Muhammad and His Dao 165
As Mungello demonstrates, Chinese Christian intellectuals de-
ployed tactics that we can also see in the Chinese Muslim setting.
Chinese Christian scholars understood themselves, Mungello ex-
plains, as literati and understood their teaching (the “Lord of
Heaven Teaching,” 天主教; that is, Christianity or, more narrowly,
Roman Catholicism) as entirely consonant with Confucianism.
Consequently, Mungello argues that these thinkers saw Christian-
ity as something other than a belief system per se—as part of, if not
the fulfillment of, Confucian orthodox thought.
For example, absent from the writings of Zhang Xingyao 張星曜
( 1633 –ca. 1725 ), a Chinese Christian author of the seventeenth cen-
tury, is any enumeration of Christian “beliefs” or “theology.”
What appears to us as a glaring—or even deceptive—omission of his deep-
est beliefs from the History would have been viewed very differently [i.e.,
as fully understandable and not peculiar at all] by Zhang. He saw himself
as a very orthodox literatus whose acceptance of the Lord of Heaven
Teaching reinforced his orthodoxy. For this reason, the term “conver-
sion” would have been entirely too radical to describe how Zhang viewed
the adoption of this teaching from the West.^3
There are elements here that are familiar. As we have seen in the
Genealogy of Zhao Can, Chinese Muslim scholars, too, universally
referred to Islam as “our teaching” 吾教 or “our Dao” 吾道.^4 Only
rather rarely did they identify it as a faith or belief system or con-
sider their writings about it in any sense confessional. Their view
of themselves as members of a broader literati class, rather than as
members of a community of believers, is echoed in Mungello’s de-
piction of Zhang. Finally, the fact that Zhang, as Mungello puts it,
understood Christian teachings as a reinforcement of Confucian
orthodoxy, is also characteristic of Chinese Muslim thought of the
period. Chinese Christians negotiated their own identity vis-à-vis
Confucian intellectual culture in ways strikingly similar to their
Muslim counterparts.
Standaert’s study of Yang Tingyun 楊廷筠 ( 1562 – 1627 ) provides
a more explicit instance of Christian thinkers’ self-inclusion in the
body and history of orthodox Chinese thought. The parallel with
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3. Mungello, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou, p. 144.
4. See Chapters 1 and 2.