This book should have been an article. It is highly repetitive. I didn’t find it especially interesting.[/quote]
I agree. The book is highly overrated. It makes a few good points, and then makes them again, and again, and again.
Actually, it was an article. Most of the book is other articles following up on the initial one and others’ reactions to it.
Actually, it was an article. Most of the book is other articles following up on the initial one and others’ reactions to it.[/quote]
Okay, then the article should not have been printed in a book, but have been photocopied and distributed by a crop duster over a forumosa.com social event. Cranky, you are secretly a big Bo Yang fan, admit it!
I think you should qualify this with “Chinese Mahayana Buddhism” or, more accurately, Mahayana Buddhism as practiced in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Maybe that’s only a matter of wording. Tibetan Buddhism is also Mahayana in its outlook, but it’s often called Tantrayana because of its unique Tantra practices.
Regarding the slow pace of change you mentioned, these things don’t happen quickly. It may take generations. Now Taiwan is getting input from southeast Asian as well as Tibetan Buddhist traditions. They are still minorities in Taiwan, but I’m sure they are growing fast. I think Taiwan’s financial wealth has faciliated the exchanges.
There’s nothing secret about it: I am an admirer of Bo Yang. From everything I’ve read of and about him, he seems to be both sharp and principled. No wonder the KMT tossed him into prison for more than nine years.
recent scholarship indicates that kongzi’s analects aren’t really his. just as the new testament wasn’t written down during jesus’ lifetime, neither were the analects finalized anytime near the death of kongzi. his followers kept on adding to them. a basic reading of the text will illustrate such. the early chapters are pretty straightforward. the latter chapters get pretty spacey. early on, the point is made that the master never spoke of the supernatural. by the end, the mysticisim is so thick and deep so as to be off-putting. which one was the real confucius?
it is widely acknowledged that the analects were written down by his antecedents. the extent to which the analects changed over time is a largely unrecognized phenomena.
There’s a representative and extensive excerpt from the English edition of The Ugly Chinaman here:
Couldn’t agree with you more. But on the other hand, he’s become a little too buddy-buddy with Chen Shui-bian recently for my tastes.
Anyway, yes his book is just a collection of essays and speeches, and then questions & answers and reactions from people. I don’t believe it was written with the intention to be widely read by a Western audience, but rather to initiate debate amongst Chinese themselves as to how to advance their culture. In this respect, I think it was meant to have a similar effect to Lu Xun’s work (although it is hard to compare anything to Lu Xun - he was a brilliant author and one of my favorites). Anyway, I think something is lost in the English translation, but if you read the original, if for nothing else, you can gain an appreciation for Bo Yang’s literary style and humor.
[quote=“skeptic yank”]recent scholarship indicates that kongzi’s analects aren’t really his. just as the new testament wasn’t written down during jesus’ lifetime, neither were the analects finalized anytime near the death of kongzi. his followers kept on adding to them. a basic reading of the text will illustrate such. the early chapters are pretty straightforward. the latter chapters get pretty spacey. early on, the point is made that the master never spoke of the supernatural. by the end, the mysticisim is so thick and deep so as to be off-putting. which one was the real confucius?
it is widely acknowledged that the analects were written down by his antecedents. the extent to which the analects changed over time is a largely unrecognized phenomena.[/quote]
Chinese literature has always been this way. A book with an even more dubious history is Laozi’s “Daodejing”. There are so many versions floating around, although many scholars now accept the version discovered some years ago at Mawangdui as being the earliest version. There is a good English translation of this version by Victor Mair, a professor at University of Pennsylvania. A great amount of time is spent by scholars on issues of authenticity and dating, as opposed to interpretation and analyses nowadays. Even more recent works like Cao Xueqin’s “Dream of the Red Chamber” are difficult to piece together a history for. However, I’m not so interested in how close the Analects is to the original teachings of Confucius as opposed to how what was handed down has influenced contemporary culture. Perhaps even more influential than the original Analects was the Neo-Confucian movement and Zhu Xi’s commentaries on the classics that became orthodox beginning from the Song Dynasty. Some of his ideas are waaaaaaay out there … yet they were accepted by the authorities of the day as being legitimate.
My favorite version / translation / commentary of the Daodejing was the one done by Lin Yu-Tang. It also contained commentary on Zhuangdzs writings (or those attributed to him).
That’s what I was taught.
I’m amazed anyone would think highly of that literary ragout by Bo Yiang. It’s filled with arch caricatures, cliches, faulty reasoning, and a lack of international perspective beyond the United States and Europe. Most of his observations about the Chinese could be said about any national or ethnic group.
“When my wife was teaching in Taiwan, whenever she started lecturing to her students about morality or personal values, they would immediately raise a protest: ‘We don’t want to learn about how to live, we want to learn how to get high marks on our examinations.’”
Damn tooting. Who wants to hear some teacher telling his or her students how to live? Leave it to the parents.
“Chinese people are the same everywhere.”
Nonsense. Chinese in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, China have significant differences. They are not the same everywhere any more than all Western Europeans are the same.
“Life is a little bit like a stone in a cement mixer; when it gets tossed around with the other ingredients, it loses control of its own existence.”
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to find inside.
“In Taipei they once tried to mount a campaign against filth and disorder, but it only lasted a few days. Our kitchens and our homes are always in a mess. In many residential areas, as soon as the Chinese move in, everyone else moves out.”
In many U.S. cities, Asians (including Chinese and Koreans) have largely been responsible for reversing urban blight. They moved into areas where whites wouldn’t go and made those areas livable again.
“On my last visit to the United States, I stayed with a friend who teaches at an American university. He was a very reasonable and intelligent person, and we held discussions on many subjects, including how to save China. The following day I told this-man that I wanted to visit a Mr G., a mutual acquaintance of ours. At the mere mention of Mr G.'s name, my friend’s eyes lit up in anger. And when I asked him to drive me to Mr G.'s house, he said, ‘Sorry, Bo Yang, you’ll have to get there on your own’. Both Mr G. and my host are university professors and grew up in the same place in China, but they cannot tolerate each other. Are they rational human beings? I’ll say it again: infighting is a serious problem among the Chinese.”
Does Yiang seriously believe that this sort of situation is unique to the Chinese?
“Why do people constantly compare the Chinese with the Jews? Many say that the Chinese and the Jews are particularly industrious. We can approach this question from two angles. First, the industriousness which was once the great pride of the Chinese people was destroyed during the reign of the Gang of Four in the Cultural Revolution, as a result of which Chinese people no longer possess a virtue that sustained them for thousands of years.”
Yiang said this in a speech in 1984, five years after China had reversed its economic tailspin caused by the Cultural Revolution. It looks even sillier from today’s perspective.
“I don’t have to cite examples of boasting and lying, but Chinese verbal brutality deserves special mention. Even in the confines of the bedroom, where Western couples habitually address each other as ‘honey’ and ‘darling’, Chinese people prefer such endearments as ‘You deserve death by a thousand cuts!’”
Yes, Western couples often call each other ‘honey’ and ‘darling’ right up to the moment they sign their divorce papers – sometimes even afterwards.
In Chinese society it is easy to astound people by performing miracles, but impossible to sustain such activity for an extended period. As soon as someone can claim some trivial achievement, he will suddenly lose his hearing or eyesight, or have difficulty walking. Anyone who publishes two articles is an ‘author’. Anyone who acts in two films is a ‘star’. Anyone who is a petty bureaucrat for two years is ‘the people’s saviour’. A student who spends two years in a university in the United States is a ‘returned overseas scholar’. Such titles are all auto-inflationary."
Yes, having looked over a few resumes, I can definitely say this isn’t a trait you can find in the West. We’re all just a bunch of straight-shooters when it comes to talking about our achievements.
Over the past 4000 years, China has produced only one great thinker: Confucius.
Horseshit.
I could have cited another two or three dozen comments from the essay/speech which were just as silly. Reading this kind of writing is often a tonic if you’ve read nothing but carefully written position papers or academic writing, but it’s not honest analysis.
In one part of the essay, Yiang complains about the Chinese people’s inability to reason. He should consider himself exhibit one as proof of that. He blames Chinese culture for the ills that have befallen the Chinese people, but some of the problems he describes (The Great Leap Forward, The Gang of Four) could just as well be assigned to Communism or China’s recent history or colonialism.
I strongly question that assumption that the Chinese cultural past can be used to understand modern Chinese societies. Sinologists like to say this sort of thing because it makes them seem more useful. A good grasp of modern Chinese history and detailed knowledge of specific institutions and practices is a much better guide to understanding why Taiwan is the way it is.
Feiren –
I agree. I think ancient history is useful for understanding modern society – any modern society – only at the margins.
Confucianism is blamed by some here for local apathy, and it may have a part in it (to the extent we can ever even know what this apathy is and how deep it runs), but modern Chinese have dropped Confucianism when it suited them. The modern economy of Greater China is hardly run according to Confucianist principles.
With the exception of the driving conditions in Monterey Park.
[quote=“Cold Front”]Feiren –
I agree. I think ancient history is useful for understanding modern society – any modern society – only at the margins.
Confucianism is blamed by some here for local apathy, and it may have a part in it (to the extent we can ever even know what this apathy is and how deep it runs), but modern Chinese have dropped Confucianism when it suited them. The modern economy of Greater China is hardly run according to Confucianist principles.[/quote]
true, China and Taiwan aren’t the Chu and Wei kingdoms of long ago. but confucianism has evolved and been mixed with other beliefs, secular, religious, etc., but there is still a deep underpinning of core “chinese” or “confucian” beliefs such as the Family. Sure, there isn’t any longer the authority of the Patrilineal Line, and who the hell sticks to the Rituals in the Li Ji and reads the Odes and Songs.
but i think your comment on economy is a bit irrelevant. first, economic principals and confucianism don’t belong in the same bucket. Confucianism isn’t an economic system like capitalism or Keynesian models. It’s a social system at its core. anyways, the dude despised the merchants and the strong. (although you might say a society has a ‘confucian economy’ where the merchants are near the bottom of the social caste eg japan, but that is again social order, not economic system)
I can understand some of your criticism about the Bo guy. haven’t read his stuff though.
about his comment on the lack of reasoning in Chinese. well, I can see what he means although certainly sounds badly written.
To me, it’s not that Chinese are somehow mentally incapable of rationalisation. That’s absurd. It’s more because they don’t have the fundamental revolution and belief in Rationalism as in the West. So it’s more like that they are brought up in a society where reasoning is not as important (but still used though in a different fashion from the western sense) as say moral codes or something. there isn’t a strong history of ancient Greek, Kantian, etc philisophies. There were some way back, but their significance has been mostly diminished and edited out (by the Confucianists mostly… the worst censors in all human history).
Agreed. You don’t need to be up to your armpits in Mengzi to analyse Taiwan’s strengths and weaknesses. Sinologists and most Chinese people who have battled their way through such irrelevant tosh don’t like to hear this. Cue Sinologist/Chinese Person: “You don’t understand China/Taiwan”
The status of merchants is a good counterexample. During the Ming and Qing dynasties merchants enjoyed high social status despite Confucian ideology. You can read Yu Ying-shi’s study of the Anhui merchants if you are curious.
Today in Taiwan, business people are on the top of the social ladder whereas teachers adnd civil servants are losing status rapidly. Money talks, Confucian bullshit walks.
For those of you who think formerly Confucian societies cannot sustain rule of law, how do you explain the case of Japan? There you have a country with a strong Confucian tradition but a highly developed legal system.
The reason I mentioned the economy was that until the latter part of last century, it was the conventional scholarly consensus that China was underdeveloped because of Confucianism. The stratified social and political system of China, which drew its inspiration from Confucianism, supposedly retarded business. Once Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and later China began to boom, suddenly Confucianism was critical to the Chinese economic success.
CF, that’s exactly how I felt after reading his book. His criticisms remind me of many of the complaints made about Taiwan / Taiwanese by some posters on this site - they are complaints you could make about nations / people the world over.
HakkaSonic –
Did you know Chinese are prone to exaggerate their virtues?
Did you know they are loud in public?
Did you know they often disagree amongst themselves?
Change the word “Chinese” to just about any other nationality/ethnicity in the world and you’ll have just as plausible a set of formulations.
Did you know Italians are prone to exaggerate their virtues?
Did you know they are loud in public?
Did you know they often disagree amongst themselves?
Or…
Did you know Russians are prone to exaggerate their virtues?
Did you know they are loud in public?
Did you know they often disagree amongst themselves?
Keep going until you run out of plausible alternatives; it should be a fun exercise.