第八十三章《胡适英文论著：中国思想史》（1）

  第八十三章《胡适英文论著：中国思想史》（1）

  Intellectual China in 1919
  The Chinese Social and Political Science Review
  Dec., 1919. Vol. 4. No. 4. pp. 345-355.
  Buddhist Influence on Chinese Religious Life
  The Chinese Social and Political Science Review
  Jan., 1925. Vol. 9. pp. 142-150.
  “This is a part of a lecture on ‘Buddhistic Influence on Chinese Thought’ delivered before the November meeting of the Peking Historical Association. The lecture was divided into three parts: Literature, Religion, and Philosophy. At the urgent request of the Editor of the Review, the second part of this lecture is here published as it was read. I hope that I may be able to revise the other parts before they appear in this Review.”

  —S. H.
  The Renaissance in China
  Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
  1926. Vol. V. pp. 265-283.
  Address given on November 9, 1926.
  The Civilizations of the East and the West
  Charles A. Beard, ed., Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization.
  New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928. pp. 25-41.
  Wang Mang, the Socialist Emperor of Nineteen Centuries Ago
  Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
  Vol. LIX, 1928.
  Conflict of Cultures
  Bruno Lasker, ed., Problems of the Pacific, 1931.
  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932. pp. 471-477; 499.
  The Establishment of Confucianism as a State Religion During the Han Dynasty
  Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
  1929. Vol. LX. pp. 20-41.
  Social Changes in China
  The People’s Tribune
  Apr. 1, 1934. Vol. 6. No. 7.pp. 385-392.
  A View of Immortality
  Unpublished Script
  The Struggle for Intellectual Freedom in Historic China
  World Affairs
  Sep., 1942. Vol. 105. No. 3. pp. 170-173.
  The Concept of Immortality in Chinese Thought
  Harvard Divinity School Bulletin
  Chinese Thought
  Harley F. Mac Nair, ed., China.
  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946. Chap. xiii, pp. 221-230.
  T he history of Chinese thought can be divided into three periods of about one thousand years each. The ancient period covers the major part of the first millennium B.C. The medieval period covers the first millennium of the Christian era, during which Taoism and Buddhism flourished in China. The modern period of intellectual and philosophical renaissance begins in the tenth century, with extensive printing of books, and continues with the rise of secular Chinese philosophy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
  The ancient period includes the classical age—the indigenous, original, and creative age of intellectual and philosophical activity. It is the period of Confucius (551-479 B.C.), Lao Tzǔ, and Mo Ti, or Mo Tzǔ; of Mencius, Chuang Tzǔ, and Han Fei (d. ca. 233 B.C.). (See chaps. xv, xvii, below.) Philosophers of the classical age are better known to the Western world than those of later periods. The classical age not only set the pattern of Chinese thought of all subsequent ages, but also furnished the inspiration and intellectual tools with which Chinese thinkers of the medieval and modern periods labored for their philosophical and cultural renaissance.
  The intellectual heritage of the classical period is threefold. First is its humanism, with special emphasis on man, his life, duties, and relations in this world. Second is its rationalism, or intellectualism. (Since rationalism has something of a theological connotation in the Western world, the term “intellectualism” may be preferable to indicate its special emphasis on knowledge and education.) Third is its spirit of freedom and democracy which champions the supreme importance of the people and advocates the social and political responsibility of the intelligentsia.
  The classical age was humanistic in that it consistently and distinctly concerned itself with human life, human conduct, and human society. It scrupulously avoided supernatural and otherworldly problems. When Confucius was asked how to serve the gods and the spirits, he replied, “We have not yet learned to serve men. How can we serve the gods and the spirits?” Asked “What is death?” he answered, “We have not yet learned to know life. How can we know death?” Preoccupation with man and his life in this world is a characteristic which differentiates Chinese thought, at least ancient thought, from that of India, Persia, and Israel.
  A useful sourcebook on Indian and Chinese thought has been compiled by Dr. Lin Yutang, bearing the title The Wisdom of India and China . It is instructive to compare the section on India with that on China. The former discusses the gods, future life, and the religious life; the latter discusses, in the main, human nature and human problems, man’s relation to the family, the state, and the world—education, government, and law. This fundamental difference runs through the history of the intellectual life of the peoples of India and China. Ancient China, which produced a great civilization with highly developed theories of human nature, moral conduct, and political organization, seems to have taken little interest in problems of religion. It was almost primitive in its religious and theological thinking, and spent little time in speculation about life after death. It is the predominant interest in man and his problems that constitutes the first heritage bequeathed by the classical age to China.
  The classical age is noted for its strictly intellectualistic approach to the problems of thought. The Chinese are the least mystic of peoples, but among them were thinkers who tended toward mysticism. Lao Tzǔ, for example, declares that without going outdoors one can know the world and that without peeping out the window one can know the ways of Heaven. He goes on to say that the farther one goes the less one knows—which would appear to constitute a mystical approach! But, on the whole, the classical tradition of China places most emphasis on knowledge—on empirical and exact knowledge, on learning and thinking.
  Confucius laid down the dictum, “Learning without thinking is confusing, but thinking without learning is perilous.” This observation is representative of the intellectual tradition of the classical period. One of the later Confucianists expressed the intellectualistic attitude in a fivefold formula: “Study widely, inquire minutely, think carefully, analyze clearly, and then practice earnestly.”

  It was the intellectualistic approach that led most Chinese scholars to stress the importance of education, of learning, and of thinking. The most influential leader in China’s national life during the last twenty-five centuries, the idol of countless millions of Chinese youth, was not a military hero or a messiah, but a schoolmaster—Confucius. He described himself merely as one “who never grew tired of learning, and never grew weary of instructing others.” Never to grow tired of learning or of instructing others—that is indeed the ideal of a schoolmaster! Confucius sums up the intellectualistic attitude—the most valuable and characteristic gift inherited by China from the ancient period.
  The classical age was one of mental freedom and independence, an age of democratic ideas. It bequeathed to later ages a spirit of freedom of thought and speech, of independence of character, and of the worth and dignity of personality. It was primarily an age of independent and warring nations. Because of the juxtaposition and coexistence of so many states, a thinker persecuted in one state could usually find political asylum and welcome in another. It was also an age in which the scholarly class was making its influence felt on the internal and external policies of the states. Because of these two factors, thought and speech were relatively free and the thinkers of the age were fully conscious of their moral responsibilities. One of the great disciples of Confucius said, “The scholar must needs be stout-hearted and courageous, for his burden is heavy and his journey is long. Humanity is the burden he imposes upon his own shoulders: is that not a heavy burden? And only death ends his toils: is that not a long journey?”

  This sense of the grave responsibility of the individual, especially of the educated individual, was shared by most of the social and political thinkers of the classical age. Mencius, whose moral and intellectual influence was second only to that of Confucius, often spoke of “the individual shouldering the heavy burden of the world.” The sense of social responsibility of the intelligentsia is a peculiarly Chinese tradition. Every Chinese schoolboy remembers the saying of Ku Yen-wu, a seventeenth-century patriot, “The humble individual, however humble, has a share in the responsibility for the prosperity or the downfall of the empire.” He may not realize, however, that this remark goes back to Mencius and to the school of Confucius.
  The feeling of responsibility gives to the educated individual a sense of dignity and a spirit of independence. Mencius said: “Who is the great man? The great man is he who cannot be tempted by wealth and honor, who cannot be budged by poverty and lowliness, and who cannot be bent by authority and power. That is the great man.”

  From the sense of moral responsibility for the well-being or the misfortune of the nation has emerged the classical tradition of the individual’s duty to be out-spoken and to fight unrighteousness, misrule, and corruption. It has become a tradition for scholars to fight against tyrannical monarchs and corrupt officials in the interests of the state and the people. From this stems China’s fight for freedom and democracy through the ages. The democratic tradition has developed primarily from Confucianism, one of the most orthodox schools of thought of the classical age.
  In the Hsiao Ching (Book of Filial Piety), a tiny classic of doubtful authorship, which for more than two thousand years was read by every schoolboy as his primer, Confucius is made to say: “In the face of unrighteousness it is the duty of the son to fight it out before his father and it is the duty of a minister to fight it out before his sovereign. Therefore, I say, in the face of unrighteousness, fight it out.” And in the Meng Tzǔ (Works of Mencius), which was used as a second reader, Mencius taught: “When a ruler treats his subjects like grass and dirt, then it is the right of his subjects to treat him as a bandit and an enemy.” (See chap. i, above.) Any ruler violating the principles of benevolence and righteousness is no longer a ruler, but a robber and a murderer whom the people have a duty to overthrow and kill.
  These dangerous and revolutionary doctrines are contained in the classical works which have been the required reading of every Chinese student through more than two thousand years, and which have been used throughout the last ten centuries in the competitive civil service examinations for selection of government officials. Such is the heritage of freedom and independence, social responsibility, and democratic control which has come down through the ages.
  The threefold heritage of the classical age has been the bedrock of China’s intellectual life. It has given the Chinese the criteria with which to evaluate imported ideas and institutions—and the antitoxin to neutralize the poisonous effects of certain of these. It has served also as the soil to which many kinds of foreign thoughts and institutions have been transplanted and have grown to flowering and fruition.
  The classical age ended about 200 B.C., when the country became a united empire. In such an empire it was no longer possible for a thinker persecuted in one part of the country to find asylum in another; nor was it possible for a book banned in one province to be published in another. There was, in consequence, less intellectual freedom and independence. But it is the glory of the Chinese that, in spite of the unified empire and in spite of several thousand years of monarchical rule, there has been maintained a tradition of comparative freedom of thought and scholarship—thought and scholarship that often came into conflict with the established ideas and practices of the great religions of the Middle Ages.
  The medieval period lasted approximately from 200 B.C. to A.D. 1000. Chinese thought, in this period, had to cope with two gigantic problems. The first was to build up not a military but a civilian government of continuity and stability which should soften the harshness of absolute rule in a unified empire; the second was to rescue China from the fanaticism brought about by mass conversion to the Indian religion of Buddhism and by the rise of its native, imitative counterpart in Taoism. (See chaps. xvii, xviii, below.) Secular life and civil institutions had to be carried on in the midst of wholesale conversion to otherworldly religions, and the torch of intellectualism had to be kept alight in the midst of a population going mad under the strange attraction of such religions.
  It was no easy task to maintain the tradition and authority of civilian government in empires and dynasties often founded or controlled by warriors or by men and women who arose from the lowest strata of society. The intelligentsia, however, steadily accomplished the task by following the classical tradition.
  Four instrumentalities were responsible for the continuity and stability of civilian government in the medieval period. First was the founding of a civil service examination system for the selection of government officials. Begun in the year 125 B.C., the examination system became, through the centuries, one of the most important weapons in the struggle of the people for equality of political rights. Confucius had laid down a democratic educational philosophy in four words: “With education, [there is] no class.” This germinal idea was worked out in the civil service examination system, which was competitive, objective, and open to practically everyone of ability. It broke down class distinctions, feudalism, and artificial barriers of race, tribe, religion, and color. Prior to its abolition in 1905 it was China’s most effective tool in the fight for political equality.
  Second was the founding of a national university in 125 B.C. Opening with only fifty students, it had ten thousand by A.D. 4, and in the second century as many as thirty thousand students. With the rise of a national university, numerous private schools were established, some of which had thousands of students. The spread of learning was necessary to supply educated personnel for the civil service.
  Third was the development of a codified law which came to be one of the greatest systems in the world. There exist today five completely preserved codes of the last five great dynasties between A.D. 600 and 1900; there are, also, fragments of nine codes antedating the year 600. This body of codified law is one of the most important tools in the development and maintenance of civilian government.
  Fourth was the establishment of a canon of Confucianism, not only of standard texts for use in the schools but, more particularly, of sacred scriptures. The Confucian canon gradually acquired authority equivalent to that of basic law in limiting monarchical power and protecting the people against the encroachments of rulers and administrators. An important illustration is the Mêng Tzǔ , which contained many democratic and even revolutionary doctrines. This was one of the works used in the examinations for selection of public officials. In 1372, Chu Yüan-chang, founder of the Ming dynasty, who apparently had not read Mencius’ book in his boyhood, discovered that it contained dangerous ideas. So he ousted Mencius from the temple of Confucius and later (1394) ordered a third of the book expurgated. But the desired results were not achieved. The Mêng Tzǔ continued to be read in its entirety and to be cherished by the nation. The authority of Mencius was greater than that of the Hung-wu emperor (1368-1399).
  The second great problem of the medieval period was how to rescue China from religious fanaticism. Buddhism was introduced perhaps in the first century B.C.—or earlier. By the third century of the Christian era it had become popular and powerful. China had become Buddhized and Indianized to a considerable degree. Mass conversions took place, for the native religion was too simple to satisfy the yearnings of many. No heaven, no hell, no future life: Chinese classical thought was too simple! Indian Buddhism offered China not one heaven but thirty-two heavens, not one hell but sixteen or eighteen hells! In place of the old idea of retribution of good and evil, India gave China the doctrine of Karma, the iron law of causation, which teaches that moral retribution runs through all existences, past, present, and future. It was a situation which a Chinese proverb describes as “A little witch conquered by a great witch”: a simple religion was conquered by a great religion.
  For a time it seemed that Chinese rationality and humanism might be submerged by Indian thought and belief. Hundreds of thousands of men and women withdrew from their families to enter the monastic life. Fanaticism swept the country. A zealous monk would burn a finger, an arm, or even his whole body as a supreme sacrifice to a Buddhist deity. Thousands of the pious, sometimes including members of the imperial court, flocked on occasion to a mountainside to witness and wail at the self-destruction of a great monk by slow burning.
  Otherworldliness and inhuman fanaticism finally shocked the people back to their senses, to reason and humanity. Behind governmental persecutions of Buddhism was always the protest of Chinese civilization against the “barbarization” of the country. The imperial edict of the great persecution of 845, for example, said: “The government cannot abandon the human beings of the Middle Kingdom to the following of the life-denying (wu-sheng ) religion of a foreign country.” Humanism revolted against the Indianization of Chinese thought and civilization.
  The greatest representative and most articulate leader of the revolt against Buddhism was Han Yü (768-824), who pointed out that the ideal of Chinese thought was that moral and intellectual cultivation of the individual must have a social objective and that this objective was the ordering of the family, society, the state, and the world. Individual cultivation which aims at personal salvation by denying life and fleeing the world is antisocial and un-Chinese. Han Yü’s famous battle cry for this revolt was “Man their men!”—that is, restore the monks and nuns to their humane life.
  Han Yü’s severe criticism of Buddhism, especially his attack on the imperial court’s patronage of the Buddhist religion, brought about his exile in 819. However, twenty years after his death his ideas were carried out by the great persecution of Buddhism (845).
  But persecution has never succeeded in uprooting a religion which has taken a strong hold on the intelligentsia as well as on the vast majority of the people. It was the thousand years of preservation and slow spread of classical education which finally achieved the task, a few centuries after Han Yü’s death.
  Paper had been invented A.D. 105. A living secular literature of prose and poetry arose in the medieval period. Printing with wood blocks came into vogue about A.D. 800. Book printing on a large scale took place in the tenth century. Confucian classics, with standard commentaries, were printed under government patronage. Schools were established in increasing number in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Printing from movable types was invented in the middle of the eleventh century.
  A Chinese renaissance was taking place. The middle age was passing away.
  In the eleventh century there were two outstanding movements toward political, economic, and educational reform. The first, in the middle of the century, was led by a great Confucian scholar, Fan Chung-yen (989-1052), who is remembered for his saying, “A scholar ought to worry [over the problems of the time] before anyone else begins to worry [about them], and ought to enjoy life only after everybody else has enjoyed life.” In this dictum is seen arising a new spirit which harks back to the classical tradition of the Chinese scholar taking upon himself the burden of humanity. How totally different from the otherworldliness of the medieval period!
  The second reform movement was led by another great statesman, Wang An-shih (1021-1086), who brought about numerous economic, educational, and political reforms. The cry of the age was: Revive the social, political, and educational ideas and institutions of the classical age, and make them sufficiently attractive to the youth and the best minds of the nation. Then, but not until then, the otherworldly, anti-social, and un-Chinese religions of the middle age will surely die a natural death!
  Revival of a secular and indigenous philosophical movement opened the third, or modern, period of Chinese thought. It was the age of Chinese philosophical renaissance. In the course of the nine hundred years of modern Chinese philosophical development there has been a new flowering of the humanism, intellectualism, and spirit of freedom of the classical age.
  In the earlier stages of Neo-Confucian, or rational, philosophy (See chap. xvi, below) monastic and moral austerity and much sterile scholastic speculation still survived from the age of medieval religion. On the whole, however, the spirit of intellectual freedom encouraged the development of rival schools of thought, some of which succeeded in breaking away almost completely from medieval influence. Speculation became more methodical and scientific; moral teaching became more humane and reasonable.
  In the twelfth century the school of Chu Hsi (1130-1200) laid special emphasis on the intellectualistic approach to knowledge. The slogans of this school were: “Go to the things and investigate into the reasons thereof.” “From your own body to the reason-of-being of Heaven and Earth, everything is an object of investigation.” “Every grass and every shrub must be studied.” “Investigate one thing at a time. Understand one thing today, another tomorrow. When you accumulate sufficient knowledge, you will some day understand the whole.”

  This strictly intellectualistic spirit and methodology gradually brought about a new rationalism in Chinese thought. Lacking, however, the tradition and technique of experimenting with objects of nature, this scientific ideal did not produce a natural science. (See chap. ii, note 7, above.) But its spirit came gradually to be felt in historical and philological studies. It has, in the last three hundred years, produced a scientific methodology in the study of classical and historical literature. It has developed textual criticism, higher criticism, and a philological approach to ancient texts. Scholars who were seeking to overthrow traditional commentaries now perfected a tool in the form of a methodology by which they were in a position to sweep aside subjective interpretation and traditional authority, with the strength of philological evidence and inductive reasoning. The old rationalism became scientific and the spirit of intellectual freedom found a powerful weapon.
  This brief summary of the foundations of Chinese thought may be concluded with two anecdotes. Wu Ching-heng, China’s oldest living philosopher, was presented in his teens to the master of the famous Nan Tsing Academy at Kiangyin. When he entered, he saw a wall scroll with eight characters written in the large, bold writing of the master himself. The inscription read, “Seek the truth and do not compromise.”

  In looking over my father’s unpublished writings some years ago, I found volumes of notes made when he was a student at the Lung Men Academy in Shanghai, about 1875. These were written on notebooks printed by the Academy for the use of its students. On the top of every page was printed in red a motto reading, in part: “The student must first learn to approach the subject in a spirit of doubt. … The philosopher Chang Tsai [A.D. 1020-1077] used to say: ‘If you can doubt at points where other people feel no impulse to doubt, then you are making progress.’”

  Approach every subject in the spirit of doubt; seek the truth; do not compromise . That has been the spirit of those Chinese thinkers who have kept the torch of intellectual freedom burning throughout the ages. That is the spirit which has made Chinese thinkers feel at home in this new world of science, technology, and democracy.
  The Right to Doubt in Ancient Chinese Thought
  Philosophy East and West
  Jan., 1963. Vol. 12. No. 4. pp. 295-300.