A Confucian Christmas in China

This article was published by Asia Times on Dec 21, 2012. A shorter version was published by Shanghai Daily on Dec 20, 2012. (c) Pattberg

A Confucian Christmas in China

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 theHuainanzi, 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 theLun 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 ofshengren 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.