Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics

Wm. Theodore de Bary

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231527194
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Asie centrale

Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics is an essential, all-access guide to the core texts of East Asian civilization and culture. Essays address frequently read, foundational texts in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, as well as early modern fictional classics and nonfiction works of the seventeenth century. Building strong links between these writings and the critical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, this volume shows the vital role of the classics in the shaping of Asian history and in the development of the humanities at large.

Wm. Theodore de Bary focuses on texts that have survived for centuries, if not millennia, through avid questioning and contestation. Recognized as perennial reflections on life and society, these works represent diverse historical periods and cultures and include the Analects of Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Xunxi, the Lotus Sutra, Tang poetry, the Pillow Book, The Tale of Genji, and the writings of Chikamatsu and Kaibara Ekken. Contributors explain the core and most commonly understood aspects of these works and how they operate within their traditions. They trace their reach and reinvention throughout history and their ongoing relevance in modern life.

With fresh interpretations of familiar readings, these essays inspire renewed appreciation and examination. In the case of some classics open to multiple interpretations, de Bary chooses two complementary essays from different contributors. Expanding on debates concerning the challenges of teaching classics in the twenty-first century, several pieces speak to the value of Asia in the core curriculum. Indispensable for early scholarship on Asia and the evolution of global civilization, Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics helps one master the major texts of human thought.

1

ASIAN CLASSICS AS THE GREAT BOOKS OF THE EAST

Wm. Theodore de Bary

THE ASIAN CLASSICS may not be included in the “Hundred Great Books” or the “Hundred Great Ideas”¹ today, but the idea of books so challenging to the mind, so close to the human heart, and of such impressive depth or stature as to command the attention of generation after generation is certainly not confined to the Western world. Each of the major Asian civilizations has had its canonical texts and literary classics. Significant differences appear, however, in the way that the classic canon is defined—by whom, for what audience, for what purposes, and in what form. To Muhammad, “the people of the book” was an important concept for locating the spiritual roots of Islam in an earlier prophetic tradition and for affirming a common religious ground in the Bible among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.² Yet it is by no means clear that the books of the Old Testament, or such of the New as he in any way recognized, were thought to be essential reading for his own followers, let alone for the other “people of the book.” Anyone who today reads the great Muslim philosophers and theologians would know that they, no less than St. Augustine and St. Thomas, engaged in significant dialogue with the Greek philosophers and were long ago party to the “Great Conversation” that Mark Van Doren, Lyman Bryson, and Jacques Barzun used to talk about at Columbia and on CBS radio. Though the contributions of Islamic philosophers were rarely acknowledged in the discussion that Bryson held on CBS’s Sunday morning “Invitation to Learning,” in 1978 a published series on Western spirituality recognized that they do indeed belong in this company.³ Here too, however, it is doubtful that in the Muslim world itself the writings of Plato and Aristotle would have been thought essential reading for any but the scholarly few who studied Al-Ghazālī, Avicenna, Averroes, or Ibn Khaldūn.

Hindus had their own sacred scriptures, some lines of which would be on the lips of pious Indians, but for the most part these texts were considered the sacred preserve of learned pandits, not to be read—much less discussed—by the faithful. Among the latter, oral texts had far more currency than written. In China too there were the classics of the Confucian tradition, but again they were the property principally of a learned elite, though Daoist works such as the Laozi and Zhuangzi also figured in cultivated discourse among the literati and thus in a sense qualified as great books even if not as canonical literature.

In Japan, eminent Buddhist monks such as Saichō and Kūkai in the ninth century advanced the idea that, for those who would occupy positions of social as well as clerical importance, a proper training should include the reading of at least some Confucian classics, together with the major scriptures of Mahāyāna Buddhism. So assiduously cultivated in Heian Japan was this classical study that even court ladies such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, great writers in the vernacular Japanese literature of the eleventh century, had themselves read the major Confucian classics along with the monumental Chinese histories and leading Tang poets, and they would have disdained as uncouth and illiterate anyone who had not done the same. Important later writers in Japan as diverse as the monk-essayist Kenkō in the fourteenth century, the teacher of military science Yamaga Sokō in the seventeenth century, and the great nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga in the eighteenth all had read the classic Confucian and Daoist texts as part of their mixed cultural inheritance, whether or not they identified themselves with either of the traditions from which these works derived. Thus the latter were read by non-Chinese too as great books that commanded attention even when not compelling assent.

In this respect, the Japanese (along with the Koreans and Vietnamese, who shared the same Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist literature) may have been more accustomed to multicultural learning than some other Asian peoples who rarely recognized as classics the major works of traditions other than their own. As a general rule, certainly, the traditions transmitting these texts were apt to be socially circumscribed and more or less culture bound within the limits of a common “classical” literature. As religions, their appeal might be more universal, but in the transmission of texts they stood out as high classical traditions—“great traditions” for the few rather than little traditions shared in by the many. Their “great books” were most often scriptures preserved and read by particular religious communities or classics cherished by the bearers of high culture. A main reason for this lay in the fact that most classics and scriptures were preserved in difficult classical or sacred languages, and even popular works in the vernacular tended over time to become inaccessible, because spoken tongues, more subject to change (being less fixed and disciplined than classical languages), tend toward their own kind of obsolescence. The recognized “classics” of popular fiction too, as well as philosophical and religious dialogues in the vernacular (such as Zen dialogues or Neo-Confucian “recorded conversations”), could be so studded with colloquialisms as to present special difficulties for readers of a later age.

One can hardly exaggerate the persistence and pervasiveness of this problem in communication. Modern writers sometimes assume that the restricted readership of classical literature in Asian societies is mainly attributable to an exclusivity or possessiveness on the part of the custodians of the high tradition. Their monopoly of learning, it is supposed, gave them a vested interest in preserving sacred knowledge as something precious, recondite, and out of the ordinary man’s reach. The Confucian literati, one is told, both jealously guarded the purity and reveled in the complexity of a written language the masses were not supposed to touch. Buddhist monks of Heian Japan, historians often say or imply, deliberately mystified religious learning so as to insure their own dominance over credulous masses.

Such imputations are not without some basis, as for instance in the case of the Confucian literati in fifteenth-century Korea who resisted the development and use of a new alphabet for their native language because it would compete for attention with Chinese language and literature—an argument not unmixed with the concern of some to maintain their own privileged position as dispensers of the Chinese classical tradition. Yet there are contrary cases. For example, the leading Japanese monk Kūkai, himself a spokesman for the so-called Esoteric School of Buddhism, advocated public schooling in the ninth century, and Zhu Xi, the great Neo-Confucian philosopher of the twelfth century, was a strong advocate of universal education through public schools. Zhu devoted himself to editing and simplifying the classics with a view to making them more understandable for ordinary persons. Since other leading Neo-Confucians after Zhu Xi took up this cause in their writings, the limited success of their efforts must have been due to factors other than the lack of good intentions. Chief among these were probably (1) the perception of peasants in a predominantly agrarian society that learning yielded few economic benefits unless one could convert it into official position or status and (2) the government’s lack of interest in the matter beyond the needs of bureaucratic recruitment. In such circumstances, for those with little leisure to dispose of, the difficulties of mastering the great books in classical languages might not seem worth the costs.

In some ways Zhu Xi, as an educator trying to reach beyond his immediate scholarly audience, was the Mortimer Adler of his time, but he would probably have thought a reading list of One Hundred Great Books too ambitious. His goal was to reach the aspiring youth of every village and hamlet in China, for which he recommended a shorter list: a program based on the Confucian Four Books and his own compact anthology of Song-dynasty thought, Reflections on Things at Hand (Jin-si-lu). Zhu’s competition in those days, the Chan (Zen) masters, were offering enlightenment at no cost in terms of reading, and Zen painters even portrayed sages tearing up the scriptures. Too much booklearning was already seen as injurious to the health, and Zhu Xi himself, as well as his Neo-Confucian predecessors, favored the careful reading of a few books, as well as reflection over them and discussion with others, instead of a superficial acquaintance with many. Hence he was modest in his initial demands, trying to keep his reading program simple and within people’s means and capabilities.

In his efforts along this line, Zhu very early reached the Aspen phase of his Great Books movement, when snippets and selections would often have to serve in place of whole books if the reading was to be done by other than scholars. Two of his Four Books, in fact, were selected short chapters from the classic Record of Rites: “The Great Learning” and “The Mean.” These he further revised and edited in order to make the texts more coherent, systematic, and integral—shaping them according to what, in his mind, the classic form must have been.

Zhu Xi also had his rough equivalent of Aspen in sylvan retreats such as the historic White Deer Grotto near Mount Lu, at the deep bend in the Yangzi River, where he conducted colloquia on the Confucian classics for his students and other literati of the day. But so concerned was he with the larger educational needs of his society and with developing a cradle-to-grave approach for the individual that he even directed the compilation of a preparatory text called the Elementary Learning (Xiao xue), as a guide to the training of the young before they took up the Four Books and Five Classics.

For all of these efforts at providing a Reader’s Digest of the Confucian classics, Zhu never attempted to translate his scriptures into a Vulgate. Even the Elementary Learning was composed of so many excerpts in classical Chinese that it would serve better as a teacher’s manual than as a student’s primer. Followed or accompanied by the Four Books and then by the Five Classics, it became part of the standard classical curriculum throughout East Asia and had a remarkable diffusion for premodern times, yet it remained constrained by the severe limits that the classical Chinese language imposed on its adaptability to popular audiences and changing times. In China, this system lasted down to 1905, when the pressure to adopt Western scientific learning led to the scrapping of Zhu’s humanistic core curriculum based on the Chinese classics.

Half a world away and by a curious historical coincidence, at about the same time that Chinese classical learning was being abandoned, American college education was being cut loose from its old moorings in classical studies. At what was sometimes called the new “Acropolis on the Hudson,” which Columbia presidents Seth Low and Nicholas Murray Butler were erecting on Morningside Heights in the early decades of this century, the old language requirements in Greek and Latin, along with the reading of the classics in the original, were giving way to a new educational approach. John Erskine, following George Woodberry, championed the idea that all the benefits of a liberal education in the classics need not be lost even if Greek and Latin were no longer obligatory, provided that undergraduates could read and discuss the classics in translation. This was the germ of Erskine’s Honors course, first offered just after World War I, out of which grew the later Great Books movement.

When purists objected that something of these classics would be lost by reading them in translation, Erskine countered by asking how many readers of the Bible in his day felt able, or found it necessary, to read the Good Book in its original languages. If that rhetorical question answered itself in Erskine’s favor, it was at least partly because his largely WASP audience (a convenient example, by the way, of a colloquialism that may well, a century or so from now, require a footnote to make it understood) was so accustomed to reading and appreciating the Bible in the King James version that they would no doubt have thought something would be lost by reading it in the original.

What Erskine at least implied, if he did not actually say as much, was that great books could be read like the Good Book—that the principal measure of a great book was its having something to say so universal, so perennial, and so personal that it could speak to the human individual even through the medium of translation. Strict logic or hermeneutic method might resist an argument so circular, considering how readily one could be persuaded of a book’s greatness if what one most wished to believe could be read into it through translation. As a practical matter, however, and for public purposes, some process of consensus among translators and readers has decided what would be thought sufficiently meaningful and of lasting value to be worth everybody’s effort. In this way, enough such books have been made available in translation so that there are plenty for the individual to choose from on his or her own terms.

If great books were to be read for something of the deep meaning found in the Good Book, something too of a missionary zeal went into propagating the Great Books idea. Its advocates brought to the new movement a depth of conviction and evangelical zeal rarely seen in academic enterprises. The original locale may have been the classroom, but the spread of the Great Books program well beyond the halls of academe had something of the old-time religion about it, as if the religious roots of the early Ivy League foundations had taken on new life in the liberal, cosmopolitan atmosphere of New York, later to be transplanted to Chicago, Annapolis, Aspen, or wherever the populist spirit and new technology—rather than a stuffy traditionalism—might carry it.

An essential feature of the new movement was its insistence on the discussion method. The Honors course, as a colloquium, reasserted not only the primacy of the classics but also the importance of reading the classics for what they had to say about life as a whole, combining ideas and value judgments that were increasingly, in Erskine’s day, becoming pigeonholed in one or another academic compartment. The discussion method rejected the idea that all learning should be presented in lectures, as specialized subjects taught by authoritative scholars to receptive—but largely passive—students. This latter method had become almost universal with the eclipse of classical education, but Erskine and his followers led a counterrevolution in American education to reassert the kind of intimate, personal engagement of teachers and students that has become increasingly recognized as a necessary antidote to the impersonality and passive ingestion so typical of large lecture classes.

Lionel Trilling once observed that the transition at Columbia from the old-style classical education for gentlemen of the Hudson Valley to the new liberal education was accompanied by a demographic shift toward the assimilation of bright young members of New York’s immigrant populations—especially Jewish, Irish, and Italian—into the educated class. Trilling did not himself mention it, so far as I know, but the published memoirs of Diana Trilling suggest to me that there was in this process a strong admixture of New York Jewish intellectuality, with its legacy of Talmudic discourse from the ghettoes of Europe. That intense speculative and probing mode of discourse could well, it has seemed to me, have entered into the Great Conversation over the Great Books at that particular time in our cultural history. In any case, I shall continue in this belief for more anecdotal reasons than it is appropriate to recite here, where I am dealing with the Great Books of the East rather than with the good news of the Great Books as carried by the apostles to the Midwest.

What was then newly depicted as a great conversation over the ...