Recently, Thomas Michael, a professor at The Beijing Center (TBC), was interviewed our staff and shared with us his perspective on studying Daoist thought and living in China. Professor Michael is a researcher at the School of Philosophy at Beijing Normal University. He received his Ph.D. in History of Religions from the University of Chicago, where he focused on Daoist philosophy and shamanism. In the interview, he brings his rich and interesting personal experience and academic views.
The following interviews are presented from Professor Michael’s point of view.
During my undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, I took a vacation and traveled around the world, including six months in India. That experience was very memorable for me. I was able to get up close and personal with a number of Indian locals, including a Brahmin priest, and I learned a lot about Indian religion during those days. So, when I came back to the United States, I had was inspired to learn about a foreign culture. I wanted to take a course in Hindi or Sanskrit, but my university didn’t teach either of those languages. But I still held on to this idea of learning something exotic or different from my environment, and I ended up choosing Chinese.
My Chinese professor was an American who had lived in China for many years and then came back to the U.S. and became a professor teaching Chinese. In addition to language instruction, he also taught Chinese poetry and literature. During my Chinese studies, I became interested in the lifestyle of the Chinese hermit fisherman and wrote my thesis on it, realizing that these people who lived in the mountains, wore straw hats, rowed boats, and lived in close proximity to birds and fish were all Daoist. That was the time when I began my relationship with Daoism — I started to develop a strong interest in Laozi and Zhuangzi.
My undergraduate advisor encouraged me to apply to graduate school at the University of Chicago because there was a scholar at the University of Chicago who had ample experience in the field of Chinese religion and literature, Anthony Yu. He was a professor involved in translating the entire Journey to the West, and there was a lot of Daoist thought in that book as well. I think Daoism is a marvelous philosophy and also an excellent way of life, thus I want to learn more about Daoism.
My home state of Oregon is one of the more prevalent places in the U.S. for Daoism. We are in the Pacific Northwest, far from the East Coast, far from the south, with all the cowboys, and far from California, with all the actors and singers. We have mountains, beaches, and forests, it’s very laid back and we tend to enjoy life rather than focus on career success.
2. Delving into Daoism
During my time studying and teaching Chinese philosophy, my favorite Chinese philosopher was Laozi. His philosophical ideas have been very inspiring to me and my way of thinking. Meanwhile, I also have a lot of respect for Confucius. If one reads the Analects of Confucius one can recognize that Confucius is a free thinker and has the deepest understanding of the world. But I don’t like Mencius. Later scholars took Confucius as an idea and put it into a system, but Confucius’s thoughts are free, and everything in the world can be thought about. To frame his thoughts within a system is a limitation of that freedom. In fact, the same thing happened to Laozi, who is also a free thinker.
Laozi has an original set of philosophies, and the philosophical ideas we see in the original excavated text of the Daodejing are very different from those we see in later versions of the Daodejing. For example, there are two famous additions to the Daodejing in China, the first from He Shang Gong of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the second from Wang Bi of the Wei Dynasty. These men absorbed the philosophical ideas of Laozi and incorporated them into a system. They turned it into metaphysics. Laozi’s original philosophy was not metaphysics; it was a phenomenology. When I look at Laozi, I see his original philosophy; when I look at Confucius, I see him as a great free thinker.
But I prefer Laozi. Confucius focuses a lot on social interaction and virtue – which I think is great — while Laozi talks about the interrelationships between human beings and animals, nature, heaven and earth, and the universe as a whole. Laozi says that the highest state of a person exists when we are born. Confucius says the opposite: a baby is not really a human being when it is born, and that every child must go through the process of Cheng Ren, which means becoming an adult. To become an adult, you must learn language, learn to obey your parents, and learn how to conduct yourself in society. This is the primary difference in their philosophy. There is no right or wrong in this distinction, except that I myself would resonate with one side more than the other. Laozi has a much more expansive view of existence, which is one of the things I admire about him.
3. Exploring China
Before I came to teach at TBC, I had visited China many times during the summer to attend conferences or to teach during the summer sessions. I made some good friends in China as a result, and Beijing Normal University warmly extended an offer to me, which was a precious opportunity, so I accepted. The year was 2016. Since arriving here, I have been teaching Chinese philosophy, with a general focus around Daoist thoughts. I have offered two courses at Beijing Normal University, both for Chinese students or international students from other countries. Then, I was introduced to the TBC staff by my close friend Robin Wang, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. I was interested in TBC and wanted to join. After TBC restarted the course program and recruited students again, I officially became one of the TBC members to teach Daoism-related courses this semester.
In fact, my relationship with China began long before I came to work here. I studied Chinese in Taiwan for a year, and I came to Mainland China for the first time in 2002, and from 2005 onwards, I would come to China in the summer to attend conferences or teach summer courses, and these annual visits continued until the year I moved to China to work officially. I studied Chinese for a long time, and for some other foreign scholars, the language is a barrier. If one doesn’t know Chinese at all, their academic research and daily work become difficult.
I like where I am now, but if I could do it all over again, I wish I had more time for myself in my busy work schedule to travel around the country again. I once went to a Confucian ceremony in Qufu, where the park behind the temple had a large circle for people to walk around, and where it was said that Confucius’ descendants would worship their ancestors.
Rather than visiting museums during trips, I prefer climbing mountains more. The process of climbing is a great opportunity to get in touch with nature, and I also enjoy the time I spend climbing with my friends. I now have a friend who is very passionate about climbing as I am, and we meet up every time.
Of all the mountains I’ve climbed, my favorite is Emei Mountain, but one of the best climbing experiences was at Jizhu Mountain in Yunnan. It was a climb many years ago, around 2005, when I didn’t even have a cell phone — or rather, my cell phone didn’t work properly in China. As I was about to start the climb, I met a group of “pilgrims”, four older women and the daughter of one of them. They were older than me, but they were very skillful in climbing, which shocked me at the time.
When we reached the top of the mountain, close to the clouds were monasteries inhabited by Buddhist monks, and when the clouds cleared, the village was at the foot of the mountain, and there was another monastery visible. The higher monastery was inhabited by monks and the lower one by nuns, a marvelous combination of yin and yang between the mountain and the clouds. The scene was so interesting that I took photos, and one of them later became the cover of my first book.
4. Cultural Exchange and Sense of Belonging
I teach two courses at Beijing Normal University, where my students are both local Chinese students and international students from all over the world. Teaching students from different regions is indeed a unique experience. First of all, the writing styles of Chinese and international students are quite different, and I have tried to teach my Chinese students in my courses the Western Academic Essay Writing style, which can help them better adapt to foreign academic conferences or help them more successfully publish their papers in worldwide journals. Most of these courses for Chinese students are graduate courses, and my students have their own wealth of knowledge. Our classes are more like seminars, and we all learn a lot from each other.
The other class is for a new program at Beijing Normal University called The International Master’s Degree in Chinese Philosophy, which was briefly shelved in recent years, and then restarted a year or two ago. The students in this program are all international students whose previous majors are not all related to philosophy, and some of them have not taken Chinese philosophy courses before, so my lectures are more basic, aiming to popularize the basic knowledge of Chinese philosophical schools. Chinese students and overseas students also have different styles of classroom performance. My teaching style is more dialogic, listening to students’ ideas and pushing them at the right time, and I encourage my students to express themselves more.
In fact, the differences are not only among students. Both Chinese and overseas researchers have a solid understanding of what Daoist thought is, but we use different methods. Chinese scholars have a more textual understanding, such as the meaning of a word, its etymology, or the author of a particular text and when it was actually written, while Western scholars have a more theoretical understanding, such as “how to understand ‘Wu Wei’ from a philosophical point of view”. These differences are narrowing, however, as some Chinese students stay in the United States to teach after graduation, and these scholars bring their nuanced understanding of Chinese culture to different countries, facilitating more in-depth exchanges between scholars on both sides of the border.
Finally, I would like to leave a piece of advice for international students or anyone coming from other countries to work in China: just enjoy the process of immersing in the local culture. If you feel like an “outsider,” you are. My Chinese friends make me feel that while I‘m Chinese, but I am not a “foreigner” or an “outsider” either. I am an individual in between.
Recently, Thomas Michael, a professor at The Beijing Center (TBC), was interviewed our staff and shared with us his perspective on studying Daoist thought and living in China. Professor Michael is a researcher at the School of Philosophy at Beijing Normal University.
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