Beyond East and West by John C.H. Wu with a new Foreword by John Wu, Jr.
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Copyright © by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana undpress.nd.edu Published in the United States of America All Rights Reserved
Original edition published by Sheed & Ward, Inc. ©
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Contents Beyond East and West: A Foreword • John Wu, Jr.
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——— A Note of Introduction • F. J. Sheed Illustrations
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Part One
. The Gift of Life
. My Father
. My Little Mother
. My Big Mother
. The Philosophy of Nursery
. Adam and Eve
. John is My Name
. The Hound of Heaven
x . The Story of a Friendship
. “Law Is My Idol”
. De Profundis
Part Two . The Religions of China
. The Lotus and the Mud
. Mental Roamings
. The Return of the Prodigal
. The Kindergarten of My Cathollic Life
. Escape from a Lion’s Den
. The Poetry of Life
. A Chinese Tunic for Christ
. The Diplomacy of Love
. My Last Trip to China
Explanations and Acknowledgments
European Reminiscences (an Appendix to Beyond East and West)
Beyond East and West A Foreword I In April 1951, when Sheed and Ward published Beyond East and West, my father had already been credited with a number of works in Chinese and English that were published in China and in Hong Kong. His autobiography was the first of a series of books written in English that initially saw light in America and then within a relatively short time were translated into several major European and Asian languages, including French, Polish, Vietnamese, and Korean. For one reason or another, however, none of these books were rendered into Chinese, his native tongue. As for Beyond East and West, a Catholic best seller in the States, when my father was asked why he had not pushed harder for its Chinese translation—despite requests for such a project— his usual reply was that the book was meant for a primarily Western reading public and therefore, in his opinion, a Chinese version was not appropriate. Then he would quickly add that if one day he saw fit to write of his life in and for the Chinese exclusively, he would present it from a more “Chinese” or personal perspective. Unfortunately for his people, this never came to be, though I have always believed that had he fulfilled his promise, the result could hardly have been more “Chinese” or more personal than the original xi
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English version. Granted, perhaps it could have been more “Chinese,” in some sense, but certainly it could not have been more personal, at least coming from the mind of a great legal and a budding mystical scholar. The books that followed the autobiography included The Interior Carmel (1953), a study of the Christian path of perfection through meditations on the Beatitudes; Fountain of Justice (1955), a study in the natural law tradition; Cases and Materials on Jurisprudence (1958), a casebook used in law schools in America; Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality (1965), a fascinating collection of essays covering such diverse subjects as Confucianism, Taoism, and the Carmelite spirituality of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the French saint whose thought was instrumental in my father’s conversion to Roman Catholicism; and The Four Seasons of T’ang Poetry (1972), a rich poetic commentary on the poetry of the T’ang Dynasty (618– 906 C.E.). My father’s book The Golden Age of Zen, initially published in English in Taiwan and translated into Chinese, French, and two separate Korean renditions, was published in America for the first time by Doubleday in 1996. Its Chinese translation by Wu I, my father’s student in Taiwan, continues to sell. In addition, my father’s Chinese translations of the Psalms and the New Testament, rendered into an exquisite modern classical Chinese form in the 1940s, continue to be read to this day in Taiwan, though they are no longer sold anywhere. At this writing, unhappily, virtually all of my father’s works in English, including the Golden Age and his translation of the Tao Teh Ching, the classic work of Taoism, are also out of print. Regrettably, too, The Interior Carmel, Fountain of Justice, and Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality—English writings done during what we might regard as the height of his intellectual and spiritual powers— remain untranslated for the Chinese reading public. This neglect on the part of Chinese scholars may be attributed to at least two factors: indifference to his thought and, possibly, intimidation by the scope of his scholarship and vision.
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The Holmes-Wu correspondence (April 19, 1921–April 2, 1933) of 111 letters, which is preserved at the Harvard Law School Library and extensively documented in this autobiography in the chapters “The Story of a Friendship” and “‘Law Is My Idol,’” provides the reader with excellent and copious examples of both men’s intellectual, scholarly, and leisure interests, which were many. It is rather incredible that nearly sixty years separated them in age, not to mention that they had to overcome many cultural and racial differences. One other important set of letters that has been preserved is my father’s extensive correspondence with Thomas Merton, the American Cistercian monk and writer. These letters date from early 1961 to late 1968, up to Merton’s sudden death by accidental electrocution in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, exactly twenty-seven years to the day the monk arrived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky. A good number of Merton’s letters to my father can be found in the collection The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns (the first of five volumes of Merton correspondence), selected and edited by William H. Shannon and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1985). For a glimpse into the nature and scope of the Wu-Merton letters, see my essay “A Lovely Day for a Friendship,” delivered in Rochester, New York, in June 1991 and printed in The Merton Annual, volume 5 (1997), published by AMS Press, New York. The most complete collection of their letters is found in the book Merton and Tao: Dialogue with John Wu and the Ancient Sages (Fons Vitae, 2013). In the early 1960s, when my father was teaching in the Asian Studies Department at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, he first threw himself into the study of Zen (Ch’an) Buddhist literature. Through his exposure to Zen Buddhism, he came to a more solid and existential identification with the world. It further confirmed for him the necessity of studying such literature in the West as a prelude to, and as groundbreaking work for, a recovery of Western culture in general and Christian spirituality in particular.
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Last but not least, my father was most interested in giving his own Chinese culture, which he viewed as a sleeping giant, a muchneeded spiritual and intellectual impetus. He believed strongly and often affirmed, nearly litany-like, that the cultural recovery of Asia would come through the West. And especially while in the West, he saw this as part of his own calling. Though Beyond East and West is a deeply personal spiritual odyssey, it is also a work of vast cultural and intellectual importance. To miss this point would be to miss a good part of its original élan and intention—as it were, to mistake the trees for the forest, as Walt Whitman famously implied in his “Song of the Redwood Tree” (Leaves of Grass, 1881–82).
II For years there have been requests to reissue Beyond East and West in its original English or in a Chinese translation. These requests come from many sources, not least from scholars who have taken a renewed interest in a twentieth-century man of letters whose specialization was the law but who, throughout his rich and, I think, saintly life, possessed an unquenchable interest in areas of knowledge that on the surface appear to have little or nothing in common. Yet in his person he seemed to have carried all these contradictions with grace and aplomb. Requests also come from men and women of religion, particularly Christians of different sorts who are searching for a gentler and more expansive and generous form of their religion. They are sincere Christians craving to break out of the Western-oriented and masculine cultural biases of the Christian tradition and to find a more subtle and sublime, or, if I may put it this way, feminine vehicle of expression, one that would give their faith a truly universal and magnanimous tone. They seek a religion that is authentically a spirituality intended to redeem and give solace to all humankind, beyond any geographic or cultural bounds. In a self-description to me, my father called himself an anomaly, and by this I suppose he meant a misfit, an abnormality, a person
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who deviates consciously or unconsciously from the expected norm. He was that, to be sure. Yet the passage of time and my rereading of his numerous writings now convince me that he was also that rare genius whose person and many achievements defy any facile classification. Could it be, I now ask, that his entire existence was dictated by an altogether higher law and providential will, one that is not fully graspable by those of us trying to fathom the roots of his often surprising and profound insights? He teases us with dreams and visions of something wonderful to come but which, to him, had most certainly already arrived because he was already living them to their very core. In short, as a very serious follower of Christ (and, for that matter, of all the great paradigms of history, since he could not by nature reject anything or anyone true and good), my father regarded the Incarnation not as a mere footnote but as verbatim truth. He drew out its implications in every phase of his existence. It was because of his religious faith that he became such a sound and serious intellectual—because somewhere along the intellectual road, in spite of the fact that he himself was a first-rate thinker, he learned an allimportant lesson about the limits of intellectualism. This is for me one of the greatest lessons of his life, and one, we might say, without which he could not have gone as far as he did, ironic as this may sound. Nothing else can quite explain the untrammeled and outright joy and divine hope that naturally graced every line he wrote and spoke, or the utter simplicity with which he learned to live his life, particularly as inspired by the “Sermon on the Mount,” which he regarded as coming directly from the Heart of the Savior. That is why he spent an entire book, The Interior Carmel, dissecting this sermon’s beauteous inner roads, which lead to its very center, to Christ Himself. If one understands the simplicity of truth in my father’s life, even the occasional lapses or unevenness in style in his autobiography nevertheless take on, I believe, a particular charm and beauty. He let things fall where they may, as naturally as possible. His words, one discovers, are simply the unabashed disclosures of an ingenuousness found only in persons of profound simplicity, unbridled by
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normal social conventions and not puffed up by the consciousness of their own achievements. In his case, the man and the style seemed perfectly melded together and articulate each other without fuss or artificiality. He never pursued goals that could lead to a false self or an inflated ego. He wrote from the heart, from some secret chamber where the eternal Muse refused to let him be anyone but a genuine man of Tao who had come directly from the Mind of God. His writings—and I believe this to be especially true of the current book—were an outpouring of gratitude to his Divine Maker for the gifts that were given to him mysteriously and, to him, always unearned, at conception. His mature life was characterized by the full recognition that all his joys, sorrows, and sufferings were but divine acquisitions lavished upon him by an all-merciful Redeemer. His later piety was such that he was convinced that even particular qualities which had taken him a lifetime to cultivate were in the end not of his own making. He knew this implicitly from a relatively early age, when he was still struggling to understand both himself and God. Such piety might have belonged to a hermit; the great sinologist and friend, William Theodore deBary, once complimented my father by intimating that he was “a hermit at home in many traditions.” Viewing history as a continuous unfolding of the drama of salvation, my father seemed to be saying in his autobiography, “If Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas could make copious use of the Greeks in penetrating the Heart of Christ, I too am at liberty to see Christ through Confucius, Lao Tzu, and other Chinese sages!” Here he would be echoing Thomas Merton (see Merton’s The Way of Chuang Tzu, which the Cistercian Merton dedicated to my father), although, at least chronologically, such a thought would have predated his cherished friend’s sentiments by more than a decade. Asian and Western scholars have long pointed out striking similarities between Asian sages and the Jesus of the Gospels. Few, however, have blatantly and unblushingly regarded the ancient sages as harbingers of the Good News, or done so in quite the same way
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and degree as my father. In coming to Christ through the East, he not only gave new blood and multidimensionality to Christianity but also may have unwittingly revitalized his own native traditions by placing them in an eternal and universal light, impregnating them with a transcendent and holy meaning that in their inception was of divine origin. To him, how could they be otherwise? In this regard, he was following not some particular whim but the natural law itself, which for him is dynamically and continuously unfolding in man’s consciousness in time, seeking after itself in an ever-developing process. Like the evolution that occurs in species, human knowledge evolves by gathering the most diverse elements, as though guided by a compassion, love, and mercy that refuse to cast away seemingly useless bits of humanity and human thought that may bring about a profounder whole, beyond the natural and human. My father had an extraordinary gift for and faith in harmony. That holy instinct pushed him to investigate and salvage all knowledge, both sacred and profane. His developing theological and existential understanding of the Incarnation and Redemption and his penetrating studies into philosophical Taoism and Zen Buddhism—which contributed to his seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary—convinced him that all creation, regardless of how it may appear to our sometimes jaded minds and hearts, bore the unmistakable stamp of the Sacred Heart and Mind. The proof of his convictions lies not so much in what he wrote, which was certainly eloquent and copious, but in the meticulous way he carried out his daily responsibilities, beginning with morning Mass and Holy Communion. As disarmingly chronicled in Beyond East and West, this was especially true following his religious conversion. We see in this spiritual classic that what was otherwise prosaic suddenly takes on poetry, and even the sweeping of a room—to borrow a George Herbert image—is alchemized into a romance. Among other things, the Roman Catholic Church, besides giving my father his raison d’etre, helped explode and dispel all the intellectual illusions and moral ennui that had plagued and
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enervated him for nearly two decades leading up to his fateful encounter with Christ. And perhaps most ironically, in being given the gift of faith, he may have unwittingly fulfilled the one philosophical goal of the great Chinese sages: the inseparability of theory and practice, the blurring of the line between what one thinks and what one does. In this he was caught entirely unawares, for, in a sense, grace for the most part worked in him in a secret way. Thus his later achievements appeared to be effortless as well. As a profound mystic, he lived in mystery. And those in the past who have most appreciated this book and other books of his—even on ideas not centered on religion and the spiritual life—have been those who possessed a great sensitivity to and depth of religious feeling. In the Tao Teh Ching, we have the deeply paradoxical thought that going far is to return. That is what I believe my father finally attained. Intellectually, he seemed to have pressed forward as far as he could, and in trying all the ways and byways, he had lost all taste for such travels and hit solid intellectual and moral cul-de-sacs. Nothing seems more obvious in this autobiography and his later books than his disenchantment with a pseudo-intellectualism that lacks fire and emotion and that, being stillborn, virtually has no place to go. But even more so in his pursuit of the religious life, he sought long and hard for a Christ whose signature was that of the divine heart rather than the brilliant mind, not because he disparaged the mind—he was, after all, a great intellectual himself—but because he felt a mind acting without a heart is absolutely incapable of penetrating deeply into the sublime regions of life itself. At home, in our evening recital of the Rosary, our dear father nearly always stressed the importance of striving after a healthy moral life and never encouraged the kind of narrow moralistic strivings that would take us to the brink of forfeiting the very grace with which we have all been endowed. This was a formidable challenge, but, as we were growing up—all thirteen surviving siblings—we felt it as something that each of us had a deep obligation to fulfill, not toward our paterfamilias but to God Himself.
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As for his conversion, there was no way my father could be satisfied with remaining outside, at the entrance, perceiving the hidden treasures within; he thirsted for at least a share in the way that the Perceiver himself perceived His creation. In short, he sought nothing less than to be engulfed by the contemplative vision. Hearing such a call from deep within, he thirsted to find a way back to what he regarded as his true home. That is why it was so important for him to have found in the very center of life a warm, throbbing, and knowing heart from which he knew all hearts emanate and go toward naturally, back to a nurturing Mother. In a letter to Thomas Merton dated September 6, 1966, my father wrote: “The beautiful thing about you is that your heart is as great as your mind. Thus in you love and knowledge [are] united organically. Herein lies your profound significance for this great age of synthesis of East and West.” He might as well have been writing about himself. Beyond East and West can be read in terms of a sojourner having once again recovered all the mislaid treasures and merriment that had sustained him as a child. That is the reason we can so readily view my father’s faith in terms of a spiritual childhood—that which irresistibly drew him to St. Thérèse of Lisieux and made him love her so very much—and why unrestrained joy jumps off the pages of the book. It is, of course, a contemporary retelling of the story of the prodigal son. III Being an incurable bookworm, my father was a voracious reader of both ancient and modern classics. He also kept abreast of theological writings, from the old classics, The City of God and the Summa Theologica, to the moderns, such as the works of John Henry Newman, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Evelyn Underhill, Rudolph Otto, Bernard Lonergan, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, the great Jewish Hasidic. Moreover, being himself a mystic, he was especially attracted to the Spanish saints, St. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, as well as to Henry Suso,
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John of Ruysbroeck, and Meister Eckhart, among others. Yet theology, including mystical writings, for all its grand structures and invaluable insights, was for him merely a support and buttress for, or a scaffolding of, that initial gift of faith. He knew that no amount of theological or intellectual wizardry and cleverness—though they could surely strengthen one’s faith—could ever in and by themselves transport one directly to faith. In short, he could understand faith only in terms of an absolute free gift from God, especially as a wholly undeserved gift to one unworthy of God’s love, which is given to each one of us, without exception. The world’s great books, while filling the cup of his ever curious mental life and continuing throughout his life to broaden the scope of his interests, nevertheless fell short in fulfilling his most basic spiritual needs. In Catholic converts such as Newman, Léon Bloy, the Maritains, and Thomas Merton, he happened upon the Divine Heart and Mind that gave weight to all knowledge and that helped fuse into a perfect unity what otherwise would have remained at best scattered and unconnected. The center in him held only because of the presence of this inexplicable faith. Yet, if Christ were the beacon, then the ancient Asian sages were at least the doorway to his fateful return to Christ. For truly, as he acknowledged gratefully, the Chinese classics, notably Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching, had spontaneously, naturally, and matter-of-factly prepared him for this grand banquet at the foot of Christ. As one writer has put it: “It was not the intellectualism of Catholicism that attracted Wu; rather it was the simplicity of the Catholic message, its admission of the inscrutable mystery of God’s love, and its demand for child-like faith.”1 In an age dictated by wild swings of values, he refused to give in to the temptation that had befallen so many intellectuals of his own day. In the face of a dire moral relativism, a life without the natural law and without an eternal law to
1. Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, ed. Howard L. Boorman et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967–71), 3:421.