The Religious Philosophy of Liang Shuming_ The Hidden Buddhist

Abstract

I was delighted when Professor Meynard asked me to write a foreword to his book. Upon reading the volume, I found it fascinating to observe his mind, highly attuned to philosophical nuance, examining those writings of Liang’s that I myself had read long ago, but from a perspective quite different from the one with which I had read them. He makes a clear and cogent case for Liang being primarily a religionist. In the process he reviews in a sophisticated and balanced fashion the hoary questions of what is “religion,” and of how Buddhism, Confucianism, folk Daoism, and Christianity relate to it. It is one of the most coherent and compelling discussion on the subject that I have read. It is worthy of his Jesuit intellectual forebearers who created this discourse centuries ago. Professor Meynard’s subtitle “The Hidden Buddhist,” suggests a correspondence to my Liang biography title, “The Last Confucian.” Thus, I feel compelled to write a few words on the relationship between our two distinctly different approaches to our common subject. As I am sure most are aware, the title “The Last Confucian” was never meant to be taken literally. One of the most dramatic events in Liang’s life was his public defiance of Mao in 1953; in it he exemplified certain traditions of moral and political autonomy in what people have generally considered Confucian. Especially from the vantage point of the mid-1970s, it did appear that he would be the last Chinese intellectual to perform the role of moral remonstrator of the highest political authority. It was, after all, criticism of Wu Han’s historical play “The Dismissal of Hai Rui” that was the harbinger of the Cultural Revolution, which was still going on when I was researching and writing the book. I began my biography with this scene, precisely because of its dramatic quality and the “Confucianness” of the act. Buddhist monks, on the other hand, did not see speaking truth to power as their role or purpose. The words “Last Confucian” also have a certain romantic quality evocative of the anti-Confucian attacks of the preceding sixty years. Of course, such a title also went well with Liang’s well-known self-proclaimed “Confucianness.” In my book, I did not make more of Liang’s Buddhism for various reasons. Most important was the fact that after 1921, Liang did not champion Buddhism publicly, nor did he praise it. He did announce in 1921 that he still believed ultimately in the Buddhist ideal of enlightenment, but seldom brought up the subject again, publicly or in writing, until over half a century had passed. It was not until during our talks in 1980 that he announced unequivocally that he had always wanted to be a monk. Thus, at the time I wrote the book, Liang’s Buddhism seemed too peripheral to the other major aspects of his thought and activities to warrant much space and discussion. In addition, I admittedly lacked the mastery of the texts, terminology and scholarship of Weishi Buddhism necessary to do justice to such a discussion. Professor Meynard, on the other hand, has taken up and met this latter challenge quite successfully. His understanding of and empathy with Buddhism, as well as his extraordinary philosophical perceptiveness, are testimony to both his special sensitivity to the religious as well as to the profundity of his scholarship. His work benefited from material that shed more light on Liang’s deep and abiding Buddhist commitment, such as his diary and statements of the early 1980s and the scholarship on Liang from 1980 to the present. I should also point out that Professor Meynard’s work is a true intellectual biography. In comparison, perhaps because it was the first academic work in any language to take up Liang as a serious historical subject, my volume was an attempt relate and analyze Liang’s total response to his historical situation. It stressed the interface between thought and action as constituting a whole. During my conversations with Liang in 1980, he announced unequivocally that he had always been a Buddhist. We should all be aware, however, that during our talks he also implied that he was a Marxist, and that he accepted the validity of “Scientific Socialism.” He was aware of the tension between Marxism and religion, which is why he had such high regard for Kawakami Hajime, a Marxist champion of religion. He was also highly interested in Pavlovian psychology, and had hoped to go to the USSR to study it in depth. At the same time, he also expressed great respect toward Daoism, both philosophical and “religious” or folk Daoism, pointing out that the Chinese medical traditions stem primarily from the latter. He admired George Marshall as a highly moral, “good” man, qualities he thought Marshall possessed because he was a pious Christian. Liang also said that he thought that the lives of most people were determined by larger forces and fate. He also expressed a “faith” in the accuracy of fortune telling. Of course he also accepted the title of “Confucian” as well. Professor Meynard’s tack in studying Liang might also be seen as bringing to the fore the appropriateness of the suffixes “ist,” “ism” and “ian” in older Chinese historical contexts. At one point, I asked Liang at one point whether, looking back on his past writing, he saw any errors. He thought a bit and then said that, early in his career, he has misunderstood the nature of “instinct” as a concept and term. That is to say, otherwise he saw no contradictions among his various commitments to and respect for ideologies that would appear to be in direct conflict with one another. As Meynard points out, both Zhang Taiyan and Liang Qichao (together with many of their generation of intellectuals) were fervent Buddhists while they were perhaps more noted in history for other commitments. Marxist-Leninist Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party and a friend and colleague of Liang’s, managed to be a great admirer of French Vitalist Henri Bergson and an ardent nationalist (at a time when the Party was committed to internationalism). In that period, intellectuals often changed their philosophical or spiritual allegiances radically. Some early Chinese Anarchists such as Liu Shipei ended up as a monarchist and cultural conservative. Yan Fu, famed critic of Chinese civilization, champion of Western thought and institutions, and radical reformer, ended up a monarchist critic of the West. All of this is simply to observe that Liang was representative of Chinese scholars of his generation in his pronounced eclectic penchant. Although Liang accepted, as Professor Meynard points out, the modern Western concept of religion, I don’t think he accepted the binary logic and consequent exclusivity associated with this concept. In monotheistic religious traditions, at least, one cannot fully subscribe to two or more religions simultaneously. Speaking a bit simplistically, this is fully consonant with the Aristotelian Laws of Contradiction and of the Excluded Middle, (that the two propositions A is B and A is not B are mutually exclusive, or that something cannot exist and not exist simultaneously, and such-like expressions). The cosmological assumption that all pre-Qin texts seem to share (and is explicit in the Book of Changes), however, is that the universe, in perpetual flux, is an organic whole made up interdependent, interpenetrating, and complementary parts. Yin cannot exist without Yang, and visa-versa. Therefore, one might say that absolute bifurcation in such a cosmology is impossible. Professor Meynard skillfully argues, in effect, that Liang hierarchized the values to which he was committed, so that Buddhism was his ultimate commitment. In sum, Professor Meynard has provided us with a spiritual portrait of Liang that is both broader and deeper than those that have preceded it. It is distinguished especially by his remarkable subtlety and acuity in treating the religious dimension of human existence and his profound grasp of the philosophy and religion of Buddhism.