snippet from an entry entitled "What Wm. T. de Bary Has Taught Me":
"My fondest memory of Dr. de Bary, and the one that is imprinted most
deeply in my mind, is when he brought out a scroll during his lecture
on Neo-Confucianism for our East Asian Civ class. The scroll,
written in beautiful Chinese calligraphy by a friend of his (if I
recall rightly), contained the word ren 仁， perhaps the most
important term in the Confucian lexicon. The term has been
translated as 'humaneness' 'humanity' and 'benevolence,' and
expresses the proper relationship between two human beings. It is
fundamental to all Confucian thinking. Why I remember this episode
fondly is that when presenting the scroll, he paused and looked at it
with such complete admiration, his eyes lit up and his face broke
into a broad smile. Then he returned to his stern, grandfatherly
countenance and resumed his lecture."
Field also quotes one of de Bary's observations on Neo-Confucianism:
"As I said earlier, Buddhism was a missionary religion; its spiritual
drive and zeal naturally fit the expansionist movement Reischauer
describes. But Confucianism had no such proselytizing aim or
apostolic mission, and one might wonder how it could generate a
comparable elan. The answer, I believe, lies not only in recognizing
the difference between Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, but in seeing
how the third stage of East Asian civilization differed from the
second. In short, this was not an expansionist phase, but one
distinguished rather by the degree of its intensive internal
development--economically, socially, and culturally. In this
situation, with less scope for missionaries and cultural emissaries
than for teachers, scholars, and officials, Neo-Confucianism
furnished the most plausible rationale for East Asian civilizations
preoccupied with their own inner development--self-centered in the
positive sense of being inner-directed, conservative of their
energies, and concentrated in their efforts. To my mind, Neo-
Confucianism is also the key to understanding how later on, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the inward-looking civilizations
of East Asia would appear to the expansionist West to be ingrown,
self-contented, smug, and isolationist, while the West would seem to
East Asians the very embodiment of uncontrolled aggressiveness--power
on the loose, bound to no moral or spiritual center."
Wm. T. de Bary, East Asian Civilization: A Dialogue in Five Stages,
Harvard U. Press, 1988, p. 44.
Andrew Field:
http://tinyurl.com/34rmfl
http://shanghaijournal.squarespace.com/
