On Friendship

One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince

Matteo Ricci, Timothy Billings

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231520287
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Asian History

"On Friendship, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."—Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship—the first book to be written in Chinese by a European—that instantly became a late Ming best seller.

On Friendship distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure and provocative Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true.

Available for the first time in English, On Friendship matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, On Friendship is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation.

INTRODUCTION

A FRIEND FROM AFAR

I n 1595, when an upstart player named William Shakespeare was writing a fantastical comedy in English verse called A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the London stage, on the opposite side of the globe, in the southern Chinese city of Nanchang

, an equally remarkable man named Matteo Ricci was composing an essay on friendship in the formal diction of classical Chinese. Ricci called his essay simply You lun

(Essay on Friends), a title that would later be changed under the influence of one of Ricci’s many Chinese friends to the more resonant Jiaoyou lun

(Essay on Friendship), the name by which it is known and loved by Chinese intellectuals even today.

For many readers, Matteo Ricci needs no introduction. To anyone with a high-school education in China, he is also instantly recognizable by the Chinese name that he chose for himself, Li Madou

. As a talented scholar with an extraordinary memory and a gift for languages, as the most eminent cofounder of the Jesuit mission in China (which Saint Francis Xavier had struggled in vain to establish shortly before his death off the coast of China in 1552), as the first European to gain access to the imperial Forbidden City in Beijing, and as the first European to have his writings included in an imperial anthology (including this essay on friendship), Ricci has become almost legendary as a figure who braved apparently insurmountable odds in order to forge meaningful cultural connections between Europe and China. Even as a Christian missionary whose chief aim was the saving of souls through baptism and conversion, Ricci has been admired—and also severely criticized—for his attempts to adapt or “accommodate” Christian teachings to Chinese cultural expectations in addition to spreading secular European knowledge related to cartography, mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, philosophy, music, and visual art. After a dozen tumultuous years in southern China, Ricci was still five years away from obtaining permission to visit the imperial court in Beijing at the time that he wrote this essay on friendship, but his intelligence and his familiarity with the Confucian classics along with his dignified bearing had already begun to earn him influential Chinese friends of the scholar-official class. The essay would win him many more.

In fact, the staggering popularity of the essay was to play a crucial role in all his subsequent missionary efforts by establishing Ricci’s reputation as a Western sage whose unusual teachings were worthy of consideration. Within a year of its composition, Ricci wrote in a letter to Rome: “There are so many people who ask to see it and to transcribe it that I never have any copies on hand to show.”¹ The same year, in 1596, a local official from a nearby town who had become a great friend to the Jesuits decided to have it published without Ricci’s knowledge.² (Ricci stressed this point, since the Jesuits were not allowed to print without approval from Rome, which could take years, but in the same letter he also praised the friend’s good soul for doing so.) Within the next five years, two other editions were independently printed, in 1599 and 1601, by two other Chinese friends, also without Ricci’s permission or knowledge, thus quickly turning it into the late Ming equivalent of a best seller. In a letter of 1599, Ricci wrote: “This Friendship has earned more credit for me and for our Europe than anything else that we have done; because the others do us credit for mechanical and artificial things of hands and tools; but this does us credit for literature, for wit, and for virtue.”³ A decade later, in 1609, when Ricci was compiling his journals for later publication in Europe, he reported that the essay still “astounds all the kingdom” (fa stupire a tutto questo regno), that it had been repeatedly printed both in Beijing and in other provinces with great applause from all scholars, that it had made for him many friendships and caused him to be known by many important people, and that it had already begun to be quoted in important Chinese books.⁴

Ricci probably knew that as early as 1602 about a third of the essay had been excerpted with slight revisions to the style in Wang Kentang’s

(1549–1613) influential anthology Yugang zhai bizhu

(Pen Notes from the Lush Ridge Studio).⁵ But the extraordinary popularity of the work is demonstrated by its repeated anthologizing in full or in part by other Chinese writers after Ricci’s death, including such authors as Wu Congxian

(1614), Chen Jiru

(1615), Jiang Xuqi

(1616), Feng Kebin

(1622), Zhu Tingdan

(1626), and Tao Zongyi

(1646).⁶ In addition to all these versions, Ricci’s friend and former collaborator, Li Zhizao

(1565–1630), prepared what has long been considered to be the definitive edition (although it bears some of the latter’s emendations) in a multivolume anthology of Jesuit Chinese writings printed two decades after Ricci’s death as the Tianxue chuhan

(First Writings of Heavenly Studies, 1629).⁷

Most impressively of all, the whole of Ricci’s work (lacking only the proem) was reprinted in the first of the great imperial libraries, or congshu

(collectanea), of the eighteenth century, the Gujin tushu jicheng

(The Compendium of Ancient and Modern Books and Illustrations, hereafter TSJC) in 1725. Ricci had written brief commentaries to a number of maxims using the half-size characters normally reserved for scholarly exegesis on classical texts, thus cleverly creating for his text the look and feel of an instant classic. At the end of the essay, however, the editors of the TSJC write: “Note: Since the Essay on Friends is literature from the Western Regions, the explanatory comments are extremely difficult to understand!” (

). To be sure, the commentaries rarely do more than repeat the main idea...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• On Friendship
• Chronology of Editions
• Texts and Variants
• Sources and Notes
• Index