LRCCS Mourning the passing of Donald J. Munro

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In Loving Memory of Professor Donald Munro

Being a teacher for a day, being a father for a lifetime. ()

My father is 92 years old this year, the same as Professor Munro. Therefore, the above-mentioned Chinese idiom always speaks to me personally whenever I think of Professor Munro. He is indeed a father to my professional identity. He introduced me to Chinese Philosophy, which I had never explored or been interested in even though I grew up in the Chinese culture of Hong Kong. His way of interpreting Chinese philosophy with the eyes of a humanitarian and the views of a perceptive philosopher opened a new horizon of my culture and an important part of universal humanity to me. He gave me the light to find my career home base.

And like my father, Professor Munro was my role model to whom I am deeply grateful for the many life lessons he taught me implicitly and implicitly. First and foremost is his respect and dedication to his students. Although he always guided his students with solid scholarship and stimulated them with challenging questions, he had tremendous respect for their intellectual autonomy and never intended to clone them after himself. That is why his specializations among students cover a wide spectrum, from the topics of ethics, and political philosophy, to religion and the history of philosophy, covering between the periods of early, Medieval, late, and modern Chinese philosophy. I really remember this question from him when I last met him in Michigan in 2018, What have you learned from your students lately? She wonderfully reminded me to be as humble to my students as she always was to hers. He never fails to complement his students’ work by saying how much he has learned from it.

And he is a caring teacher who builds personal relationships with his students. He shared his personal anecdotes with us and religiously sent us Xmas cards and updates every year. He helped me explore financial resources when I was still a student. When I had a family emergency in Thailand, she compassionately shared my concerns and exhausted her personal and professional network to try to get me help. I owe a lot to his kindness!

His dedication to Chinese studies and philosophy has been and continues to inspire me even though I can’t catch up with him. As he explained to me, his retirement in 1996 (while at an intellectually vibrant age) was not intended to be a retirement from intellectual pursuits. On the contrary, it was made to enable a more focused devotion to the study of the new and exciting field of evolutionary ethics. In fact, a new book of his that came out a few years later is a testament to that effort! And the importance and indelible marks he left for the study of Chinese philosophy in this country cannot be overstated. Aside from his influential and widely studied trilogy of work on the concept of man and human nature in China and his contribution to nurturing generations of highly active scholars of Chinese philosophy in the field, I would never would be grateful enough for his incredibly generous endowment of the Tang Junyi Professorship of Chinese Philosophy at the University of Michigan (and again, note his humility that the endowment is in his teacher’s name, not his own! ) both graduate and undergraduate levels at one of the country’s flagship universities but above all, it will help solidify the status of Chinese Philosophy as an important philosophical tradition by teaching it in a world-class Western philosophy department.

Every year when I receive her Xmas card, her gentle love for her family (including her cats) shines through and warms my heart! And he is truly a Confucian junzi. His love and kindness emanated from him and his family. He is still actively fighting for his country’s democracy with his participation in the campaign to end Citizens United in his 80s. He had a humanitarian concern for the whole world (tianxia), especially for China, and he personally helped to facilitate the connection of the Republic of China with the outside world in the 1970s.

As he pointed out to me, a Chinese junzi often seeks spiritual respite in Daoism. Engagement with worldly affairs must be intertwined with a perspective that transcends human concern by placing us in nature. Professor Munro also has a Daoist hermitage. Its his cabin where his ashes will rest. His kindness and dedication though will have a place in my heart!!

Sin-Yee ChanProfessor, Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Vermont

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