The Image of Neo-Confucianism in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus

The Image of Neo-Confucianism in Confucius Sinarum PhilosophusAuthor(s): Knud LundbaekSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1983), pp. 19-30Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709302 .

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THE IMAGE OF NEO-CONFUCIANISM IN CONFUCIUS SINARUM PHILOSOPHUS

BY KNUD LUNDBAEK

The Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, published by Jesuits of the China mission at Paris in 1687, gave to the Western world the first systematic and comprehensive presentation of Confucianism as the main component of Chinese civilization. Written in Latin it was ac- cessible to all educated persons in Europe. Widely read and com- mented upon in the contemporary learned periodicals, it started the first Western wave of enthusiasm for the wisdom of Confucius, a wave that was to last for nearly a century.1

According to the title page of this book the Latin translations were prepared by Prosper Intorcetta, Christian Herdtrich, Frangois Rouge- mont, and Philippe Couplet, four Jesuits of nearly the same age who had come to China about the same time (1658-1660). The Proemialis Declaratio, was signed by Couplet, who arranged the edition of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus in Paris in 1687 while he was in Europe recruiting new missionaries for China, travelling widely and meeting many important persons interested in China.

Confucianism was presented by a Life of Confucius and by translations of the first three of the Four Books, the cornerstone of Chinese education, namely, the Analects (or discussions of Confucius) and the two smaller books, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, also thought at the time to have been written by Confucius.2 The translators and publishers of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus claimed that what they presented in the main body of the book was not a description of Confucianism as they currently witnessed it in China but rather a kernel of ancient philosophy which they perceived in some of the oldest classical texts. They contrasted this philosophy with later elaborations and new interpretations, especially by the

Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, sive Scientia Sinensis latine exposita studio et opera Prosperi Intorcetta, Christiani Herdtrich, Francisci Rougemont, Philippi Cou- plet, Patrum Societatis Jesu (Paris, 1687).

2 Nearly a century before a Latin translation of the first part of the Great Learn- ing had been printed in Antonio Possevino's Bibliotheca Selecta in Rome, 1593. However, this small text, translated by Michele Ruggieri, the first Jesuit missionary in China, did not attract the attention of European readers. See K. Lundbaek "The First Translation from a Confucian Classic in the West," China Mission Studies (1550-1800) Bulletin, 1 (1979), 2-11.

19

Copyright Jan. 1983 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.



20 KNUD LUNDBAEK

Sung philosophers. In so doing they presented a picture of what came to be known in the Western world as Neo-Confucianism.

My purpose is to give a short discussion of this first picture of Neo-Confucianism as contained in the Confucius Sinarum Philo- sophus, especially in the 100-page introduction, the Proemialis Decla- ratio to this work.3 The importance of this subject for the Jesuits publishing their Confucius Sinarum Philosophus is evident from the headlines of the very first page: "The Sources and the Purpose of the work, also a Proemialis Declaratio about Chinese Books, their In- terpreters, the Sects and the Philosophy called by them Natural Philosophy" (my italics).4

3 I do not aim in the present paper to discuss the image of Confucius as it appears in the Life and in the translations. Paul D. Rule has shown that the Confucius the Jesuits brought to Europe was in many ways a crude Christianized distortion of the Chinese K'ung-Tzu. ("K'ung-Tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit interpretation of Confu- cianism," doctoral thesis, Australian National University, 1972). The Proemialis Declaratio which I am discussing here did not attract attention at the time of publication, for it was the Life of Confucius and the translations of his works that interested readers. Jean Le Clerc's review of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus covered 68 pages in his Bibliotheque universelle et historique (Amsterdam, Dec. 1687). It contained only six insignificant lines about the Sung philosophers. Regis and Bernier, Journal des seavans (Amsterdam 1687 and 1688) did not mention them at all. The Protestant Basnage, however, had a few statements about the t'ai chi, e.g., "the great Axis on which the whole machine of this world turns. . . but it is only a material principle .. ." He copied the odd phrase in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (p.LV) where the Neoterics' idea about t'ai chi is compared with Michel Servet's letter to Calvin, stating his heretical ideas about God being stone in a stone, and added, "On y remarque enfin des propos assez bizarres et incertaines." (B[asnage] Histoire des ouvrages des seavans [Rotterdam, September 1687]). More than half of the review in the Acta Eruditorum (Leipzig, May 1688) deals with the Proemialis Declaratio, dwelling especially on the chapter on Buddhism. The reviewer summarizes correctly the chain of metaphors describing t'ai chi, but he gives up when he reaches the t'ai chi-li problem. For the history of the moder Western reception of Neo- Confucianism the reader is referred to the notes and references in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, 1963). A general survey of the works printed in the first two centuries is found in K. Lundbaek, "Notes sur l'image du neo-confucianisme dans la litterature europeenne du 17ieme a la fin du 19ieme siecle," printed in Actes du Ille Colloque International de Sinologie a Chantilly (Paris, 1983).

4 The present study has included an examination of certain parts of the manuscript which is in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, Fonds Latin 6277, 2 vols. Vol. I: (Fine European paper throughout. Neat copyist hand) Fol. I-XXXII, pp. 1-369. Contents: the first part of the Proemialis Declaratio, translation of the Great Learn- ing, the Doctrine of the Mean and the first part of the Analects. Vol. II: 1. (Poor quality brown paper) Fol. 2-23 (Fol. 1 missing). 2. (Fine thin paper-Chinese?) Fol. 24-243. 3. (Same paper as 1.) Fol. 244-258 (Fol. 259 missing). 4. (Same paper as 2.) Fol. 260-281. 1 and 3 are written with a rather poor calligraphy, and have numerous erasures and corrections. 2 and 4 are written by a very elegant copyist hand. Con- tents: 1 plus 3: Second part of the Proemialis Declaratio. 2 plus 4: Second part of the Analects.



JESUITS' IMAGE OF NEO-CONFUCIANISM 21

I. The Jesuits' Sources After a short chapter on Taoism and a longer one on Buddhism the

Proemialis Declaratio focuses on contemporary Confucianism, the result of "interpretations and horrible distortions of the ancient texts by the Neoterics." These new teachers as opposed to the ancient ones, Confucius, Mencius, etc., were the Sung philosophers listed as Cheu (Chou Tun-i), Cham (Chang Tsai), the Chim brothers (Ch'eng I and Ch'eng Hao), and Chu (Chu Hsi). The most important were said to be the Ch'eng brothers who flourished around 1070 and Chu Hsi who died in 1200.5 The Jesuits knew these philosophers through the

This manuscript has been discussed briefly by V. Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France (1640-1740), (Paris, 1932), 151-58, and in an article by A. Brou, Revue de l'Histoire des Missions, XI (1934), 551-56. Pinot had

only seen vol. I. Brou criticizes Pinot for his idea that Parisian editors changed and distorted the text of the Jesuits in China. He thinks the changes were made by Couplet himself. This is not the place to describe this manuscript in detail.

Suffice it to note here that the manuscript seems to indicate that the Proemialis Declaratio, or at least the first part of it, had already been written about the year 1667. This appears from a correction on p. 1 of Vol. I, where "80 years ago when the way was opened for the Jesuits into China" has been changed to "100 years ago. . ." We know that some of the translations printed here had been published during the 1660s: Sapientia Sinica, containing Intorcetta's and da Costa's translation of the Great Learning and parts of the Analects (Chien Ch'ang, 1662); Sinarum Scientia Politico- Moralis, Intorcetta's translation of the Doctrine of the Mean (Canton and Goa, 1667 and 1669). The publication of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus in Paris in 1687 with a dedication to Louis XIV may be related to the fact that in 1685 the king sent five French Jesuits to Peking--"les mathematiciens du Roy." It may also be related to the fact that Navarette's violent anti-Jesuit book, Tratados historicos . .. de la Monarchia de China... , had been published at Madrid in 1676. The manuscript deals with Navarette, but this passage was not printed. Several other parts of the manuscript were also not included in the printed book, e.g., a section about the square and circular arrangements of the Hexagrams, in the "Prior to Heaven" order (see D. E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism-the Search for Accord [Honolulu, 1977]), and a large chapter on the Chinese language, featuring several pages with the huge fantastic "ancient characters," very similar to the ones that Athanasius Kircher had included in his China monumentis . . . illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667). A note in the manuscript says that since these characters have been published by Kircher, the whole language section may be omitted. (see K. Lundbaek, "Kinesiske Fantasitegn," Danmark Kina, May 1981). The last chapter but one, entitled "The cause of the disputations," and an insert on p. 1 of Vol. II deal with the Rites and Term controversy, naming both Navarette and Antoine de Sainte Marie. Marginal note: "II faut omettre tout cecy." I have used the manuscript only for the narrow purpose of studying the picture of Neo-Confucianism given by the authors of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. It seems to me that it deserves a general and thorough examination.

5 These authors are in fact Chu Hsi and the masters he selected for praise and study. Shao Yung, often included under the heading "The five Masters of the early Sung period" was rejected by Chu Hsi (cf. the book by Wing-Tsit Chan mentioned above in note 3). Shao Yung has a prominent place in the Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu where the whole of his "Supreme Principle governing the World" is included. He is not mentioned in the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus; perhaps the Jesuits shied away from his abstruse numerology.



22 KNUD LUNDBAEK

Sim li ta given (Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu), to which they referred as the Pandect of Natural Philosophy. This was a huge collection of Sung philosophy published by order of the Yung lo emperor in 1415, which for the Chinese had nearly the same sacrosanct status as the Five Classics and the Four Books.6

Confronted with this immense collection of texts the early Jesuits seem to have worked especially with two parts of it, the very first one, Chou Tun-i's The Great Diagram Explained, and Book 26 entitled Hsing-li, like the common title of the anthology. The Great Diagram Explained is followed by commentaries (by Chu Hsi, his masters and pupils) nearly a hundred times as long as the text itself. The Hsing-li book is a compilation of various Sung philosophers, dealing with li, ch'i, Heaven and Earth, and with astronomy.

The authors of the Proemialis Declaratio concentrated mainly on two sections: first the extensive commentaries to the first part of the second phrase of Chou Tun-i's text, dealing with t'ai chi moving to produce Yang, resting to produce Yin, and the eternal revolutions of these two principles; secondly, with one subsection of Book 26, also dealing with t'ai chi. Nearly all the many things they said about t'ai chi are to be found in these two parts of the Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu. Their summary characterization of li could have been taken from the same pages.7

II. The Presentation of Neo-Confucianism A coherent presentation and evaluation of Neo-Confucianism is

found in Chapter 1 of Part II of the Proemialis Declaratio called "About the First Principles or Causes of Things, material as well as efficient, according to the Ancients and the moder Chinese" (p. LIIII). The discussion begins: "The Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu men-

6 Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu, 70 chian, [1415], vols. 118-131 of Wang Yiin-wu's Szu K'u Ch'iian Shu Chen Pen Wu Chi, (Taipei, 1976), an edition bearing a preface dated 1673. Some of the important complete works included in this anthology, such as the Great Diagram Explained, are included in Wing-Tsit Chan's book (see above, note 3). In Alfred Forke's Geschichte der neueren chinesischen Philosophie (Ham- burg, 1938) there are many texts from the Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu in Chinese with German translation, also of the less well known Sung and Yuan philosophers. The relation between the Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu and the abbreviated and modified Hsing- li ching-i, arranged and published by order of the K'ang-hsi emperor in 1715, is discussed in Wing-Tsit Chan's article "The Hsing-li ching-i and the Ch'eng-Chu School of the Seventeenth century," in "The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism", ed. Wm.Th. de Bary (New York, 1975), 543-79.

7 In this chapter the manuscript has 28 marginal notes referring to various books and chapters of the Hsing-li ta-ch'iian shu, 17 to Book 1 or to Book 26, called Hsing-li, like the general title of the work. In working with Chou Tun-i's book the early Jesuits wisely kept away from the first sentence about the Great Ultimate and the Not Ultimate, a problem that was to occupy the mind of Joseph Premare, an eminent later Jesuit in China (see note 19 below).




tioned above starts with the material Principle of things and discusses it in great detail in several chapters. The name given to this Principle by the Neoterics is Tai kie (t'ai chi)."

This postulate, that t'ai chi is material, is not immediately sup- ported in what follows. Instead, the reader finds a long paragraph about the history of this term in Chinese literature, and an even longer one dealing with the Neo-Confucians' many attempts to describe or elucidate it. According to the authors the Neo-Confucians admit that the term t'ai chi occurs in only one place in the ancient classics, namely in the Hsi Tz'u, Confucius' Great Appendix to the Book of Changes. The famous sentence is given in transliteration as well as in translation. Legge translates it as follows: "Therefore in (the system of) the Yi there is the Great Terminus, which produced the two ele- mentary Forms. These two Forms produced the four emblematic Symbols, which again produced the eight Trigrams."8

It is on this short passage, says the Proemialis Declaratio, and on nothing more, that the Neo-Confucians build their elaborate phanta- sies about the t'ai chi. According to them the t'ai chi is ineffable; it is a spiritual something that the human mind cannot fathom. They speak about it, therefore, in metaphors related to the idea of a terminus or an axis, calling it the Axis or the Pole of the World, but they also convey the idea of the pole of a house, the crossbeam ensuring the stability of the structures of a Chinese building. They also compare it to the root of a tree, the hub of a wheel, the post of a door, sometimes using expressions like base, column, or foundation. T'ai chi exists prior to all things but it also exists in everything-everything is iden- tical with this one thing; in other words, each individual thing in the world can be said in a way to be t'ai chi.

T'ai chi possesses the power of activity and creativity: from being quietly at rest it starts moving, thereby producing Yang. Then resting again it produces Yin. This is like a man, they say, who contemplates what to say, and then, after careful consideration, speaks up. They also compare t'ai chi to a globule of mercury at rest until it is suddenly broken up and dispersed in all directions, forming multitudes of new globules of mercury. Due to the activity of t'ai chi the world is in perpetual change, moving and resting. Sometimes they think of it as the perpetual movement of a wheel or a water pump (noria). Other similes the Neo-Confucians use are the rhythmical patterns of inhala- tion and exhalation, of day and night, and of the seasons of the year.

Some of the expressions are so extreme that t'ai chi seems nearly to be divine. They speak about its capacity, magnitude, extension, its penetrating power, and a kind of accord with all things. They call it the

8 The I Ching, trans. James Legge, 2nd ed. (New York, 1963), 373. Yi is I, i.e., change or Book of Changes, that is why Legge put in the parenthesis. The Great Terminus is t'ai chi.



24 KNUD LUNDBAEK

first by itself, the most high, most subtle, most pure, most beautiful, the true Mean, the highest Perfection, the highest Good, the model and idea of all things, without beginning and without end. Calling it also Soul or Spirit, they seem to indicate that it is a living entity. If all these attributes were consistently presented by the Neo-Confucians, the Proemialis Declaratio says, the reader would hardly doubt that they were speaking about the Supreme Numen, i.e., God.

Actually, however [the writers conclude], t'ai chi is just the Prime Matter of some of our philosophers. That this is so appears from the fact that they give it another name, calling it li. This word clearly expresses what we mean by the word ratio. In this particular connection, however, they use it to explain t'ai chi by saying that it is from this ratio that the essential differences between things derive. In their philosophy this ratio seems to constitute some universal entity, different from the things themselves, but which never- theless insinuates itself in things-in species as well as in individuals. There- fore, we must assume that by the term t'ai chi they mean Prime Matter, and that the term li is meant to indicate a kind of ratio or constitutive and distinctive form. (p. LVII)

We have seen that the discussion of t'ai chi started with the un- proven postulate that it is material. Now, by taking li as ratio or form, and by construing t'ai chi-4i as an inseparable duality, the writers had to define t'ai chi as Matter. Interpreting the rhetoric of the Neo- Confucian discourse in this way, the Jesuits came up with a rather amazing structure, the Aristotelian pair of causes, a material and a formal cause. We expect then to hear about an efficient and a final cause.9

First, however, we find a short section which shows that the early Jesuits understood a fundamental issue in Neo-Confucianism, viz., the correspondance between physical and human nature. The authors observe that the Chinese use the same term li to denote the ratio, i.e., the relationship that exists or ought to exist between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife. The soul when it rules over the body is also li, but this li disappears when the soul loses its power over the body.

Then a break occurs in the text, introducing abruptly the expected efficient cause with the words "However, they do not stop at that but proceed to the greatest and most stupid errors, for on their way through these complicated mysteries we see them sliding gradually into atheism-always avoiding to mention any supernatural efficient

9 The four Aristotelian causes or First Principles are the material cause (the Prime Matter of the Scholastics), or that out of which something arises; the formal cause, that is the pattern (form or ratio) determining the creation of things; the efficient cause, or the force or agent producing an effect; and the final cause, that because of which something is or becomes.




First Principle." (p. LVII; my italics.) This being the case, the question of a final Cause need not be put at all. The seventeenth-century European mind probably could not have conceived an organismic cosmos with final causes but lacking a supernatural efficient cause.10

Still wavering, for reasons that will appear, the authors admit that in certain places the Neoterics speak admirably about the Supreme Heart, a divine moderator of the human mind, and about some Ta Teu Nao (ta t'ou nao) or brain of the Great Head that conserves and rules this wonderful world-a spiritual, non-material entity: "It is like listening to a Platonist or some other philosopher that was not against God." But then again, the writers ask, how do they dare to give the same attributes they give to their li and t'ai chi to the true God of the Ancient Sages, Shang Ti, the Lord Above or T'ien, Heaven? Is it not just a mass of poetical metaphors? And the final verdict of the Proemialis Declaratio is that the philosophy of the Neoterics is a pestiferous atheism that has to be fought tooth and nail. (p. LVIII)

III. The Jesuits' Understanding of Neo-Confucianism

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was the first Jesuit missionary who gained access to influential circles in Peking where he lived from 1601 till his death. He laid the foundation of the missionary work in China according to the so-called accommodation method by accepting as civil ceremonies the ancestor worship and the Confucius cult of the Chinese, as well as by publicly expressing his admiration for the high ethical value of the Confucian classics. In these works, especially in the Four Books, he thought he could discern vestiges of a primitive belief in God-Shang Ti or T'ien, the Lord Above or Heaven. He soon realized, however, the big difference between the classical texts themselves and the vast amount of commentaries in which they were embedded on the printed pages. Here he found the abstruse metaphysics and the apparent atheism of certain later interpreters, ideas totally

10 This is, of course, just what Joseph Needham seems to imply the Neo- Confucians conceived. His great work on the socio-cultural history of science in China contains extensive analyses of, and reflections on, the cosmological texts of the Sung philosophers, and concludes that fundamentally their world view was the same as that of moder organismic philosophy, substituting a built-in servomechanical principle for a Final Cause. In Needham's view, the question about a supernatural Efficient Cause, "some creativity 'behind' the phenomenal universe with [high] 'spiritual' qualities, is perhaps outside the field of philosophy, and certainly outside that of natural science." Needham warns, however, against regarding the Neo- Confucian conception of Heaven as a coldly rationalistic one: "Chu Hsi's world outlook possessed a markedly numinous quality." Chu Hsi reminds Needham of William Blake, as he reminded Olaf Graf, the German Chu Hsi scholar, of Friedrich Holderlin. J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols., (Cambridge, 1954-76), II, 474 and 493.



26 KNUD LUNDBAEK

unacceptable to the Christian missionary. 1 This point of view put him in an awkward situation among the high ranking officials he was frequenting and whom he tried to convert to his faith. Practically all of them regarded the Sung interpretation or some of the later variants of it as the true Confucianism. Ricci had to persuade them that he understood Chinese philosophy and Chinese history better than they had themselves.

Niccolo Longobardi (1565-1655), who succeeded him as Superior of the Chinese mission in 1610, disagreed with all this: to him the ancient sages had been just as atheistic as the- newer ones and the rituals were clearly condemnable superstitions. In these ideas he was followed by a few Jesuits in China and by nearly all the other missionaries: Dominicans, Franciscans, and others. These animadversions were the nuclei in the Terms and Rites Controversies which raged for a century and contributed so much to the ruin of the Jesuits; the order was suppressed in 1773. In this fight Intorcetta and his coworkers were firmly on the side of the Ricci party, accepting Confucius while rejecting the Neo-Confucians. When the Confucius Sinarum Philoso- phus was published (Paris, 1687) the Western world had recently been introduced to the opposite point of view by the publication of a text by Longobardi, which was enclosed in a violent anti-Jesuit book by the Dominican friar Domingo Fernandes Navarette, the Tratados historicos... de la Monarchia de China (Madrid, 1676).12

The authors of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus had intended to discuss these problems in their book but had finally given it up.13 The problems were there, however, for everybody to see, e.g., in the fact that in all these many pages the name of Longobardi did not occur; he was Ricci's successor and had died in 1655-only a few years before Intorcetta arrived in China-at age 90, and after 58 years service in the Jesuits' China mission.

The picture of Neo-Confucianism which the authors inserted in the Proemialis Declaratio of their book served the puroose of defining

1 In the De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas ab Societate Iesu Suscepta, ex Matthaei Ricii Commentariis Libri V, auctore P. Nicolao Trigautio, Belga (Augsburg, 1615) there are a few lines about Neo-Confucianism. According to Ricci these ideas were Buddhist inspired ones, incorporated in Confucianism about 1100 A.D., especially that "the Creator and all created things form one body" (106). Ricci's so-called "catechism," the Tien-chu shi-i, published in China in 1603, contains remarks about t'ai chi and li. In 1604 he sent a copy of this book to the Jesuit General in Rome, together with a Latin summary, including his refutation of the Chinese concept of T'ai chi (Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, Ms. 2136). A part of this letter is quoted inFonti Ricciane, ed. P. D'Elia, 3 vols. (Rome, 1942-49), II, 297-98.

12 Domingo Fernandez Navarette, Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos y religio- sos de la Monarchia de China (Madrid, 1676). Longobardi's text was reprinted in a French translation, published at Paris in 1701 under the misleading title Traite sur quelques points de la religion des Chinois. It was not a treatise but an internal report circulating among Jesuit missionaries in China. (See K. Lundbaek, "Notes sur l'image du Neo-Confucianism . .." in note 3 above and David Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism ... in note 4 above.)

13 See note 4 above.




their position in the controversy: for Confucius, against the Sung philosophers. It served as a foil against which they could demonstrate the humane wisdom of the ancient sages with its traces of an original theism.

It is easy for us today to see that this picture is wrong. Generaliz- ing, simplifying, and omitting many important aspects, it may perhaps be said that the central issue in Neo-Confucian cosmology is the li-ch'i duality (organizing principle and activated matter or matter- energy) introduced by the Ch'eng brothers and strongly emphasized by Chu Hsi. T'ai chi is not mentioned by the Ch'eng brothers. Chu Hsi, by selecting Chou Tun-i as the first of his masters, had to cope with the ancient concept of t'ai chi. In spite of his profuse expressions of veneration for this ultimate entity, his embarrassment seems ob- vious in many places. His favorite expression is "T'ai chi, that is just li."14

Surprisingly the li-ch'i duality or pair is not mentioned in the Proemialis Declaratio. It is true that it does not appear in Chou Tun-i's Great Diagram Explained, but it occurs over and over again in Chu Hsi's voluminous commentaries on it; and it is one of the essential constitutent structures of Book 26, the Hsing-li book.

A t'ai chi-li duality, or a t'ai chi-li pair, on the other hand, does not appear in any of the great cosmological works of the Sung philosophers; actually the authors of the Proemialis Declaratio had great difficulty in deciding how to express their ideas on that dual concept. This appears clearly in a comparison of the printed text with the manuscript, Vol. II, Fol. 5a. The crucial sentence which starts with "Actually, however, t'ai chi is just Prime Matter. . ." is awkwardly formulated in the printed Latin text: Sed enim quod meram materiam primam cum Philosophis quoque nostris intelligant, confirmatur ex eo quod aliud quoque nomen suo illi Tai kie adscribant Li illud vocant-a colon or a semicolon seems to be omitted after "adscribant". This phrase is found in the manuscript with several erasures and additions made by at least two hands. It appears that the writers actually did know that t'ai chi and li cannot be identified; they are not two names given to the same metaphysical entity, but at most can be regarded as two different ways of viewing that entity, for we read under one of the erasures siquidem Tai chi a Li ipsi distinguent-since they themselves do distinguish t'ai chi from li. Looking at this page of the manuscript one feels the uneasiness of the writers, their perplexity when confronted with the Neo-Confucian jargon. It is nearly as if the Latin mere (just) represents the chih (just) of Chu Hsi's dictum, "T'ai chi, that is just (chih) li !", as if there had been a slip-up at the start of this sentence.

14 David Gedalecia has discussed the same type of difficulty in Chu Hsi's handling of the Substance-Function problem in his article "Excursions into substance and function: the development of the t'i-yung paradigm in Chu Hsi," Philosophy East and West, 24, (1974), 443-51.



28 KNUD LUNDBAEK

It is not difficult to see why this first picture of Neo-Confucianism was faulty and distorted. The seventeenth-century Jesuits of the China mission were a highly educated elite, well trained in philosophy and theology. They may well have been able to obtain a more correct understanding of Neo-Confucianism, but they were missionaries; their ultimate aim was to convert the Chinese, to save them from eternal damnation, and not to produce an academic exposition of the prevailing ideology of Chinese civilization. To Intorcetta and his friends, Neo-Confucianism was something to avoid, not to delve into for intellectual curiosity. Their missionary policy, both in China and at home, was such that all they needed was to know enough to put up a defense against the atheists' distortions of the ancient wisdom. One other thing which prevented them from being seriously occupied with a study of Neo-Confucian ideas may have been personal resentment. In their intercourse with the Chinese literati high up in the hierarchy they often met with haughty disdain and ridicule: Chu Hsi and his masters were flung at them.15

There is of course another reason for the failure of the early Jesuits-up to and including Intorcetta and his coworkers-to present a correct picture of Neo-Confucianism: the sheer amount of hard and arduous labor required to penetrate and understand the many mysteries embodied in the thousands of pages of Sung philosophy. They did not want, but they also did not think they ought, to waste their time on such a task.16

If one asks why the picture of Neo-Confucianism produced by the authors of the Proemialis Declaratio turned out as it did, the answer, or a partial answer, has already been suggested above-they fell back on the Aristotelian modes of thought in which they were so well trained and which the European reader would readily understand and accept.

15 Such disagreeable situations are vividly depicted in Longobardi's book, 86-92 (See note 12 above).

16 To the authors of theProemialis Declaratio and the translators of the Confucian texts, writing in mid- 17th century, the "Natural Philosophy" of the Neoterics was the description of the Sung philosophers they found, or thought they found, in the Hsing-li ta-ch'ian shu. One wonders how far they wee aware of later developments in Neo-Confucianism, from reading about it or from discussions with their Mandarin friends. So far as I can see, Wang Yang-ming does not figure in seventeenth-century Jesuits' printed texts, nor does Lo Ch'in-shun. A further study of manuscripts, reports, and letters may reveal whether this omission was due to ignorance or whether the Jesuits in China, writing for European readers in a highly critical situation, simply decided to evade the complicated problems of later developments and modifications of the Ch'eng-Chu philosophy-the extremely interesting history now being presented to Western readers in great detail by a number of American sinolo- gists, e.g., most recently by Irene Bloom in her article on Lo Ch'in-shun in Wm.Th. de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds.), Principle and Practicality (New York, 1979).




IV. Weapons from the Enemy's Camp As mentioned above, the Jesuits' negative evaluation of the Neo-

Confucian world-picture is interspersed curiously with statements of admiration.

One reason for this uneasy hesitancy may have been the fact that they found such strong indications of vestiges of a belief in the true God in some parts of the Sung philosophers' texts and also in some parts of the Book of Changes (I Ching). Among the classics this book was, of course, the mainstay for the cosmological speculations of the Sung philosophers. In general, the Proemialis Declaratio treats this work with little respect, calling it an enigma, full of obscure mysteries (e.g., p. XVIII), which Confucius had been unable to solve before he died. However, at the beginning of the discussion of the Book of Changes (p. XLIII) the authors translated a section of "Remarks about the Trigrams" as expounded by a certain interpreter.17 This passage describes the Heavenly Emperor who goes forth and mani- fests himself in Springtime in the East. At the end of Spring, when Summer is drawing near, he disposes and arranges all things in the South-East, he makes all plants and animals and plants grow and thrive, until finally, at the end of the circle and the preparation of the new year, he is in the North-East. The interpreter concludes: "All this derives from the Lordship and Government of the Supreme Em- peror."18

It is true that the authors of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus thought that the "Remarks about the Trigrams" was written by Con- fucius, and therefore this quotation, with its apparent reference to God, was acceptable to them. However, by the same token the concept of t'ai chi had also to be taken serious, occurring as it does in the "Great Appendix," also thought at the time to have been composed by Confucius. At any rate, here we find an argument for the true God taken from the Chinese classic venerated above all others by the Neo-Confucian cosmologists.

But the authors of the Proemialis Declaratio also borrowed di- 17 This interpreter is usually called Cham Colao, Chang the Grand Secretary, but

in one place his name is given as Cham Kiu Chim (Chang Chi-cheng). This man is known today not as an interpreter of classical works, but as the famous statesman who served three Ming emperors (1525-82). He did, however, write commentaries on several of the classics for the child emperor Wan li. These commentaries were published and were of the greatest importance to the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Jesuits because of the simple and straightforward style in which they were composed, and because it seemed to them that Chang Chii-cheng repudiated to some degree the Neo-Confucians' metaphysical speculations (See K. Lundbaek, "Chang Chii-cheng and the early China Jesuits," China Mission Studies (1550-1800) Bulletin 3 (1981), 2-11, and D. E. Mungello, "The Jesuits' Use of Chang Chii-cheng's com- mentary in their translation of the Confucian Four Books (1687)," Ibid., 12-22.

18 The phrase is given in Latin as well as in Chinese transliteration: Haec omnia sunt a supremi Imperatoris dominio et gubernatio, and Kiai xam ti chi chu qai.



30 KNUD LUNDBAEK

rectly from a Neo-Confucian philosopher. In a general discussion of the use of the Book of Changes (p. XLVI), indicating that Confucius did not regard it as a book of divination, they inserted a passage "found at the beginning of the introduction to the tables of the 64 hexagrams by the 42 interpreters": There is a certain supreme Lord and Governor, whose name is Emperor. They asked: "Who is this Lord and Governor?" They answered: "He is the Lord and Governor himself. Heaven is a rigid and perfect thing, rotating incessantly. This eternal rotation is brought about, undoubtedly, by some Lord and Governor. Each human being must seek for himself to understand and unravel this concept. There are no words in language with which to explain it.l9

This is Chu Hsi speaking in one of his conversations with his pupils! Perhaps this is one of the strongest formulations in Confucian and Neo-Confucian texts to support a theistic interpretation of Chi- nese metaphysics: if not a Creator, at least an Upholder of the world! As it stands, it looks like a clear positive answer to a clear question, followed by a reference to a personal factor, something like Faith. At any rate, the authors of the Proemialis Declaratio were so impressed by it that they felt they had to include it, notwithstanding the fact that it was taken from their arch-enemies, the Neoterics.

Aarhus Universitet, Danmark. 19 In Vol. I of the manuscript this passage has been added as a marginal note (Fol.

XXVIIIb). In Vol. II, Fol. 7a, there is a more precise statement of the reference. Here it is given as "just at the beginning of the explanation of the first of the hexagrams, K'ien K'ien, meaning Heaven-Heaven." Actually, it can be found in one of great editions of the Book of Changes in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris (Y King, premier livre classique avec le Grand Commentaire, Courant no. 2660-62, chiian 1, Fol. 3b). In this book the phrase about the emperor that moves Heaven as its Lord and Governor is surrounded by a red pencil line and has three tiny lexical references by an old hand.

The paragraph also occurs in Chu Hsi's "Collected Works" in the much discussed chapter 49 (Li ch'i, section T'ien ti). A modern translation of this important chapter appears in Pang Ching-jen's L'idee de Dieu chez Malebranche et l'idee de Li chez Tchou Hi (Paris, 1943). The phrase quoted occurs as a footnote in Wing-Tsit Chan's edition of Chu Hsi and Li Tsu-ch'ien's Reflections on Things at Hand (New York and London, 1967), 9. Later Jesuits writing to Europe also favored this text. Premare quoted it in his great "Lettre sur le monotheisme des Chinois," written in 1728 but published only in 1861: G. Pauthier, Lettre inedite du P. Premare (Paris, 1861). This work is analyzed in D. Mungello's "The reconciliation of Neo-Confucianism and Christianity in the writings of Joseph Premare, S. J.", Philosophy East and West, 26 (1976), 389-410. See also the recent article by the same author, "Malebranche and Chinese Philosophy," J.Hist.Ideas, 41 (1980), 551-78. It is interesting to note the importance given to this phrase as late as in Pang Ching-jen's book (see above) composed as a dialogue between an 18th-century pupil of Malebranche and a Chinese disciple of Chu Hsi, followed by the translation of Chapter 49 of the "Collected Works." The very last remark with which the Chinese closes the dialogue includes a reference to Chu Hsi's words about "un directeur et ordinateur (du Ciel)" (69), a footnote referring the reader to the section of the translation which contains the paragraph in question (99).



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The Image of Neo-Confucianism in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus