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A Response to “On State and Religion in China” Henry Rosemont Jr. In his response to Anthony C. Yu’s address given as the third Ven. Hsüan Hua Memorial Lecture, Henry Rosemont Jr., while expressing agreement with Professor Yu on many points, raises questions on others, among them whether Chinese imperial governments were as controlling of religion as the current regime.

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am happy to be with you tonight, not least because it brings back the fond memories I have of the evening, two and a half years ago, when I had the honor and pleasure of being in this room as the first speaker in the Hsüan Hua Memorial Lecture Series. Very seldom have I addressed a large audience whose many and good questions combined criticism of my views with a clear understanding and at least some sympathy for them; it was a most unusual and rewarding experience.

Another reason I am happy to be here tonight is the opportunity to profit once again, as I have so often profited in the past, from the outstanding, incisive and impassioned scholarship of Professor Anthony Yu. (Because I consider him a friend as well as a distinguished colleague, I will hereafter refer to him as “Tony,” an informality which I hope the shade of Confucius will not frown upon.)

In the splendidly crafted lecture we have just heard, Tony takes a stand on a number of controversial historical and religious issues in contemporary sinological scholarship, three of which I want to address briefly in these remarks. I hope that doing so will not distract, however, from other important claims he has also advanced tonight, especially his analysis of how the cult of ancestor worship developed as a political ideology no less than as a religion in ancient and imperial China.

The first issue I want to take up is whether the Chinese can be considered to be truly religious or not. Tony answers affirmatively, and so do I, but for somewhat different reasons, and I want to prod him a bit on this issue 3, june 2003

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score. The second issue is the extent to which the actions of the present Chinese government resemble the actions of their imperial predecessors, especially with regard to religious intolerance; Tony sees many close parallels, whereas many other scholars, not alone conservative anti-Communists, see relatively few. And the third issue is whether the emphasis on uniformity and conformity as opposed to individuality and creativity, an emphasis which we both see as a characteristic of Chinese imperial governments and of the larger society, exists because of, or in spite of, the writings of the early Confucians. Tony suggests that the Master and his successors were, intentionally or otherwise, complicit in developing the ideology of conformity and a totalizing state, whereas I read them as much more open with respect to human flourishing, and much more condemning of despotism in any form.

Addressing the first issue, given that the scholarly study of religion began in the West, it is not at all surprising that the Judaic-Christian heritage has been taken by scholars as paradigmatic of reThe idea of a single creator ligion, with a consequent early focus on how much or how little the beliefs and practices found in other cultures mirrored those described in the Good Book, esGod is not a necessary pecially with regard to the idea of a single creator God. Tony and I agree that such an idea is not a necessary condition for religiosity. condition for religiosity, and that ancestor worship in China served well most of the same functions ascribed to the great bulk of beliefs and practices of Jews, Christians and Muslims.

But Tony invokes the concept of transcendence in making his argument for Chinese spirituality, a concept I am loath to employ in characterizing Chinese thought. If I am correct, throughout the monotheistic theologies—but especially in Christianity—the world of God is wholly other than the world of our human experience; the “Kingdom of Heaven” is altogether independent of our world, while at the same time our world is utterly dependent on it.

If this is an accurate account of the concept of a transcendental realm in the Abrahamic religions, I would argue that such a concept is not to be found in any early Chinese text. “Tian” and “Shangdi”—usually translated as “Heaven” and “Supreme Ancestor” or “High Ancestor”—are the Chinese terms that Father Matteo Ricci and many of his missionary successors saw as lexically equivalent to “God.” Tony does not, as you heard, follow Ricci on this score, nor would I, but I would go further and claim that while tian and Shangdi may indeed be lofty at times, they are nevertheless of this world, the only world humans ever experience. If the idea of God is not essential for religion, then neither can God entering this world be es-

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A Response to “On State and Religion in China”

sential for sacralizing the secular; rituals properly understood and performed can achieve this goal, as Herbert Fingarette has so well described in his Confucius: The Secular as Sacred.

In the same way, while the spirits of the ancestors to whom we offer ritual sacrifices—whether these spirits be shen, guei, ling, bo, hun or some combination thereof—are normally invisible to us, they do not inhabit a world altogether distinct from this one, as texts ranging from the Book of Poetry through the Records of Ritual make clear, at least as I read them.

Indeed, the avowed purpose of the purification rites that were preparatory to making the ancestral sacrifices, as described at length in the Liji, was to make the spirits perceptible again to the purified.

This is a horribly laconic summary of several complex and interrelated issues, but, in sum, I believe that Tony well and accurately describes the Chinese as deeply religious, but that he does not have to attribute a concept of transcendence to them in order to make his case.

Turning now to the second issue, I endorse fully Tony’s claim that the present Chinese government is of a piece with its imperial predecessors in seeking to order many dimensions of social life, not alone religion, by means of regulations deemed necessary for creating social stability at least, social harmony at best. What we disagree about is the extent to which repression of religion characterized imperial governments as well as the present one.

To be sure, many emperors repressed Daoist groups, Buddhists and practitioners of “folk” religion at times, but they did so not nearly as consistently and thoroughly as the government of Jiang Zemin does, nor for the same reasons. Tony describes well in brief compass the beliefs which these religious groups and practitioners held, beliefs which were at wide variance with the tenets of an expanded ancestor worship cult which legitimated governmental authority. But if that cult was needed to justify the actions of totalizing emperors, it is difficult to explain why, throughout imperial history, so relatively few of them consistently repressed these rival ideologies. The “savage persecutions” of Buddhists Tony mentions in his lecture, for example, are, I take it, references to the dismantling of many monasteries and the forced laicization of monks in 842–845 under the Tang.

But these persecutions, savage though they indeed were, followed a long period of successive famines and the earlier massive slaughters that defined the bloody rebellion of An Lushan. In part at least, the repression was inspired by the need to increase the number of farmers and, attendantly, to redistribute monastic lands heretofore not subject to taxation. We should also note that the Tang emperors did not repress Daoism; indeed they claimed direct descent from Laozi.

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I do not wish to suggest that emperors acted only from benign motives, nor that their repression was not brutal at times. I do want to suggest that such persecutions were more the exception to the rule of general religious tolerance in Chinese dynastic history, and were significantly different from the actions of the present government’s persecution of Tibetans, Uighurs, the Falun Gong, Christians and other groups. The Cultural Revolution and the Beijing Massacre of 1989 have undermined the Party’s claim of moral authority to rule, I believe, in ways that the earlier occupants of the Dragon Throne were never threatened; hence the subsequent repression of all contemporary rival claims to moral authority. Again, I have greatly oversimplified this issue, but I hope that Tony might expand a bit on his analysis of it.

The third question I want to take up is arguably the most important, for it goes beyond historical interpretation to philosophical issues that, as Tony makes explicit in the concluding remarks of his paper, must be faced by every Chinese intellectual today, as well as their Western, especially American, counterparts. Earlier in his paper, he says: Within this ethos fostered by religious devotion to Heaven and to the ancestors, the ideals preferred are those promoting uniformity, orderliness, continuity, conformity and compliance with group norms and even group tastes, in sharp contrast to the predilection for difference in individuality, originality, creativity and self-initiative championed by other civilizations.

Now I believe Tony is correct in characterizing much of the ethos of Chinese society as concerned with uniformity and conformity to group norms, but he is suggesting in his lecture that this ethos developed significantly on the basis of early Confucian writings, whereas I would argue that it developed more in spite of them.

At least since the Enlightenment era and the rise of industrial capitalism, a Manichean split between rugged individualism and a faceless collectivism has dominated Western political thought, and it has been influential in China as well, especially since the May 4th Movement. Speaking for myself, I have come to see this conceptual split as a Western philosophical conceit alongside another in moral philosophy, namely, between selfishness and altruism, and I have worked to suggest that classical Confucianism offers an alternative way for human beings to construe themselves as persons, and as members of communities; it is not merely either/or. We need to entertain some very new or very old ways of thinking, I believe, if the twenty-first century is to be more peaceful, just and humane than the twentieth, and we are certainly not off to a good start.

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A Response to “On State and Religion in China”

Consequently, I hope I have simply misunderstood Tony as suggesting early Confucian complicity in the development of the ideology of an altogether uniform society controlled by a totalizing government. I certainly do not need to tutor him on the many passages of the Analects wherein Confucius rails against self-seeking despots, disavows coercion, insists that students may challenge their teachers, remonstrate with rulers, and says that “To see what it is appropriate to do, and not do it, is cowardice.”

Tony similarly knows that in a semantically camouflaged way, Mencius provided ideological justification for regicide and rebellion, and that even when the ruler was doing his job, he was the least important element in a well-ordered society. Xunzi’s writings are replete with similar claims and arguments.

Thus, while I certainly do not find support for a capitalist-oriented rugged individualism in the early Confucian texts, I do not find them endorsing a mindless collectivism overseen by totalitarian despots either, Communist or otherwise. Rather do I see them as offering an alternative vision of the good society and the good life for human beings.

It is becoming increasingly evident, to me at least, that for somewhat different reasons, both the Chinese and the American peoples are losing their moral and spiritual compasses, and hence we all might profit from a close reexamination of that alternative vision of the “Human Way” (ren dao) mapped out for us long ago by the early Confucians.

Tony, I hope you will agree at least on this point, if not on the others; and thanks once again for a wonderful lecture. ❧ Professor Yu’s reply to Professor Rosemont’s response will appear in book form as part of the expanded version of his lecture (Open Court, forthcoming).

About the Author Henry Rosemont Jr. is George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, senior consulting professor at Fudan University, and professional lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He is currently visiting professor of religious studies at Brown University and visiting professor of philosophy at Trinity University. He took his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Washington, and has pursued postdoctoral studies in linguistics at M.I.T. and in advanced Chinese studies at the University of London. He is author of A Chinese Mirror (1991); Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World’s Spiritual Traditions (2001); and the forthcoming A Confucian Alternative (2003), as well as many issue 3, june 2003

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articles and translations, including, with Roger T. Ames, The Analects of Confucius (1998).

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