Liang Shuming

Works

• 1921Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies

  Lectures that compare three basic orientations of the will to live – forward striving in the West, harmony and balance in China, turning back in India – and predict that the world will turn to the Chinese, Confucian attitude.

• 1949The Essential Meaning of Chinese Culture

  Chinese society is built neither on the individual nor on classes but on ethical relationships, with the family as model; reason in the sense of mutual moral understanding replaces religion.

Position

In “Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies” Liang argued that a culture is the way of life that follows from a basic orientation of the will. The West presses forward, seeks to master nature and has produced science and democracy; China seeks balance and contentment within given conditions; India turns back and seeks to extinguish desire. These are not stages of one development but different answers to different problems. China, Liang concluded, should adopt science and democracy, but with the Confucian attitude, and the world would turn to this attitude once its material problems were solved. In developing this view he combined the intuition of Bergson with the innate moral knowing of Mencius and Wang Yangming and with the epistemology of Yogacara Buddhism. Hu Shih criticised the scheme in 1923 as an arbitrary generalisation. In his later work Liang described Chinese society as “ethics-based” and organised by occupation rather than by class, and he therefore rejected class struggle in favour of rural reconstruction. Guy Alitto called him “the last Confucian”; he is usually counted among the forerunners of New Confucianism, although his thought remained closely tied to Buddhism.

Life & context

Liang Shuming was born on 18 October 1893 in Beijing into a family of officials. He attended a modern middle school but never a university, worked as a journalist in the revolution of 1911 and for a time wanted to become a Buddhist monk. An essay on Buddhism published in 1916 led Cai Yuanpei to invite him to lecture on Indian philosophy at Peking University in 1917. In 1918 his father, Liang Ji, drowned himself, leaving notes that lamented the moral decline of the country. Liang’s lectures “Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies” appeared in 1921 and made him famous. He left the university in 1924 to devote himself to education and from 1931 to 1937 led the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute in Zouping, an attempt to renew village life through schools, cooperatives and local compacts. During the war against Japan he worked to mediate between the Nationalists and the Communists and helped found the political grouping that became the China Democratic League. After 1949 he stayed in Beijing; in 1953 Mao Zedong publicly attacked him after he spoke about the hardships of the peasants. In 1974 he refused to join the campaign against Confucius. He died in Beijing on 23 June 1988.

Further main works

• On Searching for the Origin and Resolving Doubt (Jiu yuan jue yi lun, 1916)
• Outline of Indian Philosophy (Yindu zhexue gailun, 1919)
• Exposition of Consciousness-Only (Weishi shuyi, 1920)
• Theory of Rural Reconstruction (Xiangcun jianshe lilun, 1937)
• The Human Mind and Human Life (Renxin yu rensheng, 1984)