SPEAKING
FREELY A
Confucian Christmas in China By
Thorsten Pattberg
Speaking Freely is
an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please
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BEIJING - Few people
know what Confucius is - not who, but what. The
ancient teacher is known by many names; he's King
Kung, Master Kong or just K'ung Fu-tzu. But unlike
the biblical Saint Nicholas, alias Santa Claus,
Confucius isn't a Christian saint but a Chinese
sage; more correctly, Confucius is a
shengren.
The shengren of
Confucianism (there are hundreds of them) - like
the buddhas of Buddhism - are entirely
un-European. They cultivate the ideal personality
and become the highest members
in the family-based Chinese
value tradition; sagacious human beings who have
the highest moral standards, called de, who
apply the principles of ren, li, yi, zhi
and xin, and connect between all the people
as if they were, metaphorically speaking, one big
family.
Yet, even in China, there are only
a handful of scholars who know about "
shengren" That's because this word and
concept have been carefully removed from the
history of thought. To the Western missionaries in
the 17th century and thereafter, Confucius was
erroneously believed to idolize the Christian God,
and thus ought to be a true "saint", just like,
say, our Western Saint Jerome or Saint Benedict.
In 1688, Randal Taylor wrote that "the
origin of the CHINESE nation was not long after
the Flood ... This being so, it must necessarily
follow that the first inhabitants of CHINA had
likewise the true knowledge of GOD and of the
creation of the world." This was the beginning of
the seemingly total Christianization of China.
And, today, yes, Beijing lives in the year (of our
Lord, Jesus Christ) 2012 and China celebrates a
Christmas. In contrast, who in Europe knows, for
example, that this year is also the 2,563rd
anniversary of the birth of Confucius?
How
could China lose its shengren to Western
cultural imperialism? The Chinese term "sheng"
appears 260 times in the Huainanzi, 48
times in Mengzi, 132 times in the Chun
Qiu Fan Lu, 157 times in Xunzi, 33
times in Laozi, 149 times in
Zhuangzi, 81 times in the He Guang
Zi, 40 times in the Yi Qing, 8 times in
the Lun Yu, and 185 times in The Records
of the Grand Historian. Yet, despite its
omnipresence, Western scholars obviously never
read those books nor used that term. Why?
As the historian Howard Zinn once wrote:
"If something is omitted from history, you have no
way of knowing it is omitted." Western efforts to
distort China's originality by translation knew of
no restraints: the British, the French, and the
German philosophers, the theologicians and
story-tellers, they all called K'ung Fu-tzu
everything but by his true term; they called him,
fashion-wise, a philosopher, a saint, a magus, a
teacher, or a sage, whatever floated their theory
at that time. Tens of thousands of other Chinese
(and other foreign) key concepts were excluded
from world history this way. In effect,
translations made China drop out of the humanist
project and made her look as if she had no
originality at all.
Some scholars have
argued with me that China must engage in a
dialogue with the West - they mean "in the English
language". To this I add, yes, but only if the
Chinese bring their own terms to the table.
Otherwise, the so-called dialogue with the West
will always be a Western monologue.
In
practice, this would mean to identify the
untranslatables, and to promote them. Most
writings of European "China experts" today are
inadequate because they describe a China without
Chinese terminologies.
Traditionally,
European thinkers translated China at will, always
according to their own cultural predicaments. For
example "the sage/le sage" became today's
preferred (neutral) translation of shengren
only in Britain and France, but not so in Germany.
The all-favored German word is the biblical
"Heilige," meaning saint or holy man. The
reason is simple: German language, in contrast to
English and French, reserved the noun phrase of
"sapientia" (a Latin term for wisdom) not
for persons but for fairy tales and legends.
In addition, the German language is deeply
Biblical. The first major German book in print was
Luther's translation of the Bible. Unsurprisingly,
the word "heilig," meaning holy, follows
the Germans like a dark specter wherever they
venture; that's why the works of Karl Guetzlaff
and Richard Wilhelm, for example, read like
Biblical bedtime stories. The German language,
frankly speaking, is uniquely disqualified from
translating the Chinese tradition, which is
entirely non-Christian.
As long as Western
China scholarship floats on misleading European
terminology, the West isn't learning anything new
from Asia. In this century, it will be necessary
to depart from some erroneous Western
translations. The East isn't just an appendix to
the Western lingo; it has more to offer than the
West could ever satisfactorily translate.
The key is to adopt Chinese terminologies,
so that, one day, we may have something, anything
really, to celebrate for being truly and
faithfully Chinese. Amen.
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
Thorsten Pattberg is a
Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Humanistic Studies of Peking University.
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