The angelic hosts are at His beckoning call. Then, how come down here on the earth followers of Jesus Christ have so much trouble carrying out His will? Think about it. He wrote out all the instructions ahead of time in a timeless book called the Word of God, The Bible.
It is not really hard to understand if you spend time in it and ask the Spirit of God to open your eyes to the timeless truths within its pages. The problem is not understanding what the will of God is all about. But when it collides with my will, then we have a choice to make. He spent much of his time reading and translating the texts of the Confucian tradition. Following the advice of friendly literati , he also adopted in the silken robes and hat of Confucian scholars. Confucian scholars in the late Ming prized the study of ethical questions, a staple of Chinese philosophy for two millennia.
Some of them, moreover, were open to religious experimentation. Ricci was able to rely on his knowledge of natural and mathematical sciences, Greek and Roman philosophy, Christian theology, and the Confucian classical tradition, to engage important intellectuals, often in public fashion. By the mids, he had left the deep south, moving to central China, and he tried in to establish himself in the imperial capital of Beijing.
After a setback there, he moved to the secondary capital of Nanjing, in the great cultural hub of the Jiangnan region.
By , however, he left again Nanjing for the north, this time succeeding through literati and imperial patronage at remaining in Beijing, where he would die in During these years, he took detailed notes of his conversations with literati , especially in Jiangnan and Beijing, on several important moral themes: the passing of time and the meaning of life and death; the attributes of a virtuous person; the importance of self-examination; the shape of the afterlife; the harms of astrology; the evils of greed and stinginess; the fallacies of the Buddhist theories of reincarnation, vegetarianism, and the release of animal life.
These themes, eventually collected in The True Meaning , reveal that Ricci had made a strategic choice: to ally with neo-Confucianism, the dominant intellectual ideology; to highlight components of the Confucian classics that seemed to support Christian theology and ethics; and to wage a war on many practices and conceptions of Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religions.
Ricci adopted for his text a literary form well-established both in the West and China, a fictitious dialogue between a Western and a Chinese literatus. The True Record , however, was only marginally engaged with Confucian thought. The device of the dialogue was not simply a literary fiction, but actually reproduced the flow of his actual learned conversations.
This book was a war machine. To our modern ecumenical sensibility, this approach looks quite suspect. The book continued to be admired for centuries and was republished many times and translated into several languages.
It was also a labor that included many Chinese scholars. Ricci prepared a first version of the text and circulated it as manuscript in the years between and among his Chinese friends, asking for feedback.
In , a finalized version was ready, and with the financial support of the renowned official Feng Yingjing, an orthodox Confucian and fiercely anti-Buddhist scholar, the printing woodblocks were carved.
One last round of corrections from friends happened again before printing. Obviously, this shows that the final product, while mainly from the brush of Ricci, was in fact also a collective work, where several sympathetic scholars offered input and support. An exception might have been the conversations held with two Buddhist opponents, the monk San Huai in Nanjing in , and the devout Buddhist Huang Hui in In fact, Buddhist critics took up the challenge, and wrote refutations of the anti-Buddhist rhetoric of Ricci, accusing him of misunderstanding Buddhist concepts and of ignorance about the vast Buddhist canonical literature, accusations that were well founded.
There are two problems with this view. The first is that we do far more bad than good. Consider the Ten Commandments briefly. Have you always put God first? Your kingdom come, Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others of their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
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