From World Religion to World Order Confucianism in the Straits at the Turn of the 20th Century

Introduction

This essay explores the impact of the emerging scholarly discipline of the “science of religion” on the Confucianist movement in Singapore in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anna Sun’s recent study on the modern origin of Confucianism as a “world religion” foregrounds the role of James Legge, a missionary and an Oxford University professor, in the establishment and dissemination of the scholarly category of “Confucianism” in the period.1 However, her study is limited to an exploration of the impact of Legge’s scholarship on the study of world religions in the Western academic and missionary circles.

The author hardly mentions Legge’s career in Malacca and the influence his study of Chinese classics had on missionary and Confucian reformist circles in Singapore at the turn of the 20th century. While it delineates a historical arc that connects mutual contestations between the secular and religious interpretations of Confucianism from the 19th century British Empire to present-day China, her book neglects analogous debates articulated in the Confucianist and Christian intellectual circles in the Straits of Malacca.

This essay is an attempt to include the voices of Confucian reformers in the Straits of Malacca in the study of the history of Confucianism in its modern, global format. It will highlight the formative role of intellectual exchanges, between Western scholars and/or missionaries and local Confucianist thinkers, in the conceptualisation of Confucianism as, simultaneously, a national (Chinese) religion and transnational (global) political force. Apart from East Asian societies and states, Confucianism has also played an important role in Southeast Asia. Historical trajectories behind the relatively recent (2006) acknowledgement of Confucianism as a state-sponsored religion in Indonesia, and Confucianism as an ethical regime that governs the conditions to sociability in postcolonial Singapore, deserve comparative studies of their own.

As an initial step in that direction, this essay discusses the articulations of Confucianism through the perspective of the comparative study of religions, as it was understood by the Confucian reformers in Singapore – led by Lim Boon Keng – at the turn of the 20th century. I will argue that the debates between the Chinese reformists and the Straits-based British missionaries on the religious status of Confucianism cannot be properly understood without taking Legge’s academic and missionary/theological authority into consideration. This argument is supported by an analysis of a series of essays and notes written by Lim during the period. By placing Legge within the history of the Confucian reformist movement in the Straits of Malacca, I aim to foreground the constitutive role of Southeast Asian reformers in the modern history of Confucianism in its global dimension.

Missionaries and scholars of world religions played a role in the debates where Confucianism was introduced onto the world map as a religion and promoted as a leading force in a new, China-centred global order as it was imagined from within the Straits of Malacca. The religion-related debates in the Straits of Malacca were no exception in the period under consideration. According to Peter van der Veer, religions in the Chinese and Indian modern contexts were transformed into “moral sources of citizenship and national belonging” – rather than marginalised or eliminated – through their contact with the emerging political project of secularism as a colonial governing tool of religious and cultural difference.2

Apart from playing a crucial role in the formulation of “national imaginaries”, the encounter with the imperial West enabled religions to be utilised to form – or imagine – supranational alliances and “alternative visions of the moral state”.3 This essay will show that the case of Lim Boon Keng’s articulations of Confucianism, as a religion and source of transnational moral citizenship, is an excellent example of the contradictory effect of secularism in a colonial setting, in van der Veer’s sense. In the spirit of the times, Legge conceptualised Confucian religion as a defining element of the Chinese race/nation. It was through a critical study of Legge’s translations, conceived from within the imperial context of Britain and related global missionary aspirations, that Lim developed his perspective of Confucianism as, simultaneously, a national (Chinese) and supranational (global) social and historical force, fit to form the basis of a new world order. In other words, Lim conceptualised the new world with a reformed China as its leader.

This essay will show that Lim’s personal engagement in, or substantial proximity to, the mutually opposing/constitutive social and historical projects – i.e. Christian proselytisation and the Confucianist movement, were, in van der Veer’s sense, responsible for the formation of a neutral cognitive space. That space was contained in the newly established “science of religion” which, with its authority anchored in rationality and “scientific objectivity”, had a pacifying effect on the debate between missionaries and Confucian reformists. In other words, the authority of deciding about the religious or secular/philosophical nature of Confucianism was placed in the realm of science, at a distance from ecclesiastic authorities. Lim’s multiple political alliances (to Britain and a reformed China) also decidedly marked his image of Confucianism as compatible with liberal democracy. In short, Lim embraced the lessons learned from his reading of the scientific approach to the study of world religions and used them to build his view of a new world history with Confucianism as its progressive goal. In this process, Lim adopted, contested or elaborated on Legge’s translations of the Confucian classics and views on Confucianism in relation to Christianity.

Lim’s crucial role in the Confucianist movement in the Straits has already received substantial scholarly attention.4 However, his engagement with Legge’s scholarly work is noted only in passing.5 In addition, Lim’s knowledge of the science of religion and its impact on his articulation of Confucianism as a world religion has entirely evaded the attention of the scholars working on the topic.

This essay, in turn, foregrounds the historical entanglement, between Protestant contestations and scholarly world-religion consolidations of Confucianism, in the construction of Lim’s view of this religion, and its place in the new world order as a political form of universal humanity, and a condition to modern, transnational and moral citizenship. Apart from van der Veer’s study, my approach to the study of the emergence of Confucianism, as a religion and global ethos in the Straits of Malacca, is also indebted to Tomoko Masuzawa’s study of the history of the concept of “world religion” within the discipline of science of religion and, in particular, the epistemic formation of this concept’s universalistic, supraethnic, or transnational, character.6

As Masuzawa shows, during the 19th century, the category of “world religion” emerged to help articulate the self-image of Europe as an ideal model of universal history, or leader of an international, global order on the one hand. On the other, this new category also served to (self) portray Europe as the sole custodian of harmonious regulation of internal differences within nation-states.7 Stated otherwise, world religions through their study within the new discipline of science of religion were approached as defining elements of non-European nations.8 The study presented in this essay, like those of van der Veer’s and Sun’s, acknowledges the ultimate intellectual legacy of Talal Asad’s enquiry into the mutual formation of the religious and the secular through the colonial encounter.9

Only when approached as a singular analytical field of enquiry can Lim’s views of Confucianism, simultaneously a religion and global political force, be understood as an effect of mutually transformative historical exchanges between the opposing social movements of Christian proselytisation (and related global domination) and Confucianist Chinese emancipation.

James Legge and the Study of Confucianism

James Legge (1815–1897) was the first professor of Chinese at Oxford University, where he worked from 1876 until his death. Before becoming a professor, Legge spent a large part of his life (1839–1873) as a missionary for the London Missionary Society, with postings in Malacca and Hong Kong.10 In the contemporary academic world, Legge is best remembered for his English translations of the Chinese classics, as well as his engagement in the scientific study of Chinese religions in general – foremost of which was Confucianism.11 His lasting scholarly reputation was instrumental in shaping the current global perception of Confucianism as a defining element of Chinese culture, nation and politics.

Legge’s first missionary posting in Malacca only lasted four years, from 1839 to 1843. Nevertheless, by the time of his death, Legge was a wellknown Christian proselytiser, scholar and educationalist in the Anglo- Chinese circles in Singapore. Early in his career, Legge personally financed the education of Song Hoot Kiam, who was to become one of the most prominent English-educated Christian Chinese intellectuals in Singapore, and two other boys in Hong Kong and Scotland.12

Song commemorated Legge’s life in a few obituaries13 published in The Straits Chinese Magazine: A Quarterly Journal of Oriental and Occidental Culture upon Legge’s death in 1897.14 This periodical, in circulation between 1897 and 1907, was co-founded and co-edited by Song’s son, Song Ong Siang, a Chinese Christian community leader and an English-educated intellectual. Along with Lim, Song Ong Siang was a recipient of the Queen’s Scholarship, the award that enabled both men to study in Britain.15 During his studies in Britain in the late 1880s or early 1890s, Song Ong Siang visited Legge at his home in Oxford, where the latter was working on his translations of Chinese texts.16 Although this visit did not prompt Song Ong Siang “to take up the study of Chinese classics”,17 his fellow Chinese reformist Lim showed great interest in Legge’s translations and views of Confucianism.

The Straits Chinese Magazine, or SCM, was intended, among other goals, to encourage debate among the Straits intellectual elite of “all nationalities who are in every respect better educated than those of a former generation”.18 Lim, one of the most vociferous Singaporean Confucian reformists of the period, who was also a founder and co-editor of the SCM,19 published his critiques of Legge’s understanding of Confucianism and proposed a different picture of the religion’s role in facilitating the overall progress of the Chinese people. In so doing, Lim made an invaluable contribution to the then emerging concept of “objective” or “scientific” study of religion, which explored Confucianism as a “world religion” within the new scholarly discipline of comparative religion.20

Masuzawa shows that one of the fathers of the science of religion – known today as comparative religion – Friedrich Max Müller, developed this discipline based on his expertise in Sanskrit philology and language.21 Specifically, between 1861 and 1870, Max Müller formulated his science of religion upon his previous field of expertise, the science of language. His comparative study of religion was, in fact, based on comparative philology. The analytical connection between race/nationality, language/culture and religion, which has endured to the present, has been attributed to Max Müller. This despite the fact that, as Masuzawa argues, Max Müller was openly against establishing a relationship of biological or physiological causality between languages and races.

In other words, Max Müller opposed, unsuccessfully, the development of racialist philology.22 His opposition was directed at the anthropological prescriptions for “race” prevalent at the time, which suggested discrepant origins of different races, where “difference” was treated as a biological fact. Instead, Max Müller was in favour of a shared origin of humankind, supported through his comparative study of the family of languages.23 Apart from this particular racial or national aspect of religion, Masuzawa notes that the imperial conquest and aspirations of Christianity, and also encounters with Buddhism, simultaneously shaped the transnational or supra-racial character (or aspirations) of religions.24

Max Müller’s concept of “universalistic humanity”25 and the historical entanglement between the Chinese race and Confucianism all made a decisive impact on Lim’s articulation of a Confucianist world order, as discussed later in this essay. Whereas the intellectual connection between Max Müller’s science of religion and Lim’s Confucianism remain unexamined, academic collaboration between Max Müller and Legge is a well-studied phenomenon.

Legge in Malacca and Early Years in Hong Kong

In the preface to his first volume of The Chinese Classics, Legge made a comment on his posting in “the East” (i.e. Malacca), where he arrived “equipped with… a few months’ instruction in Chinese from the late Professor Kidd at the University of London”.26 Legge was to assume his duties as the principal of the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca. This position meant that he had an unhindered access to the college library. Dissatisfied with the then-existing state of translations of classical Chinese texts into European languages, Legge made an outline of his prospective study and translation of these texts before 1841, planning to publish his work in seven volumes. From the onset of his stay in Malacca and having the required books and dictionaries within his reach, Legge engaged in the study of a set of works he translated into English as “Confucian Analects”.27 These translations were included in his first volume of The Chinese Classics, published in 1861 while he was in Hong Kong. There, Legge offered his definition of the “classical” Chinese texts:

The Books now recognised as of highest authority in China are
comprehended under the denominations of “The five King”,
and the “The four Shoo”. The term King is of textile origin, and
signifies the warp threads of a web, and their adjustment. An easy
application of it is to denote what is regular and insures regularity.
As used with reference to books, it indicates their authority on the
subjects of which they treat. “The five King” are the five canonical
works, containing the truth upon the highest subjects from the sages
of China, and which should be received as law by all generations.
The term Shoo simply means Writings or Books.28

By the early 1860s, Legge had already been engaged in the preaching to and teaching of the Chinese for 21 years. The substantial experience he gained convinced him that he would have remained unqualified for his missionary job unless he “had thoroughly mastered the Classical Books of the Chinese”.29 In those books, Legge believed, the sages of China established “the foundations of the moral, the social, and the political life of the people”.30 His translations of the Classics were intended foremost for the benefit of missionaries and students of Chinese language and literature, though Legge hoped that they could also be of use to the general public.31

At the age of 11, Song Hoot Kiam became one of the boarders of the Anglo- Chinese College in Malacca when Reverend James Legge was its principal.32 More than half a century later, Song was still able to recall his years in Malacca under Legge’s supervision in great detail.33 Written in memory of the recently deceased Legge, Song’s recollections of the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca were intended for the “friends of the late Professor all over the globe who would be interested to hear anything relating to any, the shortest, part of his long and useful career”.34

According to Song, Legge managed to gather around 45 Chinese boys as boarders in the college. This was quite an accomplishment, as most Straits Chinese at that time ascribed little value to an English education for their children, while some viewed missionaries with suspicion. Song recalled that most inhabitants of Malacca were engaged in fishing or growing rice, with little commerce going on in the town. He remembered Legge as a strict but righteous principal and teacher when in college, and a friendly playmate during the few daily excursions he organised for his students.35

From Malacca, Legge relocated to Hong Kong to take charge of the Anglo- Chinese College there. When he left Malacca, he took two Chinese girls and a Chinese boy with him. In the meantime, Song’s father placed him and his elder brother in a private Chinese school in Singapore. Unwilling to give up on their English education, Song and a fellow student soon managed to “escape” from Singapore and take an adventurous trip to Hong Kong, where they continued their studies at the Anglo-Chinese College, with financial support provided by Legge himself.36

In 1846, Legge, Song and two other Chinese students arrived in London after a six-month sea voyage. They were subsequently located in Scotland where they received further education as well as baptism in 1847.37 The following year, the three Chinese students returned to Hong Kong and Singapore respectively. Song married and settled down soon after that, thus establishing “the oldest family of Straits Chinese Christians in Singapore”.38 The two men kept in touch until Legge’s death.39

Legge’s Missionary and Academic Careers

Legge continued working on the Chinese texts over the great number of years he spent as a missionary educator in Hong Kong.40 Even though his work did not always progress at the desired pace, the third volume of his Chinese Classics appeared in 1865.41 Legge’s The Chinese Classics were well-received in the contemporaneous academic circles. He retired from his missionary duties in 1873 and returned to England, where he was widely recognised as “one of the first and best translators of Chinese classics”.42 In 1876, he became a professor of Chinese language and literature at Oxford, where he taught and worked on translations until his death in 1897.

In 1875, Max Müller contacted Legge expressing his admiration for the latter’s translation of The Chinese Classics. In this period, Max Müller identified and approached potential academic collaborators for an ambitious project entitled The Sacred Books of the East, published in 50 volumes between 1879 and 1910.43 Max Müller’s desire had been to study religions in a scholarly, “scientific” manner.44 To achieve this, he relied on the method of mutual comparison of doctrinal texts or canons of various religious traditions in Asia.

In his preface to The Sacred Books of the East, Max Müller identified eight “great and original religions which profess to be founded on Sacred Books”.45

Apart from the interest which the Sacred Books of all religions
possess in the eyes of the theologian, and, more particularly, of
the missionary, to whom an accurate knowledge of them is as
indispensable as a knowledge of the enemy’s country is to a general,
these works have of late assumed a new importance, as viewed in
the character of ancient historical documents.46

Max Müller’s list of “world religions”, as they are called at present, included what are known today as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. 47 The Sacred Books of the East were intended to provide translations of the books of all the mentioned religions, with the exception of the first two.48

Legge’s contribution to The Sacred Books of the East project consisted of his translations of the “Sacred Books of China”, which comprised four volumes on Confucianism and two volumes on Taoism.49 Although the Englishlanguage term “Confucianism” was not used in scholarly circles or outside of them during this period, Legge was the one who defined and promoted its academic usage. According to Sun’s research, the term “Confucianism” was first recorded in 1862, independent of Legge. However, it was Legge who first used it in a paper presented in his absence before a Protestant Missionary Conference held in Shanghai in 1877, where he compared Confucianism with Christianity.

The reaction of his fellow missionaries was to reject the proposed comparability between the two – Christianity was understood as the only true religion and was thus beyond comparison. Legge used his collaboration with Max Müller to further his views of Confucianism as a “world religion” and support his translations of it to related theological concepts in terms hitherto reserved for Protestant Christianity.50

In his preface to The Sacred Books of the East, Legge noted that there were three religions in China – Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism – and viewed the former as “the religion of China par excellence”. Unlike Buddhism, both Confucianism and Taoism were native to China.51 This classification of certain spiritual, ritualistic and philosophical traditions into the three religions of China has had a lasting scholarly and popular influence on current perceptions of what counts as religion in the Chinese context. Importantly, Legge’s promotion of Confucianism as the defining concept of Chinese identity was undertaken not only by Western academics and missionaries, but also by the most prominent Singaporean Confucian reformist, Lim Boon Keng, which will be discussed shortly.

In 1880, Legge delivered a series of lectures at the Presbyterian College in London, which were subsequently published in the same year as The Religions of China: Confucianism and Tâoism Described and Compared with Christianity. In these lectures, Legge defined Confucianism as “the ancient religion of China”, which comprised views of Confucius, “the great philosopher himself”, written directly by the sage or narrated in the writings by his disciples. He thought it erroneous not to regard Confucius as a religious teacher.52 At that time, the missionaries working in China rejected Legge’s attempt to view both Christianity and Confucianism as religions that could be compared. To the majority of Protestant missionaries working to convert the people of China, the proposal of comparison itself was unacceptable and “too liberal”.53

Although he regarded Confucianism as a religion and compared it with Christianity, Legge thought this religion was inferior to Christianity due to the latter’s individually accessible worship of God. Confucianism, Legge explained, still allowed for the worship of spirits, unlike the only proper religion – i.e. Protestant – Christianity.54 Legge thought that this aspect of Confucianism developed over time due to the monopolisation of the worship of God by the Emperor, which prevented ordinary people from worshipping God.55 Legge had personally experienced this insight during his visit to the Temple of Heaven in Peking56 where he stood barefoot and, together with his Christian friends, sang a doxology in praise of God.57

I rejoice in the imperial worship of God, but I can never
sufficiently regret that this shaped itself even in prehistoric time into
a representative worship by the head of the state, instead of being
extended throughout the nation, and joined in by the multitudes of
the people.58

Legge thought that the lack of individual access to one’s worship of God helped the spread of sin among the Chinese people, thus preventing their growth and development.59 He saw Confucianism as an ethical regime exclusively focused on the regulation of social relations. Its goal was to prescribe conditions to sociability through defining five types of relational duties perceived to uphold all social structures. These entailed the relationship between sovereign and subject, father and son, husband and wife, brothers and friends.60 According to Legge, lacking in this scheme was the relationship to God as the central defining element of humanity, conceptualised through “[o]ur Christian catechism”.61 This particular aspect of Legge’s theological assessment of Confucianism apparently had a lasting effect on Singaporean missionary circles.

In fact, Legge’s missionary work in and on China was celebrated in the Singapore press long after his death.62 Another obituary commemorating Legge’s missionary achievements, besides Song Hoot Kiam’s, was also published in the SCM.63 It was written by Legge’s fellow missionary J.A.B. Cook, who had the opportunity to personally attend Legge’s Presbyterian College lecture series in 1880. Cook assured readers that Legge was a zealous missionary and that all his scholarly work was “to bring the stores of his learning to the service of Christ”.64 He went on to support Legge’s understanding of Confucianism as a religion inferior to Christianity, in that it focused on ethical regulation of social relations and failed to prioritise – or even introduce – a relationship between God and believer.65

Reverend W. Murray relied on Legge’s writings in his outline of reasons as to why he regarded Confucius as a failed religious teacher in comparison with Jesus Christ. Murray quoted Legge’s essay on “Christianity and Confucianism Compared in Their Teaching of the Whole Duty of Man”, which was included in a missionary-sponsored publication called The Religious Tract Society from London, and issued throughout the 1880s and later. There, Murray quoted Legge’s opinion of Confucius’ “untruthfulness” as the mark of a standard of morality lower than the impeccable morality of Christ’s.66

A note to the article states that it was originally delivered in the format of a lecture given at the Young Men’s Christian Association of Singapore on 20 May 1905. Murray noted that within a short period of time, “a student of Confucianism” had published a profound critique of the lecture in The Singapore Free Press. Hence, Murray revised the original lecture and published it as the SCM article under current discussion, erasing those “portions of the material not relevant to the argument” but leaving its conclusion intact. In fact, the process of revising the article enabled Murray to overturn the main line of the “student’s” critique. To recall here, the latter insisted that Legge abandoned his early conviction in Confucius’ untruthfulness as the cause of the low state of morality in China. It was then that Murray turned to “Christianity and Confucianism Compared in Their Teaching of the Whole Duty of Man” in which Legge had expressed his doubts about Confucius’ truthfulness.67