Hu Shih

In February 1919 a young professor of philosophy at Peking University published an essay called "Immortality: My Religion" in Xin qingnian, New Youth, the magazine of the movement that was trying to remake Chinese thought. Near its end he told a story about himself:

There was a boy of eleven, and that boy was I, who read these lines in the Tongjian and was deeply moved, and it went on to influence half of his thinking and conduct. Yet the man who said them, Fan Zhen, had been dead fifteen hundred years.¹²

The professor was Hu Shih, then twenty-seven. The lines were a sentence about a knife. This chapter asks how a boy raised among Buddhist devotions in a mountain village lost his fear of hell from two old sentences, why it took him seventeen years to say so in print, and how his unbelief changed as he grew old.

A household of devotions

He was born in Shanghai on 17 December 1891.³ His father was an official who served in Jiangsu and then in Taiwan; in the war year of 1894 he sent his wife and small son home to the family village in Jixi, in the southern mountains of Anhui, and in 1895, after Taiwan was ceded to Japan, he died at Xiamen. Hu's mother, born into the Feng family of a nearby village, was a widow at twenty-three, and Hu was her only child.⁴⁵⁶ His father's last wish was that the boy be educated. Every day before dawn, Hu wrote, his mother woke him to tell him what his father had been like; it went on for nine years.⁷ He studied at home and then in a school kept by his uncle, and his learning until he was twelve was "entirely Chinese."⁸

The house he grew up in was devout. In his memoir of 1933 he recalled that his father had written a poem against the belief that river-gods show themselves as snakes, and had kept the monks and Daoist priests away. After his death the women of the household, led by an aunt who became a vegetarian devotee, took up Buddhism and called the monks in. The boy read the tales of hell and saw them acted on the stage. His mother vowed him to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, and once walked up a mountain to keep a vow she had made when he was ill. To please her he built a little shrine to Confucius.⁹ She believed in old remedies too. In 1909, when her brother was ill, she shut the door, burned incense, and cut flesh from her own arm to put in his medicine.¹⁰ On the belief timeline, these years stand for his faith.

Two sentences

The crack came from books. In his uncle's school he read Zhu Xi's primer, the Xiaoxue, and in it a sentence of the Song historian Sima Guang: once the body has rotted the spirit has scattered, so that the pounding and grinding of hell have nothing left to act on.¹¹ Then his elder brother urged him to read Sima Guang's great history, the Zizhi tongjian, and in its 136th chapter he met Fan Zhen, the Liang-dynasty scholar who had argued that the spirit dies with the body.¹²¹³ Hu printed Fan's sentence in his essay of 1919: "Spirit is to form as sharpness is to the knife; never has one heard of the knife being gone and the sharpness remaining; how could the form perish and the spirit stay?"¹⁴

He was eleven, he said in 1919; eleven or twelve, he said in 1933, by the Chinese count of age, which would make him ten or eleven by ours.¹²² In the later account he explained what the two sentences did. The first taught him not to fear hell, the second not to fear rebirth, and he liked them because "they taught me not to be afraid." By then, he said, he had become an atheist. He did not know then that Fan's essay stood in the official history of the Liang, or that the replies to it had been collected in a Buddhist anthology.¹² On the timeline, his doubt sits here, in a child's reading.

He soon tested it. At thirteen by the Chinese count, he recalled, he proposed to a nephew that they throw the clay gods of a roadside pavilion into the privy. A labourer told his mother the gods were angry, and when the boy later fell into a fever he pretended to be possessed; his mother prayed for him and had him thank the gods. He kept his unbelief from her until he came home at twenty-seven, again by the Chinese count.¹⁵

Shanghai and America

In 1904 he went to Shanghai with his third brother, who died there that year, and passed through three schools without finishing any.¹⁶ At sixteen, by his own later account, he published short pieces against ghosts in a Shanghai magazine. One attacked the novels Journey to the West and The Investiture of the Gods, and quoted with approval an ancient law from the Book of Rites: "Whoever uses ghosts and spirits, days and times, and divination, to confuse the people: kill."¹⁷¹⁸ Half a century later he would quote those words against himself.

In 1910 he passed the examination for the American scholarships and sailed for Cornell, before he could go home to say goodbye to his mother.¹⁹ He took his degree in 1914 and went on to Columbia, where from 1915 to 1917 he wrote a dissertation on the logical method of ancient China.²⁰²¹ In it he treated the philosopher Mozi as the one Chinese thinker who "can truly be said to have founded a religion," and asked how Mozi's "religious temperament" had led him to defend belief in ghosts by its usefulness.²²²³²⁴ He read the American pragmatists closely; the dissertation cites John Dewey, who taught at Columbia, though no source in hand says Dewey supervised him.²¹

From New York, in January 1917, he sent New Youth a short programme for reforming Chinese literature: write in the language people speak, because "each age has its own literature."²⁵²⁶ That summer he came home to a chair of philosophy at Peking University.²⁰²⁷

My religion

His mother died in November 1918. He was in Beijing and reached the village five days after the coffin had been sealed. In her obituary he wrote that her sincerity deserved to be remembered "without decay," bu xiu; and he said later that the idea of his essay came to him at her funeral.²⁸

The essay was "Bu xiu," "Immortality," and on the timeline it is his declaration. It set out three kinds of immortality. The first was the soul's. Hu gave Fan Zhen's argument and Sima Guang's against it, and then set the question aside: "Whether the soul perishes or not truly has no important effect on how people live. Having no practical effect, it can almost be said to be no problem at all."²⁹³⁰ People who did right only from fear of hell, he added, were merely selfish.³⁰ The second was the old Confucian immortality of virtue, deeds and words, which he found better but open only to the few.³¹ The third was his own, "social immortality": "The 'small self' perishes; the 'great self' never perishes."³² Every act, good or bad, lived on in the endless stream of humanity, and so he wrote: "To my own mind, this notion of social immortality can well serve as my religion."³³ Its creed was responsibility: "This small self of mine now bears a heavy responsibility toward the great, undying self's endless past, and a heavy responsibility too toward its endless future."³⁴³⁵

The editors noted that the essay agreed with the views of life of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, and called the four essays nearly the whole outlook of the magazine.³⁶ It was in the same essay that he told the story of the boy of eleven. Why it took seventeen years to reach print he did not say. The sources show only that he had hidden his unbelief from his mother into his twenties, and that the essay was conceived at her funeral.¹⁵²⁸

That spring Dewey landed at Shanghai, three days before the student demonstrations of 4 May 1919, and lectured in China for two years.³⁷ Hu had already written that the pragmatist William James, a clergyman's son, could not judge religion without prejudice, and that James's "will to believe" was a harmful way to argue for God.³⁸ What Dewey gave China, Hu said when he left, was not a creed but a method: "He gave us only one philosophical method, so that we could use it to solve our own particular problems."³⁹⁴⁰

Science and the view of life

In February 1923 the philosopher Zhang Junmai gave a lecture at Tsinghua that started the most famous debate of the decade. A view of life, he said, is "subjective, intuitive, synthetic, free-willed, and unique," and so "no matter how far science advances," the question "is beyond what science can do."⁴¹⁴² Among the questions science could not settle he listed whether a creator stands behind the world.⁴³ He feared a life of laboratories and factories, "life like a machine," in which "where the spirit finds comfort, no one can know."⁴⁴ The public intellectual Liang Qichao took a middle way: matters of the intellect belonged to science, but love and beauty were "absolutely beyond science." "If two young people agreed to a 'scientific love affair'," he asked, "would one not burst out laughing?"⁴⁵⁴⁶⁴⁷

Hu, ill for much of the year, answered at the end with a long preface to the collected debate. China, he said, was in no danger of too much science: "We have only the view of life of getting office and wealth, only the view of life of living on heaven's mercy, only the view of life of consulting gods and diviners."⁴⁸⁴⁹ The English word "agnostic," he argued, had been a shield that men like Huxley needed against a powerful Church, and China did not need it: "If we are convinced that the scientific evidence we have can only lead us to deny the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, then we may as well honestly call ourselves 'atheists'." He added at once: "When the evidence for theism is sufficient, it will not be too late for us to change and believe in theism."⁵⁰⁵¹⁵² He set out a "naturalistic view of life" in ten points, ending with the small self that dies and the great self that does not, and called religions that sought an individual heaven or Pure Land "selfish."⁵³⁵⁴ The way forward was persuasion, not force: "our true enemy is not the other side; our true enemy is prejudice, is not thinking."⁵⁵⁵⁶ In a letter of 1928 he put the matter shortly: "Life has no meaning of its own; whatever meaning you can give it, it has."⁵⁷⁵⁸

Tolerance

The free record of his later life is thin. He left Shanghai for the United States in April 1949.⁵⁹ In Taipei in March 1959 he wrote an essay on tolerance and freedom. He was still an atheist, he said: he did not believe in a god with a will or in the immortality of the soul. But his atheism was not the Communists', who would abolish religion. Society had tolerated his unbelief for forty years, and he owed believers the same. He quoted his sixteen-year-old self and the ancient law "kill," and called that boy an intolerant moralist. He credited the lesson to a Cornell teacher, the historian George Lincoln Burr, who had told him that with age tolerance came to seem more important than freedom.⁶⁰⁶¹ The revision on his timeline stands for these two moments, 1923 and 1959: he reached the same conclusion each time, but held it with less certainty that others must share it.

In 1919 he wrote that Fan Zhen had been dead fifteen hundred years when his sentence reached a boy in Anhui. Hu's own idea of immortality, that every act goes on into the lives that follow, describes what happened to that sentence.

Fan Zhen, whose sentence about the knife the boy read, has his own chapter in this book.