For centuries, a conversation has been going on in both Asia and the West about the values that could sustain a human community, but there has been only limited exchange between the two conversations. Today, the challenges of the contemporary world are such that the civilizing process can only be sustained through an education that includes (at least in part) sharing in the traditional curricula developed on both sides, based on classics now recognized as not only enduring but world class.
The essays in this book speak first of all to the nature of a core curriculum as it has developed recently in the West, then how a kind of core curriculum also developed in East Asia as part of a liberal education “modern” for its own time. Finally, examples are given of recent Chinese and Japanese scholars who have helped us share in Asian classics by articulating their more traditional values in a modern context.
Paradoxically, among the things that threaten this sharing of the wisdom traditions in a new world community is the idea much touted recently of the globalization of education as an accompaniment to the spread of a global economy. This “globalization” calls for college curricula to include a large component of multicultural studies and to promote study abroad at new centers around the world that are in touch with current trends. Ironically, this movement only extends a process of globalization that has already enveloped much of Asia, as education there has become more and more geared to the world market. It dictates how young people can qualify for and compete in this market, most often at the expense of any continuing discourse with either their own or others’ humanistic traditions.
So far, the proponents of globalization have seen its open-endedness and unlimited variety as goods in themselves, depending only on how well they fit prevailing economic trends and develop a mentality keyed to the opportunities of the free market. The idea is to open educational free markets anywhere in the world, counting on the already considerable appeal of “study abroad” programs and further enhancing them.
To some degree, this study-abroad idea can indeed be compatible with a core curriculum already incorporating a balanced program of humanistic learning at the center (required of all students) along with one or another elective specialization. In such cases, the study-abroad program can well fit in with the specialized elective, especially where language learning is a key to the study of another culture. Whether it would do anything for the core humanities program is another matter.
The problem becomes particularly acute at colleges where an attempt has been made to incorporate Asian civilizations within the scope of the core. In most cases, this necessitates extending the core into the third and fourth years, which tends to conflict with study abroad at a center that likely does not itself offer such core courses. In such an event, any kind of priority given to study abroad tends to be at the expense of a truly global core—it will privilege one particular culture at the expense of an approach that should emphasize human commonality as well as cultural diversity.
In effect, this means that it is truly difficult to define a “globalization” program that also has a genuine core. It depends, of course, on what one means by core and whether or not that core is based on classics or great books representative of more than one cultural tradition.
A main purpose of the essays that follow is to argue that either a true core or true multiculturalism must draw on classics from more than one such tradition because the process of reading and discussing the classics should itself involve the bridging of cultures in order to establish the terms of equivalence or difference that are not themselves culture bound.
At this point, however, I want to step aside to East Asia in order to establish a kind of universality we can hope to talk about, one contrary to the impression created by one “great books” program highly promoted in the twentieth-century West, i.e., the Hundred Great Books or Hundred Great Ideas, which were seen by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins as exclusively to be found in the West. Those finite numbers quickly yield to the recognition that the classics of the Asian tradition merit like, if not equal, attention, as already many of the most influential minds in the modern West have recognized by the interest they have shown in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese classics.
Moreover, the idea of providing a defined program for the reading and discussion of the classics—a curricular core—is not peculiar to the West. Without going into its long history in the West before the twentieth century, let me just point out that it has as long a history in East Asia as it does in the West.
It goes without saying that almost any school of learning in early times had to decide what its own classic canon consisted in—what would be the heart of its curriculum. In early China, this became a matter of public (not just private, scholastic, or sectarian concern) in reaction to the unification of the imperial state. Although early Chinese schools had their own way of referring to a classic canon on which they founded their teachings, the most notable efforts to certify classics for public or official purposes came in response to the repressive measures of the newly unified empire of the Qin dynasty (221–207 b.c.e.) when it acted to suppress the Confucian classics through the infamous “Burning of the Books.” This led to efforts under its successor, the Han dynasty, to restore the classics by certifying certain surviving texts as authentic for public purposes. When I say “for public purposes,” it means primarily for the preparation of those aspiring to serve in positions of public office. This leadership class was limited to those who had access to education and a literacy that would enable them to communicate with a bureaucratic ruling class. Among Confucians, this meant a concern for individual self-cultivation balanced with service to others.
After a subsequent long period of disunity, the question arose again with the reunification of China by the Sui (589–618) and Tang (618–906) dynasties. Reunification brought a massive attempt to re-create a bureaucratic structure staffed through civil-service exams. One of the examination fields dealt with the Confucian classics, but it was only one of several paths to accreditation, others of which included belles lettres, Daoist texts, hydrology, military arts, law, and astronomy. In this case, however, we could not consider the Confucian classics as a true “core” and the others as technical specialties because the most sought after and prized degree was the one in literary styles (not surprising in a Tang culture with a strong aesthetic orientation), and the “classics” exam, which stressed rote learning of the classic texts, was regarded by most candidates as too routine and mechanical and was criticized by serious scholars as altogether too lacking in either moral seriousness or intellectual challenge.
Such was the prestige of the Tang dynasty, however, that its neighbors Korea and Japan readily adopted the Tang examination system and curriculum as features of a new advanced world culture “modern” for its time. Attending this was a new educational system that even leading Buddhist thinkers such as Saichō (767–872) and Kūkai (774–835) tried to incorporate in the training of monks. In these cases, their aim was to combine Confucian learning with Buddhist spiritual training, so that monks would be able to provide social service along with religious instruction. In this connection, both Saichō and Kūkai incorporated the study of Confucian classics along with Buddhist scriptures into a basic core training, which Saichō said should consist of two-thirds study of Buddhist texts and one-third Chinese classics.1
Kūkai, citing the Chinese example of universal schooling for commoners as well as the elite, recommended the establishment of a School of Arts and Sciences that would include the study of Confucian and Daoist classics, as well as Chinese histories, along with Buddhist texts, in a program of universal schooling both religious and secular, citing sayings of both Buddha and Confucius: “The beings in the three worlds are all my children, roars the Buddha [in the Lotus Sutra].” And there is the beautiful saying of Confucius (Analects 7): “All within the Four Seas are my brothers. Do honor to them” (SJT 1:171).
The third example of the defining of a new core curriculum comes with the rise of Neo-Confucianism in Song-period (960–1279) China. In this case, the Neo-Confucians sought to reassert the primacy of the Confucian classics, arguing that Buddhism and Daoism had failed to deal with the civil disorders of the late Sui and Tang dynasties (eighth–tenth c.) and that only Confucian teaching based on substantive moral values could do so. At the same time, they reinterpreted the classics (especially the Classic of Changes) to provide an alternative to the metaphysics of Buddhism and Daoism.
The culmination of this process came with the synthesizing of a new curriculum based on the so-called Four Books and Five Classics but including new “classics” based on the writings of Zhu Xi’s recent predecessors in the Song. The Four Books included, besides the Analects and Mencius, texts drawn from the Record of Rites entitled the Great Learning and the Mean. This represented an intense focusing on a few texts that could provide a core for the structuring of a new curriculum, aimed at defining a systematic learning process (in the Great Learning) and mind cultivation (in the Mean) that would serve as a foundation for the political process and social improvement that neither Buddhism nor Daoism could provide. Starting with the Eight Stages of the Great Learning (“the investigation or recognition of things,” “extending of knowledge,” “rectification of the mind,” etc.), it applied this process to the methodical study of the classics in the light of interpretations and speculations found in the writings of Zhu’s Song predecessors, who had developed a Confucian metaphysics as an alternative to Buddhism and Daoism. Primary features of this new core, in contrast to earlier, more compendious collections of classics, were its intense focusing on a few primary texts and from this base working out to a larger body of texts, listed by Zhu in the more extended curriculum he set forth for advanced study in higher schools and in preparation for civil examinations. In this larger curriculum he included Daoist classics, Legalist writings, and a wide range of histories as well as recent thinkers in the Song.
Later, Zhu’s anthology of recent thought, the Jinsilu (Reflections on Things at Hand) became a fixture of the Neo-Confucian core curriculum. It was organized under the headings found in the first chapter of the Great Learning, so that even the outer ranges of learning were to be directed in accordance with the same initial principles Zhu had foregrounded in his study sequence—a focused core to start with, leading out to open horizons, the exploration of which would still be guided by core principles.
One might notice here a striking omission—no Buddhist texts. The fact is that even in the Tang period, which was so powerfully infiltrated by Buddhism, the examinations had no provision for Buddhist texts, nor was there in the Song. Later, when a Yuan-dynasty prime minister, catering to the Mongols’ nominal identification with Buddhism, proposed that there be such exams on Buddhist scriptures, a leading Chan (Zen) master came to court to protest it, arguing that Buddhism does not rely on texts, public discourse, or public service. This fact did not keep Zhu Xi from taking Chan seriously and engaging with it philosophically, but its depreciation of textual study and public discourse disqualified it from inclusion in the core curriculum.
This limitation on Chan, however, did not at all apply to Neo-Confucianism or disqualify Zhu’s core curriculum from widespread adoption all over East Asia—in Korea, Tokugawa Japan, and Annam (Vietnam). What might have been thought primarily a Chinese revival of Confucianism was quietly recognized by the Mongol conquerors of China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a universal teaching, a basic humanistic ethic, which could serve to pacify and consolidate their own rule. Then it was from the Mongols’ own official adoption and sponsorship of it that the Koreans and Japanese came to know about and accept the Neo-Confucian core as the latest and best answer to the key problem of their time—the need for national and international stability based on a shared public trust.
Indeed, when Fujiwara Seika (1567–1709), the leading Japanese proponent of Zhu’s teaching as adviser to the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, had to deal with a problem in the expanding Tokugawa commerce with Annam (in the “free market” of the time), he appealed to the Neo-Confucian ethic as a means of resolving a trade dispute, citing the virtue of mutual trust as the underlying principle of the Neo-Confucian humanist ethic—trust as true to the core.
Perhaps this much of the Neo-Confucian experience will suffice to provide an Asian perspective on the importance of the core in Asia as well as in the West, and more particularly on the importance of Neo-Confucian contributions to a great civilized conversation, the main subject of this book.
