Chapter 30 chapter 30

Dr. Giles Chinese biographical dictionary, it must be admitted, is a work of enormous labor. But here again Dr. Giles shows an utter lack of the most ordinary judgment. In such a work, one would expect to find notices only of really notable men. Hie manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi, Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat, Quique pii votes et Phoebo digna locuti, Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo. But side by side with sages and heroes of antiquity, with mythical and mythological personages, we find General Tcheng Ki-tong, Mr. Ku Hung-ming, Viceroy Chang Chi-tung and Captain Lew Buah, _the last whose sole title to distinction is that he used often to treat his foreign friends with unlimited quantities of champagne!

Lastly these "Adversaria,"_Dr. Giles latest publication_will not, I am afraid, enhance Dr. Giles reputation as a scholar of sense and judgment. The subjects chosen, for the most part, have no earthly practical or human interest. It would really seem that Dr. Giles has taken the trouble to write these books not with any intention to tell the world anything about the Chinese and their literature but to show what a learned Chinese scholar Dr. Giles is and how much better he understands Chinese than anybody else . Moreover, Dr. Giles, here as elsewhere, shows a harsh and pugnacious dogmatism which is as un-philosophical, as unbecoming a scholar as it is unpleasant. It is these characteristics of sinologues like Dr. Giles which have made, as Mr. Hopkins says, the very name of sinologue and Chinese scholarship a byword and scorn among practical foreign residents in the Far East.

I shall here select two articles from Dr. Giles latest publication and will try to show that if hitherto writings of foreign scholars on the subjects of Chinese learning and Chinese literature have been without human or practical interest, the fault is not in Chinese learning and Chinese literature. The first article is entitled "What is filial piety." The point in the article turns upon the meaning of two Chinese characters. A discipline asked what is filial piety. Confucius said: se nan fa^ (lit, color difficult). Dr. Giles says, "The question is, and has been for twenty centuries past, what do. these two characters mean?" After citing and dismissing all the interpretations and translations of native and foreign scholars alike. Dr. Giles of course finds out the true meaning. In order to show Dr. Giles harsh and unscholarly dogmatic manner, I shall here quote Dr. Giles words with which he announces his discovery. Dr.

Giles says:_ "It may seem presumptuous after the above exordium to declare that the meaning lies a la Bill Stumps (! ) upon the surface, and all you have to do, as the poet says, is to Stoop, and there it is; Seek it not right nor left! "When Tzu-hsia asked Confucius, What is filial piety? the latter replied simply, "se to define it, nan is difficult, a most intelligible and appropriate answer." I shall not here enter into the niceties of Chinese grammar to show that Dr. Giles is wrong. I will only say here that if Dr. Giles is right in supposing that the character se is a verb, then in good grammatical Chinese, the sentence would not read se nan, but se chih wei nanto define it, is difficult. The impersonal pronoun chi it, is here absolutely indispensable, if the character se here is used as a verb.

But apart from grammatical niceties, the translation as given by Dr. Giles of Confucius answer, when taken with the whole context, has no point or sense in it at all. Tzu hsia asked, what is filial piety? Confucius said, "The difficulty is with the manner of doing it. That merely when there is work to be done, the young people should take the trouble of doing it, and when there is wine and food, the old folk are allowed to partake it, _do you really think that is filial piety?" (Discourses and Sayings Ch. .. ) Now the whole point in the text above lies in this, _that importance is laid not upon what duties you perform towards your parents, but upon how _in what manner, with what spirit, you per-

_ Compare another saying of Confucius Il!f^"fe Oi iao yen ling se, plausible speech and fine manners (Discourses and Sayings Ch. .. ) form those duties. The greatness and true efficacy of Confucius moral teaching, I wish to say here, lies in this very point which Dr. Giles fails to see, _ the point namely that in the performance of moral duties, Confucius insisted upon the importance not of the what , but of the how. For herein lies the difference between what is called morality and religion, between mere rules of moral conduct and the vivifying teaching of great and true religious teachers. Teachers of morality merely tell you what kind of action is moral and what kind of action is immoral. But true religious teachers do not merely tell you this. True religious teachers do not merely inculcate the doing of the outward act, but insist upon the importance of the manner, the inwardness of the act. that the morality or immorality of our actions does not consist in what we do, but in how we do it.