HOLY CONFUCIUS! Do Not Confuse The Master With Saint Nicholas
How The Western Plan To Translate China Into Christianity Collapsed
Few people know what Confucius is - not who but what:
The ancient teacher is known by many names; he's King Kung, Master Kong or just K'ung Fu-tzu. But unlike the biblical Saint Nicholas, alias Santa Claus, Confucius isn't a Christian saint but a Chinese sage; more correctly: Confucius a shengren.
The shengren of Confucianism (there are hundreds of them) - like the buddhas of Buddhism - are un-European. They cultivate the ideal personality and become the highest members in the family-based Chinese value tradition.
NOTE: If you are into Translation, or Confucianism and Taoism, consider ordering a copy of HOLY CONFUCIUS! this holiday season. Why, because we must cherish Asian cultures and revive the Chinese shengren! Thanks! And talk to you soon! T
Yet, even in China, there are only a handful of scholars who know about shengren. That's because shengren, this word and concept, has been carefully removed from the history of thought. To the Western missionaries in the 17th century and thereafter, Confucius was erroneously believed to idolize the Christian God, and thus ought to be a true "saint," just like, say, our Western Saint Jerome or Saint Benedict.
In the year 1688 of our Lord, Jesus Christ, Randal Taylor wrote that "the origin of the Chinese nation was not long after the Flood [...] This being so, it must necessarily follow that the first inhabitants of China had likewise the true knowledge of GOD and of the creation of the world."
This was the beginning of the seemingly total Christianization of China. And, today, yes, Beijing lives in the year 2023 of our Lord, and China celebrates a Christmas. In contrast, who in Europe knows, for example, that this year is also the 2,574th anniversary of the birth of Confucius?
Lost in translation
How could China lose its shengren to Western cultural imperialism? The Chinese term sheng appears 260 times in the Huainanzi, 48 times in Mengzi, 132 times in the Chun Qiu Fan Lu, 157 times in Xunzi, 33 times in Laozi, 149 times in Zhuangzi, 40 times in the Yi Qing, and a whopping 185 times in The Records of the Grand Historian. Yet, despite its omnipresence, Western scholars obviously never read those books nor used that term. Why?
As the historian Howard Zinn once wrote: "If something is omitted from history, you have no way of knowing it is omitted." Western efforts to distort China's originality by translation knew no restraint: the British, the French, and the German philosophers, the theologicians and storytellers, they all called K'ung Fu-tzu everything but by his true term; they called him, fashion-wise, a philosopher, a saint, a magus, a teacher, or a sage, whatever floated their theory at that time.
Tens of thousands of other Chinese (and other foreign) key concepts were excluded from world history this way. In effect, translations made China drop out of the humanist project and made her look as if she had no originality at all.
Some scholars have argued with me that China must engage in a dialogue with the West - they mean "in English language." To this I add, yes, but only if the Chinese bring their own terms to the tables. Otherwise the so-called dialogue with the West will always be a Western monologue. In practice, this would mean to identify the untranslatables, and to promote them. Most writings of European "China experts" today are inadequate because they describe a China without Chinese terminologies.
Traditionally, European thinkers translated China at will, always according to their own cultural predicaments. For example "the sage/le sage" became today's preferred (neutral) translation of shengren only in Britain and France, but not so in Germany. The all-favored German word is the biblical "Heilige," meaning saint or holyman. The reason is simple: German language, in contrast to English and French, reserved the noun phrase of "sapientia" (a Latin term for wisdom) not for persons but for fairy tales and legends.
In addition, German language is deeply biblical.
A Confucian Christmas
The first major German book in print was Luther's translation of the Bible. Unsurprisingly, the word "heilig," meaning holy, follows the Germans like a dark specter wherever they venture; that's why the works of Karl Guetzlaff and Richard Wilhelm, for example, read like biblical bedtime stories.
The German language, frankly speaking, is uniquely disqualified from translating the Chinese tradition which is entirely non-Christian, while the English language is just a one-eyed man among blind people. No European language so far had the power to correctly translate Chinese cultural key terminologies.
As long as Western China scholarship floats on misleading European terminology, the West isn't learning anything new from Asia. In this century, it will be necessary to depart from some Western erroneous translations. The East isn't just an appendix to the Western lingo; it has more to offer than the West could ever satisfactorily translate.
The key is to adopt Chinese terminologies. So that, one day, we may have something, anything really, to celebrate for being truly and faithfully global.
End.
Mao believed 'everyone should do their fair share of the work' when millions of people were forced out of their homes and away from loved ones to work on the land. This was actually… very creative!
They are teaching the young in china how we added a thousand years to history in the west by making the I into a one 1 when the letters I and j were added to the alphabet in 1542 when the letter I stood for isheua the work of the Russian Formeko the phantom time hypothesis, And about Tartaria and how it fell and how Peter the great of Russia changed the year from 7207 to 1700 , In the leaked speech of general Chi Hoating he lays out their great leap out from a country that is poisoned by pollution not to Taiwan but Australia, Canada and New Zealand total population of all 3 countries 70 million, with the western military dropping like flies we could well be deleted from history very soon