chapter 30
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Dr. Giles ese biographical diary, it must be admitted, is a work of immense labour. But <dfn>.?</dfn>here again Dr. Giles shows an utter lack of the most ordinary judgment. In such a work, one would expect to find notices only of really notable men.Hie manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi, Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita ma, Quique pii votes et Phoebo digna locuti, Ias aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo.
But side by side with sages and heroes of antiquity, with mythical and mythological personages, we find General Tg Ki-tong,
Mr. Ku Hung-ming, Viceroy g Chi-tung and Captain Lew Buah, _99ｌｉb?he last whose sole title to distin is that he used often to treat his fn friends with unlimited quantities of champagne!
Lastly these "Adversaria,"_Dr. Giles latest publication_will not, I am afraid, enhance Dr. Giles reputation as a scholar of sense and judgment. The subjects chosen, for the most part, have hly practical or human i. It would really seem that Dr. Giles has takerouble to write these books not with any iion to tell the world anything about the ese and their literature but to show what a learned ese scholar Dr. Giles is and how much b<q>?99liｂ?</q>etter he uands ese than anybody else. Moreover, Dr. Giles, here as elsewhere, shows a harsh and pugnacious dogmatism which is as un-philosophical, as unbeing a scholar as it is unpleasing. It is these characteristics of sinologues like Dr. Giles which have made, as Mr. Hopkins says, the very name of sinologue and ese scholarship a byword and s among practical fn residents in the Far East.
I shall here select two articles friles latest publication and will try to show that if hitherto writings of fn scholars on the subjects of ese learning and ese literature have been without human or practical i, the fault is not in ese learning and ese literature.
The first article is entitled "What is filial piety." The point iicle turns upon the meaning of two ese characters. A disciple asked what is filial piety. fucius said: se nan fa^ (lit, colour difficult).
Dr. Giles says, "The question is, and has been for twenty turies past, what do.these two characters mean?" After g and dismissing all the interpretations and translations of native and fn scholars alike<cite>..</cite>. Dr. Giles of course finds out the true meaning. In order to shiles harsh and unscholarly dogmatiner, I shall here quote Dr. Giles words with which he announces his discovery. Dr.
Giles says:_
"It may seem presumptuous after the above exordium to declare that the meaning lies a la Bill Stumps (! ) upon the surface, and all you have to do, as the poet says, is to
Stoop, and there it is;
Seek it nht nor left!
"When Tzu-hsia asked fucius, What is filial piety? the latter replied simply,
" se to defi, nan is difficult, a most intelligible and appropriate answer."
I shall not here enter into the ies of ese grammar to show that Dr. Giles is wrong. I will only say here that if Dr. Giles is right in supposing that the character se is a verb, then in good grammatical ese, the sentence would not read se nan, but se chih wei nanto defi, is difficult. The impersonal pronoun chi it, is here absolutely indispensable, if the character se here is used as a verb.
But apart from grammatiiceties, the translation as given by Dr. Giles of fucius answer, when taken with the whole text, has no point or sense in it at all.
Tzu hsia asked, what is filial piety? fucius said, " The difficulty is with the manner of doing it. That merely when there is work to be dohe young people should take the trouble of doing it, and when there is wine and food, the old folk are allowed to partake it, _do you really think that is filial piety?" (Discourses and Sayings Ch. .. ) Now the whole point iext above lies in this, _that importance is laid not upon what duties you perform towards your parents, but upon how _in what manner, with irit, you per-
_ pare another saying of fucius Il!f^"fe Oi iao yen ling se, plausible speed fine manners (Discourses and Sayings Ch. .. )
form those duties.
The greatness and t<s>?</s>rue efficacy of fucius moral teag, I wish to say here, lies in this very point which Dr. Giles fails to see, _ the point hat in the performanoral duties, fucius insisted upon the importa of the what, but of the how. For hereihe differeween what is called morality and religioween mere rules of moral dud the vivifying teag of great and true religious teachers. Teachers of morality merely tell you what kind of a is moral and what kind of a is immoral. But true religious teachers do not merely tell you this. True religious teachers do not merely inculcate the doing of the outward act, but insist upon the importance of the mahe inwardness of the act. True religious teachers teach that the morality or immorality of our as does not sist in what we do, but in how we do it.
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