Zhong Wen: Ricci’s rejection of Buddhism, aside from the doctrinal “contradictions” between Buddhism and Catholicism that were difficult to reconcile, was also heavily influenced by the intellectual climate of the late Ming period.

During the final decades of the Ming dynasty, political corruption was rampant; internally, peasant uprisings occurred frequently, and externally, the Later Jin dynasty was rising beyond the northern frontier. Many scholars, from the perspective of “practical statecraft,” sharply criticized Neo-Confucianism for “empty talk on mind-and-nature, ignoring worldly affairs.” Since Neo-Confucianism had borrowed large amounts of theoretical resources from Buddhism and Daoism, the intellectual backlash against Neo-Confucianism gradually extended toward Buddhism itself. Huang Zongxi remarked in his Records of Ming Confucian Learning: “According to the Gaozi school, the understanding of human nature is coarse; according to the Buddhists, it is subtle. To distinguish these four characters among the Buddhists is easy; to distinguish them in the Yangming school is difficult. The Buddhists establish an empty doctrine, while our Confucians secretly harm the true teaching.” Accusing Buddhism of “secretly damaging the true teaching” placed it in direct conflict with the late-Ming ideal of “practical governance.”

Ricci’s strategy of criticizing Buddhism gained considerable success among the scholar-official class. Xu Xuchen wrote in the preface to General Introduction to Western Learning: “Since then, literati who flatter Buddhism embellished and exaggerated its teachings, almost standing in opposition to Confucianism. Many Confucians in turn picked up what they left behind, even wielding their own weapons inside the Buddhist chambers. Alas! When the rites are lost, one must seek them among the common folk. Reading Western Learning, and first studying natural investigation, eliminating empty talk—the parts that accord with the teachings of the ancient sages, those I accept.” In the eyes of late Ming scholars, Catholic doctrine appeared more compatible with “the teachings of the ancient sages.”

Bo Ya: I believe Ricci opposed Buddhism also because Mahayana Buddhism—dominant in China—had already departed from the atheistic nature of early Buddhism and Theravāda Buddhism. This put it into a “zero-sum game within the theistic camp” with Catholicism. Even though, from a Catholic perspective, “superstitious Buddhism,” despite its hells and spirits, remained a form of atheism!

Zhong Wen: Beyond the anti-Buddhist climate of the late Ming, the internal corruption of Buddhism itself was another reason Ricci wanted to draw a clear line. The late Ming text Record of Lamenting Antiquity notes: “Some became monks after their crimes of robbery were exposed; some became monks to escape from prison; some became monks after rebelling against their parents… even among tricksters, thieves, artisans of a hundred skills, monks could be found.” During his missionary work, Ricci interacted with many Buddhist monks, and in his eyes, ordinary monks were lazy, ignorant, and notorious. In Ricci’s China Journal, he recounts a debate with a Buddhist master in Nanjing: when “this invited sage” failed, he “attempted to conceal his ignorance by stirring up another bout of shouting and noise, burying the value of his argument beneath the commotion.” From Ricci’s words, one can clearly sense his disdain and aversion toward Buddhism at the time.

Bo Ya: By the late Ming, Buddhism had already been in China for more than 1,500 years—spanning an entire civilizational cycle. It was evidently past its prime.

Zhong Wen: Ricci, however, was skillful at using the On Friendship (Jiaoyoulun) to bridge Confucianism and Catholicism.

Early missionaries believed that Confucius was similar to religious founders in other “pagan” nations. Under this assumption, Confucius was considered the object of Chinese religious worship, and commemorating him meant treating him as a divine incarnation or representative. As Ricci gained deeper understanding, he realized that Confucius merely compiled classical texts for future study; these texts provided no knowledge of God and were mostly moral rules and ritual norms for everyday life. Upon recognizing this, Ricci quickly repositioned Confucius: not as a religious leader, but as a moral philosopher, on the same level as thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome.

In Catholic terminology, moral philosophy refers to the moral knowledge humans obtain through natural reason. From the perspective of Catholic doctrine, moral philosophy serves as an auxiliary tool to Christian faith. At that time, the Church’s attitude toward reason was very different from that of the Enlightenment; “the opposition between reason and faith” was not yet a known concept in Ricci’s era.

Viewing Confucius as a moral philosopher greatly aided Ricci’s missionary work. Missionaries no longer opposed Confucian rituals from a Christian standpoint. Ricci’s strategy of “supplementing Confucianism” involved finding Western maxims that aligned with Chinese thought so that the two could complement and reinforce each other.

In the 23rd year of Wanli, Ricci presented his newly completed Chinese translation of On Friendship to the Ming prince of Jian’an. The book contained more than 3,600 characters and collected 100 sayings and stories from Western figures, mostly written in maxims.

These maxims came from 28 European thinkers including Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Augustine.

Confucianism contains many reflections on “friendship.” In the Analects, Confucius divides friends into two beneficial and two harmful categories: “Three kinds of friends benefit: the upright, the sincere, the knowledgeable. Three harm: the flattering, the weakly compliant, the eloquently cunning.” Ricci writes in On Friendship: “If you live near a dyer’s shop and keep company with dyers, you will unavoidably be soiled. If you befriend wicked men, constantly hearing and seeing their wicked deeds, you will inevitably imitate them and corrupt your nature. If I happen to meet a virtuous friend, even if we simply clasp hands once and part, I have never failed to benefit and strengthen my resolve toward goodness. The essence of friendship is nothing more than this: if his strengths exceed mine, I imitate him; if mine exceed his, I instruct him. Thus learning is teaching, and teaching is learning; the two sustain each other. If his strengths are not worth imitating, and his faults cannot be corrected through teaching, then how is idle joking with him all day not a waste of time?” (paraphrase omitted here)

Guo Xiwei, in “A Preliminary Study of Ricci’s Missionary Methods,” argues that the Western ethical emphasis on “philia” (friendly love) stems from the Christian doctrines “Love God” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Loving others—even one’s enemies—expresses a universalist “brotherly love.” In China, the Confucian hierarchy of familial ethics places “fraternal love among friends” last in the Five Relationships. At the time Ricci composed On Friendship, Chinese thinkers like He Xinyin and Li Zhi were already emphasizing the concept of friendship, attempting to introduce notions of equality into the hierarchical Five Relationships. Ricci’s use of humanist maxims thus resonated with this emerging intellectual current.

On Friendship caused an immediate sensation among late Ming scholars. This was partly because Ricci did not “re-Christianize” these maxims, but instead carried out an initial “sinicization.” In the book, Ricci sometimes used Chinese medical knowledge to explain Greek sayings: “A friend tested only in my good fortune is not to be trusted.” He annotated: “The pulse is taken with the left hand; the left hand detects ill fortune.” (In Chinese medicine, men’s pulses are typically taken on the left hand; the idea is that testing a friend during one’s good fortune may reveal his unreliability.) Such annotations intentionally guided late Ming literati to perceive a resonance between Catholicism and Confucianism.

Bo Ya: In a 1599 letter, Ricci proudly wrote: “This On Friendship has won me the trust of the people, and it has also shown them what we Europeans are capable of. The work is the fruit of literature, wisdom, and virtue.” In this way, Ricci won the affection of many Ming scholars and cast a Western stone into the deep pool of ancient Chinese thought. Yet we can also see that this “Western stone” had already been sinicized.