Authors: Michela Fontana
Ricci arrived at the banquet and took part in the customary ritual of greeting with the other guests, about twenty in all, taking tea together before going in to dine. It was then that the Buddhist monk Huang Hong’en—better known as Sanhuai and renowned for his books and poems as well as his expert knowledge of the three Chinese religions—asked him about the faith practiced by the missionaries.
According to Ricci’s account, he replied with a question: “What do you think of the Lord of Heaven, creator of all things?”
Sanhuai answered that he believed in the existence of the Lord of Heaven but, unlike the Jesuit, did not consider him a being superior to man.
Shocked by the monk’s words, Ricci asked if he too was capable, like God, of creating everything that existed in the heavens and on the earth.
“Certainly,” he replied. “I too would be capable of creating the heavens and the earth.”
Ricci challenged him to prove this by producing a bronze brazier like the one burning in the room in front of all those present. This gave rise to a heated exchange, with Sanhuai dismissing the challenge as absurd and Ricci accusing him of having lied. Their curiosity aroused, the other guests gathered around to listen, some taking the Jesuit’s side and some the monk’s.
Sanhuai tried another approach: “You have the reputation of being a great astronomer and expert mathematician. Is this true?”
“I have a certain knowledge of these sciences.”
“So, when you speak about the sun and the moon, do you go up into the heavens where these celestial bodies are or do they come down to you?”
“Neither of these happens. When we see an object, we form an image of it in the mind, and when we speak about that object later on, even though we no longer have it in front of us, we refer to its mental image.”
Sanhuai replied: “In that case, you, who are a man, have created a new sun and a new moon, and therefore, just as I said, you can create whatever you want. I have proved that I am right.”
Ricci countered as follows: “The images I have formed within me are not the real sun and the real moon but only mental copies, and if I had never looked at the sun and the moon in the sky, I could never have recreated their images in my mind.” He went on to give an example: “If you see the sun and the moon reflected in a mirror, will you be so foolish as to believe that these celestial bodies are really contained in the mirror?”
Some of the guests—again according to Ricci’s account—shook their heads and acknowledged that the Jesuit was right, at which point the monk lost his temper, and the host had to step in and separate the two adversaries so as to avoid the discussion degenerating into a real argument. Li Ruzhen asked the guests to step into the dining room. Ricci was seated in the place of honor with the host beside him to begin the banquet after the customary rituals.
In the interval between one course and another, when a great many dishes had piled up on the table and numerous toasts had been drunk, some of the guests put forward a philosophical issue for amicable discussion, as was customary on such occasions. This time it was the classic question of the goodness of human nature, dating back to the earliest traditions and addressed by all the great Chinese philosophers. According to Mencius, every man is naturally good. According to the philosopher Xun Qing, who lived in the third century
bc
and is accredited with the authorship of the
Xunzi
, human nature is intrinsically wicked and man has a spontaneous tendency toward evil. Those taking the middle ground maintain that behavior is determined by external influences. The debate continued at the banquet in more or less the same terms as when it had begun many centuries before. If man’s nature is good, where does evil come from? If it is bad, where does good come from? If it is neither good nor bad, who can guide it toward goodness and how?
Ricci listened in silence, but when the host asked him to give his opinion, he seized the opportunity to resume the discussion with the monk Sanhuai. “We all agree that the Lord of Heaven is supremely good. Well then, if man is so weak that he does not know whether his nature is good or bad, how can Master Sanhuai claim that man is the equal of the Lord of Heaven? If he were truly the equal of the Lord of Heaven, how could he not know that he too is supremely good?”
Urged to answer by another guest, Sanhuai illustrated the Buddhist doctrine on this point to conclude that the Lord of Heaven is neither good nor bad. The argument finally came to an end with Ricci determined to say no more even if asked to continue, being now convinced that it was impossible to make the Chinese monk listen to reason. The latter was most probably also convinced that it was impossible to make a Western missionary listen to reason. It was in fact a debate of the deaf, as each of the adversaries was accustomed to reasoning solely in accordance with the postulates of his own philosophy. There was certainly no common ground between a Buddhist who believed that the world we perceive is not real and an Aristotelian convinced of the exact opposite, namely that the world is real and that the human mind can understand it by means of reason.
For a Buddhist, the absolute is beyond any determination and is innate in all beings, each of which possesses the nature of Buddha in the deepest recesses of its spirit. For Ricci, confusing the individual with God was simply heresy. The dispute was talked about for a long time in the city, and the Jesuit claims in his history of the mission that he was judged the moral victor.
8
While we do not know whether this was so, many intellectuals with a passion for philosophical arguments visited the missionaries’ house to hear all about the clash and to spend the afternoon in discussion with Li Madou. He was flattered by their attention and decided to devote a chapter of his catechism to the subject of the goodness of human nature.
A Universe of Crystalline Spheres:
The “Treatise on the Four Elements”
Ricci ran up against the same old difficulties of mutual comprehension every time he talked to the Chinese, and he tried to point out what he considered the absurdity of their conceptions in order to guide them to the revelation of the Christian doctrine. The Jesuit was astonished to find that they did not reason in accordance with Western logic and did not distinguish, for example, the Aristotelian concepts of form, matter, substance, and accident. The Chinese conception of the universe as a great evolving organism with all of its parts interconnecting was in fact such as to preclude clear-cut distinctions like those between matter and spirit, between the world of the senses and the transcendental world, which were so fundamental for Western culture. What was obvious to Ricci was by no means so to the Chinese, and vice versa. For the latter, the only constant principle was the Tao, spontaneous order, the dynamic principle inherent in every natural process. According to Chinese cosmology, the universe was in a state of constant change and evolution due to the alternation of the two complementary and contrasting forces of yin—the female principle connected with shadow, the earth, passivity, and dissolution—and yang, the male principle connected with light, the sun, activity, and creation. These two forces gave birth to the five “agents” or elements of water, earth, fire, wood, and metal, seen as the dynamic processes forming the Whole through never-ending transformation into one another.
Certain that he knew the truth about the structure of the universe, Ricci was determined to demonstrate the erroneous nature of the vision of the world rooted in Chinese culture since the earliest times, and he hoped to do so by exploiting the evident curiosity of some intellectuals about his scientific knowledge. In Nanjing too, he had no difficulty finding scholars eager to learn about Western mathematics and astronomy and how to construct sundials, mechanical clocks, and rudimentary instruments for observation of the heavens. He was delighted to share his knowledge with them, feeling sure that they would embrace the Christian religion much more readily once they had realized that Western science was superior to theirs and understood and accepted the system of knowledge put forward by the Jesuits. Science had proved excellent “bait,” as Ricci put it, in the case of Qu Taisu, leading him on to follow the religious teachings too, even though he had not yet made up his mind to convert. Would others follow his example in Nanjing? Ricci intended to guide Chinese intellectuals by the hand up the steps of knowledge starting at the bottom. Having taught them to reason in accordance with the principles of mathematical logic, he would help them to comprehend the description of the Ptolemaic universe and finally to understand that God was the supreme lawgiver, creator of the world and of the laws governing it. He would proceed from mathematics to theology.
His first pupil in Nanjing was Zhang Yangmo, a young man from Beijing sent by Wang Kentang, a mandarin in the capital who studied mathematics out of personal interest with a group of pupils. Wang Kentang was a member of the illustrious Hanlin Academy made up of the most influential bureaucrats, who were responsible for writing dynastic histories, drafting the most important government documents, and serving as tutors to the crown prince. According to Ricci, the academician wrote to say that he was aware of the lack of method in Chinese mathematics and wished to learn everything the Jesuit had to teach him. Since he could not leave the capital, he took the liberty of sending the pupil Zhang Yangmo in his place.
Zhang Yangmo learned “to do sums with the brush” and then read the first book of Euclid’s
Elements
in Qu Taisu’s translation, which impressed him so much that “he would only listen to arguments developed in the Euclidean way.”
7
Noting once again that Confucian literati were fascinated by Greek mathematics, Ricci began to think that his plans to implant Western reason in the Chinese might actually work. Zhang Yangmo was so happy about learning Western science that he wanted to give Ricci some advice on the best way to refute the Buddhist beliefs before returning to Beijing. In his opinion, Ricci should simply go on teaching mathematics and astronomy until he convinced his adversaries of the validity of his knowledge. If he proved that his scientific doctrines described the world with greater accuracy, the Buddhists would be convinced that his explanation of the supernatural world was also more correct. While appreciating the advice, Ricci doubted that it would prove effective, and in any case he had no intention of devoting his energies to convincing Buddhists, preferring to concentrate on the attempt to win over the Confucian scholars.
In the meantime, a small group of literati had begun to gather regularly at the Jesuits’ house in Nanjing. For Ricci, it was like running a sort of school of Western studies with arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and cosmology on the syllabus. Prompted by a desire to correct what he regarded as the completely wrongheaded ideas of Chinese natural philosophy, he based his “lessons” on what he had learned at the Roman College. While it was believed in China that the universe was made up of various combinations of the five “agents” of water, earth, fire, wood, and metal, it was an established fact in the West that the sublunary world was composed of the four elements of water, air, earth, and fire. Both theories were of course to disappear with the progress of science, but Ricci, a true child of his time, was convinced of the validity of his knowledge and wrote a short treatise on the four elements in Chinese entitled
Si yuanxing lun
in order to convince his Chinese friends too.
9
Having elucidated the composition of the universe, Ricci went on to demonstrate that the earth was round by exhibiting his terrestrial globes.
10
He then outlined the Ptolemaic system without going into the more difficult theoretical and mathematical aspects regarding the movement of planets, which he meant to explain only to those with sufficient aptitude for complex calculations. As had already happened in Nanchang, he was astonished at how hard it was for his “students” to accept the vision of a universe made up of crystalline spheres with the heavens and the earth rigidly separate.
Having presented the structure of the cosmos, Ricci spoke one day about comets. His explanation that these peculiar celestial bodies were formed out of the fire located beneath the sphere of the moon echoed the classic Aristotelian view of comets as meteorological phenomena belonging to the sublunary world rather than celestial bodies. His listeners were spellbound. No one in China had ever formulated a hypothesis as to how the comets might be formed, even though Chinese astronomers had observed “broom stars” since antiquity, keeping accurate records of their passing and being the first to note that the tail always points away from the sun. In the West, the first systematic observations of comets were the work of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli
11
in the fifteenth century, and the discovery about their tail was first made in 1532 by the Italian scientist Girolamo Fracastoro
12
and Petrus Apianus.
The Chinese were also the first, in 421
bc
, to observe Halley’s Comet, the brightest of all comets, which reappears regularly in the sky every 76 years, when its orbit brings it closest to the sun. Their records of its periodical transits proved so accurate that Western astronomers were to use them in the twentieth century as the basis for calculating the exact cycle of its appearances.
Ricci did not confine himself to presenting the theoretical aspects of astronomy but also explained how to construct equipment for the measurement and observation of the heavens, such as spheres, globes, quadrants, and astrolabes. Even though he could not call himself a specialist, he was convinced that the Chinese had a great deal to learn in that field too. His certainty was, however, soon to be shaken by an unexpected discovery.
The Forgotten Astronomical Observatory
Ricci’s reputation reached the ears of the officials on the Nanjing board of mathematicians responsible for making the calculations for the calendar in collaboration with their more authoritative colleagues in Beijing. The Jesuit often noted that he was able to obtain more accurate results by using the astronomical tables he had brought from Italy, and he regarded the local astronomers as possessing “little talent and knowledge.” He also suspected that the
guan
mathematicians feared him as an expert scientist enjoying the friendship of Minister Wang and as perhaps capable of usurping their position one day. According to Ricci’s account of events, it was made known through friends of the missionaries that Li Madou occupied a position of such importance in his native land as to have no need of any appointment in China, whereupon the delighted officials invited him to visit their observatory.