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Member’s NewsTu Weiming: ‘I Know My Own Shortcomings Too Well’
A Report from the 2nd Spiritual Humanism Symposium(Beijing, 19-20 October 2019)‘I thank everyone for dropping their other engagements and coming fromfar and wide to pay their respects, but I am afraid that the idealised TuWeiming I have heard in some of your descriptions of me is a long way fromthe limited purveyor of Confucian wisdom I know myself to have been. I
hope I can begin to fulfil your lofty expectations in the eternity that awaits
me.’ Speaking at the Closing Ceremony of the 2nd Spiritual Humanism
Symposium, on the eve of his 80th birthday, the Director of the Institute forAdvanced Humanistic Studies (IAHS) at Peking University jokingly admitted
to an admiring audience of past and present colleagues that he was entering a‘difficult phase of transition’. The pioneering Confucian intellectual, who in
his heyday packed out Harvard undergraduate lecture halls like no Chinese
scholar before him or since, uttered these words 58 years to the day after hismentor Tang Junyi had famously lamented that the fruits of Chinese culturewere ‘scattered and withering’.
The symposium effectively doubled as a birthday bash; guests each foundtheir own ways to celebrate Tu’s sprawling legacy. Many of the Chinese
attendees had contributed to the thousand-page, Chen Lai-edited tome Rujia
Disanqi de Renwen Jingshen (The Humanistic Spirit of New Confucianism),
while others, including Wu Genyou, Chen Xia, Peng Guoxiang, Hu Zhihong,Wen Haiming, He Jun and Fang Xudong, prepared papers specially for theconference. Several dozen English contributors from around the world,
including Herta Nagl, Stephen Angle, Ralph Weber, Huang Yong and otherleading international lights in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy, added aworthy cosmopolitan touch to the event, which was organised by a team ofdoctoral and postdoctoral fellows from the IAHS. Absent colleagues from theInstitut International de Philosophie (IIP), the Fédération Internationale desSociétés de Philosophie (FISP), and other friends from as far afield as Braziland India also sent their regards.
The 150-strong list of participants was comprised of research scholars
active in the spheres of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Comparative
Religion, Dialogue Among Civilisations and beyond. Many had enjoyed theprivilege of Tu’s direct supervision and guidance over a 50-year academic
career; others were among the hundreds of East Asian students to havebenefitted from Tu’s time in charge of the Harvard-Yenching Institute94

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between 1996 and 2008 to further their studies abroad. As well as looking
firmly to the future of Confucian humanism, this symposium was also about
remembering and celebrating the past - in particular, one man’s profoundinfluence on countless students and colleagues.
How can local knowledge and experience attain universal significance?
This is the question that, more than any other, has accompanied Tu Weiming
on his lifelong intellectual journey. The Confucian emphasis on ‘learning forthe self’ finds its embodiment here, in a man revered in equal measure for hiswarmth, charisma, dignity and conviction.

1985: Confucius Causes a Storm at Peking University

Prof. Chen Shaoming (Zhongshan University) and Peking University
President Hao Ping both met Tu Weiming for the first time in 1985. Chenremembers the august event on Chinese traditional culture organised at theParty School in Beijing by Tang Yijie; a 92-year-old Liang Shuming topped
the bill, while a 45-year-old Tu Weiming was the youngest of the invited
panelists. Tu’s willingness to handle all the questions from the floor - whichwere far from fawning to a ‘Taiwanese-American’ scholar of Confucianism atthe Party School in Beijing in 1985 - left a deep impression on all thosepresent, not least on Tang and Chen themselves. Hao, meanwhile, freshly
graduated from the Peking University History Department, remembers poking
his head into Tu’s lecture on Confucian philosophy: ‘The reaction to thislecture within Peking University was phenomenal.’ It was the first time since
Liang’s famous appearance in 1923 that such a public lecture onConfucianism had been held on campus.

The Reading List on Zhuangzi

Chen next met Tu a decade later, at the 9th International Chinese
Philosophy Conference in Boston in 1995; after the event, Tu invited theMainland Chinese delegation back to the Harvard-Yenching Institute for alonger chat. Chen still remembers the warmth of Tu’s praise for his contribution at the conference; the young doctoral student soon found himself underTu’s supervision as a Visiting Student: ‘He wasn’t put out at all that I had
chosen to study Zhuangzi; on the contrary, he gave me a long list of thesecondary texts he considered authoritative.’ The experience of studying
under Tu set Chen in excellent stead for his future career; as he frankly
admitted, it was the broad vision he acquired under Tu’s wing that emboldened him to tackle subjects as daunting as ‘Zhuangzi and the Enlightenment’(Chen’s symposium paper was fittingly titled ‘Confucianism and Freedom’).
Among scholars born after 1970, Prof. Chen Yun of East China Normal

Tu Weiming: ‘I Know My Own Shortcomings Too Well’

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University spoke on behalf of his colleagues Yang Guorong, Yu Zhenhua,
Fang Xudong and others in stressing Tu Weiming’s influence on their development. In Chen Yun’s own case, it was contact with Tu’s Renxing yu Ziwo
Xiuyang (Human Nature and Self-Cultivation) and Zhongyong: Lun Ruxue deZongjiaoxing (Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on ConfucianReligiousness) which spurred him to publish his own Zhongyong Sixiang in2007.

The First Students

Harold D. (Hal) Roth, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of theContemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University, was one of Tu
Weiming’s first batch of students at Princeton in 1968. Roth recalled his
young Taiwanese lecturer’s enthusiastic presentation of Wang Yangming inparticular, but it was contact with the third chapter of the Zhuangzi,‘Essentials for Nurturing Life’, which played a decisive role in Roth’s intellectual development as a scholar of Daoism.
Professor Edmund S.T. Kwok, the Chief Academic Advisor to the Beijing
Institute of Technology, Zhuhai (ZHBIT), was one of many Chinese students
to study under Tu at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. After meeting Tu at a conference in Hawaii with fellow mentors Tang Junyi and Mou Zongsan in 1972,
Kwok went on to complete his doctoral thesis on Weimar-era German intellectual history under Tu’s careful watch. In an emotional presentation, Kwok
emphasised Tu’s direct influence on his career as an educational innovatorand reformer.

From Respectful Engagement to Polite Refusal

Ralph Weber, Assistant Professor of European Global Studies at theUniversity of Basel, Switzerland, has devoted himself to the study of Tu’s
thought since his time as a doctoral student in the late nineties and early
2000s. Recounting nearly two decades of contact and exchange with Prof. Tu,
Weber stressed his subject’s rare willingness to field difficult and criticalquestions: ‘His mixture of personal warmth and intellectual openness keeps
you in a constant state of feeling like you need to raise your own game.’
In his Keynote Address at the Opening Ceremony, Prof. Guo Qiyong ofWuhan University showed copies of handwritten letters he had exchangedwith Tu Weiming, including one from 2001 in which Tu had politely refused
Guo’s offer to organise a conference on Tu’s thought in Wuhan: ‘If I canproduce some concrete results in the next eight to ten years, maybe I will
have earned the honour of such a conference. But I feel like it’s too early andundeserved at this point.’

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‘Peerless Among His Peers in Encouraging Critical Reflection’

Cheng Chung-yi, Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University ofHong Kong and a Yenching Visiting Scholar at Harvard in 2002-2003,
recalled his time with Tu in the United States as if it were yesterday. In his
first semester, Tu gave the former student of Liu Shuxian three books to read- the Bai Hu Tong, the Beixi Ziyi and the Mengzi Shuyi Shuzheng - on thegrounds that these three books together told an important story of the development of core concepts in Confucian thought. On his return to Hong Kong,
Cheng decided to teach a course on these same three books. ‘In the secondsemester,’ Cheng recounted further, ‘we read the Guodian Chu slips together.’
Ding Sixin, now Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University, was one ofseveral present at the Symposium to have been part of the same readinggroup. Owing to his expertise on the subject, Tu asked Ding to take the lead:‘We all disagreed on everything.’
Cheng described his year under Tu’s roof in Boston (most of the discussions, indeed, were held at Tu’s house) as ‘one of the happiest of his life’;
whenever advice was sought, discussions would end up lasting an hour ormore. In attempting to summarise Tu’s legacy in one sentence, Cheng offered
this: ‘Philosophical insight always has a certain dynamism about it.’‘A Coming to Life’

Speaking at the symposium banquet on the evening of 19 October, Peking
University President Hao Ping expressed his institution’s gratitude for Tu’s
service, but also recalled his own time as an exchange student at theUniversity of Hawai’i in 1991, where he had the chance to study with a great
Confucian scholar was on sabbatical from Harvard: ‘The breadth of Prof. Tu’s
scholarly horizons, together with his personal charisma, brought the work of
the university’s East-West Center to life for me.’ Summarising Prof. Tu’sinvolvement in academic discourse on the Chinese Mainland since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up period, President Hao expressed hispride at having been involved in Tu’s renewal of the conversation around
Cultural China: ‘After more than thirty years of concerted effort, we can now
see that New Confucianism has a firm footing in contemporary Chinese
academic discourse. Tu Weiming’s contributions in this area, starting in the1980s, have been nothing short of visionary.’
The 2nd Spiritual Humanism Symposium also served as a reunion formany other Chinese scholars who had lived and worked at Harvard (andelsewhere abroad) under Tu’s direct or indirect guidance. Prof. Chen Yinchi,
Head of the Chinese Department at Fudan University, was moved to see hisformer classmate Guo Yi (now a Professor at Seoul University) for the firsttime in two decades; William Guanglin Liu and Guo Wu, Professors of

Tu Weiming: ‘I Know My Own Shortcomings Too Well’97

History at Lingnan and Yunnan Universities respectively, also recounted theirstints at Harvard with no shortage of emotion.
Youngchan Ro, Prof. of Religious Studies at George Mason University,
went so far as to organise an academic forum at Georgetown University inJune 2019 in honour of Tu’s influence in American academic life. As Hal
Roth expressed it, Prof. Tu’s unique manner with his students left a deep
impression on those who themselves pursued careers as educators.
It was in this profoundly personal way, Roth and others argued, that
Confucianism was gradually able to increase its resonance on Tu Weiming’swatch, both within China and beyond.

Respecting Heaven, Earth and Humanity: The ‘Cosmic Person’

Tu’s longstanding concern for the ecological dimension of human civilisation is reflected in Spiritual Humanism’s emphasis on the four dimensionsof Self, Community, Earth and Heaven. Mary Evelyn Tucker of Yale
University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies spoke movingly at
the Closing Ceremony of Tu’s influence beyond the confines of academic
Sinology. His support for her own research and teaching had been, she said,‘beyond sagely’; nature may be physically external to individual humanbeings, but it has ‘living value’ for us. Tucker even suggested the label‘cosmic person’ for the Confucian ideal which Tu had, in her view, succeededin embodying.
Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business EMBA alumnus andShanghai-based investment firm Chairman Shi Yongmin also thanked Prof. Tufor assuming leadership of the CKGSB’s Humanities Program in 2012: ‘Prof.
Tu has constantly sought to pass on what he knows to entrepreneurs; his workon recovering the tradition of the “Confucian Entrepreneur” (Rushang) has
left its mark on the Chinese business community.’ The 7th Annual Discourse
on Confucian Entrepreneurs, held under the auspices of the 2nd Spiritual
Humanism Symposium on October 20, was a reminder of this importantdimension of Tu’s work in the past decade since his return to China.

The Way of Heaven: Dialogue Among Civilisations as a Solution toHuman Problems

Heaven is the highest dimension in Spiritual Humanism; equally, thehuman conversation with Heaven requires a constant broadening of dialogue
among human civilisations. The 2018 World Congress of Philosophy (WCP),
held in Beijing for the first time under the aegis ‘Learning To Be Human’,was made possible by Tu Weiming’s explicit efforts. Prof. Herta NaglDocekal of Vienna University, the Vice-President of the Fédération
Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP), praised the work of the98

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Chinese WCP Organising Committee and pinpointed Prof. Tu’s own WangYangming Lecture (‘Spiritual Humanism: Self, Community, Earth andHeaven’) as the highlight of the congress as a whole. Hao Ping also thanked
Tu for his help in making the 24th WCP the biggest of all time: ‘Prof. Tu led
our bid for the nomination, chose the title ‘Learning To Be Human’, andoversaw preparations from beginning to end.’
At the Opening Ceremony of the 2nd Spiritual Humanism Symposium,
Prof. Yao Xinzhong of Renmin University described Prof. Tu’s academic
concerns as encompassing ‘the entire history of human civilisation and humanthought. His work is both firmly Confucian and brimming with a universalitythat harmonises with the best in other traditions.’ Prof. Yang Guorong of East
China Normal University went further still, suggesting that Tu had actively
helped to rescue Chinese culture from both theoretical and practical oblivion;
Spiritual Humanism, he said, was a framework which represented a ‘selfconfident’ Confucianism capable of dialogue on equal terms with othercivilisations.

‘It’s Extremely Hard to Face Up to One’s Own Mortal Limitations’After two days of intellectually and emotionally intense exchange among
more than a hundred grateful and admiring experts, the last word at thesymposium rightfully belonged to Prof. Tu himself: far from following
Confucius’s own stereotyped journey towards the asymptote of perfection andself-satisfaction (‘at seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart’),Tu’s own eighth decade, he confessed, had been fraught with the dawning
twin realisations of dwindling powers and a quickening of time. Chen Yun’s
quotation of Rilke’s tribute to Michelangelo at the Closing Ceremony left its
mark on a group of younger scholars moved to tears afterwards; like theoriginal Renaissance Man himself, Tu Weiming has endeavoured to take theburden of responsibility for a whole epoch upon himself.