The Conversational Tradition in Chinese Philosophy

THE PROBLEM OF this paper is to discuss one formal aspect of Chinese philosophy that has appeared and reappeared in each of the great ages of Chinese intellectual history: the Philosophical Conversation. I shall try to show first what I mean by Philosophical Conversation and how it differs from the Philosophical Dialogue so familiar in the West. I will then pass quickly in review three of the most important manifestations of the conversational form in China, the Lun-yii ; 7, the Shih-shuo hsinyii -t f ?r X, and the Sayings of the Ch'an masters, attempting to define its essence and discover why it has had such a widespread and persistent appeal to the Chinese philosopher. Finally, once I have distilled this essential Chinese aspect of the Philosophical Conversation from its millennial history, perhaps I will be able to relate it, in a very general way, to the structure of the Chinese language. When we learn, as beginners in Chinese philosophy, that the only remaining authentic records of the greatest sage of that tradition were collected after his death in a book that is entitled Conversations (the Lun-yii), we are not really very surprised, for, however slight our knowledge of Greek philosophy may be, we know that the best record we have of the great sage of that tradition is found in the Conversations (Dialogues) written after his death by his most brilliant disciple, Plato. That the thought of the two greatest sages of the Greek and Chinese traditions are represented by conversations is another of the great number of illustrations of the universality of the human mind. And if Socrates and Confucius (551-479 B.C.) do not seem sufficient evidence, we might add, without leaving the realm of the

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · China · Chinese philosophy · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Philosophy

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