Scholars have written much about the Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and his attempts to make Christianity and Confucianism palatable to each other. Yet, although Muslim communities have a long-established presence in China, we know little about the philosophical system that blended Islam and Confucianism in the heart-minds of Chinese Muslims. A careful search into the history of Chinese philosophy reveals a rich, fascinating, but hitherto understudied philosophical tradition indigenous to China, the Han-Kitab 汉克 塔布(a Chinese-Arabic compound literally meaning “the Chinese books”). In this groundbreaking project, I set out to investigate the creationist theory developed by Wang Daiyu, the earliest and one of the most influential figures in the Han-Kitab. My central undertaking is to provide a systematic analysis of Wang’s appropriation of two neo-Confucian concepts to articulate a creationist account of the origin of being: the Non-Ultimate ( wuji ⽆极 ) and the Great-Ultimate ( taiji 太极). My analysis shows these two Ultimates in Wang’s system are quite different in nature from their neo-Confucian counterparts. Deeply influenced by Sufism, Wang embeds the two Ultimates within an emanativist ontology, thereby offering a distinct model of the Ultimates from neo-Confucians’. I argue that in so doing, Wang makes a significant contribution to the history of Chinese metaphysics.
An 'emanativist' account, as she calls it, is an account of creation similar to (and probably ultimately derived from) the Neoplatonic account of creation. This system was adapted for Islam by Avicenna in his metaphysics, which is the thirteenth book of his The Healing. Wang Diayu, who was fluent in Persian and Arabic and translated the great works of Islamic philosophy into Chinese, would certainly have known of it.
Avicenna's basic account was also adopted to Catholicism by St. Thomas Aquinas and others, and as such brings this full circle with the Catholic attempt to address Confucianism with which she begins. As it was also adapted for Judaism by Maimonides and others, this mode of thinking about how the world came to be has a claim to be the most important and widely-accepted one.
The basic way that it works in Neoplatonism is that originally all is One, and the One (which you will remember from our reading of the Parmenides -- see the sidebar if you want a refresher) is in an important sense the only real being. The One emanates the rest of creation when the One decides to examine itself, which necessitates a division between the part that is thinking, and the part that it is examining and thinking about. Such a division ends up creating more divisions as the thoughts proliferate: categories like good and bad are created, and number comes to be, and ordering these thoughts requires further divisions. Eventually the idea of everything exists, and as a further way of exploring the nature of those ideas the world is created so the ideas can play out. (An example: imagine the Platonic Ideal of a lion. It is a masterful hunter; but it cannot hunt, because it is just an idea. So the Thinker decides to make a place where lions exist, and can exercise this essence in practice).
You can see how this initial division can readily model the two Confucian Ultimates she mentions. In Catholicism, the two are The Father and the Son, which need a third thing to hold them together in relationship, and that thing is the third person of the Trinity, and the beginning of Creation.
If you would like to read her full paper, she has made it available online.
