The Dubious Choice of an Enemy: The Unprovoked Animosity of Matteo Ricci against Buddhism

Abstract

In 1595, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the legendary founder of the Jesuit China mission, notably switched his visual and sartorial affiliation from Buddhism to Confucianism. Before 1595, he was clad and tonsured like a Buddhist priest. After 1595, he not only refashioned his exterior self in the style of a Confucian scholar but also presented himself as an ambiguous defender of Confucian orthodoxy against the corruption of Buddhism. Deliberate and unprovoked, Ricci’s bold and consciously publicized campaign against Buddhism revealed his profound insight into the relationship of both competition and complement among native Chinese philosophical and religious traditions which he sought to utilize for his apostolic purposes. However, as this essay argues, the same public display of his ideological antagonism also exposed serious limitations of his cultural understanding, because it did not and could not lead to the result which he had desired.

Acknowledgement:

In addition to short-term research fellowships received in 2012 and 2013 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and in 2014 at the Clark Library of UCLA, the author would like to acknowledge the crucial support of a 2006–2007 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a 2012–2013 Fulbright lecturing-research fellowship at the City University of Hong Kong, which helped respectively to start and complete the research for this essay.

The author would also like to thank the editors of the journal and the anonymous readers for all the careful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

1. Ricci’s legendary experience in China was first recorded in the chronicle of the Jesuit China mission which Ricci himself composed toward the end of his life in Beijing. After translating it from Italian into Latin and making various modifications in the process, Nicola Trigault published it posthumously in Europe in 1615. After almost three and half centuries, Ricci’s original Italian text was published as Storia dell’introduzione del Cristianesimo in Cina, which made up the major part of Fonti Ricciane: Documenti Originali Concernanti Matteo Ricci e la Storia delle Prime Relazione tra l’Europa e la Cina (1579–1615), ed. Pasquale M. D’Elia, 3 vols. (Roma: La Libreria dello Stato, 1942–49). Based mainly on Ricci’s record of events or on Trigault’s version of his account, several biographies of Ricci were published in English in the twentieth century, including Vincent Cronin’s The Wise Man from the West (New York: Dutton, 1955), George H. Dunne’s Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), and Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984). The recent quadricentennial commemoration of Ricci’s death has seen the publication of several new biographies the most significant of which are R. Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Michela Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011), and Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).

2. Christopher A. Spalatin, S.J., Matteo Ricci’s Use of Epictetus (Waegwan, Korea: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana Facultas Theologiae, 1975), 85.

3. Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 73.

4. Dominick Fernandez Navarette, An Account of the Empire of China, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), 1.86.

5. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 259.

6. Li Zhizao, “Du ‘Jingjiao Bei’ Shuhou” [After reading about the Jingjiao Stele], in Mingmo Tianzhujiao Sanzhushi Wenjianzhu [Catholic documents of Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao, Yang Tingyun), ed. Li Tiangang (Hong Kong: Daofeng Shushe, 2007), 191; unless otherwise noted, all translations from Chinese into English are my own.

7. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 467.

8. Li Zhizao, “Du ‘Jingjiao Bei’ Shuhou,” 191.

9. Alessandro Valignano, “Letter to the Bishop of Evora, Dom Theotonio de Braganca, from Goa, 23 December 1585,” quoted in Paul A. Rule, The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 3.

10. Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742 (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994), 43.

11. About the accommodation of the earliest Buddhists in China to Daoism, see Kenneth K.S. Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), especially Chapter II, Introduction and Early Development: Han Dynasty.

12. Cited from Ruggieri’s Chinese texts in Albert Chan, S.J., “Michele Ruggieri, S.J. (1543–1607) and his Chinese Poems,” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 141, 140; the English translation here is not entirely identical to Chan’s rendition.

13. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, “The Jesuit Encounter with Buddhism in Ming China,” in Christianity and Cultures: Japan & China in Comparison 1543-1644, ed. M. Antoni J. Üçerler, S.J. (Roma: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2009), 19-43, 43.

14. R. Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, 239.

15. Lai Yonghai, Foxue yu Ruxue (Buddhism and Confucianism) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Renmin Chubanshe, 1992), 22.

16. Ibid., 25.

17. Ibid., 23.

18. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, 467.

19. Matteo Ricci, “Li Xiansheng fu Yu Quanbu Shu” (Response to the Letter of Yu Chunxi), in Li Madou Zhongwen Zhuyiji (The Collected Chinese Works and Translations of Matteo Ricci), ed. Zhu Weizheng (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chubanshe, 2001), 660.

20. Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), 267.

21. Ibid.

22. Yu Chunxi, “Tianzhu Shiyi Shasheng Bian” (Critiquing the attitude to animal-killing in Tianzhu Shiyi), in Shengchao Poxie Ji, ed. Xia Meiqi (Hong Kong: Jiandao Shenxue Yuan, 1996), 258.

23. Zhuhong, Tianshuo (On Heaven), in Shengchao Poxie Ji, 320; since Tianshuo was composed after the epistolary exchange between Ricci and Yu Chunxi, Zhuhong must have known the Jesuit father’s willfully misleading claim of Buddha putting himself above the Christian Lord of Heaven and he could have purposefully twisted the description of Ricci to denigrate Christianity.

24. Guo Peng, Ming Qing Fojiao (Buddhism of the Ming and Qing Periods) (Fuzhou, Fujian Renmin Chubanshe, 1982), 188.

25. Zheng Ande, Mingmo Qingchu Tianzhujiao he Fojiao de Hujiao Bianlun (The Self-defensive Debates of Catholicism with Buddhism in the late Ming and early Qing Periods) (Taipei: Foguangshan Wenjiao Jijinhui, 2001), 494.

26. In the early seventeenth-century members of the Jesuit Japan mission helped to bring these things to light. About this, see Michael Cooper, S.J., Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China (New York: Weatherhill, 1974).

27. “Tianzhu Shiyi Tiyao” (Summary of Tianzhu Shiyi), in Li Madou Zhongwen Zhuyiji, 139; the same authors expressed similar views in their comments on Jiren Shipian.

28. Shengyan, Mingmo Fojiao Yanjiu (Study of Late Ming Buddhism), 2^nd edition (Taipei: Fagu Wenhua Shiye Gufen Youxian Gongsi, 2000), 262.

29. Chün-fang Yü, The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 65.

30. Qu Rukui (Qu Taisu), “Biluo Yin” (A Song of Biluo), in [Kangxi] Shaozhou Fuzhi ([Kangxi Edition] History of Shaozhou), Beijing Tushuguan Gujizhenben Congkan (The Serial Collection of Ancient Books in Beijing Library), vol. 40 (Beijing: Shumu Wenxian Chubanshe, 1988), 2004.

31. Zhang Huang, Tushu Bian (Compendium of Books), in Siku Quanshu (Imperial Library), vol. 969 (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1987), 34.

32. Erik Zürcher, “Jesuit Accommodation and the Chinese Cultural Imperative,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello (Nettetal, 1994), 41.

33. Nicolas Standaert, S.J., “Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 356.

34. Pan Guiming, Zhongguo Jushi Fojiao Shi (The History of Chinese Lay Buddhists) (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 2000), 760.