Wanwuyiti and Finding God in All Things: A Comparative Study between Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation and Ignatian Spirituality

Response to Reviewer1’s Comments

Point-by-point response to Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments 1: Ti is better understood in this context as the network of interactions. Actually, ti is the potential for such interactions, just as the human body (ti) gives human beings the potential to act. However, since you are following the standard interpretation, I can’t demand that it be changed. If a change is made, it should be to explain that wanwuyiti refers to a universal integrated network of productive interactions promoting the common good (thus ren is related to wanwuyuti). "All things form one body" only because all things are interconnected through that network. 

Response 1: Thank you for pointing this out. There are a few points that I want to clarify.

    First, in my note one in the essay, I explained that there are different translations/interpretations of Wanwuyiti: “The term “wanwuyiti” （万物一体）literally means “ten thousand things forming one body”, which has been translated in various ways, e.g. “Ten Thousand Things-One Body”, “Forming One Body with the Universe”, “Unity of All Things”, “Unifying Interconnectedness”, “Theory of One Body”, and so forth.” Therefore, I have mentioned that wanwuyiti could mean “unifying interconnectedness.”

    Second, I add one sentence “From Zhang Zai, to Cheng brothers, to Zhu Xi, and to Wang Yangming” before “the Sung and Ming Neo-Confucians arrive at a consensus on the significance of the notion of wanwuyiti —it does not so much construe a coherent universe as to provide a supernatural framework that made morality and ethics imperative for the human world”. In this case, the idea of wanwuyiti is a consensus among Cheng-Zhu school and Lu-Wang school because the Neo-Confucian focus is really on self-cultivation and morality, rather than the construal of a metaphysical system as such. This is exactly what the Jesuits fail to recognize, they see no link between wanwuyiti and its moral implication. Thus, it is better to take “ti” to mean “Oneness, body” because my point of departure is the Jesuit misunderstanding of wanwuyiti as a rigorous metaphysical proposition. I also added another note to explicate this point, see note 11.

    Finally, How and why is wanwuyiti related with moral discipline, after all? I did not explicate this in detail given the limited space in the essay. Suffice to say,

    “According to the standard doxa, Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucians1 understand Li as the ‘principle’ of all things. This Principle is manifested more or less clearly and completely in particular things, owing to the character of that thing’s constituent qi, but is nonetheless present in its entirety in each thing, serving as that thing’s true nature. It is this Principle that is the intrinsically good Nature also of human beings, which is revealed as an aspect or condition of their minds…On this view, each thing has its own Li, or principle, but all of these principles are really one Principle, the Principle of all things or the ‘Great Ultimate’ (taiji), which is thus both one and many” (Ziporyn, 2008, p. 401).

    In other words, the proposition of wanwuyiti is predicated on li-qi scheme.

Comments 2: A minor point: In line 552 Shouldn’t word be capitalized here? Isn’t it a reference to the Word of God?  It is capitalized in line 583.

Point-by-point response to Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments 1: The article offers an excellent example of comparison of the Neo-Confucian tradition and the Spiritual exercises.  The first part of the paper might take a little more into consideration that readers may not be familiar with Chinese terms and ideas. 

I have revised both my first and second part of the paper in yellow font. Please read my revised version.