F. Max Müller: THE RELIGIONS OF CHINA

F. Max Müller
THE RELIGIONS OF CHINA
Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism
and Christianity
(Scripta Minora, vol. iii, 2013)

Contents:
1. Confucianism
2. Taoism
3. Buddhism and Christianity


Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) was Anglo-German orientalist and comparative philologist. His studies in mythology led him to another field of activity in which his influence was more durable and extensive, that of the comparative science of religions.


“The Chinese idea of religion was evidently very different from our own. Religion was to them giving good advice, improving the manners of the people; and they seem to have thought that for such a purpose they could never have enough teachers and preachers.”

--F. Max Müller, The Religions of China

Max Müller: TAOISM (Excerpt)

The next home-grown religion in China is Taoism, ascribed to Lâo-tzé. Of him and of his life, if we exclude mere legends, even less is known than of Confucius. Some have, indeed, gone so far as to deny his existence altogether, and though his reported interview with Confucius has been generally considered as establishing once for all the historical character of both these sages, even that meeting, fixed as having taken place about 517 B.C., might well be the product of tradition only. Something like it has happened, indeed, to most founders of religion. Tradition adds so many fanciful and miraculous traits to the real story of their lives that, like a tree smothered and killed by ivy, the subject of all these fables, the stem round which the ivy clusters, becomes almost invisible, and seems at last to be fabulous itself. Still the trunk must have been there, and must have been real in order to serve as the support of that luxuriant ivy. It is said, for instance, of Lâo-tzé that his mother bore him for seventy-two years, and that, when he was born at last, in 604 B.C., he had already white hair. Is it not palpable how this tradition arose? Lâo-tzé was the name given to him, and that name signifies Old Child, or Old Boy. This name being once given, everything else followed. He was born with white hair, and spoke words of wisdom like an old man. Even the very widely spread idea that the fathers of these wonderful heroes were old men recurs in this instance, for the father of Confucius also was said to have been well stricken in years. But, after all, the parents and what was fabled or believed about them in China are nothing to us.

Max Müller (biography)

Max Müller

MAX MÜLLER, FRIEDRICH (1823-1900), Anglo-German orientalist and comparative philologist, was born at Dessau on the 6th of December 1823, being the son of Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), the German poet, celebrated for his phil-Hellenic lyrics, who was ducal librarian at Dessau. The elder Müller had endeared himself to the most intellectual circles in Germany by his amiable character and his genuine poetic gift; his songs had been utilized by musical composers, notably Schubert; and it was his son's good fortune to meet in his youth with a succession of eminent friends, who, already interested in him for his father's sake, and charmed by the qualities which they discovered in the young man himself, powerfully aided him by advice and patronage. Mendelssohn, who was his godfather, dissuaded him from indulging his natural bent to the study of music; Professor Brockhaus of the University of Leipzig, where Max Müller matriculated in 1841, induced him to take up Sanskrit; Bopp, at the University of Berlin (1844), made the Sanskrit student a scientific comparative philologist; Schelling at the same university, inspired him with a love for metaphysical speculation, though failing to attract him to his own philosophy; Burnouf, at Paris in the following year, by teaching him Zend, started him on the track of inquiry into the science of comparative religion, and impelled him to edit the Rig Veda; and when, in 1846, Max Müller came to England upon this errand, Bunsen, in conjunction with Professor H. H. Wilson, prevailed upon the East India Company to undertake the expense of publication. Up to this time Max Müller had lived the life of a poor student, supporting himself partly by copying manuscripts, but Bunsen's introductions to Queen Victoria and the prince consort, and to Oxford University, laid the foundation for him of fame and fortune. In 1848 the printing of his Rig Veda at the University Press obliged him to settle in Oxford, a step which decided his future career. He arrived at a favourable conjuncture: the Tractarian strife, which had so long thrust learning into the background, was just over, and Oxford was becoming accessible to modern ideas. The young German excited curiosity and interest, and it was soon discovered that, although a genuine scholar, he was no mere bookworm. Part of his social success was due to his readiness to exert his musical talents at private parties. Max Müller was speedily subjugated by the genius loci. He was appointed deputy Taylorian professor of modern languages in 1850, and the German government failed to tempt him back to Strassburg. In the following year he was made M.A. and honorary fellow of Christ Church, and in 1858 he was elected a fellow of All Souls. In 1854 the Crimean War gave him the opportunity of utilizing his oriental learning in vocabularies and schemes of transliteration. In 1857 he successfully essayed another kind of literature in his beautiful story Deutsche Liebe, written both in German and English. He had by this time become an extensive contributor to English periodical literature, and had written several of the essays subsequently collected as Chips from a German Workshop. The most important of them was the fascinating essay on “Comparative Mythology” in the Oxford Essays for 1856. His valuable History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the primitive religion of the Brahmans (and hence the Vedic period only), was published in 1859.