ABSTRACT
a thorough westerner in feeling, I am necessarily deeply impressed by the strangeness of this Chinese text. It is true that some knowledge of Eastern religions and philosophies aids my intellect and intuition in understanding these ideas to a certain extent, just as I can understand the paradoxes of primitive beliefs in terms of ‘ethnology’, or in terms of the ‘comparative history of religions’. Indeed, this is the Western way of hiding one’s heart under the cloak of so-called scientific understanding. We do it partly because of the misérable vanité des savants which fears and rejects with horror any sign of living sympathy, and partly because a sympathetic understanding might permit contact with an alien spirit to become a serious experience. So-called scientific objectivity would have reserved this text for the philological acuity of Sinologues, and would have guarded it jealously from any other interpretation. But Richard Wilhelm penetrated into the secret and mysterious vitality of Chinese wisdom too deeply to have allowed such a pearl of intuitive insight to disappear in the pigeonholes of the specialists. I am greatly honoured that his choice of a psychological commentator has fallen upon me.
