Cross-cultural Workon the Chinese Classics (Confucian and Daoist) in Modern Asia Today
Co-conveners: Mark Csikszentmihalyi (EALC), Michael Nylan (History)
Yu Dan于丹, China's home-grown Oprah, manages her own book club and publishing industry, thanks in large part to her role as hostess of "Lecture Room," a popular afternoon TV talk show broadcast in Mandarin on the state-run Channel 10. Once a university teacher in Media Studies in Beijing, the irrepressibly perky Yu Dan, at the age of forty-one, left the chorus of talking heads to become a virtual pop star after she devoted, in 2006, an entire series of programs to the teachings of the Confucian Analects. Yu Dan's fans accept her as a devout "defender of traditional culture" and a significant "force for harmony" within Chinese society. Certainly, the TV series proved to be such a hit that it spawned a bestseller, Yu Dan's The Analects: Insights論語:心得, which sold three million copies in its first four months of publication in China – before Yu Dan launched a record-breaking tour of Taiwan in April of 2007.
The genius of Yu Dan’s enterprise was this fresh re-branding and multi-media marketing of a familiar name that had already become more or less emptied of actual content. To this end, Yu Dan’s Confucius becomes a dynamic go-getting pragmatist in the John Dewey mold (building on Dewey’s current vogue in China) – except when he's being morphed into a dreamy recluse. In general, Yu Dan's Confucius avoids conflict, reduces his dependence upon others, and "tends his own garden." Unique among the many Confuciuses on offer in the modern world, Yu Dan's Kongzi comes perilously close to making the Sage an eerie double for Chauncey Gardiner, the vacuous cypher at the center of the Peter Sellers' movie, "Being There." Confucius, Yu Dan seems to think (contrary to all early traditions), got ahead in the fame game through his enviable pliability and his willingness to kowtow to those in power.
Of course, there are more credible and knowledgeable writers who are intent upon considering the role of the antique Classics (not only the Analects and the Five Classics, but also Zhuangzi) in the modern world. Li Ling 李零, an eminent philologist at Peking University, has just written two books on the place of Kongzi in the early traditions (including the excavated texts) and in the modern PRC. His books have earned both extravagant praise (for his comment that modern Chinese are too slavish in their adoration of Kongzi, who "was no sage," by Li Ling's account) and over-the-top condemnation (even death threats) from the host of scholars who have made a business of promoting Confucius in the PRC, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan.[1] Matsukawa Kenji 松川健二, writing in Japan, has written a superb introduction to commentaries on the Analects, Rongo shisoshi 論語思想史, a reception history that includes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean works. Recent issues of Korean Studies have included essays on the role of Zhuangzi in traditional Korean thought (e.g., 2002:2), not to mention the countless books devoted to Confucian teachings within the Korean tradition. Several recent projects, including the Statecraft and Classical Learning: the Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History (2010), have sought to integrate our understanding of Confucian traditions, past and present, in the three countries of China, Japan, and Korea. (Michael Nylan is a contributor to that volume edited by Benjamin A. Elman and Martin Kern.) These voices have tended to be submerged in the Asian Values discourse embraced by conservative heads of state, but their growing effect upon self-perceptions of Asian intellectuals is undeniable. One has only to walk into any bookstore in Asia to see the prominence (and healthy retail sales) of books weighing in on this issue.
The modern popularity of the Zhuangzi is in part due to its often being cast as the anti-Analects. Early twentieth century writers like Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) saw parallels between the Zhuangzi and contemporary evolutionary discourse, much as Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854-1921) had found in it proto-scientific thinking. In a similar vein, Nobel prize-winning physicist Yukawa Hideki 湯川秀樹 (1907-1981) read a number of Zhuangzi stories as containing precursors to modern theories in physics in his 1963 Hon no naka no sekai本の中の世界. There is also a strong market for popular readings of the text, such as the Zen Buddhism-influenced interpretation of Yamada Fumio 山田史生 2007 Nichiyobi ni yomu Sôshi日曜日に読む荘子, whose title recalls the bestselling Tuesdays with Morrie. Not to be left out, Yu Dan followed her Analects lectures with a series on Zhuangzi. Lest we worry that Zhuangzi might frown on the cheery imperatives to be a productive worker relayed to us from Confucius through Yu Dan, her introduction to her 2007 Zhuangzi yinde莊子引得 assures us of the complementarity of the two approaches: "Confucianism gives us an earth of substance, and Taoism gives us a heaven of freedom. We people are in between the two, with limitless souls. Confucianism teaches us to take heavy responsibilities, while Daoism lets us treat heavy responsibilities as if they were light." Immortal prose like this has inspired us to believe that the working group will provide spirited discussions on a coherent topic.
[1] For a good survey of the many academics in China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea who have been promoting Kongzi as modern savior or as a Chinese alternative to Aristotle and the Enlightenment, see John Makeham, Lost Soul:"Confucianism" in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: 2008).