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Notes
- 1.
The common understanding of this movement in the West was that it was aimed at Zhou Enlai, for whom Confucius was a stand-in. The name “Duke of Zhou” (周剬) was also part of the campaign, and, of course, the name can also mean “the honorable Zhou (Enlai).”
- 2.
In English, of course, “reason” or “rationality” does not connote anything like what Liang is suggesting. As I note later, some culturally conservative Western intellectuals referred to this “moral sense” that Liang speaks of by other terms. For example, Cardinal Henry Newman, a prominent nineteenth century thinker, used the term “illative sense.” It means what Liang’s “rationality” (理性) means. One such Western intellectual did indeed use the English term “rationality” exactly the way Liang did. That was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
- 3.
What follows is a summary of Liang’s argument in Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. He does not alter the original argument at all, but insists still that human societies by their very nature will evolve a kind of Chinese culture. He said the same thing about the inevitability of socialism for all human societies, so in his mind, there is a parallel between the two entities—Chinese culture and socialism.
- 4.
I still do not understand why Mr. Liang mentioned these two men. Neither of them, as far as I have been able to discover, attempted to answer my question about the longevity and continuity of Chinese culture. Mr. Xu was a historian of sorts, but his specialties were the very early period and archaeology. He actually died in 1976. Mr. Zhou was a famous biologist who, aside from his scientific work, did publish on less specialized topics about humanity. As far as I know, however, he did not address the question of Chinese culture directly. He died in 1968.
- 5.
This is one of the many times I tried to have Mr. Liang speak to the question of universal values and the source of morality. In each case, he proceeds from Mencius’s argument that values are inherent in human biology.
- 6.
Mr. Liang continues to want to become the bearer of the Buddhist and Confucian messages to the West through me. What he explains here, however, is relatively basic Mahayana Buddhism; I don’t find anything particular or different in this description from his already recorded interpretation of Buddhism.
- 7.
Here Liang says outright what I suggested in my first article on him, that he saw himself as acting in a messianic role of Bodhisattva. Like many of the first generation of radical reformers—Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong and, to some degree, Zhang Taiyan, all of whom had a deep and abiding interest in Buddhism—he saw his activist role in society and politics as Bodhisattva-like.
- 8.
Throughout these interviews, Mr. Liang maintained that he is simultaneously a Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, Marxist, and Vitalist (à la Bergson), who also has a great respect for Christianity. In my view, this is part of a long tradition of eclecticism in Chinese thought, one of the first more important examples being the Han Dynasty “National Doctrine” (国教), which was Dong Zhongshu’s eclectic mixture of Confucian teachings, Legalist teachings, Daoism, and cosmologies derived from the Book of Changes and folk religion. At the end of the Han, the earliest folk religious text we have, the Taipingjing (《太平经》) is similarly eclectic in composition, even including Moist (墨子) elements. In my view, this is a traditional attitude of Chinese intellectuals, even into the twentieth century. Liang’s friend, Li Dazhao, for instance, was simultaneously a French-style Vitalist and a nationalist while he was embracing Communist internationalism. Often Westerners do not understand this attitude, and take it to be self-contradictory.
- 9.
In the West, “Chan” (禅) is almost universally known in the Japanese reading of the word “Zen,” because the Japanese version made the biggest impact in Western popular culture, especially in the 1950s.
- 10.
I lit my pipe. I often smoked my pipe as we talked. I now regret smoking in front of him, because I am sure that Mr. Liang was just being polite when he said he didn’t mind it.
- 11.
This is in reference to Erik Erickson, a Psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychology at Harvard. His focus was on personality and identity, and this work led to his theory of Stages of Psychosocial Development. In illustrating this theory, he wrote two famous biographies of historical figures, Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi’s Truth (1969). These two figures, Erikson wrote, were “spiritually talented.” I was impressed by the two biographies and saw Liang Shuming as another example of a “spiritually talented” person who transferred his own spiritual crisis on to humanity as a whole. Liang’s own life before his book Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, for example, had traversed the “three paths” he described for humanity’s cultural evolution. He was first a utilitarian who was in favor of a Western-style government for China. Then he became dis-illusioned and became a Buddhist. After his father’s suicide, he then went onto the Confucian path. As Erickson describes them, Luther and Gandhi did something similar with their lives.
- 12.
These documents were in the Nationalist Party Archives, which at the time were still in a small town outside of Taizhong called Caotun. Perhaps the documents I saw were prior to Liang’s joining, although I did see a classmate of his from Shuntian Middle School (顺天中学) on the membership list. Liang told me at another time he had smuggled arms in a mule cart.
- 13.
I think that previously it had been widely speculated that Yuan Shikai’s agents had assassinated him. In fact, the affair turns out to be a farcical tragedy. As Huang had indeed written an ambiguous article backing Yuan Shikai’s imperial plans, he was somehow considered by Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Party to be on Yuan’s side. So, Huang fled to San Francisco to escape from Yuan’s wrath, and was shot to death by the Revolutionary Party assassin because he was considered Yuan’s backer. The order, carried out on Christmas night, came down from Sun himself.
- 14.
Astonishing as it seems today, it was solely on the basis of this essay that Cai appointed Liang as professor at Peking University. Liang, of course, had never even attended the university, much less had specialized academic training in Indian thought.
- 15.
Frank Goodnow was a famous Columbia University Professor of Administrative Law. He had worked with both President Taft and then-governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, he became a legal advisor to the Yuan Shikai government, and in this capacity, he helped draft a new constitution. The reason that Liang remembered him was because of his assertion that the Chinese people were not mature enough for a republican form of government; Yuan Shikai immediately used Goodnow to promote his Imperial plans.
- 16.
The area referred to here, a highly successful local self-government “experiment” in the 1920s and 1930s is the area west of Nanyang, sometimes called Wanxi (宛西), consisting of Zhenping (镇平), Neixiang (内乡), Xixia (西峡), Xichuan (淅川) and Deng (邓) Counties.
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Alitto, G.S. (2013). August 13, 1980. In: Has Man a Future?. China Academic Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35816-6_2
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