{ix} Preface

The early days of May this year have been unusually beautiful, with crystal clear blue skies and lush blossoming of cherry trees and dogwood. A few mornings ago, as I was sipping my breakfast tea and watching the birds at our feeder, I found these lines of Wu Yubi coming to me: “Today, the twenty-eighth day of the second month, is such a beautiful, clear day. I have been composing poetry in my outer southern studio. The sunlight reflecting through the mountain mist shines on the flowers and trees, while birds flutter up and down in song. What a joyful mood I’m in!” (entry no. 26). There he was again, making his way into my mind as he has done so often. He and I go a long ways back, to my graduate school days at Columbia University in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We kept steady company for several years, as I worked to translate his Journal to fulfill the requirements for my doctorate. I was drawn to his open confessional manner.

In the years after graduating, I continued some work on his Journal. When the journal auto:/biography had a special issue dedicated to the theme of Autobiography and Mysticism (Vol. 6, no. 2, Fall 1991), I contributed a piece, “Writing One’s Way to Sagehood: WuYü-pi and his Journal.” Around the same time, I presented a paper (still unpublished) on “The Use of Religious Diaries in Self-Cultivation: The Case of WuYü-pi,” that included comparisons with Baptist and Quaker diaries of sixteenth-century England.

But other research interests (educational texts for women, children’s education, Catholic nuns working with Hakka women in early twentieth-century China), a full teaching load, and family life consumed my time and Wu was left behind on the shelf. He, however, was never completely absent from my life. Students and I pored over his writings in the photocopies I made of my translations. And every once in a while, one of his lines would just come to me, often at the oddest times. (The most frequent being, “Difficulties I am willing to accept as part of life, / But I never thought they would be as extreme as this!” entry 153.)

{x} Several years ago, I finally decided that I really must give Wu the full treatment in book form that he deserved. It has taken me a long time to complete the book—I am more of a turtle than a hare (our family has a thing for turtles; my daughter is training to be a herpetologist). I hope the reader will find Wu as engaging as I have. What I have discovered is that readers react to him along a spectrum of two extremes: some cannot tolerate his negative complaining and find him an incredible whiny bore; others are moved by what they regard as his wonderfully sensitive soul. There are grounds for both reactions. The value I have found of using it in a classroom is that students are given the chance to respond to him first hand, as they will, and also to see that the people trying to put Confucianism into practice were ordinary human beings like themselves.

Before proceeding, I would like to pay tribute to the sage models of my past, those who shaped my intellectual life and inspired my understanding of Confucianism. The first is Thomas Berry, my uncle, who started me on my way in Asian Studies. Next are the outstanding scholars at Columbia University that I had the privilege of studying with, most especially Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, Pei-yi Wu, and Irene Bloom. My debt of gratitude to all of them is immeasurable.

I also wish to express my deep gratitude to Deborah Wilkes, my editor at Hackett, who has been so patient and supportive of me in seeing this book through to its completion. I owe a lot to the steady encouragement she has extended to me over the past two years. I also want to thank Liz Wilson who has overseen the production end of this book, and who too has shown great patience with me.

Conventions

1. I use the pinyin system of romanization throughout the book. The one change I make is to hyphenate two-character Chinese terms, instead of putting them together as what appears to be one word. For example: fu-ren, instead of furen. When it comes to book titles, however, I do not hyphenate.

2. Because much of the material on Neo-Confucianism was done with the Wade-Giles system of romanization, to help the reader convert the names of people and books according to that system, {xi} I have provided sections in each glossary that convert them into their pinyin rendering.

3. Chinese scholars usually had at least three names. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to each only by one name. Take the case of Zhu Xi, for instance. Wu refers to him by several of Zhu’s names, but I refer to him as Zhu Xi all the time.

4. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Chinese texts are my own.