Richard Wilhelm

thumb|Richard Wilhelm Richard Wilhelm (10 May 1873 – 2 March 1930) was a German sinologist, missionary and a friend of Carl Jung. Quotes Chinesisch ist die leichteste Sprache, wenn sie unbefangen gelernt wird, vom Sinn her eher als vom Einzelausdruck. Aber für neugierige Frager bietet die Sprache eitel Tücken. Chinese is the easiest language when it is learned at ease, dwelling on its spirit rather than on the individual expression. But for inquisitive questioners, this language provides vain pitfalls. Die Seele Chinas. Berlin, Hobbing, 1926 Quotes about Wilhelm As a young man Wilhelm had gone to China in the service of a Christian mission, and there the mental world of the Orient had opened its doors wide to him. Wilhelm was a truly religious spirit, with an unclouded and farsighted view of things. He had the gift of being able to listen without bias to the revelations of a foreign mentality, and to accomplish that miracle of empathy which enabled him to make the intellectual treasures of China accessible to Europe. He was deeply influenced by Chinese culture, and once said to me, "It is a great satisfaction to me that I never baptized a single Chinese!" In spite of his Christian background, he could not help recognizing the logic and clarity of Chinese thought. [...] Clear and unmistakably Western as his mentality was, in his I Ching commentary he manifested a degree of adaptation to Chinese psychology which is altogether unmatched. Carl Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. More than 200 years later, the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm explained to a friend the hardships involved in trying to interest Weimar Germans in Chinese cultural history. In the past couple of years, Wilhelm wrote, he had been living “the life of a vagabond,” dragging slides and lectures everywhere, attending many gemiitlich get-togethers “in which one has always to inform people that the Chinese do not eat earthworms and rotten eggs and only rarely kill their little girls ... Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009) Links Carl Jung on Richard Wilhelm Category:People from Stuttgart Category:Theologians from Germany Category:Translators from Germany Category:1930 deaths Category:Sinologists