Notes Beside the Bamboo Window — Third Collection, Part 43
Continuing the Third Collection (三筆). Zhuhong closes his three-part response to the missionaries by arguing that classical Confucian tradition already possessed a full and sufficient account of Heaven long before their arrival, marshaling a dense chain of quotations from the Book of Documents, the Book of Odes, the Analects, and the Mencius — and ends with a pointed, almost defiant invitation for divine retribution should his own argument prove false.
120. 天說（三）— On Heaven (Part Three)
Zhuhong closes his three-part response to the missionaries by arguing that classical Confucian tradition already possessed a full and sufficient account of Heaven long before their arrival, marshaling a dense chain of quotations from the Book of Documents, the Book of Odes, the Analects, and the Mencius — and ends with a pointed, almost defiant invitation for divine retribution should his own argument prove false.
復次，南郊以祀上帝，王制也。曰欽若昊天，曰欽崇天道，曰昭事上帝，曰上帝臨汝，二帝三王所以憲天而立極者也。曰知天，曰畏天，曰律天，曰則天，曰富貴在天，曰知我其天，曰天生德於予，曰獲罪於天無所禱也，是遵王制、集千聖之大成者夫子也。曰畏天，曰樂天，曰知天，曰事天，亞夫子而聖者孟子也。天之說何所不足，而俟彼之創為新說也？以上所陳，儻謂不然，乞告聞天主；儻予懷妒忌心，立詭異說，故沮壞彼王教，則天主威靈洞照，當使猛烈天神下治之，以飭天討。
Furthermore, the ritual of offering sacrifice to the Sovereign on High at the southern altar has long been an established institution of kingship in our own tradition. Expressions such as "reverently according with vast Heaven," "reverently honoring the Way of Heaven," "devotedly serving the Sovereign on High," and "the Sovereign on High watches over you" are precisely the terms by which the two ancient sage-emperors and three sage-kings modeled themselves on Heaven and established their own supreme standard of rule.
Expressions such as "knowing Heaven," "revering Heaven," "following the pattern of Heaven," "taking Heaven as one's model," "wealth and honor rest with Heaven," "he who truly knows me is Heaven itself," "Heaven has endowed me with virtue," and "one who offends Heaven has nowhere left to pray" all come from Confucius himself, the very figure who honored the institutions of true kingship and gathered together the accumulated wisdom of a thousand sages before him. Expressions such as "revering Heaven," "delighting in Heaven," "knowing Heaven," and "serving Heaven" come from Mencius, the sage second only to Confucius himself.
In what way, then, does our own tradition's account of Heaven fall short, that it should require these foreigners to invent some entirely new doctrine of their own? If anyone believes what I have set forth above to be mistaken, let them go and report it directly to their own Lord of Heaven. And should it be that I myself harbor some hidden jealousy, fabricating a deceptive argument merely to undermine their royal teaching, then let their Lord of Heaven, whose divine power is said to see through all things without exception, send down his fiercest heavenly spirits to punish me accordingly, carrying out Heaven's own righteous chastisement upon me.
Every classical phrase Zhuhong marshals here is genuinely drawn from the core Confucian canon — the Book of Documents, the Book of Odes, the Analects, and the Mencius — representing the same body of scripture Matteo Ricci and his fellow Jesuits themselves cited extensively in their own efforts to argue that ancient Chinese "Heaven" and "Sovereign on High" already anticipated the Christian God, a genuine and well-documented missionary strategy of the period; Zhuhong's closing challenge, inviting divine punishment should his argument prove false, is a rhetorical gesture with deep roots in Chinese polemical writing, and brings this three-part response — spanning entries 118 through 120 — to a close on a note of confident, almost combative certainty rather than open-ended inquiry, distinguishing it from the more exploratory tone found in most of this collection's doctrinal entries.