in China. Philosophically, he professed a blend of Song-Ming Principle Learning with Kantian and Hegelian idealism but he insisted that China’s future could not be tied to any ‘ism’ and maintained Kongzi himself advocated tolerance of philosophical pluralism. He was, with Tang Junyi, Xu Fuguan and Mou Zongsan a signatory of the Manifesto of 1958,

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC which he had in fact initiated, but unlike Tang and Mou he did not see Ru Learning as inherently religious and he did not demand the recognition of an orthodox lineage of interpretation (daotong). Traveling widely to experience a spectrum of political systems in practice, he is perhaps best seen as a less doctrinaire supporter of the philosophies being developed by his co-signatories.

Qian Mu (1895-1990) was to a large extent self-educated but his publications on Chinese intellectual history were of such a high quality that he was offered a university post at Peking University. He was branded a conservative and chose to retreat to Hong Kong when the Communists came to power in 1949. There, with Tang Junyi, he founded the New Asia College which came to be seen as the focus of Xin ruxue. In 1967 he moved to Taiwan. He definitely deemed the Chinese national ethos to have been primarily shaped by Ru values and these he believed were of cardinal importance to China’s future. He was nonetheless disinclined to push a particular interpretation of Ru learning. His student Yu Yingshi (see below) has stressed that while his teacher was a close friend of those now deemed to be core advocates of Xin ruxue, he did not fully endorse their views. He declined to sign the Manifesto of 1958 and was not willing to promote their sectarian interpretations. He is more accurately seen as a sympathetic historian of Ru tradition rather that an advocate of a specific form of its revival.

Fang Dongmei (Thomé H. Fang, 1899-1977) once said: ‘I am a Confucian by family tradition; a Daoist by temperament; a Buddhist by religious inspiration; moreover, I am a Westerner by training.’iii Fang had too great an appreciation for the ultimate mystery of existence and too great a love for the vast diversity of human attempts to fathom that mystery, to be a dogmatic advocate of any one philosophical view. He had studied the Classics as a child and whilst at university in was inspired by a visit by John Dewey to continue his education in the USA. He was particularly attracted to the ideas of Bergson, William James and Hegel but he also researched ancient Greek Philosophy and, at a later date, Indian thought. While he felt Kongzi, Mengzi and Xunzi possessed great insight into the unity of matter and spirit and the possibility of realizing universal harmony, he had little enthusiasm for subsequent Ru thought and would not accept the notion of a daotong which

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC is seen as a distinctive feature of Xin ruxue. Indeed, as he felt the Daoist had an even clearer vision of comprehensive harmony than Kongzi, it seems quite inappropriate to label Fang ‘Ru’ in any exclusive sense.

Second Generation Xu Fuguan (1903-1982) was initially devoted to a military life and reached the rank of major general. He met and was deeply impressed by Xiong Shili in 1943, just two years before becoming a civilian. After retiring from the army, he turned to journalism but fled China in 1949 and resettled in Hong Kong. There, he began the Democratic Review (Minzhu Pinglun), a magazine to which Tang Junyi and Mou Zongzan enthusiastically contributed and which first published the famed Manifesto of 1958. In 1961, he moved to Taiwan to become a professor of Chinese literature. Xu differed in one fundamental way from Xiong Shili and his friends Tang and Mou. In his most important work, the History of the Theory of Human in China (Zhongguo renxinglun shi, 1963 & 1979) he argued that China had, at an early date, turned away from religion and metaphysics towards humanistic ethics. Xu was thus primarily concerned to show how the moral and political ideas of Kongzi and especially Mengzi contributed to a more profound understanding of democracy. In particular, he advanced the cause of modern institutional democracy informed by the Ru notion of humane () government.

Tang Junyi (1909-1978) had studied philosophy under Fang Dongmei and Xiong Shili before himself becoming a philosophy professor. He moved to Hong Kong in 1949 where, with Qian Mu and others, he founded the New Asia College. Tang was in accord with his close friend Mou Zongsan on many fundamental points. Both focused on a metaphysic derived from the unity of heart-mind (xin) and nature (xing) and both saw Ru teachings as anticipating, and thus being compatible with, liberal democracy. I have chosen to use Mou as my representative to discuss in more detail because of the subsequent influence of his teaching but, in their own right, Tang’s distinctive ideas are equally worthy. He was a prolific writer and his final and most ambitious work Life, Existence and the Horizons of the Heart- Mind (Shengming cunzai yu xinling jingjie, 1977) has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is something of a compendium of world philosophies organized in a manner comparable to,

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and influenced by, Hegel’s history of World Spirit. In it, he categorizes various cultural and religious phenomena depending on whether the heart-mind is oriented towards the objective world, subjective experience or the horizon which transcends the distinction between subjective and objective. Each of these is further subdivided into three (based on their orientation towards substance, form or function), giving a total of nine separate horizons. At the trans-subjective-objective level, for instance, orientation towards substance leads to the monotheistic God, orientation towards form is associated with Buddhist Emptiness while orientation toward function becomes the Ru notion of Heaven manifest as moral living due to the unity of Heaven (tian), heart-mind (xin) and nature (xing). While Tang personally advocated this final position he was genuinely appreciative of the other stances and respectful of philosophical difference.

Mou Zongsan (1909-1995) is the hub that holds Xin ruxue together and he is considered in detail in chapter 9. It is his prominence and influence that ignited a widespread enthusiasm for New Ru Learning. It is also because of the esteem in which Mou held his teacher Xiong Shili that Xiong came to be retrospectively identified as the founding patriarch of the movement. Mou’s impact through his pupils, in particularly Tu Weiming, has also contributed to the resurgence of Xin ruxue in mainland China. Mou was a great admirer of Kant and once said all previous Western philosophy converged on Kant and all subsequent philosophy, even if opposed him, had to pass through Kant.iv Many of his followers ascribe the same status to Mou himself in the history of Chinese philosophy. Of this, Mou would approve. Besides his prolific output, his undeniable brilliance and his infuriatingly obscure prose, there is a doctrinaire tone to his teaching that encourages discipleship rather than discussion. This, as we saw in chapter 6, was also characteristic of the great revivalists of the Song dynasty. Mou took pains to argue that his was the legitimate continuation of the daotong and so claimed his place amongst its rightful exponents. He saw himself as very much the man to usher in a third epoch of Ru Learning. His critics took exception to what they saw as his religious dogmatism, his sect-leader posturing and his brashness toward anyone with whom he did not agree.

Third Generation.

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Yu Yingshi (b. 1930) had studied under Qian Mu before leaving for Hong Kong in 1950. He completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1962 and has gone on to teach in both the USA and Hong Kong. His concern for accurate history has prompted his criticisms of Mou Zongsan’s brand of Xin ruxue. He protested that his teacher Qian Mu was inappropriately conscripted into their ranks when he had in fact refused to recognize an orthodox daotong or sign the Manifesto of 1958. In Yu’s opinion, the essence of Ru Learning as defined by Xiong Shili and Mou Zongsan is based upon little more than an appeal to some special gnosis allowing them to divine the ‘authentic’ crux of the tradition. Yu has great appreciation for China’s religious and philosophical traditions and he is not adverse to suggestions that the country could benefit from their revival or that the world can learn from their insights. What he dislikes is poor history being used to promote sectarian agendas.

Cheng Zhongying (b. 1935) fled China with his father in 1949 and settled in Taiwan where he later studied under Fang Dongmei. Like Fang, he has a broad and respectful appreciation of world philosophies. He completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1963 and thereafter taught at the University of Hawai’i. Befitting its location, the University of Hawai’i is renown for promoting East-West philosophical dialogue, to which Cheng has been a major contributor. With a very solid grasp of both Chinese and Western philosophy, Cheng is not interested in advancing any particular doctrine but is rather committed to facilitating intellectual exchange between the two philosophical resources and the hermeneutic challenges of mutual understanding. Cheng does not privilege Ruism over other Chinese philosophies nor does he exalt China above the West. This, of course, does not preclude him recognizing and valuing uniqueness in Ru tradition. He has a mixed attitude towards Xiong Shili and the second generation of Xin ruxue and both admires their achievements yet feels their comparative interpretations were marred by an inadequate understanding of Western philosophy.

Tu Weiming ( Du Weiming, b. 1940) was born in Yunnan province and studied under Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan in Taiwan before continuing his academic training at Harvard. After gaining his doctorate, he taught at Princeton, Berkley and, since 1981, at Harvard University although he concurrently holds a professorship at Peking University. Tu is

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

an insightful scholar whose concise books and essays are rich in acumen and are especially perceptive concerning the subtleties of Ru religiosity. Tu played a major role in the return of Xin Rujia to the PRC and in facilitating its subsequent revival. His primary concern is to provide information for the integration of Ru tradition into the modern world rather than specifying particular outcomes. He has not advocated any orthodoxy nor made claim to the superiority of Ruism over other faiths. It has been rightly observed that ‘Du Weiming’s main concern is not to build some sort of [philosophical] system, but rather to show how Confucianism – as an intellectual resource – can possibly have an influence on modern people’s lives and society.’v

Liu Shuxian’s (b. 1934) father, a close friend of Xiong Shili, encouraged his interest in Ru philosophy. In 1949 Liu retreated to Taiwan where he studied under Fang Dongmei who introduced him to the world of comparative philosophy. Later, he became a colleague of Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan who greatly inspired Liu as a young academic. Liu then moved to the USA to complete a doctorate on the theologian Paul Tillich. He thereafter taught at Southern Illinois University but was seconded to the New Asia College when both Tang Junyi and Mou Zongsan retired in 1974. He transferred permanently in 1981 and was there well positioned to launch major projects documenting and promoting Xin ruxue. He maintains Ruism has a great contribution to make to global ethics and interreligious dialogue and he feels the dictum ‘Principle is one but manifestations are many’ perfectly encapsulates the search for common ground in a pluralistic world. John Makeham has argued that Liu is the only representative of the third generation that approximates the defining features of Xin ruxue and who thus ‘may be seen to have assumed the mantle of facto successor to the Xiong-Mou lineage.’vi (Makeham 2003: 71).

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2. Notes i John Makeham, ‘The New Daotong.’ In New Confucianism: A Critical Examination, edited by John Makeham, 55-78. New York: Palgrave, 2003, p. 68. ii Feng Youlan, The Hall of Three Pines: An Account of My Life. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000, p. 368. iii Chenyang, ‘Fang Dongmei: Philosophy of Life, Creativity, and Inclusiveness.’ In Contemporary Chinese Philosophy, edited by Chung- ying Cheng and Nicholas Bunnin, 263-280. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002, p. 264. ivTang Renfeng, ‘Mou Zongsan on Intellectual Intuition.’ In Contemporary Chinese Philosophy, edited by Chung-ying Cheng and Nicholas Bunnin, 327-346. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, p. 332. v Zheng Jiadong cit. Makeham, The New Daotong, p. 68 vi Makeham, The New Daotong, p. 71

https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC