It is a pleasure and a great privilege for me to be asked to address this distinguished gathering, which is meeting to honor the memory of Professor Tang Junyi and to discuss the future of Chinese philosophy. I regret that my wife’s health prevents me from attending in person (a fact and a reason which I think Professor Tang himself would appreciate because he and his wife were greatly devoted to each other).
First, let me speak to my personal association with Professor Tang, which was in some ways a happy accident of what was otherwise a misfortune in the disruption of our lives by the violence of revolutionary times. Although that history in the twentieth century was generally prejudicial to Confucianism, in my own case the early reaction to Confucianism, prematurely judged to be an obstacle to China’s modernization, aroused a response in my early student days, a skeptical response based precisely on my own doubts about the adequacy of Western understandings of both China and modernization.
In some ways, I was a singular beneficiary of the displacement of traditional Chinese studies during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. It was an extraordinary turn of world history that brought to Columbia in the early twentieth century such a cohort of distinguished Chinese scholars/officials as Dr. Hu Shi, Luo Longji, and Feng Yulan, and the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, to name just a few, who were at Columbia, off and on, during my early years there.
My further education in Chinese studies, however, was much deepened by my research in Beijing in 1949 as a Fulbright scholar, which gave me the opportunity to read intensively the works of Tang Junyi and Qian Mu that bore on my doctoral research in the works of the seventeenth-century scholar Huang Zongxi: When Beijing was besieged later that year, it was a wrenching experience for me to have to break off from this satisfying immersion in such rewarding studies, but when the U.S. ambassador Leighton Stuart sent his private plane to Beijing to evacuate the Fulbright scholars before the impending takeover of Beijing by Mao’s forces, I left for the south.
I could not have imagined that my eventual relocation in the Guangzhou region would have the unexpected benefit of my meeting up with some of the very scholars whose works I had been studying earlier. It was an extraordinary time not only for me but for the future of Chinese philosophy and Confucianism, since the dislocations of Tang Junyi and Qian Mu led to their relocation in Hong Kong and the revival of Confucian studies in New Asia College. For me, it was a great privilege to witness the small beginnings and travails of this great educational center, the founding of which we now celebrate today, sixty years later.
That meeting for me had two major significances, one scholarly, the other educational. First, let me speak of the scholarly side, which was primarily in the domain of intellectual history. In the case of Huang Zongxi, his historical interests and intellectual concerns went beyond the merely intellectual to include a wide range of economic, political, social, literary, and educational fields, but enriching as it could be to explore such a range and depth of Chinese history, still what counted most for me in Tang Junyi’s case was his addressing the same issues as Huang did in his massive, monumental studies of first Ming and then Song-Yuan scholarship.
When I started my own studies in the 1940s, the attempts to revalidate the Chinese tradition tended to focus on those aspects that might approximate the dominant tendencies in modern Western history—in other words, to discover in the later Chinese tradition those developments that could be seen as resembling the progress of modernity in the West. In this vein, scholars like Hu Shi and Feng Yulan quite understandably and legitimately drew attention to the critical thought of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars whose work resembled the enlightenment of the early modern West. In doing this, however, they tended to interpret it as reformist and revolutionary, replicating the dynamics of the modern West, with China following the same unilinear pattern of history, rather than following its own pattern of development, both similar to and different from the West in some respects.
Some forty years ago, I described this development and Tang Junyi’s relation to it in the following terms:
The seventeenth century, which serves as the focus of this book, stands at about the midpoint in the long period of Neo-Confucian dominance and, if our interpretation is correct, this century may also represent a turning point in its development. How to interpret that turning, however, has been disputed. A prevalent view in the earlier decades of the twentieth century saw Neo-Confucianism as having lost all genuine vitality by the seventeenth century. New trends of thought were breaking away from Neo-Confucian dogmas, and an era of intellectual enlightenment was dawning which only the dead hand of the past, supported by the political repression of Manchu conquerors, held back. In these terms, the seventeenth century could be pictured by some as a kind of watershed in the development of Chinese thought, marking the emergence of the Chinese mind from a dark age of introspection and metaphysical escapism—into a new day of robust empiricism, scientific criticism, and materialism. This general view has had many adherents, but its most prominent spokesmen have been Liang Q’i-chao, Hu Shi, and more recently Hou Wai-lu. An opposing view, as expressed by Tang Junyi, does not dispute the historical facts but seeks to give them a different meaning. For Tang the change that took place represented a falling-away from the highest levels attained by Chinese thought. He considers the greatest achievements of Neo-Confucianism to have lain in the spiritual realm depreciated by Hu. To him the “super-moral ideas” of the Neo-Confucians, especially in the sixteenth century, “should be taken as expressions of their highest moral experience.” The shift in thought from the beginning of the Qing dynasty, in the mid-seventeenth century, he sees as the start of a long decline: “Chinese thought from the end of Ming to recent years has gradually left the spirit of Neo-Confucianism, which paid more attention to the spiritual values of human life, and now pays more attention to social, utilitarian, technical and natural values of human life.”1
I shall not attempt to explain further the more positive view of Ming Confucian thought that fills out Tang’s conception of its proper place in the evolutionary process. This is found in numerous works of his in Chinese already known to scholars in the audience here today and for readers in English may be found in two substantial articles of his contributed to conferences on Chinese thought to which I invited him in the 1960s, as an outgrowth of his earlier participation in my seminar on Neo-Confucianism at Columbia in 1964.2
I think it is important to recognize Tang’s contribution to these early overseas developments in the study of Chinese philosophy because they were a natural extension of his purposes in the establishment of New Asia College here in Hong Kong. The very title of the college itself is indicative of his recognition that Chinese and Confucian studies could not be sustained simply in a Chinese context or as a matter just of Chinese national survival. It is true that he went into exile in order to preserve the true Chinese tradition when it was undergoing brutal suppression at home. But he had no illusion that Chinese tradition could endure in solitary splendor, nor did he see Confucian tradition as standing alone in the world. Early on, he recognized the importance of Indian thought as a vital counterpart to Chinese studies, and even the main focus of his own Neo-Confucian studies recognized how much was “new” in it that responded to the earlier challenge of Buddhism. In the twentieth-century world, Confucianism could be expected to respond generously and positively to the challenges of Western thought. But China would be doing this alongside other Asian civilizations as well, so the best of Chinese tradition could only be sustained in recognition of and cooperation with other Asian traditions. This was reinforced for me later when we spent weeks together at the guest house of Kyoto University sharing our reactions to key features of Japanese tradition. Thus “New Asia” was essential to the name of this new college even while it was primarily dedicated to the survival of Chinese culture.
There is significance too in the choice of a traditional Chinese term for what would be known in English as a “college,” here called a shuyuan, rather than the more common daxue. Shu yuan was the expression common to Neo-Confucian academies from the eleventh to nineteenth centuries. “Hall of Books” would be a more literal translation of the term, but “academy” comes close enough to conveying that it was a meeting place for scholars whose culture was based on the preservation and study of books among communities of scholars, sustained by local support. A key feature of these academies was the promotion of open discussion (jiangxue, “discursive learning” or philosophical discussion). It was not simple indoctrination. Shu yuan were centers of private local education, independent and distinct from state-supported and controlled schools. To me, it is significant that Tang Junyi and his colleagues (especially Qian Mu) must have made this choice consciously in order to emphasize its intellectual independence and autonomy. This, of course, remains a crucial issue now that New Asia College has been incorporated into the state-supported Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Another key feature of shu yuan culture was its core curriculum. Because of the local nature of the academy, the curriculum was usually set at the option of local gentry and the presiding teacher, but its general character tended to follow the model set by Zhu Xi and his immediate disciples. The essential feature was that it be based on a set of classics selected to provide a proper starting point for higher education and therefore graduated at every stage to build toward intellectual maturity.
What is most relevant to the present occasion is the question of how the future of Chinese philosophy and a core of Chinese classics bear on each other. Here I think the most important point is how the classics as we receive them are not just the products of the age that produced them. Of course, we do have to read classics in their original contexts just as a first reading, and this initial reading is called for and warranted by the fact that they have continued to be meaningful in age after age. But they are not just validated by their antiquity. They have become foundation stones for subsequent structures, built as memorials to the old that have achieved a monumentality of their own.
This is precisely what Zhu did in his time and what Tang Junyi did in his—drawing on ancient texts to deal with current issues. And this I believe is what New Asia College was founded to do. As a consequence, we can see the establishment of its core curriculum as integrally involved in the discussion of Chinese philosophy’s present and future.
The Chinese University is to be congratulated for taking a leadership role and for assembling such an international gathering to address the problem today as one of both contemporary philosophical research and of its bearing on the future of world education. Serving the latter, in my opinion, without addressing the core, nor the core without the classics, is building on sand. The core, however, today will certainly reflect the outcome of a new interplay between past, present, and future, just as it did in Zhu Xi’s case. In compiling his Jinsilu (Reflections on Things at Hand), he anthologized the new philosophy of the Song in such a way as to serve his curriculum based on the method of the Great Learning. And his new commentaries on the Four Books were informed by the new concepts developed by his Song predecessors in response to the challenges of their own day.
Thus I hope that those gathered here today will follow the example of both Zhu Xi and Tang Junyi. In addressing the future of philosophy East and West together, they should be able to identify “classic” texts that have a bearing on contemporary philosophical issues. They will then be reassessing and redefining what it means to be “classic,” which would include both ancient and neoclassical texts.
Today, among some influential writers who want to validate classic traditions, there is a tendency to reaffirm the relevance of the early classics to contemporary problems. This is fine, but this should not stop with the ancients. It is important to include neoclassical texts that tell us how later writers revisited the classics in response to the challenges of the evolving civilization. In so doing, they produced modern classics for their own time. We can further the same process by reexamining recent works that have been thought almost canonical in the nineteenth and twentieth century: Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, John Locke, Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, etc., are such candidates in the West. Their counterparts in Asia should be considered at the same time, and I leave it to you to take your own pick. As you discuss the future of Chinese philosophy, I trust you will be reassessing both ancient and modern classics as candidates for a core common to East and West. It would be a fitting tribute to the memory of Tang Junyi.
