Embedded Files
From: dduffy@email.unc.edu <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Date: Oct 2, 2006 2:31 PM
Subject: [Vsg] persistence of neo-confucianist text
Hi all,
I was struck several years ago by a panel presentation by Shawn McHale
about how there are no Confucians in Viet Nam. I am overstating his
case, but I recall him overstating it as well. His point was that the
engagement of Vietnamese scholars with major Confucian texts and their
attendant discourses over time is slight and unsophisticated.
I'll take his word for it, as we largely do in scholarship. The only
engagement I have with any Confucian text was to read through the book
of odes with Hugh Stimson and a dictionary for a few months twenty-five
years ago. I couldn't even tell you off-hand what the major
Confucianist texts are, or who their scholars have been.
But I have known a few men who thought of themselves as representative
Vietnamese, and conceived of themselves in Confucian terms they
articulated to me as such: the patriotic scholars Nguyen Khac Vien, his
deputy Huu Ngoc, and the avant-gardist Nguyen Huy Thiep.
I heard a lot of Confucian precepts from them about how to behave. It
all fit in well enough with what I had read in English-language
Vietnamese studies, for instance Hue Tam Ho Tai's account of her
grandfather (?) the administrator.
So I have often wondered about how Shawn could be right and I could
have had those experiences. Yesterday I had dinner at the home of a US
Commerce offical, eldest son in the fourteenth generation of a family
of administrators, whose father handed me a book his own father had
translated into Vietnamese, which perhaps links the issue of discourse
Shawn is confronting and mine of practice.
Pho Ba Long, the thirteenth generation, just had printed by NXB Tre in
Viet Nam, as many overseas families are doing with books important to
them, "Phu*o*ng Pha/p ho.c cu?a Ta(ng Quo^/c Phie^n". It's nicely done,
with reproductions, a sensible scholarly apparatus, and a column each
on each page in quoc ngu Vietnamese and in English.
There is a touching pair of introductions, first the one by the 12th
generation, Long's father, Hong Feng Fu Bashun, regretting how slow he
has been to translate Zang Guofen's "Learning Methodology" into
Vietnamese and that his children will ignore it. Then there is Long's
introduction, explaining why he finally has carried out his father's
wish to publish the translation, and further translated it into English.
The book is about how to study, by which the author means how to live.
Zang Guofan was one of those administrators who labored to keep China
together as it fell apart over the 19th C. Even I've heard of him, as I
read about the Black Flags to understand why Jules Bobillot has a
street named after him in Paris.
But nobody would call Zang an important intellectual, unless he or she
was referring to the everyday work that has to be done by someone who
can read and write and think. In his book he even talks about being
awkward and not very bright as an intellectual virtue, since it
occasions steady work in compensation.
I suggest this book as a textual answer to the important issue Shawn
raises, why we talk of Viet Nam as Confucian. We do it for the same
reason we think of Saigon and the diaspora as existentialist when the
only Vietnamese philosopher we can point to in that tradition is one
lonely, tragic and unfruitful personality who had nothing to do with
the Saigon nation.
It's matter of gesture, how you walk and hold your head, smoke and
drink and do business and raise children. There is a practice of
Confucianism in Viet Nam, and it also has textual referents, and the
NXB Tre book is one that was printed this year by a man I threw a book
party for on Sunday.
The Viet Nam Literature Project party was for another project, a
xeroxed booklet about his life which he wrote for his family. VNLP
hasn't actually published that book yet, not even as a web page. We -
that is, me the editor and me the fundraiser and me the pr man and me
book-keeper - have been busy administrating.
But Long is walking around talking about what his father learned from
the forgotten book of a mediocre Confucian a long time ago, and that
was enough to fascinate an audience of 23 for 2 hours. It's a living
tradition, embodied in this case by Long, the first Vietnamese to go to
Harvard Business School.
Just to make chatter before our event, I asked Long after Tu Wei Ming,
the Harvard scholar who stumps for Confucianism as a practice, who was
on Shawn's panel, who I figured Long must know well. He had never even
heard of the man.
Dan
From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
Date: Oct 2, 2006 5:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] persistence of neo-confucianist text
To answer Dan's question about how I can be right about the lack of Confucians in Vietnam
when there is so much apparent evidence to the contrary: yes, Dan simplified my views a bit.
At one level, the argument is definitional: is there a "Confucianism," seen as a coherent
and consisent body of thought, sharply set off from other teachings -- the "ism" which some
scholars seem to presume for Vietnam? No. "Confucianism" simply isn't an "ism" like Marxism.
It is too sprawling. It is a Way, not an "ism." Not only that, but it interpenetrated with
a raft of other teachings.
At another level, my argument is simply an attempt to say that the "Confucians" and
"Confucianism" lazily invoked by many never really existed in the way that many imagined.
Confucianism is often imagined to be *the* key to unlock the Vietnamese past. But this view
has a tinge of absurdity to it, as it presumes that there is only one key to this past.
There obviously isn't.
But, someone might protest, aren't there Vietnamese individuals deeply shaped by Confucian
texts? Absolutely. Confucian texts have deeply influenced particular Vietnamese. We don't
know enough about that engagement, but I am sure that the years to come will see scholars
deepen our understanding of that process.
From: David Marr <dgm405@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Date: Oct 2, 2006 6:48 PM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] persistence of neo-confucianist text
I'd argue that Confucianism is as much a religion/ideology as
Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism. Judaism or Islam. And I think Shawn
underrates its significance in Vietnam, past and present. Of course
historians have a responsibility to place all ideas in a context of
place and time, so that the Confucianism of 1900 in Vietnam is
different from what is being debated in the 1920s and 1930s, and
certainly the Confucian formulas and rituals we see today. That's
what makes intellectual history worthwhile. I urge Dan to take a
look at Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate, for a
brilliant treatment of this question, albeit not directly
transferable to Vietnam.
David Marr
Page updated
Report abuse