Table Of ContentDao Companions to Chinese Philosophy 17
Thierry Meynard
Philippe Major Editors
Dao Companion
to Liang
Shuming’s
Philosophy
Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy
Volume 17
Series Editor
Yong Huang, Department of Philosophy
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong
Editorial Board
Stephen Angle, Wesleyan University, Middletown, USA
Shirley Chan, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Paul R. Goldin, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Chenyang Li, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Jana Rosker, University of Ljubljana, Šalovci, Slovenia
Amy Olberding, Department of Philosophy, University of
Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
While ‘‘philosophy’’ is a Western term, philosophy is not something exclusively
Western. In this increasingly globalized world, the importance of non-Western
philosophy is becoming more and more obvious. Among all the non-Western
traditions, Chinese philosophy is certainly one of the richest. In a history of more
than 2500 years, many extremely important classics, philosophers, and schools have
emerged. As China is becoming an economic power today, it is only natural that
more and more people are interested in learning about the cultural traditions,
including the philosophical tradition, of China.
The Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy series aims to provide the most
comprehensive and most up-to-date introduction to various aspects of Chinese
philosophy as well as philosophical traditions heavily influenced by it. Each volume
in this series focuses on an individual school, text, or person.
All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final
acceptance.
Thierry Meynard • Philippe Major
Editors
Dao Companion to Liang
Shuming’s Philosophy
Editors
Thierry Meynard Philippe Major
Sun Yat-sen University University of Basel
Guangzhou, China Basel, Switzerland
ISSN 2211-0275 ISSN 2542-8780 (electronic)
Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-031-18001-9 ISBN 978-3-031-18002-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18002-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the contributors to this volume who have managed to
work on their contribution despite many disruptions caused by the Covid-19 epi-
demic in their own personal life as well as in their academic institutions with
restricted access to library resources and personal contacts. We also appreciate their
willingness to adapt their contribution to our many comments and suggestions. We
learned a lot from their work as well as from the debates we had on our understand-
ings of Liang Shuming’s philosophy.
In 2019, Professor Huang Yong invited us to edit this volume before the out-
break of the pandemic, and we are thankful for his flexibility with the schedule. We
contacted most contributors by the end of 2019, and the chapters were written in
2020 and in the first half of 2021, during a period in which many of us had to work
in on-and-off quarantine.
Finally, we would like to thank Christopher Coughlin, Shanthini Kamaraj, and
all the staff at Springer who have been working for the production and promotion of
the work.
v
Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Thierry Meynard and Philippe Major
2 Liang Shuming: A Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Guy S. Alitto
3 Liang the Buddhist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Jingjing Li
4 Liang the Bergsonian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Joseph Ciaudo
5 Liang the Philosopher of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Zbigniew Wesołowski SVD
6 Liang the Philosopher of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Thierry Meynard
7 Liang the Philosopher of Living: On the Counter-Enlightenment
Thought of Liang Shuming During the 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Chan-liang Wu
8 Liang the Rural Reformer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Ady Van den Stock
9 Liang the Moral and Social Philosopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Yanming An
10 Liang the Political Philosopher: Contemplating
Confucianism and Democracy in Republican China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Hung-Yok Ip
11 Liang Under Mao: The Reconciliation of Confucianism
and Buddhism with Marxist Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Yim Fong Chan
vii
viii Contents
12 Liang Shuming’s Legacy in Hong Kong and Taiwan
Since 1949: Liang’s Philosophical Connection with Tang Junyi . . . . 255
James Zhixiang Yang
13 Liang Shuming’s Reception in Mainland China
Since the 1980s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Huajun Zhang
14 The Many Faces of Liang Shuming: One Hundred Years
in the Reception of Liang’s Thought in European
Languages (1922–2022) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Philippe Major and Milan Matthiesen
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Contributors
Guy S. Alitto University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Yanming An Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Yim Fong Chan University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Joseph Ciaudo University of Orléans, Orléans, France
Hung-Yok Ip Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA
Jingjing Li Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
Philippe Major University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Milan Matthiesen University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Thierry Meynard Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
Ady Van den Stock Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Zbigniew Wesołowski SVD Monumenta Serica, Sankt Augustin Institute,
Germany
Chan-Iiang Wu National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
James Zhixiang Yang BNU-HKBU United International College, Zhuhai, China
Huajun Zhang Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction
Thierry Meynard and Philippe Major
The aim of this volume is to provide an exhaustive and updated analysis and discus-
sion of the philosophy of Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988), one of the most
contested figures of modern Chinese intellectual history. For the last 100 years, his
thought has been interpreted in such contrasting and contradictory ways—as
Buddhist, Confucian, and Marxist, as conservative and modernist—that it seems at
times difficult to grasp who the “real” Liang was. Confronted with the many faces
of the man and his thought, researchers can either attempt to discern the one identity
that ties them all together or allow for the multifaceted nature of his thought to
remain open and focus on the diversity and tensions inherent in it. The present vol-
ume opts for the latter option.
A self-educated man who never felt at home in the academic milieu, Liang held
a complex relationship with philosophy. On the one hand, from his early years as a
so-called “utilitarian” onwards, Liang was eager to deepen his understanding of
Euro-American philosophies. On the other hand, he remained, throughout his life,
skeptical of the figure of the armchair philosopher who never felt the need to put
their thought into practice. Thinking, for Liang, was the first step in a process that
remained incomplete unless it led to praxis. Like Marx, Liang thought the goal was
to change the world, and not merely interpret it. As such, he regarded himself as a
man of action and a problem-solver rather than a philosopher. As Guy Alitto notes
in his biography, “Liang continually protested that he had neither the qualifications
not the inclinations of a scholar or a philosopher; he was instead simply
T. Meynard
Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Major (*)
University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2023
T. Meynard, P. Major (eds.), Dao Companion to Liang Shuming’s Philosophy,
Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy 17,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18002-6_1
