CHINA AND JAPAN: CONFUCIAN REFORMATION AND IMPORTED CHRISTIANITY

In East Asia, as in India, Iran, and Europe, intellectual life had a long and refined formal tradition. Here too the new linkages of the sixteenth century jolted established ideas.

WANG YANGMING

In China since the late Song dynasty (960–1279), a coherent ideology held sway among the intellectual elite, one historians now call neo-Confucianism. It built on the ancient sages, Confucius and Mencius, but added an even stronger emphasis on self-cultivation and study in the quest for moral rectitude. It formed the core of the civil service examination, so every ambitious young man sought to master this philosophy in hopes of winning a prestigious place in the bureaucracy. Neo-Confucianism survived the downfall of the Song, the Mongol invasion of China, and the Yuan dynasty set up by the Mongols (1279–1368), and it was flourishing under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

But in the early sixteenth century, just when Luther and Nanak were shaking up Europe and India, a Chinese philosopher, Wang Yangming, mounted a challenge to the reigning ideology. He did not seek to repudiate Confucianism, but to improve upon it, so he too is called a neo-Confucian thinker.

Wang Yangming (1472–1529) was born to a family of the bureaucratic and intellectual class. His father had come in first in the civil service examinations in 1481, and Wang himself did well too, earning degrees at age 19 and 26 when many other men studied into their thirties trying to pass the examinations. He served in the imperial government in middling roles until he offended the palace eunuchs in 1506 (an offense his father had committed in his day as well). For his transgressions, Wang was publicly flogged and banished far from the capital.

Exile and isolation proved productive for Wang, as it would for Mulla Sadra in Iran. During his three-year banishment, Wang developed his distinctive brand of neo-Confucian thought. His fortunes revived and he won government appointments in southern China, where he distinguished himself by crushing rebellions. He still maintained an active scholarly career while holding official posts and holding forth to many admiring students.

Wang Yangming rejected one of the main tenets of the neo-Confucianism of his youth, which treated knowledge as available only through dedicated study. Although himself a champion at book learning, Wang began to argue that true knowledge could not be separated from action and experience. Indeed, he maintained, one did not need book learning to understand truth and morality. Ordinary people, Wang claimed, could as readily obtain wisdom and act ethically as the most learned of scholars. He believed “the nature of all humans is good” and that anyone, however humble, has innate knowledge and could attain moral perfection. All that stood between people and moral perfection was selfish desire, so freeing oneself from that was key. One can see undertones of Buddhist philosophy, familiar to many Chinese intellectuals, in his logic.

This viewpoint was revolutionary in the context of the Confucian tradition and made Wang in effect a traitor to his class. His confidence in ordinary folk led him to maintain that “all the people filling the street are sages”—a heretical thought in China. His philosophy bore some resemblance to Lutheranism or Sikhism, which held that people could achieve spiritual perfection on their own without guidance from priests.

CONSIDERING THE EVIDENCE

A Hymn by Kabir in the Adi Granth

India had no shortage of holy men when Guru Nanak founded the community that would become the Sikh religion. Pirs, bhagats, mullahs, sants, qazis, swamis, brahmins, pandits, and gurus; these devotees all defended their doctrine and practices with arguments from the Hindu Vedas and the Muslim Qur’an, just as Protestants and Catholics turned to the Bible for support in their debates. Yet, both Hinduism and Islam also inspired mystics who tired of orthodox religion and the sectarian squabbling it inspired. They rejected rational arguments and the external rituals of fasting, prayer, and pilgrimage as being inferior to an intense, internal devotion to God. Kabir, for instance, was a weaver born in the early fifteenth century to Muslim parents who became the disciples of a Hindu holy man. He lived hundreds of miles away and decades before Guru Nanak; but the Sikh gurus who compiled the Adi Granth as their faith’s scripture decided to include over 500 of Kabir’s songs alongside their own teachings. As shown in the following hymn, Kabir taught that both Hinduism and Islam point to the same God, but everyone needs a personal guru to awaken them to the presence of God in their own hearts.

If Allah lives in a mosque,

to whom belongs the rest of the land?

Hindus say His name dwells in an idol:

I see the truth in neither.

Allah, Ram, I live by Your name.

Be merciful, O Sain. (Rest)

The south is Hari’s abode; Allah’s camp

is in the west. Look inside your own heart—

inside your heart of hearts—

there is His abode, His camp.

Brahmins fast twice a month twenty-four times;

qazis fast in the month of Ramadan:

Neglecting the remaining eleven months,

they search for treasure in one month.

Why go and bathe in Orissa?

Why bow heads in a mosque?

You’re a thug at heart.

Why pray and go on a hajj to the Ka’aba.

All these men and women—

they are Your forms.

Kabir is the infant of Ram-Allah;

everyone is my guru, my pir.

Kabir says, “Listen, O men and women,

seek only one shelter:

Repeat His name, O mortals.

Only then will you swim across.”

Source: Nirmal Dass, Songs of Kabir from the Adi Granth (Albany, 1991), pp. 251–252.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Does Kabir want Hindus and Muslims to stop praying or fasting, or is he more concerned about their intentions during worship?
How do Kabir’s critiques of both Hindus and Muslims help him find the common ground of both faiths?
Which lines in Kabir’s hymn would have appealed to the Sikh gurus who compiled the Adi Granth?

Wang’s philosophy attracted many adherents during the sixteenth century, and in retrospect he stands among the most influential thinkers in the Confucian tradition. Young strivers of modest means found his message liberating. Wang Yangming study groups proliferated for decades after his death. His philosophy won admirers in Japan too.

Wang Yangming’s revision to neo-Confucianism was only one strand in the tapestry of Chinese thought and belief, but it was the most influential and enduring. Other developments included a Buddhist revival among elites that spread in the late sixteenth century with support from an empress, and the arrival of Christianity, brought by missionaries beginning in 1583.

CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA AND JAPAN

In China, Christianity came mainly with the Jesuits, of whom about 900 made the perilous trip from Europe. In the early seventeenth century they met with some success, converting three high officials and thereby acquiring some protection. The Jesuits generally concentrated on the top rungs, the high literati, of Chinese society and used technical knowledge to get a hearing. At the Ming court, Jesuit skills in map making and cannon casting were of particular interest.

In general, however, Christianity was a hard sell to the Confucian literati. They had spent decades mastering a philosophical-religious system that carried immense prestige in China and had no need to exchange it for another. As a practical matter, Christian morality was often a sticking point, as many Chinese literati had concubines in their households. At a maximum, Christianity won over about 1 percent of the Chinese population, and the proportion fell after the late seventeenth century when the Jesuits tried to embrace a new dynasty of conquerors from Manchuria, the Qing. The Jesuits achieved some success with the Qing imperial household, especially that of the great emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), but they never found broad adherence among the Chinese elite.

Christianity also took root in Japan, as we saw at the start of this chapter. Europeans first arrived, shipwrecked on southern islands, in 1543, and missionaries, mainly Spanish and Portuguese, arrived in 1549 beginning with Francis Xavier and Anjirō. As in China, missionaries in Japan focused first on the upper classes, especially the great landowners called daimyo who in the sixteenth century dominated the country. Francis Xavier considered the Japanese to be “of very good manners, good in general and not malicious.” Most Japanese, however, regarded missionaries, and other Europeans, as “southern barbarians” and wanted little to do with them except perhaps trade. Missionaries found it convenient to double as importers of exotic goods. Japan was among the world’s most urbanized societies, which made the business of conversion a little easier because missionaries could reach bigger audiences in cities. Japan’s political divisions also helped the missionaries by preventing any single authority from banning the southern barbarians.

Christianity in China A sixteenth-century engraving shows the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi, a Chinese scholar who converted to Christianity. The two men are depicted in a church, illustrated with a mix of Chinese and Jesuit iconography.

Mission efforts—staffed mainly by Japanese who had already embraced Christianity—converted some 2 to 3 percent of Japan’s population, or 200,00 to 300,000 people, by 1590. Christians lived in every province. Hundreds of churches opened. Even some of Christianity’s less appealing practices caught on, such as self-flagellation with whips as a way to compensate for sin. But after 1590, rulers of an increasingly unified Japan, including men who had formerly shown some interest in Christianity, tried to prevent conversion. Eager to minimize foreign influence, the government officially banned Christianity in 1597 and again, more effectively, in 1614. Churches were torn down, missionaries expelled, Christian communities conquered by force of arms, and roughly 4,000 converts executed. By 1640, Christianity in Japan was on the edge of extinction, surviving only as an underground religion.

neo-Confucianism: An ideology originating in the Song dynasty (960–1279) that emphasized rigorous study and academic learning as the path to morality and righteousness. In the sixteenth century, Wang Yangming—also considered a neo-Confucianist—claimed that book learning was not necessary for obtaining wisdom and acting ethically.
Wang Yangming [wang YAHN-mihng] (1472–1529): A Chinese philosopher who challenged prevailing neo-Confucian thought and gained followers by arguing that ordinary people could attain moral perfection through inherent knowledge rather than through book learning.