A sanctuary for intellectuals. What is an intellectual? Today, there are fewer and fewer intellectuals in China. In the future, it is possible that they will all become specialists. A specialist is never an intellectual. Those are two concepts. If you are an expert in a field, you are not an intellectual. The intellectual is a gadfly, according to Socrates, who wants to doubt and criticize the whole society. What is the premise for questioning and criticizing society and diagnosing the disease of this era? It is to keep enough distance with this era and the interest system of the whole society. If there is no such distance, you, as an expert and a scholar, are a member of the whole social interest system, and the whole university is a link in the whole social interest system, so a university will not be a university, and the spirit of a university will disappear. There is a saying that we often hear from "educationalists". They say that universities should adapt to the needs of social development. It is true that universities should serve the society, but serving the society is not the same as adapting to the needs of the society, which is not the same concept at all.

The purpose of university to serve the society is to lead the self-criticism of the society to achieve its self-consciousness. Lead the community. If universities only meet the needs of social development, it will become a functional link of the whole social benefit system. No, the university is not an organ of the social organism. It keeps a distance from the benefit system of the whole society, so it can criticize the whole society, it can diagnose The Times. If every class of college graduates, undergraduate or postgraduate or doctoral, are only sent to the society as experts, we really adapt to the needs of social development. If a profession rises in society, we will open a corresponding major, tomorrow another profession rises, we will open another major, this is called the university to meet the needs of social development. The intellectual tradition is maintained through universities. If universities do not sustain the continued existence of intellectuals, then do we have intellectuals as a nation? There will be folk thinkers. We're a lot of people. We have all kinds of weirdos. He didn't have to write a book in college. He wrote a book in a small attic of five or six square meters in his house. If all the universities of a great nation are reduced to vocational training centers and no longer become spiritual centers, the spirit of the nation will still be there, but the spirit of the nation is in the people. And a nation to do so is in spiritual self-exile, so that the cause of the nation's thought depends on chance, on a few accidental people with universal concern. Of course, there is no way to cultivate philosophers in schools, just as the Department of Chinese language and literature cannot cultivate writers. However, universities protect a nation's humanistic thoughts, knowledge and the cause of truth, guard the way and scale of the pursuit of truth, and guard a certain tradition, which is called inheritance. This kind of inheritance, leaving college is hard, really hard. Therefore, the second aspect of the university spirit is to diagnose The Times and lead the society. Third, care about the world, face the fate. We can't substitute one Esperanto for the languages of all peoples, can we? Will there come a day when we don't speak Chinese and the whole world speaks English? It's impossible. We are in Chinese, in our spiritual home. Don't think of language as just a symbolic tool for communication. We are in our mother tongue, we are in a basic experience of the world, in a certain basic attitude towards life. A native English speaker and a native Chinese speaker have different basic world experience and attitudes towards life. We should be inspired by the West. Western philosophy has a realm of wisdom, so we try to translate the works of Western philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger. But what is the process of our translation? It's a process of distortion. Translation of great books in the field of philosophy must be a distortion. But this distortion is necessary, because it is impossible not to distort in order to be inspired by ideas from other peoples. For example, to translate the Tao Te Ching into German, one must do so through distortion, which means that the translator is able to understand Lao Tzu's inspiration on the basis of German thought - for every point of enlightenment, one can translate the meaning in German. This translation is examined by us Chinese: it doesn't mean that... It doesn't matter if you don't mean it, don't say it's wrong, because it's good for them to expand and improve their Western ideas. Just like we Chinese reading Buddhist sutras, we will certainly distort Buddhist sutras, but we have completed the Sinicization of Buddhism, with Zen as the most typical. Since then, many new words have been added to our Chinese language: consciousness, cause and effect, karma, realm, noumenon, right? Are these new words accurate expressions of the original ideas in the Buddhist scriptures? No way. These words were originally in the Sanskrit lexical system, in the Sanskrit meaning field, and once we translate them, we incorporate them into the Chinese meaning field, and let them unfold in the Chinese meaning field, which is called for our use. That's the truth of the matter.

A sanctuary for intellectuals. What is an intellectual? Today, there are fewer and fewer intellectuals in China. In the future, it is possible that they will all become specialists. A specialist is never an intellectual. Those are two concepts. If you are an expert in a field, you are not an intellectual. The intellectual is a gadfly, according to Socrates, who wants to doubt and criticize the whole society. What is the premise for questioning and criticizing society and diagnosing the disease of this era? It is to keep enough distance with this era and the interest system of the whole society. If there is no such distance, you, as an expert and a scholar, are a member of the whole social interest system, and the whole university is a link in the whole social interest system, so a university will not be a university, and the spirit of a university will disappear. There is a saying that we often hear from "educationalists". They say that universities should adapt to the needs of social development. It is true that universities should serve the society, but serving the society is not the same as adapting to the needs of the society, which is not the same concept at all.

The purpose of university to serve the society is to lead the self-criticism of the society to achieve its self-consciousness. Lead the community. If universities only meet the needs of social development, it will become a functional link of the whole social benefit system. No, the university is not an organ of the social organism. It keeps a distance from the benefit system of the whole society, so it can criticize the whole society, it can diagnose The Times. If every class of college graduates, undergraduate or postgraduate or doctoral, are only sent to the society as experts, we really adapt to the needs of social development. If a profession rises in society, we will open a corresponding major, tomorrow another profession rises, we will open another major, this is called the university to meet the needs of social development. The intellectual tradition is maintained through universities. If universities do not sustain the continued existence of intellectuals, then do we have intellectuals as a nation? There will be folk thinkers. We're a lot of people. We have all kinds of weirdos. He didn't have to write a book in college. He wrote a book in a small attic of five or six square meters in his house. If all the universities of a great nation are reduced to vocational training centers and no longer become spiritual centers, the spirit of the nation will still be there, but the spirit of the nation is in the people. And a nation to do so is in spiritual self-exile, so that the cause of the nation's thought depends on chance, on a few accidental people with universal concern. Of course, there is no way to cultivate philosophers in schools, just as the Department of Chinese language and literature cannot cultivate writers. However, universities protect a nation's humanistic thoughts, knowledge and the cause of truth, guard the way and scale of the pursuit of truth, and guard a certain tradition, which is called inheritance. This kind of inheritance, leaving college is hard, really hard. Therefore, the second aspect of the university spirit is to diagnose The Times and lead the society. Third, care about the world, face the fate. We can't substitute one Esperanto for the languages of all peoples, can we? Will there come a day when we don't speak Chinese and the whole world speaks English? It's impossible. We are in Chinese, in our spiritual home. Don't think of language as just a symbolic tool for communication. We are in our mother tongue, we are in a basic experience of the world, in a certain basic attitude towards life. A native English speaker and a native Chinese speaker have different basic world experience and attitudes towards life. We should be inspired by the West. Western philosophy has a realm of wisdom, so we try to translate the works of Western philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger. But what is the process of our translation? It's a process of distortion. Translation of great books in the field of philosophy must be a distortion. But this distortion is necessary, because it is impossible not to distort in order to be inspired by ideas from other peoples. For example, to translate the Tao Te Ching into German, one must do so through distortion, which means that the translator is able to understand Lao Tzu's inspiration on the basis of German thought - for every point of enlightenment, one can translate the meaning in German. This translation is examined by us Chinese: it doesn't mean that... It doesn't matter if you don't mean it, don't say it's wrong, because it's good for them to expand and improve their Western ideas. Just like we Chinese reading Buddhist sutras, we will certainly distort Buddhist sutras, but we have completed the Sinicization of Buddhism, with Zen as the most typical. Since then, many new words have been added to our Chinese language: consciousness, cause and effect, karma, realm, noumenon, right? Are these new words accurate expressions of the original ideas in the Buddhist scriptures? No way. These words were originally in the Sanskrit lexical system, in the Sanskrit meaning field, and once we translate them, we incorporate them into the Chinese meaning field, and let them unfold in the Chinese meaning field, which is called for our use. That's the truth of the matter.