Mr. Chairman; My Friends:

I much appreciate your invitation to speak today. And I appreciate it even more as the result of coming to know so many of your members in these last years. Our disposition is to attach a good deal of importance to practical economic, political, social, and diplomatic experience in areas of overseas study. I, by contrast, have emerged from these last years, which have been fairly rich in practical experience, with a much enhanced respect for the role of scholarship.

In accordance with tradition, it now becomes my duty to perform a time honored rite—to inflict on you the Presidential Address. I will try to do this as painlessly and as quickly as my own inadequacies will permit, but before settling down to the excruciating details I would like, in all seriousness, to throw out a suggestion to this Association, although other learned societies are welcome to it because I have no intention of seeking a patent; namely, that die Presidential Address be given either by the vice-president who becomes president at this meeting or by the rearing president at the next annual meeting. This procedure will permit the president to devote his undivided attention to the business of the Association while he is president and give the writer an opportunity to prepare his talk when he is not completely up to his ears in other Association activities. It should produce better Presidential Addresses, and should prolong the lives of ex-presidents by at least five years.

The great Chinese philosopher Ch'eng Hao (1032–1085) once set forth in a A memorial to the throne a three-point training program for statesmen. His formula for success is as valid today as it was for the Sung emperors nearly a thousand

years ago:

understand the principles taught in books;

find out the right and wrong in history;

know how to deal with men;

—more briefly, knowledge and wisdom.

Accounts of China's contributions to world culture have progessed far beyond the “paper and gunpowder” stage, but even today they seldom emphasize the Chinese role in developing techniques essential to what is known as “the modern, centralized, bureaucratic state.” This is somewhat curious, since complex organization on a vast scale is more characteristic of our age than any other activity, and it is in precisely this field that the Chinese have probably made their most important contribution.

The studies in this volume explore some of the main aspects of Hinduism in India and of Buddhism in Ceylon. Because each article is based on the author's field observations, it deals with the realities of religion as well as with its ideology, and with actual religious behavior no less than with its hopes and beliefs. These papers are not intended to give a systematic coverage of the two religions; each is rather a systematic analysis of a certain part of the religion as practiced. The emphasis is on structure and process more than on description and content. The gods are not catalogued nor are the main ceremonies enumerated; rather, the meaning of deities and of ritual in the lives of the practitioners is examined.

This paper is a preliminary study of Kim Yuka, a seventeenth-century reformer and statesman, and his role in the introduction of the tribute tax reform in the two southern provinces of Ch'ungch'ŏng and Chŏlla. It is also intended as a case study of one aspect of the actual operation of seventeenth-century Yi government. Special attention is paid to the inter-relationship between the mode of operation of the Yi government and Kim Yuk's reform efforts.

The introduction and operation of the cultivation (culture) system in Java were closely tied to the collection of landrent. Reinsma has noted this clearly and succinctly in his contention diat “the landrent served as the lever for making use of an important part of the labor and land of the people.” Yet die closeness of this relationship has frequently been overlooked. An all-too-frequent impression today is that landrent was superseded by a requirement to cultivate ground. The fact that landrent continued to be collected is regarded as an abuse of the system, a sort of double taxation. As a result, a certain confusion about how landrent functioned within the cultivation system now pervades the thinking on die subject. This confusion is especially apparent in die English-language histories dealing with the system, but is by no means limited to these. The fundamental source of confusion can be traced back to the writings and pronouncements of Johannes van den Bosch, the man who conceived and breathed life into the cultivation system during his years in Java from 1830 to 1834.

Editor's Note

The following five papers, presented as a panel on March 22,1964, at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington, D. C., are reproduced here at slightly greater length than in their original versions. The panel was organized by G. W. Skinner with the prior understanding that these somewhat longer versions would be prepared for publication in the Journal. The papers were, however, written independently of one another and have not been modified as a result of the discussion. It is clear that several of them use the term Sinology somewhat differently, but that in balance there is more agreement among the authors than might ideally have been planned in order to stimulate the kind of discussion and exchange which a panel implies. There was, however, vigorous discussion from the floor, of which the comments by Benjamin Schwartz, printed immediately following the papers in this issue, are a sample. We will publish in the November issue comments from two others, who will be able to base their remarks on the present printed papers. Others who may wish to send in comments for publication are invited to address them to the Editor.

The history of Chinese painting is a relatively new discipline. None of us who work in that discipline can as yet rely on a binding tradition, accepted methods, or even on established facts of historical significance. It is possible for several critics to arrive at surprisingly contradictory judgments about one and the same work, or sequence of works, or about the meaning of the same evidence. Our judgments, naturally, will change; the work adjudged will not. We have to come to terms with it in the end. Coming to terms, however, does not mean a compromise between opposed views or viewers. It means that the right understanding of the work or sequence in question will sooner or later prevail—that is, the right understanding of the work as a historical monument. But how is this understanding achieved? It is this seemingly simple question, the basic problem facing the historian, that I shall discuss.

This paper is intended to present in outline form a structural analysis of the total religious system of the Sinhalese of Ceylon.

The Sinhalese, excluding those few who are Hindu, Christian, or Muslim, are Theravada Buddhists who also indulge in a rich array of magical-animistic and other “non-Buddhist” practices. Descriptive accounts of these various practices are readily available in the literature. But until now no one has examined the various beliefs and rituals to see whether and how they are related to one another, to what extent they combine to form an integrated system of “Sinhalese religion,” and how this system actually functions. I will attempt such an examination by focusing on the primary religious ideals, their practical implementation, and the problems involved in this implementation. Perhaps the most crucial problem facing Sinhalese religion is that the central ideal, salvation, which legitimates all religious action, is itself practically unattainable. This fact must have far-reaching implications for the total religious system.

The fact that England, the home of the Industrial Revolution and modern economic growth, was also a leading shipping and trading nation, at one time prompted the notion that flourishing overseas trade and modern economic growth are somehow related. There are, of course, plenty of examples in European history of once flourishing trading nations which failed to industrialize. Spain, Portugal, the Hanseatic ports, and the Italian trading cities never became centres of industry. Moreover, such comparatively industrialized areas as Czechoslovakia and Prussia were not leading trading centres.

To use a word from the K'ai-feng dialect, a title like mine must seem a classic expression of chutzpah. “Will Sinology do?” indeed! What could possibly excuse the pursed lips, the nanny-ish condescension to his betters, on the part of someone who has not even gone through the Sinological mill? I should say at the start, then, that “Sinology,” in my reading, is something of a straw man. He is not Maspero. He is not Fritz Mote. But I am not sure (mumbling) that he is not Paul Pelliot, in some of his work. The Sinology that means control of texts is a wonderful means but a weak end. It was a healthy corrective to free-floating literary chinoiserie. Yet, if we may now take the professional standing of the Chinese field as granted, the time is past for texts to be used for spiritual athletics, ascetic proofs of honesty, and thoroughness in the abstract. We need to be honest and thorough not in marching and counter-marching through the literature “because it is there,” but because it relates to intellectual problems, to more than methodology.

As the legend goes, the reign of Sui Yang-ti was a great heroic age. The heroes were destined to fight either on the side of or against the great emperor to come, T'ang T'ai-tsung. Before the fall of Sui, however, Sui Yang-ti summoned all the rebels to Yangchow for a tournament. The champion was to win'the title of the Supreme Rebel, to whom would be accorded the honors due a king. The plot was to let the rebels kill each other with their own hands, and the survivors would then be killed by mines set off soon after the contest was over. If there were still some survivors left, a gate which weighed one thousand chin would be lowered into the city wall to block their retreat so that a massacre might be carried out by the Imperial troops. But since Sui Yang-ti was to lose the mandate of heaven, his plot did not work. An insufficient number of rebels were killed in the arena, and the mines did not explode as planned, thanks to the happy intervention of an ancient fox who had to save the life of the true dragon, T'ang T'ai-tsung, among all the rebels. When the gate was lowered, it was caught by a giant-like bandit who supported it long enough to let the eighteen princes and the lesser rebels from all over China escape to safety. But the gate proved too much of a burden even for such a hero, and he was crushed to death.

In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a number of Chinese officials acted as agents of modernization in their own regions of authority. The achievements of such men as Li Hung-chang and Chang Chih-tung are well known. The work of Liu Ming-ch'uan in Taiwan, however, has received little recognition outside his own country. After Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895, even Chinese scholars paid scant attention to Liu's work there, but with the removal of the Nationalist government to the island in 1949, there has understandably been a renewed interest in him. Chinese studies of Liu, however, generally treat his seven-year administration of the island without distinguishing between his efforts along traditional lines and those which required innovations. This is, of course, a perfectly valid approach, but Liu can also be seen as a modernizer. Because this paper is focused on the latter approach, it will take up only Liu's efforts at modernization.

Japanese literature of the war years (1941–45) has hardly been discussed abroad, and in Japan the tendency, until very recently, was to dismiss the entire production as “sterile,” or even to deny that any existed. Obviously more than strictly literary criteria have occasioned this reluctance to consider a most important though painful period in modern Japanese writing. Foreign scholars have hesitated to uncover dirty linen; the Japanese, embarrassed by old remembrances, naturally prefer to allude to the war in terms of its suffering, rather than in terms of the joy which most people had experienced when sharing certain ideals. On occasion, polemicists have attempted to discredit an opponent by quoting his wartime publications, but the sting of their attacks is dulled by the unspoken awareness that almost everybody was involved and, if guilty, equally so.

I Want to address myself to two points: why I think the study of China requires the study of its history, and why I think the proper practice of the historical profession in general requires some awareness of the history of China. I would argue that the study of change in time is the heart of the historical approach, and that for this reason, history's contribution to the study of China is intellectually legitimate and quite different from that of the more specialized disciplines; and conversely, that the general problems which historians find exciting are nowhere offered in such profuse and interesting combinations, with such abundant documentation, as in the history of China.