ACCORDING TO one ancient commentary of the Yijing, “how Change works as the Way shifts frequently.” Considering my life as a student and later also as a teacher, I think there is much wisdom in this observation, for it implies an understanding that the experience of difference can be processual. As I reflect on the past, my first encounter with Change so loftily conceived had to do with the experience of language.
Having returned in 1946 to my birthplace of Hong Kong after the Sino-Japanese War, during which five plus years I was a toddler following my extended family of three generations in sporadic flight across south China from the brutal conflict, I was enrolled in a combined class of third and fourth graders, an accommodation to both the scarcity of teachers and the abundance of children like myself deprived of formal schooling during the war. Well into the first semester, I received my first shock of Change when a failing grade in an elementary Chinese composition class accompanied the teacher’s curt remark: “You don’t know how to write Chinese!” My tearful protest to my mother back home that I was transcribing exactly how I thought and spoke was greeted with a less than illuminating consolation: “Yes, now that you’re in school, you must learn that you can’t write like the way you speak Cantonese! You will have to make an effort to learn how to write Chinese in the vernacular style [yutiwen, literally, the writing of the spoken style, or baihuawen, the writing of colloquial speech].” To this day, I remember my hurt and bewilderment as I pondered such questions as: If I am a Cantonese but still not a Chinese, then who is a Chinese? Why am I not allowed to communicate in the manner I think and speak? And, how could I write in a manner of speech that I do not use or even know?
A few years later, when I accompanied my parents to Taiwan and quickly learned to speak Mandarin (now universally designated as putonghua [common speech]), I discovered that its ordinary syntax and vocabulary were indeed closer to the “vernacular” style that I was now obliged to memorize by rote. In Taiwan’s society, moreover, I could not make myself known readily by speaking as a Cantonese, and I had to learn (but, alas, never with the facility equal to what I could do in Cantonese) to recite passages of classical Chinese history, poetry, and thought that I was studying with a private tutor in a different “language.” Contacts with friends and schoolmates on that island exposed me further to such other “tongues” as Shanghainese and variants, Sichuanese, Hunanese, Zhejiangese, and different forms of the Minnan and Hakka dialects, the whole experience of which served to instill in me since my early teens a persistent doubt about the alleged “unity” of the Chinese language. For the nearly ten thousand graphs in common modern usage, one may affirm more or less a conventionalized agreement between written signs and meanings, even with due allowance for the now accepted division between traditional and simplified graphs, the latter of which, in quite a few cases, have deliberately collapsed semiotic distinctions by reducing further the variety of graphs but augmenting homophonous usage. Such an agreement, however, still requires continually visual or other tactile (e.g., in the case of the blind) confirmation of the graphic representation, and the graph’s alleged ability to preserve meaning against temporal erosion or cultural subversion, as I would discover later, seems no more effective than that of other forms of linguistic sign. Thus the matter of linguistic unity in China seems to me to be part of a huge cultural myth that may continue to vex, because there are still manifestly lacking a stable agreement between sound and sense and between sound and graph, an easily sharable or transferrable system of grammar and syntax among numerous regional groups of language users, and—whether written or spoken—a dominant mode of linguistic expression meaningfully accessible to all Chinese.
To complicate a bit further my attempt to swim in this sea of signs, I was born into a virtually bilingual family. Intense schooling in English together with literary and modern Chinese in those postwar years thus became another constitutive part of this Change that would affect crucially my intellectual development. If Cantonese had posed for me the difficulty of matching thought and speech to writing, English swiftly exerted an opposite effect, because this first “foreign” language I studied eventually revealed itself as a comforting system of grammatical, syntactical, and representational stability (e.g., the verb in the third person singular present almost always ends in an “s”). Even with exceptions, the rules reassured by their relative regularity that, in turn, provided tremendous inducement to learn. For all the scholarly denunciation on the bias of extolling Indo-European languages that I would encounter much later, I discovered that alphabetical syllabification did assist me in construing the approximate vocalization of a new word before lexical consultation, while growing familiarity with grammar and syntax not only sped up comprehension of new texts but also spurred me to experiment in thought and writing through this newly acquired medium of self-expression. At the Taipei American School, the pleasure and proficiency of English were enhanced by classes in Latin and Spanish. College and graduate studies in the United States beginning in 1956 brought additional acquaintance with French, German, Italian, Greek, and Hebrew.
In an oft-quoted sentence from The Variety of Religious Experience, William James asserted that “the first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else.” On reflection, an exactly opposite move may also be a possibility. The Change of perception and understanding brought by my struggle with an elementary lesson on accepted styles of Chinese writing and speaking persuaded me that my native tongue could not be made to coincide neatly with my native language, especially if language means inclusively both speech and writing, notwithstanding the venerable debate stretching from Plato to Derrida on which expressive mode constitutes the defining attribute. In Jamesean terms, the object I sought to classify and make it one with me carried within it an irreducible difference that stubbornly resisted such a taxonomic overture. Painful as that discovery might have been, it also aroused in me—ironically but perhaps also usefully—a lifelong interest in investigating the similarity and difference of languages and their artifacts. By 1956, when I sailed in a merchant marine steamer for higher education in the United States, I knew I was heading for some form of humanistic studies that would be more or less language-based.
Majoring in English and history in college brought also escalating contacts with other European texts ancient and modern that, in twofold consequence, would affect the direction and choice of further scholastic specialization and my later career. First, I soon realized that the unity of Western culture, just from a linguistic point of view, was as mythical as the one ascribed to my native civilization. What I needed, I further realized, was to acquire some perspective, even if only in a rudimentary fashion, some outline of continuity and change in Western culture that could enable an effort in “comprehending Change” (tongbian) so frequently encouraged by the cited commentary of the ancient Chinese classic. In this endeavor, I was happily served by both my own interest and the generous opportunities for serious language study throughout my schooling, leading almost inevitably to a deepening acquaintance with many of the canonical works of those languages so engaged.
Second, the study of English and European literatures persuaded me early that one potent cultural force animating and shaping virtually the entire Western tradition has to be religion, because no obsession as keenly emotional and ideological as the religious one can dispense with representational expressivity, of which the verbal variety is but one of several options. This phenomenon, however, need not be understood only in strict doctrinal terms of the three major theistic traditions. The advancing awareness of religion as the latent or manifest quest for transcendence through ritual, institution, language, or symbol, or as the supernaturalism to be naturalized by the literary imagination, or as the power of cosmic governance ironically displaced and immanentalized in works of art became, for me at least, one way to comprehend the linkage and diversity of Western letters. This awareness also explains my decision to take up the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature in graduate school and my abiding gratitude for the opportunity to further my interest through teaching and research at my alma mater. As well, it will help to explain why I have selected a midcareer essay, “Literature and Religion” (published in the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Religion), to head this collection of disparate essays organized otherwise in rough, chronological order, for the two titular disciplines obviously are of central importance to much of my work.
For my doctoral dissertation at Chicago, I wrote on “The Myth of the Fall” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Camus’ La chute. Portions of two chapters, revised, are reprinted in this volume. Although I thought of my scholarship at the time largely in terms of religious and literary studies, I was also engaged clearly in comparative inquiry without much conscious reflection on its implications for me. The second academic “boss” I had in Chicago was Joseph Kitagawa, late dean of the Divinity School. Like me, he had come from East Asia for schooling and had been invited to remain at his alma mater to teach. His friendship, which always included blunt advice, sagacious perception, and thoughtful support, compelled and enabled me, eventually, to resume scholarly engagement with Chinese studies even as I continued to work on selective figures and issues in the Western tradition. That was another momentous experience of Change that would transform significantly my intellectual orientation and my career. As Kitagawa rightly sensed, neither my youthful puzzle over Chinese composition nor my formal academic experience in the States had reduced, let alone removed, my fundamental attachment to the canonical and noncanonical works of literary Chinese, which I was fortunate enough to have been taught by my grandfather and traditionally trained tutors before going abroad. If the linguistic problems surfacing in thought and expression attracted and stimulated early in my career, so Kitagawa argued, why not make that concern more focused in all my prospective scholarship, including translation? If I was lucky enough to have acquired a working knowledge of several Western languages, why not exploit this learning experience as well in the study of the Chinese tradition?
In his essay “What Is a Classic?” T. S. Eliot astutely remarked that “consciousness of history cannot be fully awake, except where there is other history than the history of the poet’s own people: we need this in order to see our own place in history.” I hardly qualify as “the poet” so mentioned, but the enlightened provision I received from Chicago’s collegial and institutional context has been this privilege of regaining, however modestly, such consciousness of my own history even as I experience my place in the other history.
These autobiographical musings are not meant to articulate a full-blown organizing principle for a group of previously published pieces obviously varied in subject and method. Chapters 6–9 are related to my larger project of translating and studying The Journey to the West, whereas other essays are occasional pieces of specific commissions or conferences. Reflective of my own experience of Change begotten by language and culture, their diversity may also corroborate the insight of the ancient commentary that “the motions of Change cannot be canonized as law, for they attend only to Change as such.” Even without the proverbial figure, however, I hope the carpet so woven by this collection will be useful and pleasing.
The three colleagues to whom this book is dedicated are among my oldest friends in the academy. Jonathan Z. Smith and I got to know each other while we were still in graduate study, before we both accepted appointments from the same university we have since served for life. More than any other scholar, he has taught me the fundamental import of comparison in intellectual inquiry. When I made my first submission on Chinese literature to a major journal for consideration of publication, C. T. Hsia was one of my “blind reviewers.” Soon thereafter, he took the initiative to contact me, and the friendship he instantly bestowed almost four decades ago has remained steadfast, warm, and ever supportive. His own life and writings have shown me how a deep and abiding love for literatures Chinese and Western need never be partisan or competitive. As far as we know, Ying-shih Yü and I are no kin, for our native regions in China are separated by great distances. But his munificent scholarship has fed and enriched my own thinking for the better part of my career. By precept and example, he has demonstrated to me that the outlook of a committed Confucian is not only humane but can also be modern, cosmopolitan, and democratic.