Richard Wilhelm

"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."

"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."

"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 ..."

"Carl Jung on Richard Wilhelm"