Wu Li (1632-1718) and the first Chinese Christian poetry.

• Author: Chaves, Jonathan

WU LI (1632-1718) AND THE FIRST CHINESE CHRISTIAN POETRY (1)

1. IT Is WELL KNOWN THAT Jesuit missionaries in China quickly grasped the significance of learning and scholarship for the Chinese literati, and themselves made every effort to master the classical texts upon which Confucian education was based. One of these books was the Shih ching [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or Book of Songs, an anthology of some 300 poems dating as far back as c. 1000 B.C., but compiled into a book ca. 600 B.C. Partly as a result of the inclusion of this material among the classical texts that had to be mastered to succeed in the civil service examinations, poetry came to occupy the preeminent position in the hierarchy of literary prestige. And this included the ability to write one's own original poetry, called for as well in the examinations. The writing of poetry also played a key role in social gatherings among the scholar-officials of China. Poetry was, in fact, a foundation Stone of Chinese culture, and the Jesuit missionaries came to be fully aware of this fact.

   Perhaps the first of them to envision the creation of a Chinese Christian poetry, which could help to bolster the prestige of Christianity itself among the educated elite of China, was Michele Ruggieri, S.J. (1543-1607), as recently demonstrated by Albert Chan, S.J. in an important study. (2) The poems attributed to him, however, were almost certainly written with the extensive help of Chinese collaborators. As Chan states, "It would have been impossible for him to write poems without help from some Chinese scholars." (3) The resulting poems remain curiosities of historical interest, but possess little literary value.

   Chinese converts among the literati class would have helped Ruggieri, and would soon try themselves to produce a type of poetry which they must have realized had only one precedent in literary history: the creation of a Chinese Buddhist poetry in the late Han and Six Dynasties periods (second century through the sixth century), following upon the introduction of Buddhism from India and Central Asia in the first century A.D. Similar problems were encountered: new technical terms for which there were no real Chinese equivalents, names of human or divine personages in strange languages, and the languages themselves--Sanskrit or Latin--in which the source materials were written. The predictable result in the case of Buddhist poetry was the production of much virtual doggerel, doctrinally effective but of little or no aesthetic value. And yet some poets, such as the semi-legendary Han Shan [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (?fl. early 9th century) had found ways to write superb poetry that drew extens ively upon Buddhist terminology and ideas. Perhaps something of the same achievement could be hoped for in the case of Christianity as well.

   One of the most distinguished of all literati converts, the famed Hsu Kuang-ch'i [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1562-1633), has left a body of writings that includes eight poems. (4) Ad Dudink has argued persuasively that only five of these are authentic; (5) these are tetrasyllabic poems of the type known in Chinese as tsan [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (also [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) or "eulogies" (see below). They cover such themes as the Ten Commandments, the Eight Beatitudes, the Fourteen Works of Mercy, and the Seven Cardinal Virtues Overcoming the Deadly Sins. They may be described as journeyman work, clearly intended for a purely didactic purpose. HsU was by no means a poet of significance.

   D. E. Mungello has called attention to a series of thirty-eight "inscriptions in Eulogy of the Sage Teaching" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] by a certain Chang Hsing-yao [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1633-1715), composed to accompany a series of paintings--unfortunately no longer extant--in a church at Hangchou (Hangzhou). (6) Mungello translates one of them, dedicated to St. Peter. Like the tetrasyllabic poems of Hsti Kuang-ch'i, these poems, in form, content, and tone, are strongly reminiscent of the tsan written for centuries to accompany paintings of Confucian, Taoist, and especially Buddhist figures. For example, the great Sungdynasty literatus, Su Shih [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (or Tung-p'o [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (1037-1101) wrote a series of isan to accompany eighteen paintings of Buddhist arhats (perfected monks) by the monk-painter Ch'an-ytieh [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (7) The Chang Hsingyao poems a re stylistically extremely close to the Su Shih examples.

   Still more ambitiously, the literati convert Li Tsu-po [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]--who helped to write and edit the book, T'ienhsiieh ch'uan-kai [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Transmitted Summation of the Heavenly Learning) which called down the wrath of scholar-official Yang Kuang-hsien on the Chinese Christians, leading to Li's execution in 1665--produced a long poem in the classic shih [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] format entitled "Ta tao hsing" ) [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or "Ballad of the Great Way," in which he attempted to give a poetic history of Christianity, including its advent in China, and Li's own baptism in 1622. This poem, dated to 1658, has only recently been discovered by Ad Dudink in a seventeenth-century MS of Chinese Christian texts entitled T'ien-hsiieh chi-chieh [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "Collected Explanations of the Heavenly Learning," deposited at St. Petersburg, Russia, where it arrived in 1827. (8) In this poem, Li begins by referring to the Supreme God--"The True Sovereign transcendently beyond all names and images!/Self-established, eternally existent, cut off from origin or ending"--and then goes on to describe the creation of the universe. He narrates the coming to China of Matteo Ricci, S.J. (1552-1610), his own conversion, and the work of his teacher and priest, Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (1592-1666) in helping to "establish the calendar."

2. The poem is an indication of how ambitious the enterprise of crafting a Chinese Christian poetry had become by the time that Wu Li was a young man--twenty-eight years old when Li Tsu-po wrote his "Ballad of the Great Way." And yet it remains clear that until Wu Li, there had been no major figure, already a significant poet in his own right, who succeeded in crafting a sizable body of Chinese Christian poetry, aesthetically and theologically successful.

   Wu Li [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is a familiar figure to students of Chinese painting. He is one of the so-called "Six Orthodox Masters" of early Ch'ing-dynasty painting. Works by him are now on display in some of the world's great museums, including in this country alone The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Freer Gallery of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., to name only three (see figs 1 and 4 for examples). His entry into the Society of Jesus in 1682, and his ordination as one of China's first Catholic priests in 1688, are well known, although the actual date of his baptism remains unclear. (9)

   It has recently been demonstrated by Noel Golvers that Wu Li served as the catechist of Francois de Rougemont, S.J. (1624-76), a major Belgian (or Southern Netherlands--born in Maastricht) missionary known to several important literati of the day; Golvers argues most convincingly that Wu Li "appears to have prepared his spiritual life in the 1670's in the immediate company of de Rougemont as one of his catechists," and that "in or about 1671 ... Wu Li was a Christian." (10)

   That de Rougemont himself was seriously interested in employing poetry for the purpose of inculcating Christianity in the Chinese is indicated by his involvement in the publication of a collection entitled Cantiones Rusticae, or "Rustic Songs." In an entry in his Account Book, dating from shortly after March 18, 1676, he records, "Imprimendis Cantionibus Rusticis: 0-0-6-6", which is translated by Golvers, "For printing (my) Country Songs: 0.060 tael." (11) Golvers cites a statement by Hsu Yun-hsi in 1938 to the effect that these poems are extant, and entitled Ts'ai-ch'a ko [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or "Tea-Gathering Songs." Golvers further speculates, following Ad Dudink, that these may in turn correspond to a set of unattributed poems currently found in a MS in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, MS Chin.d.51, one of the manuscripts collected by the noted sinologue, Alexander Wylie (1815-87). They prove to be one item in the collection entitled Sheng-chiao shih-tz'u ko-fu (romanticized by Wylie as Shing keaou she sze k'o foo) [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "Poems and Songs of the Holy Teaching." Wylie further describes the contents thus: "... [A] collection of stanzas, reflections, etc., on various points connected with the Christian religion." (12)

   The actual MS has been examined by Ad Dudink, who suggests the possible link with de Rougemont, (13) and more recently by myself (in microfilm). It is a "grabbag" of Christian texts, not all of them poetry, but certainly including the set of "Tea-Gathering Songs," seven-character-per-line quatrains organized according to the twelve months, with a thirteenth poem for the intercalary month placed at the end. David Helliwell of the Department of Oriental Books at the Bodleian, opines that this text is one of those which Wylie had copied, rather than an original late Ming or early Ch'ing MS. (14)

   In any case, the poems in question demonstrate that the compiler or author, whether de Rougemont with his assistants or someone else, was not only interested in using classical poetry to reach the literati, but was also attempting to forge a folk Christian poetry...