From the time the Buddha’s books entered China, a teaching spread that was altogether deviant. The followers of Laozi promoted this teaching, and thereafter the minds of the people in China lost their ability to question anything. People all degenerated into a condition of merely acquiescing in what they were told, and the Buddha said, “In Heaven above and Earth below, I alone am worthy of honor.” The ability to discern the Lord-of-Heaven degenerated, and it became a great and arrogant demon whom mankind no longer studied, followed, and honored. Consequently, the Three Mainstays [of ruler-minister, parent-child, and husband-wife] and the Five Constants [of Humaneness, Rightness, Ritual Decorum, Wisdom, and Trustworthiness] became hated and there was no effort to urge these on mankind. These people have all gone to hell without end and the followers of Confucius are not able to save them, because Confucius can neither reward nor punish nor judge the living and the dead.
I had known nothing of Buddhist texts, but once during a period of mourning someone said to me, “If you want to understand the meaning of life and death, why don’t you take the essential Buddhist texts and meditate upon them?” Then I took up and looked through the Lankavatara Sūtra, the Vimalakirti Sūtra, and other [Buddhist] books, reading their most important passages. As a result I concluded: If these are their theories, none of them have any real meaning. I could believe what the two great Confucian scholars Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi said about the Buddhist sūtras being replete with half-truths, licentiousness, heterodoxy, and escape from the world. As to the teachings of the Two Heterodoxies (Daoism and Buddhism), how is it that they continue to last for even a day in these flourishing [enlightened] times?
The Western scholars came ninety thousand li to honor the will of the Lord of Heaven and to save the world, with many benefits to us in the Central Kingdom. Their principles are correct, their people are men of worth. How can people be inattentive to their teachings, and thus throw away the eternal life of their spiritual natures [immortal souls]. My friend, Master Zhu, styled Jinan, showed me the books of the Lord of Heaven Teaching. I had not yet finished reading them when my mind became filled with doubts about the Buddha. Then I understood that Heaven and Earth naturally possess correct principles, already present in Confucian teaching, but, with some things still not completely understood by Confucian teaching, it would not do to be without the added benefit of the teachings of the Lord of Heaven.
Therefore I have collected the books of the Lord of Heaven Teaching, explained them in the over two thousand pages of the work Clearly Distinguishing the Lord of Heaven Teaching [from Heterodoxy] (Tianzhujiao mingpian), and thus exposed the falsehoods of Buddhism and Daoism. My notes on the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Governance Topically Arranged (Tongjian jishi benmo),9 filling over 1,700 pages, are so compendious and profuse that it has not been possible to get them cut and printed. However, the [Lord of Heaven Teaching] can be understood and grasped in terms of the three aspects of (1) what harmonizes with the Confucian Teaching, (2) what supplements the Confucian Teaching and finally, (3) what transcends the Confucian Teaching. The title of this work is “An inquiry into the similarities and differences between the Heavenly Lord’s Teaching and the Teaching of the Confucian Scholars.” . . .
Anyone today who is enlightened should comprehend my words and understand that the Lord of Heaven [of the Western missionaries] is the Lord-on-High [of Chinese antiquity] and that what I have written embodies his compassion to save the world. He knows me and brings retribution upon me. Let everyone hear me out.
Explanatory note written in the fifty-fourth year of the Kangxi emperor (1715) by the eighty-three-year-old elder Zhang Xingyao, styled Master Ziren.
[Zhang, preface, Tianzhujiao rujiao tongyi kao, 1a-2b—DM]
1. Wolfgang Franke, in Goodrich and Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography, p. 1144.
2. Qianyuan—the primal male element identified with Heaven in the opening portion of the Classic of Changes.
3. That is, though the Neo-Confucians (following Mencius) spoke of human nature as good (in opposition to the Buddhists), the goodness of human nature should not be thought of as wholly perfect.
4. One part of the Huangdi neijing (see vol. 1, ch. 9), the basic text of traditional Chinese medicine.
5. The Zhoubi suanjing was a work on mathematical astronomy traditionally ascribed to the early Zhou dynasty (c. 1000 B.C.E.).
6. The Kaogongji was the last section of the Zhouli (“Rites of Zhou“), which purported to describe how artisans were organized under the Zhou dynasty.
7. A reference to Zhuangzi, who was said to have been an official of Qiyuan.
8. Li Zubo, Tianxue quankai (A Summary of the Propagation of Christianity, 1665).
9. Based on Yuan Shu’s rearrangement of Sima Guang’s Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Governance (see ch. 19).
Chapter 28
CHINESE STATECRAFT AND THE OPENING OF CHINA TO THE WEST
Statecraft, as represented by the Chinese term jingshi (world ordering), traditionally had to do with the internal affairs of the Chinese world, the “Central Kingdom”; it was little concerned with the kind of power politics that occupied European princes in their multistate rivalries, their international world. As such, Chinese statecraft drew upon the age-old, voluminous record found in the treatises of the dynastic histories from the Han and after, as well as in the monumental institutional encyclopedias compiled from the late Tang onward and in the local gazetteers that recorded matters of civil administration and provincial life down through the centuries. Though we take special account of this genre only in the Qing period, the literature concerning it was a standard feature of Confucian, and especially Neo-Confucian, writings. Great impetus had been given to this in the Song. As seen earlier (chapter 21), Zhu Xi’s scholarship included careful attention to the ordering of economic and social institutions on the local level, and many schools of Neo-Confucian learning carried on this work in succeeding centuries. Indeed, it was the availability of this extensive record that enabled thinkers and scholars like Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu to sum up millennia of Chinese institutional history in their magisterial analyses, from a Confucian point of view, of China’s key internal problems.
The readings in this chapter reflect developments in statecraft thinking from the early eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth. First there are essays by typical Confucian scholar-officials discussing traditional statecraft issues that had been perennial problems for Chinese civil administration and remained a concern for conscientious officials even in the relatively stable and prosperous years of the early Qing. These matters command attention both for the challenges they presented to the Confucian reformist conscience and for the thoughtful, seasoned reflections they elicited from scholar-officials drawing on mature past experience.
In the second phase we encounter the accumulating problems that follow upon the high Qing’s very success: the rapid economic expansion, rising affluence, and population growth that attend the long period of stable rule and secure peace under the Manchus. In the midst of spectacular advances negative factors also come into play, and complicating, limiting effects ensue. These are especially worrisome when state officials play a key role in the economy; the power of the ruler and his high officials can be checked, if at all, only by the most courageous remonstrance, and corruption becomes almost routine. In such circumstances the warnings of conscientious scholar-officials, as in the cases cited here, often go unheeded, though the warners themselves do not go unpunished. Thus the late eighteenth-century experience confirmed what Huang Zongxi had said about the ineffectiveness of even self-sacrificial protest when, in the absence of legal, systemic, constitutional restraints, there are no countervailing forces to balance the power of the ruler and his henchmen.
In the last phase, this developing statecraft emerges from its preoccupation with homegrown problems, compelled finally in the nineteenth century to turn its attention to the outside world. At this point the genre of the so-called treatise on institution
al history or local gazetteer (zhi) is converted to new uses, as in Wei Yuan’s epochal Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated Gazetteer of the Maritime Countries). Thrust onto the world stage, Confucian “statecraft” is no longer left at home to mind and mend its own business but is forced to enter into the larger world of power politics.
CHEN HONGMOU AND MID-QING STATECRAFT
Chen Hongmou (1696–1771) was a career provincial governor, enjoying the longest total service and the largest number of separate provincial appointments of any governor during the Qing era. Though a prolific writer, he was neither a profound original thinker nor a scholar of notable erudition. In his own lifetime he enjoyed no great influence, either intellectual or political, beyond the confines of the specific jurisdictions in which he served. Beginning shortly after his death, however, and continuing (in some circles) down to the present day, he acquired a reputation as a “model official,” his well-documented administrative vigor and his reflections on the exercise of the responsibilities of office (revealed above all in his letters) serving to inspire generations of subsequent administrators.
Even more significantly, he was singled out by He Changling and Wei Yuan, the compilers of the enormously influential Anthology of Qing Statecraft Writings (Huangchao jingshi wenbian, 1826), as the foremost high Qing exemplar of the jingshi (statecraft) literati style: a dedication to solving the practical problems of governance based on detailed empirical observation, respect for local variation, and organizational and technological sophistication. In the anthology, Chen was the second most heavily represented figure, surpassed only by the virtually beatified Gu Yanwu.
Chen identified himself as a disciple of Zhu Xi, and the aforementioned combination of moral probity, local activism, and technical competence was a mark of the statecraft tradition stemming from Zhu Xi. Chen, however, did not follow Zhu’s teachings in any slavish or partisan fashion. He took no articulated stand in the scholarly schism between the pro-Zhu “Song Learning” (see chapter 25) and the anti-Zhu “Han Learning,” which was emerging during his lifetime; rather, he condemned any and all intellectual partisanship. The particular figures in the late imperial scholarly pantheon whom he most admired were Sima Guang (1019–1086) and Lu Kun (1536–1618), both of whom he identified with a deep sense of social mission and a hardheaded empiricism in developing institutional solutions to social ills. For the same reasons, beginning in mid-career Chen was increasingly attracted to the roughhewn “Shaanxi school” of Ming-Qing Confucianism (Guanxue).
ON SUBSTANTIVE LEARNING
Chen Hongmou himself rarely used the term jingshi, and never in a sense suggesting that he saw himself participating in an intellectual movement by that name. He did, however, repeatedly emphasize his commitment to shixue, a term frequently rendered in English as “practical [as in Zhu Xi’s earlier] learning,” but in Chen’s usage “solid” or more properly translatable as “substantive learning.” Chen despised what he saw as the twin literary evils of his day: an overly aestheticized pursuit of stylistic refinement and the arcane textual scholarship of the Kaozheng (Evidential Learning) philological movement. Both, in his view, were irresponsible dissipations of the talent of men who ought to have been more productively engaged in solving social problems. “Substantive learning” involved something different: on the one hand, the practical quest for answers to such political-economic problems as feeding the empire’s rapidly growing population and, on the other hand, the study of ethical imperatives that, when straightforwardly explained to the general population, would foster the social stability prerequisite to economic development.
The noble words and essential ideas of the sages are scattered throughout the classical canon. Only by studying these works closely can one begin to extract from them their meaning and put their ideas into practice. If one takes scholarship to be merely poetry and belles lettres, then though the craftsmanship be jewellike, it will have no relevance to one’s moral nature and may indeed serve to mislead one in one’s personal conduct. One will invariably end up with empty verbiage and groundless speculation, obstructing the grasp of true principle. This is of no use in personal cultivation, and still less in serving the needs of the people. Books then remain merely books, and quite separate from real life. It is because of this that so many people today dismiss book learning as no more than the repetition of conventional platitudes and scholarship as simply a way to pass the examinations.
[Letter to Depei, Chen wengong gong shudu 1: 13—WR]
The examination system promotes scholars on the basis of their literary achievement. But scholarly practices tend to decline over the course of time, to become less concerned with fundamentals and more with style, to substitute what simply sounds good for what one has made a genuine effort to understand. Scholars merely unthinkingly copy over the words of the past, and their vacuous phrasings have absolutely no connection to real-life affairs. Few, indeed, can even adequately explain the basic meaning of the sages’ words. They simply repeat empty conventions and the world rewards them with success in the examinations. The glibness of contemporary letters, and the slovenliness of today’s education, are primarily due to this.
[Letter to Wang Hao, Chen wengong gong shudu 1: 9—WR]
The state selects and promotes scholars above all out of the hope that they will prove useful officials in the future. In sitting for the examinations, scholars should reveal the learning they have patiently accumulated over the course of time. The examinations test first the candidate’s knowledge of basic principles revealed in the classical texts, and then move on to legal and policy questions. . . .
Imperial edicts have repeatedly ordered that, in provincial-level examinations, equal weight be given to this second part, in order to scrutinize the candidates’ understanding of political economy and prevent undue emphasis being accorded to facility with current literary fashions. . . . But students in fact do not diligently prepare for these practical policy questions on a day-to-day basis; instead they quickly cram for them as the examination approaches, by memorizing standardized crib book answers. . . . Since examining officials obviously do not take seriously this second half of the examination, these bad practices have become so institutionalized that even genuinely serious students no longer see this part as requiring more than last-minute cramming. Thus the study of political economy is neglected, and the court’s purpose in using the examinations to select officials is defeated.
Now, the Yunnan Provincial Academy . . . has recently become quite successful in producing scholars. The only problem is that the academy’s monthly tests do not include questions relevant to the second part of the examinations. Cramming at the last minute is by no means as good as studying on a protracted, regular basis. I therefore propose that, beginning with the next school term, in addition to the usual lectures on classical philosophy, a portion of each class be devoted to assignment of a passage from the Four Books, upon which the students must compose an answer in the manner of the policy questions on the exams. They should also be assigned a question in which they decide a sample legal case. The policy question should be concerned with a contemporary issue in either national or local affairs. The phrasing of this question must be clear and specific, so as to preclude giving a standard crib book response. . . . In this way, we can counter the ingrained dysfunctions of contemporary education and more fully put into practice our Sagely Dynasty’s appropriate emphasis on substantive learning.
[Peiyuantang oucun gao 4: 3–4—WR]
Substantive learning necessarily involves painstaking immersion in texts on a routine basis. . . . It seems that today there are two major harmful trends. The first is acquisition of literary polish without penetrating the text’s essential meaning. To save time, teachers lecture their students on the generalities of a passage, without making sure that they understand the precise meaning of each word and phrase. If one’s reading level does not allow one to grasp the Way, one cannot employ it effectively to put the world in order. The second harmful trend is stu
dying the classics only out of antiquarianism, without looking for applications in the world in which we live. Scholars like this may have highly refined philological skills and great bibliographic command, but by remaining mired in the past they do violence to the present. . . .
One reason why so many people today dismiss professional literati as useless is because the latter do not assiduously read the Beijing Gazette.1 . . . In my opinion, all educational officials in local cities and villages ought to make the Gazette required reading for their students. If the students are not capable of reading it on their own, all students of the locality should be formed into study groups to read it collectively. This would be highly beneficial, yet cost very little.
[Letter to Zhang Meizhuang, Huangchao jingshi wenbian 2: 33—WR]
In my view, the duties of the literati are to study when dwelling at home and to serve when called to public office. By “studying,” I mean to study proper moral conduct, which is the prerequisite to being of service. By “serving,” I mean governing the affairs of the people, which is how the superior man puts into practice that which he has studied. Practical affairs and basic principles are essentially interdependent; eternal truths and functional utility are but two aspects of the same thing. Contemporary scholars treat the two as distinct, but for the ancients themselves their profound words were inseparable from positive action. . . .
There are some today who discuss classical texts but see no need to apply them to the contemporary world, or even argue that they cannot be applied to the contemporary world. This is not only a perversion of the Way but also a trivialization of the role of scholarship. . . .
Of course, just as scholarship may be correct or misdirected, substantive or vacuous, so too will those in public service inevitably include the careless and negligent as well as the judicious and skilled. There are those who acquire a reputation for scholarship and appear solid and upright, who, once selected for an official post, immediately forget all that they have previously studied. There are even those who treat their official service as a shortcut to a lavish lifestyle and an easy paycheck, behaving precisely contrary to everything they have learned in the past. It is as if the man prior to official selection and the man after selection were two different people! Official service and scholarship are mutually complementary and must be fully integrated in one’s mental attitude.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 24