Matteo Ricci: “Religious Sects among the Chinese”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Ricci's understanding of Chinese religion was derived from his observations traveling from southern China to the imperial capital over the course of three decades. He learned much from the study of Chinese texts but also from his preferred interlocutors: state officials, called mandarins or literati, whose primary intellectual frame of reference was derived from the Confucian canon. Ricci viewed the religious panorama of China through a Christian lens, seeing various forms of belief and behavior that were either indifferent or at odds with what he considered orthodoxy. Beyond this specific religious frame, he also viewed Chinese religion in the light of the ancient Greek and Roman culture that he knew from his studies in Europe. Classical antiquity, it seemed to Ricci, offered a ready point of comparison for contemporary Western readers: like the Greeks, the Chinese were polytheistic, and, like the Romans, they had an elaborate political system based on important moral principles. So moral philosophy and paganism were intertwined in China, as they had once been in Europe; the addition of Christian revelation might potentially transform the Ming realm into another Rome.

Before describing how he executed this ambitious apostolic charge, Ricci offers a panorama of the main schools of thought in China. He was convinced that what he called the Sect of the Literati (Confucianism) was fundamentally different from its counterparts, Buddhism and Daoism. The literati were scholar-officials whose career progression was rooted in the study of the Four Books and the Five Classics of Confucianism and whose positions within the Chinese state obliged them to perform certain annual rituals. Here Ricci describes them as skeptical toward other religious traditions, prizing only moral precepts such as loyalty to the state and filial piety. He is keen to assert that their “sect” is a respectable philosophical system, which, at its core, was not offensive to Christian doctrine—indeed, Confucianism could complement Christianity, just as Greek philosophy complemented Christian theology. Confucian ritual behaviors and non-Christian edifices, Ricci makes clear, are not signs of paganism and are, in any case, reserved for only the highest ranks of the imperial hierarchy. Fortunately for the Jesuit missionaries, the literati held the keys to the social and political acceptance of their Western religion in China.

Buddhism and Daoism are not treated with the same degree of respect in this selection. Ricci's views were clearly influenced by those literati who dismissed these other religions as distractions for rustics or charlatans, but the fact that the contemporary Buddhist (and, to a lesser extent, Daoist) clergy had inspired a surge in popular piety in the early seventeenth century meant that the Jesuit properly identified his competition. Ricci paints a picture of Daoism as a complex of absurd, incoherent teachings, but he views Buddhism as a corruption of true religion, that is, Christianity, which the righteous Chinese had attempted to get from India. In contrast to the Sect of the Literati, both Buddhism and Daoism are marked by dubious practices, such as excessive fasting, and by confused logic, which led them to believe in magic and reincarnation.