TRANSCRIPTION:
Hallo! This is Bin Song, a philosophy and religion professor at Washington College. During the process of preparing this first unit of the course “Ru and Confucianism,” I ask myself: what do I want to say to students and friends who have never seriously learned Confucianism?
Think about how historically long-standing and geographically far-reaching the tradition of Confucianism has been, and we will find this is not an easy question to answer. And the situation to urge us to ask this question is also very unique: right now, Confucianism is generating global influences beyond what it has been traditionally in its pre-modern forms. In other words, it is entering a new era to migrate from East Asia to the north Atlantic and global world, and only in an area where the Confucian thought takes a minority role, the question just asked becomes especially urgent.
However, there is a convenient way to start the conversation. Just as what normally happens to people’s self-introduction to each other in a new meeting, the first thing we need to remember is their names. Therefore, why not let us talk about the English name of the tradition, Confucianism?
Throughout years, whenever allowable, I always try to push the conversations I was involved in about Confucianism to a realization that Confucianism is a wrong name. And my reason for this is very simple: Confucianism, this name, is not how the tradition historically called itself, and it was invented by Protestant Christian missionaries in around 19th century in a special period of western colonialism and with a very special purpose, the purpose of Christian mission, which is quite alien to the nature of the tradition those missionaries designated as such. However, a basic logic of respectfully naming is that the name we address people should sound agreeable to them; or at least, it should be recognizable by them as their name. None of these standards stands strongly in the case of “Confucianism,” and therefore, today, we should rectify our historical mistake, change it to how the tradition historically called itself, namely, the Ru tradition or Ruism. Meanwhile, what is more important is to understand what this term “Ru” means, and why the tradition chose this term as its name. I attached some articles, video and social media links below so that you can check the details if you want to know more about this sort of conversations.
While I made these efforts to explain the erroneous nature of the name of Confucianism, one of the most stimulating, or “provocative” should I say, push-back my interlocutors gave is that: who cares? It is just a name. Right or wrong, people use it to make reference; and as long as it is useful in the way that people understand it whenever it is mentioned, who cares that it is a wrong name?
Well, I think this push-back is particularly interesting because it can lead to an even richer conversation about almost everything related to the Ru tradition in the contemporary world. So I will try to respond to it here step by step.
Firstly, scholars in the discipline of philosophy indeed do not quite care whether “Confucianism” is a wrong name or not. This is because philosophy is normally understood as not pertaining to people’s religious identity. When philosophers study “Confucianism,” they think they are studying something similar to “Marxism,” “Platonism” or any other philosophical theory or doctrine that is named by a founding or major thinker.
However, if we look into how the Ru tradition starts, evolves and in particular, interacts with other traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism and Catholicism, we find that largely, Ruism is indeed not a membership tradition which has a clear-cut institutional boundary between insiders and outsiders. However, a person could still strongly identify him or herself as a Ru while conversing with other people who have their strong religious identities such as with a Buddhist, Daoist, or a Jesuit Catholic. A similar case to help you understand this situation is that today, a person may decide to practice Stoicism as her comprehensive way of living; clearly, in the West, Stoicism is not a church-based religious tradition, but if a person proclaims that she would like to be a Stoic, we still need to listen to this claim and address her spiritual identify in a careful way. So, understood similarly, despite not a membership tradition, because Ruism affords to be a comprehensive way of living, the practice of it can still engender a strong consciousness of spiritual self-identity in the contemporary world. If this is the case, I do think philosophers should be more sensitive to the right or wrong way of naming “Confucianism.”
A caveat about the last paragraph is that I used a crucial term “spiritual” to define the attitude of human life pertaining to one’s vision of the entire world, and in line with this vision, one would like to transform her whole personality. Understood in this way, a spiritually sharp and adept human can be philosophical or not, religious or not, theist or not, and therefore, the inclusiveness of the term “spiritual” will be very useful for us to talk about different belief systems or comprehensive ways of living without being confused by the ambiguous meanings of philosophy vs religion particularly when these terms are used across cultures and traditions.
Good, this is the case for philosophers. Then, secondly, scholars in the discipline of religious studies indeed care about the naming issue of religions or religion-like traditions more than philosophers. This is not surprising because from the beginning of the modern discipline of religious studies, scholars have tried to study religions objectively, and while doing this, one principle of terminology is that descriptions of religions ought to be recognized by religious insiders. A great example is that scholars have realized that “Muhammadanism,” a name prevalent in use around the same time when “Confucianism” was invented, is actually a wrong name. Muslims had their strong reasons to assert that this historical name of “Muhammadanism” is actually blasphemous. It was invented and imposed by religious outsiders, which is contrary to their own faith, since what the Islamic faith requires Muslims to “yield to” (the meaning of “Islam”) is Allah, the monotheistic singular God, not any human figure, even including their prophet. In face of this critique from religious insiders, scholars started to understand Islam more, and eventually eliminated the term “Muhammadanism” from contemporary English vocabulary.
By the same token, the strongest argument I read from scholars in the contemporary religious studies was from Dr. Wilfred C. Smith, who published the book “The Meaning and End of Religion” in 1963. His reasons to change the name of Confucianism to something like “the tradition of classicists” in order to match the Chinese term ? is very similar to my own, namely, Confucianism is an alien name to the spiritual self-identifiers with the Ru tradition.
However, since religious scholars typically pursue their studies in a detached and objective manner, a higher degree of advocacy on the change of the name will still depend upon how many spiritual advocates of Ruism and empathetic scholars would like to stand up to push the boundary of the public understanding of the Ru tradition.
For me, I spiritually identify myself as a Ru, but I am a cosmopolitan Ru who cherishes the values of impartial scientific researches, religious pluralism and critical thinking, since I believe all these values are intrinsically implied by the teaching of Ruism. For me, the most valuable reason to advocate the rectification of the name of Confucianism is that I believe people need to understand the meaning of the term “Ru” ?, and why the Ru tradition chose this term as its name in tandem with a variety of schools of thought in the context of ancient East Asia.
According to the most influential commentary of the Classic of Rites, called the “Standard Meanings of the Classic of Rites” (????), which was compiled in Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E) and later taken as a textbook for the system of civil examination, the term Ru has two meanings: firstly, “soft”, and secondly, “moisten.” The meaning of “soft” derives from the expectation that a Ru knows how to interact with humans and the nature in a civilized way, and these civilized human beings will intrinsically long for non-violence, peace and harmony. The meaning of “moisten” refers to the fact that the way a Ru can achieve non-violent transformation is through learning and practicing everything that distinguishes humans from other species. In Chinese, this distinctively human thing called ? is translated mostly as ritual, but actually refers to a cluster of civilized phenomena such as social etiquettes, moral conventions, civil and religious ceremonies, law and political institutions, etc. Overall, ? can be each and every possible manifestation of human civilization. But why is the idea of “moisten” related to this concept of ?? This is because although ? civilizes human beings, if misused, ? can also be oppressive. Think about all those social etiquettes in a patriarchal, or a racially segregated society; they indeed set a rule for humans’ interaction, but they are also oppressive. Therefore, according to the Ru tradition, a Ru should learn and practice the right ? so that ? can continually benefit and nourish all people’s life, and therefore, the image of “moisten” or “watering” is invoked to indicate that the right purpose of ritual-performance is to nourish people’s life, rather than oppressing people in the name of order and hierarchy.
We will definitely spend more times to talk about ? in future episodes. However, seen from the naming issue of the Ru tradition, the central role of this concept ? to the Ru tradition speaks to several points which I think are uniquely valuable and thus, worth studying by all people around the world.
Firstly, the Ru tradition constantly operates its discourse upon a “civilizational” perspective. In other words, what distinguishes civilization from other worldly phenomena and how to sustain the civilization on the earth continuous with the non-human nature are two broadest questions that a Ru asks whenever they think about concrete minor issues. This civilizational orientation clearly distinguishes Ruism from other traditions in ancient Asia such as Daoism, which emphasizes the value of the non-human nature more than the complexity of human civilization, and Buddhism, which tends to deny the distinctive nature of any being including human beings. Today, this civilizational orientation of Ruism is very much needed since humanity today is facing unusual challenges, such as global warming, pandemic and destabilized international politics, and we need a genuinely global and civilizational perspective to guide human practices to tackle these challenges.
Secondly, despite aiming to sustain human civilization, Ruism perceives clearly the ambiguity of the phenomenon of “civilization.” Not everything in a civilization is worth commending, and some aspects of it, such as those undesirable rituals, can become seriously oppressive. In this way, Ruism’s attitude towards civilization is to perfect it, improve it in a process, rather than to celebrate it regardless. Clearly, this also fits the ambiguous nature of human civilization today. It is far from perfect, although it is also worth sustaining by its own right.
Thirdly, this civilizational perspective makes the Ru tradition unusually broad and deep, and thus, be very hard to be categorized. Is it a philosophy, a religion, a way of living, or an expression of the special civilization continually existing in the Eastern part of Eurasia continent? If we learn the tradition down the road, we will find that it is all of them, but not constrained by any of them. Therefore, it is an unusually demanding ideal to become a Ru, since everything about civilization will be concerned by them.
However, since life is short, limited, and lacks meanings for all of us, why not take on some ideal of human life that is genuinely sublime and noble? If the ideal makes any sense to you, from this moment on, let us remember the meaning of Ru ?, and try to pronounce Ruism or the Ru tradition with the old name of “Confucianism” kept in mind.
CREDITS:
Opening Music: Ta-da! By Siddartha Corsus
Closing: Music: Endless forms most beautiful by Sidartha Corsus
LINKS:
www.binsonglive.wpcomstaging.com
Tony Swain, “On Confucianism and Religion”, in Confucianism in China :An Introduction, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 1-22.
Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013): 45-76
Bin Song’s discussion with scholars of comparative philosophy on Ru and Confucianism: http://warpweftandway.com/should-instead-confucianism/.
Bin Song’s discussion with scholars of sinology: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sinologists/permalink/3211240495599467/.
Email:
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