Date: Tuesday 20 January
Time: 17:00
Venue: Oxford China Centre, Dicksoon Poon Building, Lucina Ho Seminar Room
The Pixieji 闢邪集, written in 1644 by the proudly self-proclaimed Confucian Zhong Shisheng 鐘始聲, records a fervent defense of Confucianism and acerbic polemic against the newly-arrived doctrines of Catholicism. The text has a preface signed by a Buddhist monk named Shi Dalang 釋大郎, which records an exchange between Zhong and another Buddhist by the name of Chan Master Jiming 際明. Jiming advises Zhong not to worry himself with polemics against the new doctrine, while Shi Dalang goes so far as to assert that these Christian missionaries are actually bodhisattvas in disguise, who have come to stimulate debate with Buddhists and Confucians and thereby purify and strengthen Buddhism and Confucianism. Indeed, he goes on, this is why both the perverse doctrines of the Christians and the correct doctrines of the Confucians and Buddhist are both to be affirmed as “inconceivable”—wondrous manifestations of the salvific power of ultimate Buddha-nature. But things are not as they appear: Zhong Shisheng is actually the birth name of the great Ming Tiantai and Pure Land scholar Ouyi Zhixu 藕益智旭, and both Shi Dalang and Chan Master Jiming are in fact fictional creations. In other words, all three of the interlocuters are Ouyi Zhixu himself. Through examining this intricate literary and philosophical game, this paper explores the Tiantai Buddhist ideas of “the mutual interpervasion of the ten inherently entailed realms,” “the Three Thousand dwelling together as a single moment of mentation” through the coexistence of critique and tolerance, hatred and acceptance of Christians, in Zhixu’s own mind, exemplified in the many-selved coexistence of his past Confucian self and his present Buddhist self—a model of how our conditioned selves, with all their concrete loves and hates and their inexorable ambivalences, can coexist with our simultaneous understanding of the need for what we love and what we hate to continue to coexist.
Brook A. Ziporyn is a scholar of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy. Professor Ziporyn received his BA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Chicago Divinity School faculty, he taught Chinese philosophy and religion at the University of Michigan (Department of East Asian Literature and Cultures), Northwestern University (Department of Religion and Department of Philosophy), Harvard University (Department of East Asian Literature and Civilization) and the National University of Singapore (Department of Philosophy).
