The Nomadic Flâneuse

Richard Wilhelm (卫礼贤) went to the prestigious school Tubinger Slift and was ordained as a protestant minister. In 1899, the Allgemein Protestantischer Missionsverein sent 26 years old Wilhelm to China as a missionary in Qingdao, as Tsingtao, a then German colonial city.

He has never baptized a single Chinese. Instead he learned to speak and read Chinese, studied in Chinese universities in Tsingtao and Peking, encountered and befriended many cultural leaders. In the meanwhile China underwent great changes including the Boxer Rebellion, the Hsinhai Revolution and the New Culture Movement. When he left China for Germany after 21 years in the middle kingdom, China had already turned to the Republic of China and Tsingtao was a Japanese territory based on Treaty of Versailles. Wilhelm himself had been transformed to be probably the most important bridge between Chinese spirituality and German and the Western culture.

He founded the Confucius Society in Tsingtao, and in ten years time, together with his honored teacher Lau Nai Suan they translated the I Ching: Book of Changes from Chinese to German. When the last page of the translation was finished and the first printer’s proofs were coming in, the old master died. It was as if his work were completed and he had delivered the last message of the old, dying China to Europe.

As Carl Jung, a personal friend of Wilhelm wrote in his autobiography:

Wilhelm was a truly religious spirit, with an unclouded and farsighted view of things. He had the gift of being able to listen without bias to the revelations of a foreign mentality, and to accomplish that miracle of empathy which enabled him to make the intellectual treasures of China accessible to Europe.

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In spite of his Christian background, he could not help recognizing the logic and clarity of Chinese thought. “Influenced” is not quite the word to describe its effect upon him; it had overwhelmed and assimilated him. His Christian views receded into the background, but did not vanish entirely; they formed a kind of mental reservation, a moral proviso that was later to have fateful consequences.

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For the first time this profoundest work of the Orient (I Ching) was introduced to the West in a living and comprehensible fashion. Clear and unmistakably Western as his mentality was, in his I Ching commentary he manifested a degree of adaptation to Chinese psychology which is altogether unmatched.

Along with I Ching, Wilhelm also translated The Analects by Confucius, Lao Tzu, Lie Tzu and Chung Tzu, and fairy tales. What made his fame back to China was his Die Seele Chinas – The Soul of China, a wonderful observation of an “outsider” with the most inside understanding of China at a very special period of history.

I never know whether Wilhelm had believed in fate, who has been really cruel to him. In 1910 a bout of amoebic dysentery caused by some street food in Tsingtao almost took his life. It was Lau Nai Suan who saved his life and introduced to Taoist spirituality and I Ching. After return back to Germany, Wilhelm faced great difficulty to transit back into a western life. As Carl Jung pointed out, “a passive assimilation, that is to say, a succumbing to the influence of the environment, there was the danger of a relatively unconscious conflict, a clash between his Western and Eastern psyche. If, as I assumed, the Christian attitude had originally given way to the influence of China, the reverse might well be talking place now: the European element might be gaining the upper hand over the Orient once again. If such a process takes place without a strong, conscious attempt to come to terms with it, the unconscious conflict can seriously affect the physical state of health”. At the age of 57, Wilhelm left the world after struggling with resurgence of amoebic dysentery for months. A few weeks before his death, when Carl Jung had had no news from Wilhelm for a considerable time, Jung was awakened, just as he was on the point of falling asleep, by a vision. At Jung’s bed stood a Chinese in a dark blue gown, hands crossed in the sleeves. He bowed low before Jung, as if he wished to give Jung a message. “I knew what it signified. The vision was extraordinarily vivid. Not only did I see every wrinkle in the man’s face, but every thread in the fabric of his gown”.

I was reading Kafka’s Aphorisms a couple of days ago when the following words caught my attention: “There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you”. It sounded familiar – didn’t Lao Tzu say that 不出户，知天下；不窥牖，见天道。其出弥远，其知弥少?

Without opening your door,

you can open your heart to the world.

Without looking out your window,

you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,

the less you understand.

The Master arrives without leaving,

sees the light without looking,

achieves without doing a thing.

Kafka was a big fan of Wilhelm… He called him Richard Wilhelm – Tsingtao! For sure he was not talking about the beer!