Research On Qian Mu's Religious Views

Qian Mu(Ch’ien Mu)(1895-1990),a native of Wuxi,Jiangsu province,is an encyclopedic scholar for his knowledge of the humanities about the East and the West."Qian Mu fever" emerged with "the Chinese fever" in the 1990 s,which is closely related to its background namely the revival of Chinese traditional culture.At present,domestic and foreign scholars’ researches on Qian Mu have been mainly concentrated in the fields of history,politics,education,and culture,etc.,but there are still seldom systematic researches on his religious views.Based on Qian Mu’s works,this paper will make a relatively comprehensive study and analysis about the religions in his concern,and summarize five characteristics about Qian Mu’s religious views and their inner logic,on the basis of the researches by other scholars before.Then it will further explore the view of harmony between mankind and nature,realized by Qian Mu at the end of his later years.This paper consists of six parts: the introduction,the four chapters and the conclusion.The introduction will introduce the intentions,its theoretical and practical significance,its research status and methods at home and abroad.The first chapter will summarize Qian Mu’s life stories in chronological order,including his family tradition,school education,communion of academia,the preparation and operation of New Asia College,etc.It deals namely with Qian Mu’s character,sentiments and self-cultivation influenced by his parents,with his academic orientation,style and methods influenced by his good teachers and friends such as Qian Bogui,Lv Simian and Hua Zixiang,with his communion and exchange among Tang Yongtong,Feng Youlan and Xiong Shili,with his own comprehension and practice of Chinese and Western educational ideas,and with his perceptual understanding and personal experience of religious phenomena,etc.The elements above could be regarded as the direct or indirect factors affecting the formation,characteristics and logic of Qian Mu’s religious understanding.The second chapter is mainly a review of Qian Mu’s opinions on various religions,based on the collection of the first-hand materials from his works.It will discuss his opinions relevant according to the classification of three major religions in the world,namely Buddhism,Christianity,Islam,Taoism and folk religions in China as well.Qian Mu paid special attention to Zen,Huineng and Dharma during discussing Buddhism,and focused on the relation between Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism.The selective comments on Taoism,especially on Neo-Taoism,highlight his inherent doctrines,standpoint and ideal of Confucianism.His researches on Christianity and Islam is connected with his comparative studies between Chinese and Western cultures.The exploration of some important figures in Buddhism and Taoism reflects his emphasis on historical knowledge and historical significance.The third chapter is based on several disputes about religious subjects,which are germinated in modern times and have been very influential so far,concerning religious existence or its non-existence,religious substitution,religiousness and the relationship among religion,philosophy and science.This chapter will discuss on Qian Mu’s definition,analysis,demonstration and explanation about such themes,and also their background and the relevant responses of scholars in the early period of the Republic of China,and give some future prospects.Here,Qian Mu has also presented his own unique views on these issues,and his evaluation of these propositions reflects intensively his understanding and attitudes about religion.This chapter and the second chapter are parallel in form,but the second chapter is concentrated on the concrete religions,whereas this chapter deals only with the abstract issues such as religious ideas and theories.The two parts together constitute the core of this paper.The fourth chapter is the digestion and refining of the first three chapters.nearly covers all subjects concerned.It puts forward five characteristics of Qian Mu’s religious views,namely,regarding the harmonious unity between nature and mankind as the supreme orientation,taking Confucianism as the basic standpoint,searching for the confluence of the perspectives in Chinese and Western cultural comparison,unifying the knowledge and action by usage of epistemology and theory of practice,and integrating the analysis of history with the concept of geography.It will explore Qian Mu’s cognitive logic in his systematization of concrete religions,as well as describe his thinking process,that is,taking the concept namely Xin as its basic and corn term,communicating the two extremes of the sacred and the secular through the understanding of immortality of spirit,and practising the unity of knowledge and action in accordance with the harmony of nature and mankind continuously.In the conclusion part,the author makes a further interpretation about the key points in Qian Mu’s religious understanding or cultural views,such as the concept of the harmony between mankind and nature,the guiding function of Chinese traditional culture,and the religion of Xin,etc.,summarizes the difficulties in the exploration and the new ideas in this paper,and finally puts forward some appeals and prospects.In this paper,the author finds and selects from Qian Mu’s voluminous works some controversial and influential propositions during the study of religion,discussed in the academic circles as well since the modern times,by which reveals Qian Mu’s religious views intensively,and points out that the specific contents of his religious understanding are divided into different parts according to different religions,in which the framework and gradation of his theoretic system about unity of concrete and abstract contents are constructed.At the same time,Chinese historical research methods of Qian Mu are also referred.Here,it gives full consideration of combining the theories with concrete issues including human activities and their historical situations,so as to avoid empty talks mostly influenced by western academic paradigm.The paper puts stress on the principle of human initiative and tries to interpret Qian Mu’s religious outlook truly from his life stories and its social context.In connection with such realities,especially the dilemma what the West is falling increasingly into,this paper makes certain explanation and extension to the academic viewpoints,tendencies and purposes contained in Qian Mu’s religious views.