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Member News
Tang Prize Winner
The 2016 Tang Prize in
Sinology was awarded toWilliam Theodore de Baryfor his tremendous academic and educational
achievements. Born in
1919, Professor de Baryﬁnished his doctoral degreein 1953 at Columbia University. He remains at hisalma mater for the following decades and there heWiiliam Theodore de Bary
has established one of theleading centers of Chinesestudies in the West. The enterprise continues even after his retirement in1990. Professor de Bary specializes in Chinese intellectual history, particularly Confucianism, and he has written and edited over 30 books, many ofwhich have made groundbreaking contributions to Confucian studies. He
chaired the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture between 1960
and 1966 and served as Executive Vice President of Academic Aﬀairs andProvost from 1971 to 1978. He was also President of the Association ofAsian Studies from 1969 to 1970. Even now in his nineties, he continues topublish works that address key questions of humanity, including his 2013
publication The Great Civilized Conversation: Education for a World
Community.1
Professor de Bary’s exploration of Confucianism began with his study ofHuang Zongxi’s (黃宗羲; 1610 1695) Waiting for the Dawn (明夷待訪錄). He
strove to understand China’s ideals, traditions, as well as internal problems
faced throughout history, without the shackles of Western values and theories.
With this insight, Professor de Bary went on to pioneer the ﬁeld of
Neo-Confucian studies with his 1953 article, “A Reappraisal of

1 Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Great Civilized Conversation: Education for a World
Community (New York: Columbia UP, 2013).

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Neo-Confucianism.”2 He does not hail traditional Confucian thought as
perfect, but he endeavors to bring into light the Confucian idea of daotong(道統) or what he phrases as “the reconstitution of the Way.”
Over the past half a century, Professor de Bary’s research focuses on twomajor themes. The ﬁrst is the discussion of the development of theCheng-Zhu school of Neo-Confucianism from a historical perspective, which
crystallized into two representative works: Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and theLearning of the Mind-and-Heart and Message of the Mind in
Neo-Confucianism.3 The second theme being his emphasis on the value of theindividual and freedom in the Confucian tradition, a topic he explores in The
Liberal Tradition in China.4 Professor de Bary stresses that Neo-Confucian
teachings in late imperial China, especially during the Ming Dynasty, containvalues that he terms “liberal tendencies.” Throughout history, these values
were upheld by Confucian scholar-oﬃcials, also known as junzi (君 子;gentlemen), who would raise “prophetic voices” against the abuse of politicalpower. In Learning for One’s Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian
Thought, Professor de Bary tries to ﬁnd common ground between theConfucian cultivation of the self and Western individualism.5
Despite his respect for Confucianism, Professor de Bary understands thatboth the “liberal tendencies” and “prophetic voices” were never translated
into legal institutions to protect civil rights. In The Trouble with
Confucianism, he argues that the Confucian ideal of cultivating sage kings isdiﬃcult to realize and must rely on junzi to mediate between the ruler and thepeople. While junzi were regarded as the spokesmen of the “mandate ofheaven,” unlike Western prophets, they were not ordained as God’s messengers and lacked a power base such as the Church. Moreover, in theConfucian tradition, junzi mainly conveyed messages to the ruler rather thanthe people, which greatly limited their social impact.6 In his translation ofHuang Zongxi’s Waiting for the Dawn published in 1993, Professor de Bary
provides a lengthy introduction, arguing that the elements of democracy
found in Huang’s work do not entirely ﬁt in with Western democracy.
2 This article is included in Arthur Wright ed., Studies in Chinese Thought (Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1953).
3 Wm. Theodore de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mindand-Heart (New York: Columbia UP, 1981); Message of the Mind in
Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia UP, 1989).
4 Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China (Hong Kong: Chinese UP,1983).
5 Wm. Theodore de Bary, Learning for One’s Self: Essays on the Individual in
Neo-Confucian Thought (New York: Columbia UP, 1991).
6 Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUP, 1991).

Member News127Nevertheless, Huang’s idea is of particular signiﬁcance as he proposed acertain kind of rule of law, departing from traditional Confucian philosophyof politics.7
In recent years, Professor de Bary has shifted his focus to the comparisonand complementariness between Western and Eastern civilizations. In 2004,
he published Nobility and Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and theCommon Good, in which he propounds a multicultural outlook and encourages cross-cultural dialogue as the best way to demonstrate the values ofhuman rights and civil society and to resolve critical issues facing thecontemporary world.8 Professor de Bary believes that the Confucian teachingsof “subduing one’s self and returning to propriety” (克己復禮) and “one principle with a myriad of manifestations” (理一分殊) are still applicable today. An
earlier publication, in 1988, that heralded this vein of research is East AsianCivilizations: A Dialogue in Five Stages, in which Professor de Bary analyzes
the development of East Asian civilizations, emphasizing exchanges between
the diﬀerent countries of this region, meanwhile making suggestions about
dialogue between East and West. For him, to save a chaotic world, there is noway better than dialogue and exchange, whose promotion has long been thepurpose of his scholarship.
Besides the dazzling scholarly achievements, Professor de Bary is also agreat translator and editor. For decades, people in the ﬁeld of East Asianstudies, teachers and students alike, have all beneﬁted from his Sources ofChinese Tradition, in which he translates and annotates a vast number ofChinese texts, including social, political, cultural, and intellectual sources.9
The work ﬁrst came out in 1960 and has been continuously revised andenlarged. Professor de Bary also presides over a project of translating Easternclassics at Columbia University, which has seen more than 150 works translated and thus provided a solid foundation for Asian studies in the West. Inaddition, he has been holding seminars regularly and inviting scholars fromaround the world to discuss and publish their ﬁndings of Neo-Confucianism.
Overall, Professor de Bary has fostered a global conversation based on
the common values and experiences shared by both East and West. To cite
7 Wm. Theodore de Bary, Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince (New York:Columbia UP, 1993).
8 Wm. Theodore de Bary, Nobility and Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and theCommon Good (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004).
9 Wm. Theodore de Bary, Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume
One (New York: Columbia UP, 1999). Also included in this series are Sources ofIndian Tradition (2 volumes), Sources of Japanese Tradition (2 volumes), Sourcesof Korean Tradition (2 volumes), Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (1 volume),
Sources of Tibetan Tradition (1 volume), etc.

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Dr. Rachel E. Chung’s address at the 2016 Tang Prize awarding ceremony, heis not only a “bridge builder” but a “bridge” himself between Confucian
traditions and the modern world. He exempliﬁes the spirit of “interculturation.”