A tragedy of the internet is that we often lose posts to the ether. So, I apologize for the abbreviated nature of the following:
Matteo Ricci is, perhaps, the most influential sinologist the west has ever produced. A Jesuit missionary, he translated many of the Chinese Classics into Latin and the Bible into Chinese. He also wrote a variety of essays in Chinese that served as Christian apologetics/promotion (not sure which is the more correct term). One of the most famous of these essays was called “The Ten Paradoxes” and was written in 1608. Unfortunately, I cannot find this essay in any form, despite it being routinely referenced. So, I was wondering whether ILP would be able to reproduce it, at least in part, as an intellectual exercise in comparative religions. The “Ten Paradoxes” part is very easy – it is a reference to a Hui Shi, a Logician/Dialectician and a character from the Zhaungzi, widely considered the second most important Daoist text after the Daodejing.
Here are his “Ten Paradoxes”:
(33, tr. Burton Watson 1968:374)
To give a little more background on the character (of which Ricci would most certainly have been aware), here are two other small passages that involve him, also from the Watson translation of the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu, in the archaic Wade-Giles):
So . . . given this information, how could one render such a character as an anima naturaliter Christiana?
I would love to participate, but I’m a little lost right now. What I can do, though, is find the essay for you if it exists on the internet. The Ten Paradoxes. While I search for it, can you explain this a little better. Ricci was using the Hui Shih character to represent to the Chinese people what the Christian attitude is like? His presentation in the second two passages seems to be as a fan of rhetorical and skepticism. Is that right?
I tried searching for it, and I couldn’t find it. That doesn’t mean it can’t be found on the internet . . . but I do try and rigorously search for things before I post a Fedex question. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there, but I can’t find it. I think I may have found a Latin translation, but that is of very limited value.
I’d agree that Hui Shi was a skeptic and rhetoric was most certainly his bread-and-butter (millet and water?). Basically, a sophist of the first degree. I’ve posted this article before. Different scholar, but from a related school . . . so you can see what sort of borderline nonsense we are dealing with.
What is interesting, at least from what I’ve managed to gather, is that rather than try and refute those paradoxes, Ricci embraced them as a demonstration of the validity of Christian ideas. Given Hegel’s notion of Christianity being about the interplay of opposites, using a Dialectician’s mantra as a starting point is a reasonable choice for a missionary.
Would it help if I said that Ricci translated logos as Dao in his Bible, as in, “In the Beginning, there was the Dao . . .”
I think that book has an excerpt on page 95 called “The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven”. Or is that something else?
I would try worldcat.org and a9.com if you haven’t, that’s what I’ve been using, and I don’t know hardly a thing about it.
Have you tried searching by alternate titles, such as Jiren shipian and The Ten Chapters of Extraordinary Men? This little bugger is a tricky one.
The idea of the Dao being equivalent to the Logos is something that’s been at the edge of what I’m learning recently. There’s a book called Christ: The Eternal Tao that has been mentioned over in over in some of my researches, though I haven’t checked it out directly. Of course with Christ identified as the Logos, the connection becomes very important.
I want to say more about this, but I’m still not sure what do yet. You and I have talked about the connection between Confucianism and Christianity a bit, and how it relates to Korean Christianity. So then, I guess my next question that comes to mind is, how is the example of the skeptic and the sophist comparable to the Christian in the Chinese perspective, or the Christian as the Jesuit explaining Christianity to China wants them to see him? Is it about the degree to which the claims of Christianity were flying in the face of Chinese common sense?
Most often, I know my way around Dao, Huizi is well known to me, but what you are on about in his dualisms, totally escapes me … ?
Huizi was, I believe as you already stated, from the Philosophical Dao realm, just as Zhuangzi, which is rational and deeply contemplative.
If you are going to try making Dao tantamount to logos though, you are going to run into a deep contextual error that cannot be surpassed by any amount of rhetoric ~ unless you switch over to religious Dao, which is highly divisive and sectarian, and well, I think it quite rather sucks.
Where are you going with this Xunzian and I’ll give you what I know?
Have you tried running this by Chad Hansen of the university of Honk Kong? He’s got several valuable works on Chinese Philosophy that are the best I’ve seen. He side steps much of the usual attempts at parallelism (logos = Dao) that plague European-Chinese philosophical hermeneutics. Check him out. He’s got a pretty good web site.
Thanks for the site Hermes! Good stuff. It doesn’t have the particular article I’m looking for, but it has a bunch of other goodies. Always appreciated.
Ucci,
It is interesting that he chose this piece. China has a very short sophist tradition, so I think part of it is that Ricci knew he was hitting them on a weak-spot in their philosophical narrative. The paradoxes are designed to be just that, sort of silly paradoxes that we cannot reconcile. I think some of them show an early awareness of process philosophy and the tension between reality-as-construct and reality-as-it-is/ought-be.
As for how Christianity contradicts Chinese common-sense, I’ll go with Tu Weiming’s elaboration on the work of other sinologists:
–“The Continuity of Being”
That essay was tocuhed on by Mary E. Tucker when she talks about the notion of “natural cosmology”, in this case with respect to Confucianism but I think the same could be applied to Daoism and Chinese Cosmological sensibilities in general:
–Confucianism and Ecology, Introduction
Those were two that I could find on the 'net. There is another one where Tu Weiming takes a Christian-Confucian to task for inserting God into the Confucian network, but that starts to veer away from Chinese Cosmology in general and into Confucianism specifically which is too specialized for what we’re talking about here.
Essentially, the notion of something being outside the system goes against the Chinese notion of how the world works. Even gods, in the Chinese system are immanent. The Ocean, for example, is a god. It doesn’t represent a god, it isn’t a god in the form of an ocean, the god is the ocean.
This is where the paradoxes come into play, I think. Despite having an immanence-based system, there seems to be something “beyond”, something that is “bigger” than everything else and something that is “smaller” than everything else. A flat plane that extends in all directions but exists only in two dimensions. These are concepts that we can conceive, but that are not actual, as in they don’t exist in this world unless we define they to. So, I imagine he took the idea of immanence/transcendence as a solution to this problem, and sorta squeezed the Christian God in there. The trick is how he used those paradoxes to justify transcendence.
I think that this is where some sophistry can come into play. Not as in something “bad” but as in philosophy for philosophy’s own sake – “doing” philosophy as opposed to using philosophy to do something else. Notions of transcendence are sort of “high art” thoughts.
The two main problems I think that a Chinese thinking in the 1600s would have with God (and I can’t say this is entirely without projection and certainly in anachronistic terminology) would be that the Christian conception of God seems to violate both the organic holism (it exists outside the system) and the dynamic vitalism (I AM seems to suggest that God is unchanging/constant).
Side-Note: Jesus as Logos . . . interesting, I was not aware. I may have to check that book out, the reviews on Amazon make it seem interesting. Especially saying that it resembles Neville’s works, Neville being the Confucian-Christian (Christian-Confucian?) that I mentioned earlier.
While it is understandable that anyone with christian beliefs would necessarily view the world through logos,, attempting to connect this to Dao is ridiculous. Logos implies an underlying principle (God, in christian terms). This is in no way supported by the Dao itself. I agree with Mas that to pursue such a line of inquiry would require a separation of the Dao from the many Taoist ‘religions’ that claimed Taoist roots, including Confucianism.
Dao De Jing, if anything, is the opposite of logos. It is ascosmotic and denies any unifying principle. There is no ‘man behind the curtain’. The Dao that can be named is not the Dao.
Sam Crane asserted pretty much the same thing. And I agree that Dao is not the same thing as logos; however, if one were to try and render the concept of “logos” into Chinese, I think that “Dao” is the obvious choice. I mean, “logos” is different from “Word” but we can understand the parallels there in English without problem.
I think this also ties into the question of whether Dao is an immutable concept or whether it possesses the capacity for change. I’m inclined to align Dao with change (in fact, I fail to see how anyone couldn’t) and I am also inclined to say that since Dao is ineffable, it follows that we can only get a side-ways glance at its nature as opposed to actually understanding Dao as it is. That is why you end up with extended metaphors all over the DDJ, the Dao as waterlike, so we should strive to be waterlike since we cannot know the Dao we cannot emulate it directly.
So here the discussion quickly becomes “Whose Dao, which Daoism?” (a la P.J. Ivanhoe). If we accept the idea that “Dao” has meant different things to different people(s) while still maintaining its essential characteristics, I think that a Dao-Logos gloss is more than appropriate. Furthermore, since there is a good body of work that has already accomplished this there is something to it. This isn’t a discussion on whether such a thing ought be done, it already has been done. We can discuss how rigorous the concepts align, where they break down and where they match up . . . or even whether it ought have been done. But I’d say it is too late to put the cat back in the bag and say that it can’t be done since it has been being done for the past four-hundred years.
Yeah, the opening part of the Gospel of John is where we get the idea of Jesus as Logos.
How much of this clash comes from the different understandings of personhood? It seems to me that in the West, the idea of God as outside the system is more natural to accept because we see ourselves as the model for that- consciousness and free will are seen as fundamental elements of personhood that keep us intrinsically distinct from the rest of nature.
Here’s something I found about personhood in the Church. It’s an excerpt from a larger piece here:
So the appearance of a human hypostasis would conflict with Chinese holism. Is this the reason why Eastern beliefs have an illusionary view of personhood, and in turn, why the idea of a God being outside the system makes sense to one group but not the other?
While there is no ‘hard’ evidence, there are strong indicators that suggest much of early chinese thought and cosmological understanding was heavily influenced by even earlier ideas coming out of India. If you look at pre-platonic greek thought, it has much more in common with an acosmotic world view than allowed by the later development of logos. Christianity, without logos, would have remained a jewish splinter group for jewish people only. While the teachings of Jesus may have universal application, they were originally meant for the jewish community only. Logos allowed the inclusion of gentiles and the spread of the religion. Of course, with that came the externalization of creator/creation, and the ability to view the world atomistically. The legacy of logos is the predominant western point of view, and why it is so difficult to ‘see’ the holistic nature of eastern thought.
This is why I have problems with the idea that logos can successfully be merged with any understanding of Dao. The base assumptions are completely different and any extension of concepts lead to very different conclusions.
I tend to agree with Hu Shi that Chinese thought stood on its own initially and it wasn’t until later that it became Hindified through contact with Buddhism. But I think that is an academic digression.
As for Dao and Logos: personally, I think that Logos better represents the masculine aspects of the Dao and that to better flesh out the relationship, there would need to be a feminine “Ergon” of some sort (I am unsure whether this exists in the Christian context). But if one accepts a modal understanding of the Dao (again, I am unsure any other interpretation is possible but I would be interested to see if any do) I think that grasping a part of it is useful in understanding the whole. “The partial becomes complete”, wouldn’t you agree?
You are then misunderstanding the “masculine aspect” of Dao by attempting to sign it a particular agency.
The “masculine/feminine” duality in Philosophical Dao only has to do with a temporal association of change, passive/active-expanding/receding. There is nothing really “male” about it, just a matter of division of force for low level understanding.
At the moment you “partialise” any aspect of, or in completeness, Dao, it is now dao, and is not representative of the entire process, only the human perspective of their perception of the whole.
Summarily, less than.
P.S. Pure Land Buddhism was primary effector of synthesis … Dao has its roots primarily in shamanism.
The most important part of Dao, in my view, is the inter-connectedness and co-creative interaction within process. While duality forces naming, in turn forcing abstraction of ‘oneness’ into the ‘ten thousand things’, the emphasis and constant reminder in both word and concept is always holistic. This is in direct juxtaposition to all implied in logos.
Hence modality. Since the Dao is ineffable, all we can do is discuss "dao"s. I think that “logos” is strongly a “yang” concept (Jung would agree with this formulation) so to flesh out the modality of Dao it would need Ergon (the yin counterpart of logos). However, since the mind creates dualities everywhere we are limited to modal understanding of the concept, of "dao"s not Dao.
I think in both Buddhism and Dao, that is not an acceptable position. That is why the archetype is shown, the Sage. In accepting “concept of”, you are openly declaring that the concept is concrete, and therefore, you are never going to move past that cerebral position, which is firmly against the contemplative root of Daoism, philosohical Daoists would say it is against the rational root as well.
Mas said it better than I can, but dao is the un-doing of duality. It is seeing oneness and not the ‘parts’. Dao isn’t an exercise in words with which we externalize and dissect, it is an understanding of the illusions of duality.
I don’t mean to sound fuzzy, but I can’t think of any other way to say it. Logos is an absolute contradiction of dao.
Mas and Tent,
Not at all. I am addressing it as a completely fluid concept, absent of anything concrete at all – that is the point. I think you are both projecting what you think I am saying onto what I am saying.
Ucci,
Wouldn’t you know . . . I agree with what you said about the absence of a hypostasis in Chinese thought and I do agree that is a good source of divergence. Your post reminded me of something I read the other day so I went to the library and the book is missing! Terribly confusing, I mean, who is gonna grab a book on Confucianism? Seriously. . .
Gimme some time to further process the info and I’ll see what I can do free-hand. So far it has introduced me to Sabellianism, which I think offers a very good language for discussing certain concepts.
Xunzi, in most areas I defer to your knowledge as being superior, but in this case, sorry my friend, your perspective stands against the totality of the ideology.
It happens when concepts are taken out of context in order to make them fit a meaning they are not intended for, in any manner.
You are taking yin/yang … which are inseparable, and attempting to make the square peg fit the round hole of logos/ergon. They aren’t similar. There is no agency assigned to yin/yang, logos/ergon there most definitely is due to the cultural pretext of who from and how the concepts were formed.
There is no modality of Dao, it simply “is”. Anything antecedent to “is”, is error of incomplete perspective. Spend some time with Yuan Dao, then it becomes precisely clear.