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KNOWLEDGE AND INTERPRETATION:A HERMENEUTICAL STUDY OF WISDOM IN EARLY CONFUCIAN

AND ISRAELITE TRADITIONS

Wisdom lies at the center of all philosophical and religious traditions.Philosophy comes directly from the love and pursuit (philia) ofwisdom (sophia) concerning the nature and meaning of existence,reality, knowledge, and goodness, while religion in essence is a searchfor wisdom on how to transcend our limitations, whether physical,intellectual, or spiritual. On the surface, wisdom appears to be simplya collection of proverbs, maxims, and aphorisms arising from lifeexperiences that are in turn used to guide particular groups of indi-viduals on how to deal with daily matters. This is so-called practicalwisdom, a kind of wisdom closely associated with skill, know-how, andshrewdness by which people can perform their duties well and solvetheir problems satisfactorily. There is another, deeper meaning ofwisdom, however, about the nature, the ultimate meaning, and thehidden “pattern” of the world, society, and individual life. It is namedvariously “intellectual wisdom,” “transcendental wisdom,” or “greatwisdom.” It is a kind of knowledge, but it is not an ordinary kind ofknowledge. It is associated with life experiences, but it also frequentlyrequires us to sever links with experience. It permeates religious,social, and personal matters, but it often does not come to the front;rather it hides itself in the somewhat mysterious revelation of the pat-terns by which people and events shape themselves.

This article attempts to provide a conceptual discussion of wisdomby hermeneutically interpreting what is said about wisdom in earlyConfucian and early Israelite traditions. Modern scholarship tends tomake a clear distinction between the theological and ethical wisdom.We will argue that this is a narrow vision of the history of ideas andcannot be easily applied to ancient systems of thought. Wisdom inearly Confucian and Israelite traditions is both philosophical and

XINZHONG YAO, professor, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Universityof Wales, Lampeter Hunan Normal University. Specialties: comparative religion, ethics,comparative philosophy. E-mail: xinzhong.yao@theology.ox.ac.uk

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32:2 (June 2005) 297–311© 2005 Journal of Chinese Philosophy

religious, closely related to the concept of the world order and howhumans understand, adjust themselves to, and make use of the con-stancy of the universe.

Methodological Paradigms

A comparative framework cannot be established until we have com-pleted critical studies of a number of texts important for earlyIsraelite and Confucian understanding and have considered theirmetaphysical, epistemological, and ethical implications. There aremany ways and approaches available to our study of wisdom in theearly Israelite and Confucian traditions—theological, historical,socio-anthropological, or philosophical. Traditionally in the Westthere are two kinds of methodology employed within the disciplineof the study of religious traditions. The first may be termed “textualstudy” as it focuses on sacred scriptures, taking the texts as transpar-ent blueprints of a particular tradition that tell us about religiousleaders’ authentic teachings and early followers’ practices. Thismethodology was initiated and fundamentally shaped by the under-standing that the Christian Bible was the only source of truth, andthat by studying the passages of biblical texts we were able to graspthe messages from Jesus Christ and his disciples. For a long timeindeed the study of biblical texts facilitated the transmission of reli-gious, philosophical, and historical knowledge. However, religioustexts do not necessarily provide us with a true picture of the originand early developments of a religion. Although believers may havebeen convinced that the texts are full of religious visions, these textswere in fact produced or edited during a much later period thatdemonstrated a significant difference from the earlier period in philo-sophical and religious views of the world and life. Therefore, studiesof these texts most likely point to certain beliefs and ideals reflectedin later authors’ own experience and values.

Having seen the problems of textual studies, a number of scholars,for example, Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) and Ninian Smart(1927–2001), advanced a new approach to the study of religion, whichwas generally accepted as phenomenological paradigm. Phenomeno-logical methodology focuses on the dimensions of religion that canbe categorized, observed, and recorded, and separates what religionis from the observer’s religious experience. On the one hand it aimsto describe faithfully what people believe and behave, by which wecan understand the message and the meaning of sacredness within aparticular religion. On the other hand, however, since it desires forquasi-scientific “objectivity,” the phenomenology of religious studies

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tends to be content with an uncritical perspective on religious ideasand practices.

The third paradigm arises from the application of hermeneutics tothe study of religion that we are going to take for the study of wisdomin early Confucian and Israelite traditions. Disregarding subjectivereadings of the text and objective descriptions of the sacred, thisapproach is aimed at an interpretative reconstruction of what wisdomis according to certain texts. Fundamentally hermeneutical, our par-adigm recognizes that the message of Confucian and Israelite textslies in their existential appeal, and their meaning is clothed in a formof discourse that is an expression of the time in which the texts werewritten. Hermeneutics is a theory of interpretation. Different fromearlier biblical interpretation methods, however, it confirms that alldifferent interpretations are closely related with the interpreters’ ownexperience and understanding of the ultimate reality and truth.Chung-ying Cheng elevates this new interpretation methodology to the onto-metaphysical level, calling it an “onto-hermeneuticalenterprise” embracing both Gadamerian subject-oriented reflectiveinsights and the analytical constructive theories into an integratedtheory of human understanding relative to our interpretation ofhuman existence and reality.1

Both Confucianism and Judaism are essentially traditions of inter-pretation; each generation comes to a new view or understanding ofearly Confucian and Israelite ideas and theories through interpretingand reinterpreting the classical writings, and in the process a hugenumber of commentaries have been generated. But our hermeneuti-cal approach is not confined merely to historical and allegorical inter-pretation. It is characterized by the following features. First, itsearches for meaning and answers through a meaningful combinationof the particular and the general, and in the interaction between apassage of a text and the sense of the whole text, and between inter-pretive ideas and creative experience. Hermeneutics reveals that ourinterpretation of a particular message is meaningful only when wehave a general sense of the situation overall, while the meaning of thewhole text is relevant only when we have fore-projected an initialmeaning from a particular message. This is termed Heidegger’s“hermeneutic circle.”2 The importance of this interdependencebetween the whole and the particular is that through this circle andindeed through going through this circle repeatedly it has becomepossible for us to reconstruct our knowledge concerning a particularmessage or text.

The second feature of our hermeneutical paradigm is that it seeksto shed new light on questions about meaning and understanding inConfucian and Israelite wisdom contexts, by looking at the Israelite

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wisdom texts in the light of Confucian understanding and by inter-preting Confucian wisdom in the light of Israelite views. A particularexample of wisdom thinking in one tradition is meaningful to us onlyif it can be reflected in our comparative framework, either in contrastor in parallel, which is based on another hermeneutical principle that “Human understanding takes its direction from the fore-understanding deriving from its particular existential situation, andthis fore-understanding stakes out the thematic framework andparameters of every interpretation.”3 The Confucian-Israelite inter-interpretation, that is, their mutually being the interpretative “other,”is our framework and parameter for this study, and therefore our“fore-understanding.” The value of this inter-interpretation is that itallows presuppositions which are implicit and unobserved within onesystem to come into view through juxtaposition with another. Placingtexts in the narrative context of their occurrence, the comparativehermeneutics involves their decontextualizing in one context andtheir recontextualizing in another.

Third, it aims to understand the Confucian and Israelite writingsnot only as historical documents of the past but also as living dis-courses that continue to address the central concerns of these two tra-ditions. In the process of recontextualization, the writings are notsimply taken as what they were, but also as what they should be, witheach being placed in parallel to the other. A hermeneutical paradigmsuch as this one requires a distance from both of the traditions thatare to be compared, so that our interpretation of the ideas containedin one does not become exclusively apologetic for the other, and yetat the same time it requires that the distance should not be so greatthat a reconstruction has to be based on purely subjective imagina-tion. To reconstruct hermeneutically the wisdom world of ancientIsrael and China, the paradigm requires to set ourselves in the timeand cultural setting when wisdom teaching was made and instructiongiven, and to evaluate them in relation to the world in which the Confucian and Israelite teachers lived and operated.

Wisdom Models and Wisdom Traditions

An examination of two different wisdom traditions enables us to havea better understanding of the nature of wisdom. What is wisdom?Where does it come from? What functions has it played in history andhow is it transmitted? Many scholars have already devoted greateffort to uncovering the answers to these questions, seeking clues inthe understanding of wisdom as the ability to cope with life problems,or as practical knowledge of the laws of life and of the world based

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on experience, or as the quest for self-understanding and for masteryof the world, or more generally as a philosophical way of thinking anda religious principle of living.

As far as the nature of wisdom in the Old Testament is concerned,outstanding scholarly opinions range from “practical knowledge ofthe laws of life and of the world, based on experience,”4 to “a set ofideas, or an attitude to life,” or “innate intelligence.”5 Concerning itssource, it is said either to come from “the quest of self-understandingin terms of relationships,”6 or to issue “from the effort to discoverorder in human life.”7 There is no doubt that all these aspects are ofsignificance for our understanding of human wisdom traditions, but itis more important, as we will argue, that wisdom is a path to humandestiny, deriving from human observation of the world, natural andsocial, as well as from human reflection on the hidden “laws” that aremanifested through the sequences of phenomena, affairs, and events.

Wisdom exists in, and functions according to, various models, andit passes itself on through different transmitting ways. First, wisdomis a way of thinking, in which human relationships with the externalworld, with other people in a social context and with spiritual author-ity are contemplated, speculated, and analyzed. Wisdom thinking isdistinct from other kinds of thinking in the sense that it searches forthe best way to cope with life based on wisely calculating all factorsinvolved and anticipating the possible consequences, bad or good, asguidelines for action. Secondly, wisdom grows in the transmission ofpast knowledge and experience. Wisdom tradition is enriched througheach generation that adds its own knowledge and experience to theenterprise. It defines the way of life in the sense that it has been for-malized as legal codes, mores, and customs, which have a discipliningand forceful power to impose on individuals in choosing particularcourses of action. In transmission, wisdom tradition itself changes inresponse to the changes of social and cultural circumstances, and ourunderstanding of the tradition has also changed accordingly. Thirdly,wisdom exists in a special kind of literature or text that theoreticallyreflects wisdom thinking and records wisdom tradition in a condensedform (for example the Analects of Confucius, and the Israelite Bookof Proverbs). A wisdom text is normally the result of several genera-tions’ efforts in collecting, editing, and compiling existing materials,and it presents an either loosely or systematically composed book thatis used as a textbook for education or as general reading for thepublic.

The dividing of wisdom into different models and transmissionways is useful only from the point of view of form. In fact, thesemodels are always intertwined and must be seen as three facets of thesame wisdom tradition. Therefore, to understand the nature of

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wisdom we have to go to the content and context in which wisdomexists and operates. From this perspective, wisdom can be understoodas contemplating on the world order that makes human knowledgeand understanding meaningful and possible, as an intellectual devel-opment that springs from internal intelligence and external investi-gation, as enriched and extended relationships between humans andthe world and society, and as an attempt to understand the seeminglyunfathomable power that is beyond the human existence.

Wisdom and the World Order

The world we live in is full of mysteries and wonders. Do these mys-teries and wonders reflect an original universal order? If there is suchan order, why did it come into being, and how does it work? Is theorder essentially of a divine or natural origin and nature? Investiga-tion into these questions and into the methods of how to cope withthe world and how to make use of natural and social laws for humanpurposes marked the beginning of human civilization and is thepower driving humans to search for “wisdom.” Therefore wisdomstarts with the understanding that there is a certain order or patternin the world, in a series of events and between different stages ofdevelopment or evolution, which is either expressed in theologicalterms as “the work or creation of God” (Ecclesiastes, 11: 5)8 or innatural terms as “the constant order in the course of Nature” (tianxing you chang, in Xunzi, 17:1).9

If this “constant order” or pattern is discerned, then rules and reg-ulations can be established. By following rules and regulations, peoplewill find it much easier to cope with life’s problems and to deal withsimilar situations. Those who have discovered the order are thencalled teachers of wisdom or “wise men,” and those who have skil-fully established and employed the “rules” and “regulations” arenamed “sages” or “sage-kings.” Rules and regulations are thenmorally justified and become ethical, just, and righteous; people areexpected to follow them and to implement them, and for doing so arepromised certain awards and rewards, in terms either of material hap-piness or of spiritual benefit. However, life does not always appear tobe as simple as this. Those who follow the “good” rules are not alwaysable to lead a successful career, or even worse they suffer undeservedpunishments, while those who disregard rules would enjoy a rich andglorious life. This touches the second level of the meaning for theworld order. Those who attempt to reflect on such a “disorderedorder” or “unjust justice” aim to explain why this should happen, andtheir discoveries become recognized as “wisdom” or “insight” of ahigher rank.

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Different societies and cultures have developed different ways tocarry out the investigation and to formalize the “rules,” and this pro-duces different “forms” or “kinds” of wisdom. However, underlyingall these forms is an attempt to unlock the secrets of the world andlife, and then to make use of the order to lead a happy life. BothIsraelite and Confucian thinkers believe that the knowledge of thisorder enables them to have insights into seemingly disorganizedthings and matters, to grasp the laws of the natural and the socialworld, and to discharge their duties successfully. The authors of theso-called wisdom texts strongly oppose the disorder currently pre-vailing in life, having serious concerns about the chaos or disruptionthat was dominant in their times, and take wisdom as a way, a partic-ularly effective way, so it is believed, to order, or to restore the orderof, the world. Can this order be fully understood or followed? On dif-ferent grounds Israelite sages and Confucian masters generallybelieved that, however hidden and complicated, the order could beknown. At the same time they were fully aware of the elements of mystery and uncertainty. While some Confucians attributed theunknown to the Way or the Destiny that was beyond ordinary com-prehension, most of them would admit that eventually “learningbelow will be able to penetrate what is above” (The Analects 14:35).For some of the Israelite sages, this question has more serious consequences for their interpretation of wisdom. Believing that theorder is bestowed by the Lord, they wondered if, without divine revelation, humans would ever be able to “penetrate” the designs ofGod, know the depth of the order, and this led some of them finallyto admit that God and his creation are “great beyond our knowledge”(Job, 36: 26).

Wisdom and Intellectual Development

A good understanding of the world order is, at least partly, derivedfrom intellectual training and reflects how humans are differentiatedfrom other beings. Through the Confucian and Israelite discourseswisdom has become a living tradition and a body of literature. Thetradition was primarily driven by “teachers” or sages, and was closelyassociated with a particular understanding of reality. The ultimatereality is twofold: the religious and the intellectual. The former,whether called God’s creation or the Order, Tian, or the Mandate ofHeaven, is believed to be out there, challenging humans to search andto find, while the latter, whether termed as Wisdom or Truth, isattained only in acknowledging, and conforming to, the Order or theWay. In this sense, wisdom is a reward to those who have foundharmony or union with the ultimate reality.

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Wisdom is more than a tradition and literature. It is also an atti-tude towards life and a special experience of life that arises from intel-ligent reflection on human experience, and it is expressed through the medium of language. Life and language are multi-faceted, as iswisdom. It is well-known that in the European tradition, Greek termsfor wisdom refer to different aspects of intellectual, moral, and ordi-nary life, and all are very much intellectually oriented. Sophia refersto the gifts of a philosopher who has devoted himself to a contem-plative life in pursuit of truth. Phronesis, or practical wisdom, refersto the quality of a statesman who is able to locate the prudent courseof action and resist the urgings of the passions and the deceptions ofthe senses. Episteme refers to a form of scientific knowledge devel-oped in those who know the nature of things and the principles gov-erning their behavior.10 There are also a number of Hebrew wordsthat are equivalent to what we call “wisdom”: binah (understanding,intelligence), hakam (to make wise, teach), hokma (wisdom, skill), andsakal (to become wise or intelligent).11 The root word most frequentlyused in the Hebrew texts is hkm, which according to R.N. Whybray“refers to innate intelligence of a quite general kind,”12 and which “isexpressed in a variety of abilities or skills.” Anyone who possessedthese skills would be “considered wise”.13 The close relationshipbetween intellectual knowledge and wisdom can be seen from the factthat the Hebrew word da’at (knowledge), which is derived from theroot yd’ (to know), has a close association with wisdom thinking inthe Hebrew scriptures where it occurs 90 times, of which there are“40 times in Proverbs, 11 in Job, 8 in Ecclesiastes,” and in the GreekBible it has 21 equivalents ranging from epistemological knowledgeto philosophical wisdom.14

The ancient Chinese developed a fundamentally different systemof writing language that originated from pictographic images and wasintended to make connections between the internal conception andthe external images.15 In earlier writing systems, such as oracle-boneinscriptions (around 13–15 centuries BCE) and bronze inscriptions(12–9 centuries BCE), the character for wisdom is a word for knowl-edge, pronounced as ‘zhi’, composed of a zhi (knowledge), a bai(whiteness), and a yu (air).16 In later texts, this character is simplifiedas a word for knowledge that is also pronounced zhi, composed of anarrow (shi) and a mouth (kou), symbolizing that one grasps the prin-ciple or reason (li) of an event or thing as quickly as a flying arrow.Wisdom is believed to be an extension of knowledge. A definition of zhi is later given as: “Wisdom means knowledge, [and the man ofwisdom] refers to the one who has nothing unknown.”17 Because ofthe identity between wisdom and knowledge, in most early Chinesephilosophical and religious texts, wisdom zhi is not separated from

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knowledge, zhi, which indicates that in the mind of the ancientChinese, wisdom is primarily derived from knowledge or results fromthe extension of knowledge. This etymological identification pointsthe Chinese concept of wisdom in a heavily intellectual direction.

Wisdom for Enriched Relationships

To know is to make a connection, and to be wise is to interpret intel-lectually and to make use of connections skilfully. Wisdom is thusessentially concerned with relationships, and it is meaningful only inthe context of relationships. In many philosophical and religioussystems, relationships are primarily defined by the four objects weattempt to grasp intelligently and interpret wisely—the world, society,the self, and the spiritual ultimate—by which we gain four kinds ofwisdom—nature, social, personal, and transcendental. Just as theworld, society, the self, and the spiritual ultimate cannot be totally sep-arated from each other, wisdom of a particular tradition contains allfour aspects of insight, knowledge, or intuition, and it equips us withefficient tools to understand, interpret, and regulate our relationshipwith the natural environment, social institutions, individuals, and reli-gious “others.”To fully understand the nature and function of wisdom,we will analyze below these four kinds of wisdom one by one.

The first relationship humans attempt to establish and understandis between us and the outside world (the cosmos, the universe, nature,etc.). Concerning the natural world, wisdom questions the origin,nature, and order of the world in which we live and act. The order ofthe world may refer to the order of creation in a theistic tradition, orto the natural or moral way in other kinds of traditions. Whether ofa divine nature or not, the order or the way is believed to underlie allphenomena and to demand human conformity. In this sense, ourknowledge and insight about it may be called “cosmic wisdom” thatsearches for answers to the deepest and most fundamental meta-physical questions, or “nature wisdom” that is drawn from knowledgeconcerning first the relationship between individual events and thenatural order, and secondly the way humans should behave in rela-tion to things and the environment.

In 1 Kings 4 :3 it is recorded that, apart from three thousandproverbs, Solomon also described “plant life, from the cedar ofLebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls,” and “taught aboutanimals and birds, reptiles and fish,” with the intention that certainregular patterns in the natural world should be employed as guide-lines for human behavior. Knowledge about natural events and phenomena is also frequently the source of analogies to further

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understanding and to master life. Israelite teachers frequently drewwise teachings from animal behavior; for example, they taught that“Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise”: ants,conies, locusts, and lizards (Proverbs, 30: 24–28).

Knowledge concerning the natural world is also an importantelement of Confucian wisdom. The sayings in the Analects are pri-marily concerned with social, political, and personal matters, but thisdoes not mean that Confucius had no interest in natural phenomena.He once wondered what was the reason for “young plants that fail toproduce blossoms and blossoms that fail to produce fruits” (TheAnalects, 9: 22). He also observed “the four seasons going round andhundred things coming into being” (17: 19), underlying which, hefurther reasoned, there must be an order. Xunzi naturalized theconcept of Heaven and for him all mysteries of the universe could beexplained by the sequences of natural events. It is in the knowledgeof nature that we gain our wisdom to interpret the seemingly un-interpretable, and to control violent natural forces such as weatherand flood. In the Confucian discourse of nature wisdom, we can see an eco-ethical discipline requiring us to respect nature, follownatural laws, and protect the natural environment. Underlying such a discipline is a deep wisdom that sees humans and nature asone unity and maintains that humans must co-exist with the naturalenvironment.

The second relationship we must have is with society, including itspolitical, juridical, ethical, and communal aspects. Understanding thisrelation enables us to gain so-called social wisdom and leads to theformation of ethical norms, moral establishments, legal systems, andpolitical infrastructures by which a particular social order is pre-scribed for all people to follow. These are all practical matters we haveto master. Therefore social wisdom is also called practical wisdom,involving skills and abilities to cope with the demands of life. Skill isa word with many implications and meanings. It refers to the so-called“soft” skills such as attitudes, moral approaches, and skilful ways todeal with difficult situations. It also refers to “hard” skills that are usedto overcome difficulties and complete tasks. Confucius placed a stresson both meanings of skill, and he exhorted his students to learn aboutit to sort out practical problems. One of his disciples praised Confu-cius, saying that he was not only a sage, but also was “skilled in somany things,” to which Confucius explained that the reason he hadmany practical accomplishments in regard to everyday matters wasthat he had been brought up in humble circumstances (The Analects9:6). To illustrate the importance of skills for completing tasks, Con-fucius compared the cultivation of life skills to the sharpening of toolsof a craftsman:“A craftsman who wishes to practise his craft well must

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first sharpen his tools” (The Analects, 15:10). The Hebrew wisdomtexts also talk about skills as part of practical wisdom. The Book ofProverbs not only highlights the skills enabling one to shun offdangers, but also suggests that with good practical skills a wise manis able to build a house (Proverbs 24: 3). In dealing with political andlegal matters, we gain legal and political wisdom that comes fromreflection on evaluation of governing practices in relation to thepeople, and it is applied to sort out legal and political problems.

The key to this kind of wisdom is to maintain a sound social orderby which peace and harmony can last. How to govern well is one ofthe fundamental issues for Confucians, who primarily advised theheads of states on policy and political ideology. Confucians advocateda moralist government and suggested that if proper use was made ofmoral influence, order and peace would come naturally. To the ques-tion of what to do to win the support of the common people, Confu-cius replied, “Raise the straight and set them over the crooked andthe common people will look up to you. Raise the crooked and setthem over the straight and the common people will not look up toyou” (The Analects, 2:19). Political wisdom in ancient Israel was pri-marily concerned with how to deal with juridical cases, to ensure thatthe wise would be rewarded and the fool suffer the consequences ofhis foolishness. Therefore how to maintain social justice becomescentral to the Israelite legal wisdom. This highly praised wisdom inpolitical and legal matters can be illustrated by Solomon’s judgementin a case where two women were competing for one baby (1 Kings,25–28).

The third relationship each of us must enter is with other individ-uals. This is further divided into two aspects: one concerns personalrelationships revealed as one and others, male and female, young andold, superior and inferior, etc., and the other concerns the internalworld of human beings, including both rational and irrational ele-ments. Personal relationship is necessary for human survival but atthe same time creates great difficulties for individuals to cope with.Generation after generation has acquired fundamental insights intothese relationships and etched them into the collective memorythrough careful formulation of wise sayings and instructions. InHebrew and Confucian texts we find a great many sayings concernedwith these aspects, providing us with wise teachings about how to treata particular person in a fruitful way. The second aspect of personalwisdom concerns how a particular individual him/herself thinks, ismotivated, and responds wisely in the face of choices, and what kindof choices each of us should make in a particular situation and at aparticular time, by which one’s personal character is formed andknown.18

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In a sense, it is more difficult to know ourselves intelligently thanto grasp the world outside, because most of us find it extremely diffi-cult to form a balanced opinion when introspecting the inner self, andmany have a strong bias toward basing it on our own feelings, emo-tions, and views. It is in this sense that the author of the Daode jingelevates the wisdom of knowing oneself above knowing others: “Hewho knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened”(Chapter 33). Personal wisdom requires one to appreciate what hecan and what he cannot do. Anyone who attempts to do what isbeyond his ability is bound to fail, while one who knows his limita-tions will achieve success. Self-control is the key to living a peacefullife, as it says in The Book of Proverbs: “One who is slow to anger isbetter than the mighty, and one whose temper is controlled than onewho captures a city” (Proverbs, 16:32). These qualities often lead oneto modesty or even humility, which is one of the most important ele-ments in wisdom. Since a person of wisdom knows his limits, he doesnot waste his time in complaining about his situation. Rather he iscontent with what he has, the quality Confucius commended in hisdisciple Yan Hui: “How admirable Hui is! Living in a mean dwellingon a bowlful of rice and a ladleful of water is hardship most menwould find intolerable, but Hui does not allow this to affect his joy”(The Analects, 6:11). A person of wisdom will find peace within whilebeing misjudged by others. For Confucius one remained a gentle-man if he did not take offence when others failed to appreciate hisabilities (The Analects, 1:1).

Wisdom as a Sacred Enterprise

In ancient philosophical and religious traditions, wisdom is alwaysrelated to the ultimate reality, either called the spiritual being or themystic power. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the ultimate reality isthe Creator or God, the understanding of whom leads to what JamesCrenshaw defines as theological wisdom.19 Theological wisdom comesfrom reflection upon one’s relationship with the transcendentalpower. In ancient Israel this is primarily concerned with the acknowl-edgement of the divine source of wisdom: “Where then does wisdomcome from? And where is the place of understanding? It is hiddenfrom the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of air” (Job,28: 20–22). The hiddenness of wisdom does not mean that wisdom isnot possible for humans, but it implies that God alone has access towisdom and humans will not have wisdom unless God gives her tothem: “I went about seeking how to get her for myself. . . . But I per-ceived that I would not possess wisdom unless God gave her to me”

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(Wisdom of Solomon, 8: 18–21). The second aspect of Israelite theo-logical wisdom is concerned with questions of theodicy, how to vin-dicate the justice of God, in the face of prevailing injustice anddisorder. According to the so-called “Deuteronomic theology,” if oneobeys God and his laws, one will be rewarded with good life, protec-tion, riches, health, etc. If one disobeys, then one will be punished.However, it is not always so in reality, since good people can sufferand the wicked live an easy life. To explain this, wisdom thinkers, par-ticularly the author of the Book of Job, expounded upon the humanrelation with God and developed speculative wisdom in Hebrewthought.

Similar developments also happened at roughly the same period inChina when divine justice questions were raised because good peoplesuffered greatly from the consequences of natural and social disas-ters. A reflection on them is recorded in some poems of the Book ofPoetry, where people complained that Heaven did not care about theinjustice they suffered. Rationalism arising particularly during the 7thand 5th centuries, however, redirected the thinking of most Confu-cian masters and turned them away from questioning the justice orinjustice of Heaven to the examination of human ways: “The Way of Heaven is distant, while the way of humans is near.”20 Instead ofexpounding upon metaphysical questions concerning divine justice,Confucians explored what humans should do to be in conformity withthe heavenly order. However, this does not mean that within classi-cal Confucianism there is no speculation on human relationships withthe transcendental. In thinking of the human relation to Heaven Confucians outlined “theological wisdom” as follows: What Heavenendowed could not be taken away by humans (The Analects, 7:23);humans had a mission endowed by Heaven and it was their primaryduty to carry it out (The Analects, 9:5); Heaven could not be cheated,and one who was against the will of Heaven would have nowhere topray for (The Analects, 3:13); and Heaven or the “will of Heaven” canbe known through understanding human heart/mind (xin) andthrough cultivating human nature (Mencius, 7A:1). These have pro-vided Confucian wisdom with a sacred ground on which all otherhuman enterprises are engaged and expanded.

Conclusion

Rich in content and style, the early Israelite wisdom literature and theConfucian classics open up ways for us to appreciate wisdom.Employing hermeneutical tools, our reading of these texts from twohistorically unrelated traditions yields an interpretation that both

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Biblical wisdom and Confucian wisdom are intended to draw up aroadmap for intellectual explorers and to determine a route for spir-itual travellers. Wisdom is thus essentially a journey, taken either col-lectively by a group of people, or individually by a particular person.The journey is a process of overcoming the tension within as well asbetween the human and the superhuman, or between the experien-tial and the mysterious.21 It is also an expedition that enables humanbeings to go from natural endowment to the completion of theirmission in the world. More importantly, it is intended to be a journeyof personal growth, both in intellectual and in spiritual terms, fromthe experiential accumulation of knowledge and possession of skillsthat enable us to cope with life, to the mastery of rules, laws, and prin-ciples that enable us to steer skilfully the voyage of life in social,ethical, and political spheres, and finally to the intellectual and spiri-tual fulfilment that enables us to overcome our limitations. This is adevelopment from the secular to the sacred, from ordinary knowl-edge to spiritual transcendence, enabling everyone who takes part init to reach the ideal, the sage in Confucianism and the prophet inancient Israelite tradition.

UNIVERSITY OF WALESLampeter, United Kingdom

Endnotes

1. “This notion of hermeneutics could also ascend to the level where ontological refer-ence to both the subject and the object in a unified experience of the ultimate realityis required to be made clear” (Chung-ying Cheng,“Inquiring into the Primary Model:Yijing and Structure of Chinese Hermeneutic Tradition,” Journal of Chinese Philos-ophy 30, no. 3-4 [2003]).

2. We can genuinely grasp the positive possibility of the most primordial kind ofknowing “only when we have understood that our first, last, and constant task in inter-preting is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and for-conception to be pre-sented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientifictheme secure by working out those fore-structures in terms of the things themselves”(Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson[Oxford: Blackwell, 1962], p. 153).

3. Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven, London:Yale University Press, 1994), p. 92.

4. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967),p. 418.

5. R. N. Whybray, The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 1974), pp. 7, 72.

6. James Crenshaw, Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom (New York: Ktav, 1976), p. 484.7. John G. Gammie, Walter A. Brueggemann, W. Lee Humphreys, and James M. Ward,

eds., Israelite Wisdom: Theological and Literary Essays in Honor of Samuel Terrien(Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1978), p. 35.

8. Quotations from Israelite wisdom texts are made from The New Oxford AnnotatedBible with the Apocrypha, second edition, edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M.Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

310 xinzhong yao

9. Quotations from Confucian classics in this article come primarily from sources in Chinese, with references to the following English translations: The Analects of Confucius and Mencius (tr. by D.C. Lau, Penguin Classics, 1979, 1970) and Xunzi:Complete Works, Vols. 1–3 (tr. by John Knoblock) (Palo Alto: Stanford UniversityPress, 1988–1994).

10. Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 14.

11. Robert Young, Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible, eighth edition (London:Lutterworth Press, 1939), pp. 1059–1060.

12. Whybray, 1974, p. 7.13. Dianne Bergant, What Are They Saying about Wisdom Literature (New York/Ramsey:

Paulist Press, 1984), p. 7.14. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, edited by G. Johannes Botterweck and

Helmer Ringgren, translated by David E. Green, Volume V (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Wiliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986), p. 453.

15. According to Xu Shen (30–124), the author of the first etymological dictionary ofChinese characters (around the year of 120), original characters were simply imita-tions of natural things: “the images in the sky,” “the patterns on the earth,” and “thepatterns of birds and beasts” (Shuowen jiezi zhu, A Commentary on ExplainingSimple Graphs and Analyzing Compound Characters [Hanzhou: Zhejiang gujichubanshe, 1998], p. 753).

16. Hanyu da zidian, edited by Hanyu da zidian bianji weiyuanhui (Sichuan: Sichuancishu chubanshe, 1993), p. 638. It is also specifically explained that zhi (wisdom) is acharacter for Knowledge (see Shuowen jiezi zhu [Hanzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe,1998], pp. 137, 227).

17. Hanyu da zidian, 1993, p. 638.18. The goal of all wisdom is the formation of character. For a more informed discussion

of this aspect of wisdom, see William P. Brown, Character in Crisis: A Fresh Approachto the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996).

19. James Crenshaw, Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom (New York: KTAV, 1976), p. ix.20. Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. 1, translated by Derk Bodde

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 32.21. In discussing the boundary of wisdom literature in the Old Testament, Katherine Dell

comments that “Tension between the human and divine is at the centre of an under-standing of wisdom, and the wisdom enterprise is to be characterised by this tensionbetween the two emphases” (Katherine Dell, “Get Wisdom, Get Insight”: An Intro-duction to Israel’s Wisdom Literature [Macon: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc., 2000],p. 6).

Chinese Glossary

bai tian

Hanyu da zidian tian xing you chang

Hanyu da zidian bianji weiyuanhui xin

Yan Hui

kou Yijing

li yu

shi zhi

Shuowen jiezi zhu zhi

Sichuan cishu chubanshe

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