Those were the problems raised by Longobardo’s challenge. To a Western mind the incense and prostrations before ancestral tablets seemed superstitious—to be condemned as forcibly as Ricci had condemned Buddhist funeral rites—but twenty years’ experience of China, poor and rich, together with a profound knowledge of her holy books had taught Ricci, who was always ready to recognise and admire good, whatever its setting, to look beneath the outwardly scandalous performance to the thoughts and motives inspiring the action: in fact, to apply the principles of the New rather than of the Old Testament. He had concluded that the rites to ancestors and Confucius were pious not superstitious ceremonies and could therefore be safely tolerated, though Christians should be encouraged to spend their money to better purpose on alms for the poor.
Valignano discussed the problem with Dias. As early as 1592 the Visitor, faced with a similar dilemma in Japan, had written to Rome suggesting that everything possible should be conceded without countenancing even the suspicion of idolatry or infringing the Faith. The missionaries were dealing with a different mentality and age-old customs: in Israel itself, prepared as it was by centuries of prophecy, the early Christians had turned to good account all that was not hostile. If that had been necessary within the framework of the same civilisation, how much more necessary in a vastly different one.
Eleven years’ further experience had confirmed him in this view. After a detailed consideration of the rites question, Valignano informed Ricci that he wholeheartedly approved his present practice.
chapter eleven
Clash with the Buddhists
Helped by Pantoja, who was able now to speak and write Chinese, Ricci began to reap a harvest among the influential men of Peking. Their first converts included a nobleman, married to the sister of the Emperor’s consort, “the pious and modest Empress” Hsiao Tun; two sons of the imperial physician and a nephew of the Minister of Justice. The most brilliant was Li Ying-shih. Five years younger than Ricci, he had commanded a regiment in the Korean war before succeeding his father as “General who owes his rank to meritorious relatives” in the imperial bodyguard. A mathematician, he lived in Peking with his mother, wife and children, and came to know Ricci through his scientific teaching. Primarily an astrologer and an expert in casting horoscopes, Li also knew how to choose the site of a grave or a new house, and the right time to transact business: for which he was esteemed and often consulted at court. To embrace Christianity would mean abandoning his role of cosmic wizard, even—so he imagined—calling his predictions coincidences and himself a charlatan. By explaining that past successes had been obtained through the devil’s agency, Ricci showed a sympathy which made conversion possible.
Li was baptised with the name of Paul on the feast of Ricci’s own patron saint, 1602. It took him three whole days to destroy the geomantic books in his fine library, most of them manuscript works based on his own calculations and occult formulae collected from all over China. He burned the books publicly, both to proclaim his new creed and to show his former clients that he was no longer a practising astrologer. His mother, wife and two sons were presently converted, together with his old tutor and several servants. He constructed a chapel in his house and had one of his sons, a boy of fourteen, taught the difficult Latin responses so that he could serve Ricci’s Mass.
It was Ricci’s custom to introduce fasting gradually during Lent and on the vigils of feast-days, but from Macaonese students at the mission house Li learnt and at once scrupulously followed the strict Christian practices. Learning too that a plenary indulgence was granted to anyone making a convert, he determined to achieve this goal. He wanted to travel to Macao to be confirmed by the bishop, but family business soon obliged him to return to his native province of Hukwang. There he baptised several friends in articulo mortis, using the formula which Ricci had transliterated from the Latin: Uo-ngo te pa-ti-zo in no-mi-no Pa-te-li-se uo-te Fei-li-i uo-te Se-pei-li-tu-se San-co-ti. Ia-mom: I replacing r, and p, t, s, c, being united to a vowel, since otherwise they were incapable of being pronounced. After the baptisms Paul Li wrote Ricci a triumphant letter—he had gained his plenary pardon at last.
As notable converts increased, it became generally known that the new religion would not tolerate any other creed. The Buddhists, foreseeing the danger should the Emperor, their chief protector, be converted, rallied to the attack. One of Ricci’s new opponents was a well-known poet and prose-writer called Huang Hui, who at fourteen had taken the degree of master and now held the high post of Assistant Supervisor of Instruction and Lecturer of the Imperial Academy. He was also tutor to the Emperor’s eldest son, who through Huang’s influence had recently been proclaimed heir to the throne. His wife had died when he was forty, and Huang had become a Buddhist contemplative, practising fasting and abstinence. Through Ts’ai, Governor of the Castle of Barbarians, he obtained the loan of certain manuscript writings on which Ricci was then engaged. These he perused with a fellow member of the Imperial Academy, writing comments in the margin, Huang in black ink, his friend in red. The notion that God was separate from the human soul seemed particularly ridiculous to Huang, whose sect followed the teaching of Liu Tsung-chou: “Beings are not beings, I am not I; we all form a single substance.” When the manuscripts were returned, Ricci, knowing that Huang was planning to give the Emperor a memorial against the missionaries, kept prudent silence. However, he devoted a chapter of his Catechism to monist attacks, without naming their advocates. His chief argument was that if man were of the same substance as God, then the contrary would be true, in which case, given that acts belong to individuals, not to their instruments, sin would be imputable to God.
The Buddhist threat to expel Ricci from China, which at any moment seemed likely to be realised, was presently rendered empty by an unexpected succession of severe reverses. One of the most prominent Buddhists, the bonze who had given Ricci a laudatory poem in Nanking, was on the point of visiting the northern capital, where he had many disciples, when he was accused by an influential censor of preaching a doctrine hostile to Confucius and Mencius. The Emperor, unable to support openly works which so disparaged the national philosophy, ordered the author to be brought to Peking in chains and the wooden blocks of all his books destroyed. In shame and terror, the old man—he was seventy-six—cut his throat with a razor, dying in agony two days later.
The success of this charge prompted the Minister of Rites, a close friend of Ricci, to submit an important memorial against all mandarins and graduates who depreciated Confucianism. He pointed out that students in the examinations (for which his Ministry was responsible) were citing Buddhist works. “Being has become non-being; a famous doctrine has become a chain and discipline a tumour. Bold views are the rage and it is considered brilliant to suppress all distinction between true and false, good and evil. Buddhist sayings about the soul and nature, because of a certain superficial resemblance, are introduced into Confucianism. . . . A man cannot fully master the Classics until his hair has grown white, yet the innovators suggest that to the age-old course should be added other, foreign doctrines: thus they reject the spirit and marrow of our patrimony and abandon the substance of traditional teaching.” The Emperor approved the memorial: “Taoism and Buddhism are alien creeds, suitable for hermits who live alone in the woods or on mountain-tops. If any magistrate feels sympathy for them, let him give up his career and join the hermits. These two doctrines can never be ranked with Confucianism, otherwise the empire would be rent by rebellion.” This reply was all the more extraordinary since the Emperor, together with his mother, concubines and family, was known to be sympathetic to Buddhism. It was one more proof that he did not dare impose personal beliefs on his people, that his essential role was to preserve the traditional unifying philosophy, counterpart to the order of nature. The Minister of Rites issued a decree forbidding candidates in the examinations to speak of Buddhism unless to refute it. As a result Huang and his fellow Academician retired from public life, and in future no officia
l dared support any but the state philosophy.
The following year, 1603, the Buddhists suffered an even greater blow. Many bonzes were attached to the court, although they could never enter the palace. One in particular, Shen Ta-kuan—whose robe the Emperor’s consort, the pious and modest Hsiao Tun, adored as a sacred relic—was influential with the Empress Mother, who gave him alms for temples, idols and the support of thousands of disciples.
Between the Ta Hsueh, or Heavy Snow, and the winter solstice—by Ricci’s reckoning, on the morning of December the fourteenth—a printed memorial purporting to be signed by one of the censors was found in the imperial apartments and at the palaces of all the chief mandarins. The pasquinade—an attack on the Emperor and court—claimed thatHis Majesty had been forced against his will to appoint as heir his first-born son by his official consort, the pious and modest Hsiao Tun, and that later he had secretly changed the succession, giving it to Fu, third son by his favourite concubine. Its sting lay in the fact that one of the Chancellors and the Great Council, to please the Emperor, had projected just such a change.
Determined to find the perpetrator, Wan Li promised a huge reward and high honours to anyone securing his conviction. For fear of spies no one in Peking dared speak of the lampoon, while Ricci as a foreigner was automatically in danger. The bonze Shen, as spiritual adviser to Hsiao Tun, the court physician and many high officials were arrested and tortured. Shen’s personal papers, although silent about the lampoon, showed that he had been bribed by friends to obtain appointments. Another bonze was found to be supporting twelve concubines in different provinces. Worst of all was a letter written by Shen to a friend, criticising the Emperor for lack of devotion to Buddhism, and of respect to his mother. The bonze was thrown into prison: the magistrates hated him for his notoriously supercilious attitude to the mandarin class, and had him beaten to death. He used to claim that he cared nothing for his body, but when the blows fell he cried out like any other prisoner and in dying effaced a lifetime’s reputation for sanctity.
As for the pasquinade, an educated merchant, who wrote occasional poetry, the style of which was considered similar to that of the offensive document, confessed under torture and was condemned to be cut into 1,600 pieces, without a bone being broken or his head injured, so that he could witness his own disintegration. At the end of the public execution one of the crowd, to gain a large reward promised by the merchant’s family, dashed out, severed and seized the dead man’s head, then ran away, throwing money over his shoulder in order to delay his pursuers.
With the discrediting of Buddhism, Peking was more in the mood to accept a religion which accepted and brought to perfection the principles of Confucius. Ricci seized the occasion to publish the Catechism on which he had been engaged for the past nine years. He had proceeded warily, knowing that he was casting the mould of Oriental Christianity, selecting Chinese terms which, once in general use, could not easily be replaced. He had circulated the manuscript among his friends, taking their advice about style and noticing the arguments which proved most effective. When a close friend first saw the manuscript, he offered to print it at his own expense. But at that time Valignano’s imprimatur had not yet arrived and Ricci replied that he was still polishing it. The friend sent back a message saying “This country is steeped in sin, like a sick man at the point of death. Your book provides the cure. It is a poor answer to say that you want to improve the already clear style. You are like a doctor who attends a very sick patient and writes out a remedy which can save his life, then adds ‘Wait a moment while I word the prescription more elegantly.’” In 1603, when the work was completed to Ricci’s satisfaction and the imprimatur obtained, the friend paid for the edition, to which he had two years earlier contributed a preface, giving Ricci the title of doctor. This set a precedent and future authors continued to write of “Doctor Li.”
Treating not of all the Christian mysteries, which the missionaries explained only to catechumens and converts, but of certain general principles, especially those which could be proved by the light of natural reason, A True Disputation about God was a work of apologetic in the form of a dialogue between a Chinese and a Western graduate. The existence of God having been proved by four arguments, eleven ancient Chinese texts were cited in which the Supreme Lord, synonym for Heaven, was shown to be a unique, personal, intelligent being. The pantheistic monism maintained by Huang Hui was refuted, Lucifer, who claimed to be like God, being designated the first author of this argument. In a chapter entitled “Refutation of the six ways of the metempsychotic wheel and the prohibition against killing animals, together with a true explanation of fasting” Ricci suggested that Pythagoras was the first man to preach metempsychosis, a doctrine which the Buddhists brought from India, a much less important country than China, as the recent edition of his map had made clear. Since all things were created for man, there could be no law forbidding him to kill his food. Finally, after treating of heaven and hell, human nature, free will and the end of man, the Westerner explained that the Lord of Heaven became man 1,603 years ago. The Chinese graduate was made to answer:
“How could people at that time be certain that Jesus was really the Lord of Heaven and not just an outstanding man? His own testimony surely would be insufficient.”
The Western graduate replied, “The word ‘saint’ has a narrower meaning in the West than in the Middle Kingdom, and even more so when applied to the Lord of Heaven. If the ruler of a country a hundred li in circumference rallied his vassals and conquered the Middle Kingdom without committing a single injustice or killing a single innocent person, in the West he would not thereby be called a saint. If an eminent ruler gave up a life of glory to become a poor religious, he would be called no more than ‘frugal.’ A saint is one who pays diligent honour to the Lord of Heaven, suffers humiliation, says and does extraordinary things beyond man’s powers, such as healing incurable diseases without medicine, raising the dead, prophesying. Those whom my humble country terms saints are all men of this kind. . . . The miracles performed by the Lord of Heaven when He was in this world are still more numerous and wonderful than those of saints. They performed miracles through the power of the Lord of Heaven, whereas He used His own power.”
After summarising the life of Christ, the Westerner continued: “Four saints wrote down His earthly life and His doctrine in books which circulated in many countries. Then all the people from north, south, east and west embraced His doctrine, observing it from generation to generation. Thenceforward the civilisation of the countries of the Far West made great progress. The annals of the Middle Kingdom recount that the Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty, having heard news of the doctrine, sent ambassadors westwards to ask for its holy books. On the way, mistakenly believing that the Emperor had referred to India, they obtained copies of the Buddhist scriptures and circulated them in the Middle Flowery Kingdom. Your noble country has been misled until now and has heard nothing of the true religion. Surely that is a sad disgrace for learning and the arts?”
This book contained the fruits of Ricci’s discussions with such friends as the Ministers of Civil Appointments and of War, with the Censor at Nanking; and with the geographer Li Chih-tsao. Appealing in every case to principles acceptable to most Chinese or to their ancient and authoritative texts, in matter, approach and style a triumph of adaptation, bearing witness to his love and understanding of the Chinese, the book probed beneath all the inessential differences, obvious and subtle, between East and West, to proclaim their unity as men made by the same God. As a climate of thought in which Christianity would be most likely to flourish, it advocated a return to the purity of ancient religious thought, stripped of the atheist accretions imparted by Chu Hsi. No appeal could have been better attuned to a people in love with the past. The graduates came to view the new doctrine not as an abhorrent novelty but as the crowning of all their noblest traditions, while for Chinese Christians and those drawn to Christianity Ricci’s work provided an invaluable summary of ap
ologetic.
The book ran through several editions and was widely read, for mandarins enjoyed works of moral philosophy almost as much as poetry and history. These genres were treated in a highly fastidious and rarefied manner, with never a low note, in striking contrast to the many pornographic novels—this form, like that of the drama, was an importation of the Mongols—which the majority of graduates disdained to open.
In the spring of 1604 one of Nanking’s leading Christians, a certain Hsü Kuang-ch’i, came to the northern capital to sit for an examination. Born at Shanghai in 1562, he had become bachelor of arts at the age of nineteen and in 1592 tutor to a family in Shiuchow. Here he became friendly with Cattaneo, who gave him his first religious instruction, which he continued at Nanking under Ricci. In 1601 he had sat his doctorate, passing with honours, seventh on the list. However, the examiners, discovering that they had awarded 301 instead of 300 degrees, decided to rectify their error by deleting one name at random. The unfortunate man was Hsü. In 1603, in the hope of finding Ricci, he had returned to Nanking, where he had been baptised with the name of Paul, usually reserved for the most outstanding converts. Now Ricci, who had the highest respect for his character and intelligence, welcomed Hsü to Peking and wished him success in the doctoral contest, deemed by all China the most important any man could enter. So far no mandarin with the highest degree had accepted Christianity, and it was therefore a matter of great importance to Ricci that Paul Hsü should distinguish himself.
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