Source: TW
Pretty hilarious - and kind of disturbing - to read how the first Christian missionaries to China presented Catholicism so the Chinese wouldn’t find it too unfamiliar. E.g. as Europeans they presented themselves as Indian monks following a special strand of Buddhism. A short 🧵. This is all extracted from this book 🔽, “A Jesuit in the Forbidden City”, by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia on the life of Matteo Ricci.
So the key challenge for missionaries was how to present a religion that is so profoundly different from anything the Chinese believed in, coming from a land that the Chinese had never heard about and would consider barbarian territory? The answer was - largely - deception (no other word for it) through creating their own personal legend.
As such, they shaved their heads and dressed as Buddhist monks, introducing themselves as “monks from Tianzhu guo, India [also means heaven, incidentally], the land of Buddha”. The Chinese were of course very familiar with India since this was indeed the land where Buddhism came from and they were somewhat used to seeing monks coming from India to preach special schools of Buddhism.
Hilariously enough, the missionaries were also quick to notice the importance of the goddess Guanyin in Chinese Buddhism and… her interesting ressemblance to Virgin Mary. They decided to bank on that. They displayed images of the Virgin and Child which soon became “assimilated into the Chinese understanding as the Son-giving Guanyin.” It was of course very important at the time for Chinese families to have a son and they were led to believe praying to the pictures helped.
The very name chosen as a Chinese translation for the religion - Tian Zhu Jiao (天主教), the religion of the Lord of Heaven (which is how Catholicism is called in China to this day) - is also indicative of an attempt to stay in familiar territory for the Chinese. They expanded on the traditional Confucian concept of Heaven, arguing it had a Lord. One missionary put it this way to Chinese interlocutors: “Worshiping ‘Heaven’ and not ‘the Lord of Heaven’ is ridiculous; as if someone would kneel to the imperial palace and not the emperor.”
The very first Christian catechism published in Chinese by Michele Ruggieri - a companion of Ricci - under the title “Tianzhu shilu” is also enlightening. Signing under his Chinese name Luo Mingjian, Ruggieri presented himself under the title of ‘Tianzhu seng (an Indian monk)’. Ruggieri chose as a format for the book a dialogue between a monk (seng) and a Chinese interlocutor. In the introduction, Ruggieri argues that loving the Lord of Heaven is a natural consequence of filial gratitude; which is of course a major traditional belief in China. He also names gratitude for writing this booklet, to give ‘truth’ to the Chinese, who have shown him great hospitality, since he cannot offer them gold and jewels. The acts of the Lord of Heaven, Ruggieri tells the reader, originated in Tianzhu (India) and were later propagated in the four directions. His is an easy religion, requiring no daily fasts, no Chan meditation, no need to abandon the secular life to follow a religious master …worshipping the Lord with a sincere heart is sufficient to bring blessings. It almost reads like marketing material 🤭
To be sure, the book did include some of the major tenets of Christianism but always in a way that the Chinese could relate to. For instance to describe Jesus descending upon the earth to teach his doctrines (the incarnation), Ruggieri uses the word ‘hua’ (transform), a term…… employed in Buddhist texts to denote the transformation of Buddhas and boddhisatvas into their myriad representations.
To be clear, these were the very early attempts at propagating Catholicism in China and, despite the lengths to which they went to accommodate the religion in ways that would be palatable to the Chinese, they were in fact not very successful. Matteo Ricci, after 10 years of living as a Buddhist monk and making a very limited impact, decided to assume a different persona - that of a Confucian scholar, as I explain in this other thread 🔽
These immense accommodations of the Catholic religion in order to spread it in China also didn’t quite please the clergy over in Rome. It slowly gave birth to a huge debate which came to be known as the “Chinese Rites controversy” 🔽 (wiki).
To conclude, this illustrates just how difficult it is to bridge Western and Chinese cultures. They’re just very different from each others - having developed independently during millennia - and attempts to convert from one to the other often end up debasing one or the other. This is a very contemporary question too, as we constantly blame China for not liberalizing. After 500+ years it’s time to realize China is China, we are us, we can understand and maybe inspire each others but proselyte attempts to transform China in our mirror image are futile.
Confucian mask
Source: TW
One of the most consequential - and smartest - persons in history was 16th century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, the first European to enter China’s Forbidden City. Yet, ask people on the street if they’ve heard of him and you’d be hard press to find anyone who has. A small 🧵
Born in Italy, after studying to be a Jesuit priest Ricci applied at 25 years old for a missionary expedition to the Far East. He arrived in Macau in 1582. At first, he believed the best way to perform his missionary work was to become a Buddhist monk in China. He thought monks would have in China the same influence as they had in Europe at the time, figures of authority whose words would carry a lot of weight, including with the political elites. And indeed, he dressed up and shaved his head like a Buddhist monk during 10 years.
However he gradually realized that China was a largely secular society where the elites - the Mandarins - looked down on monks. Monks were kept in monasteries and were forbidden to interfere in politics. A big contrast to Europe where religion and politics were intertwined. What he did discover though was that the Chinese looked up to scholars.
Lucky for him, he was one of Europe’s most brilliant minds with an incredible depth of knowledge in astronomy, philosophy and mathematics. He thus abandoned his Buddhist garb, grew a beard and started dressing up as a Confucian scholar. He ceased to describe himself as a “Western monk” (xi seng) and began identifying himself as a “Western literatus” (xi ru, xi shi). By that point he’d also learned to read and write classical Chinese, the literary language of scholars and officials, and he’d mastered the Chinese classics. This allowed him to explain Christianity to the Chinese in terms that he now understood would resonate.
For instance, to translate “God”, a notion that didn’t exist in China, he used the term Tian Zhu (天主, Lord of Heaven). Because he saw the Chinese believed in the philosophical Confucian/Taoist concept of Tian (“Heaven”) and were, in that sense, monotheistic +++(non-sense)+++: only one Tian. And it stuck: even today, the Catholic faith in China is translated as “the religion of the Lord of Heaven” (天主教, Tian Zhu Jiao).
Thanks to his knowledge of China and his erudition - particularly in astronomy (Ricci could predict eclipses, which impressed Chinese intellectuals) - Ricci was invited as an adviser to the court of the Wanli Emperor, the first Westerner to be invited into the Forbidden City. With his newfound knowledge of Chinese, he also proceeded to translate the Chinese classics into Latin together with Chinese intellectual Xu Guangqi. They were the first to ever do so.
Those translations soon made their way back to Europe though the Jesuit missionary channels. This was of course the time of the Renaissance, a time when Europe was in deep intellectual ferment. In France in particular, thinkers at the time were desperate to find a way to get rid of the hold the Church on people’s minds. Ricci’s translations were a godsend (pun intended) for them. They realized “here is a civilization that has succeeded in having morality without religion, that’s what we need too!” This created the philosophical basis for Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire or Descartes.
In fact Voltaire was so taken by Chinese philosophy that he kept a painting of Confucius facing him while he worked. He believed China had reached the apex of human civilisation and wrote that since Confucius no “finer rule of conduct has ever been given throughout the earth.” To conclude, while it would be a stretch to claim that the Enlightenment solely finds its roots in Ricci’s translations of the Chinese classics, it played a much bigger role than most people realize.
Ricci’s life and achievements is a testament to the fact that when you really take the time to understand others, everyone benefits. You’re able to explain yourself to others in ways that resonate and you can understand others in ways that benefit you. It’s also a reminder of who we used to be, humble and open-minded, in a day and age when the key disease affecting the West is one of a misguided sentiment of superiority. Instead of trying to approach others as equals, we lecture them with little to no understanding of who they are. Obviously, this doesn’t resonate and results in cutting ourselves off of them. It’s the deeper reason behind the growing “West vs the rest” divide we’re witnessing. We can be better: we used to be! We have too many warmongers who seek to accentuate divides and fostering hatred instead of promoting mutual understanding and respect. This can only lead us on a path of conflict. We need to produce the Matteo Riccis of our age.