Donald J. Munro

My first encounter with Don came as I was applying to graduate school in the spring of 1987. I was pretty sure that I wanted to get a PhD and go on to teach and write about Confucianism, but had been wavering on which discipline to pursue. History? Philosophy? Religious Studies? My interdisciplinary studies at Yale had been centered more in history than anything else, but I’d felt frustrated that such classes did not engage with Chinese ideas in the same ways that the Western philosophy classes I’d also been taking dug into Plato or Kant. In the end I had submitted an application to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, among a few other places, and of course included a writing sample in my application. As great as it was to learn that spring that I had been accepted to Michigan, what really thrilled me was a letter from Don coupled with detailed, marginal comments on my application essay. I immediately saw that this was the right fit for me: Don’s thoughtful, charitable approach to my efforts to engage with late-Ming Confucianism pointed toward just the approach (and just the kind of mentor) that I’d been seeking.

Don’s open-minded, probing curiosity shaped how I came to approach Confucian philosophy. I learned that while it was possible, albeit with considerable effort, for us moderns (and Americans) to access the thousand year-old teachings of Neo-Confucianism, we must be careful to note the ways in which their concerns and methods are not identical to our own. I also learned to take seriously both the scholarship and the creative philosophizing of modern Chinese thinkers like Tang Junyi, who of course was one of Don’s own teachers. Don was fascinated by the enduring, distinctive ways that early Chinese ideas continued to play important — sometimes compelling though sometimes troubling — roles in subsequent Chinese societies. He cared deeply that contemporary scholars take Chinese philosophy seriously as live philosophy; even beyond the seminar room and conference hall, he supported this goal through advocacy and personal generosity, leading to the establishment of the Tang Junyi Lecture Series.

Don’s approach to philosophy and his values as a person have been imprinted on so many students over the decades; we are all very lucky to have had him as our teacher.

Stephen C. Angle
Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and Professor of Philosophy
Wesleyan University

When I arrived in the area in 2004 as a new professor at EMU, Don Munro was one of a handful of superlative scholars in my field, internationally known and respected.  Despite our distance in age and stature, he welcomed me like an old friend, and over the years I came to treasure long conversations with him.  He was untiringly inquisitive, always open to new ideas and perspectives, generous, meticulous, and modest.  In 2012, he honored me with an invitation to give the Tang Junyi lecture series at U-M.  In 2015, he contributed a book chapter to a volume I edited, and in 2019, I had the privilege of co-editing his festschrift volume.  In all of these academic interactions, at friendly lunches near campus, and at family dinners at his house and mine, I always came away enriched and enlivened by my encounters with him.  One of Don's last academic pursuits was the Confucian topic of "the special worth of family and close friends."   Looking back, I now realize how deeply his expertise ran on this topic.  He was a giant in the field and will always be a giant in my heart.

Brian Bruya
Professor of Philosophy
Eastern Michigan University

In the early ‘70s, Don was recruited by another university and went to teach there for a year. He surprised us by returning to U-M and I asked him why he had. He replied that when he attended faculty talks during his year away, the interest of colleagues there seemed to be in finding errors in speakers’ ideas and demonstrating their own knowledge. At U-M, colleagues listened for new ideas of value that they could learn. Anyone who took a grad seminar with Don would know that this was what made him such a terrific teacher and mentor, and his thirst for new ideas and approaches is why his books were so fresh and different, even when the topics overlapped.

When I first enrolled in Don’s Chinese philosophy course as a junior in 1968, little expecting to pursue the topic past that year, I bought the course texts second hand from a student who had enrolled the year before. I went over to her place on Division Street and after paying for the books, I asked her what she thought of the course. “Professor Munro is an unusual man,” she said. “It seems like he lives what he teaches.” I never saw her again, but I have thought of her words hundreds of times over the years.

Robert Eno
Associate Professor, Retired
East Asia Languages and Cultures
Indiana University, Bloomington

I first met Don Munro at a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1969.  The conference pulled together leading China specialists from around the US with the goal of producing an edited volume of multidisciplinary perspectives on China.  Jane and I, graduate students at the time, served as rapporteurs at that conference.  I was amazed to hear Don, the only Philosophy professor at this conclave, analyze Mao Zedong Thought in terms that drew from his deep understanding of traditional Chinese philosophy.  His contribution was one of the most impactful of that meeting.

I got to know Don far better after I joined the U-M faculty in 1983.  “Getting to know him” was in fact a process, during which I gradually learned of his military experience in the US Navy, his ongoing insights into intelligence and national security, joy of travel, love of nature, and boundless enthusiasm for building a log cabin on the Leelanau Peninsula.

I cannot recall any conversation with Don that did not conclude with his recommendation of a book or article for me to read and some key issue for me to delve into.  He found true joy in teaching, discussing, exploring, and doing. It was a privilege to know someone who always expanded my own boundaries.

Kenneth G. Lieberthal
Senior Fellow Emeritus in Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Michigan

In Fond Memory of Donald Munro

On November 4, 1992, I found a large yellow envelope in my mailbox in the office of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Literatures (later changed to the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures) in the now non-existent Frieze Building.  Inside the envelope was a gift from Don Munro, a copy of the book Zhuangzi Speaks: The Music of Nature, a translation by Brian Bruya of a book by the master cartoon illustrator of Chinese classics Tsai Chih Chung, published by Princeton University Press in July that year.  It contained Don’s signed and dated inscription with the note: “For my friend Shuen-fu Lin, who embodies some of the best of the Zhuangzi as well as the fine teachings of the Ru (a term commonly understood as ‘the Confucians’ in scholarly works written in English on China).”  He also wrote a seventeen-page “Afterword” to this delightful book.  I begin my remembrance with this incident not so much because of Don’s effusive praise of me as because of its indication of some of my friend’s rare qualities that I admire.

It is important for people to take note of the fact that Don held the appointment of “Professor of Philosophy and Chinese,” rather than “Professor of Chinese Intellectual History,” at the University of Michigan.  To qualify for that appointment, Don had to have the dual competence in teaching and conducting research in both the disciplines of philosophy and of sinology.  For most of his career, Don was on the faculty of the Department of Philosophy, and transferred to the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures only a few years before his retirement in 1996.  Indeed, I cannot think of another person of Don’s generation who had the ability and training to meet the demands of two diverse disciplines.

Don had the gift for explaining complex philosophical ideas or issues in clear and simple language, fully accessible to the general listener or reader.  I say this from my experiences in reading his scholarly writings, in having conversations with him about intellectual subjects, as well as in listening to his public lectures and to his teaching Daoist philosophy to undergraduate students in the course “Arts and Letters of China.”  Don’s “Afterword” to Bruya’s book mentioned above is another good example of his usual shen ru qian chu 深入浅出 approach (i.e., explaining the profound in a simple way) in writing and teaching.  In this short essay, Don covers the cultural and intellectual contexts in which Zhuangzi (circa 369-286 BCE) lived and wrote and the main contents of the ancient Chinese text Zhuangzi.  Although placed at the end of the book, Don’s “Afterword” could well serve as an excellent introduction to the Tsai/Bruya book.

I would like to close this remembrance with a true story that can explain why Don the philosopher would even write an afterword to a translation of a cartoon illustration of an ancient Chinese text.  In the “Introduction” to his The Complete Works of Zhuangzi (Columbia, 1968 & 2013, xi), Burton Watson says, “Zhuangzi uses throughout his writings that deadliest of weapons against all that is pompous, staid, and holy: humor.”  Humor is undoubtedly one of the things that drew Don to the Zhuangzi and to Bruya’s translation of Tsai’s extraordinary illustration.  Don’s appreciation of humor was well known to people who had come into contact with him.  But perhaps not many people know about this story.  One evening in the winter term of 1988, several faculty members (including Don Munro, Ken Lieberthal and myself) met in the cafeteria in Michigan League to discuss some affairs of the Center for Chinese Studies.  Don was a bit late to arrive for the meeting.  When Don finally showed up, he was grinning from ear to ear.  He told us that he had just come from a fascinating lecture given by Tong Enzheng 童恩正 (1935-1997) who was a visiting scholar at the university in 1987-1988.  He told us that Tong had related a legend about a Jinniu Dao 金牛道 (Gold Ox Road) in Sichuan Province, the site of the ancient Shu 蜀Kingdom.  The road is so named because a legend has it that King Hui of Qin 秦惠王 (r. 356-311 BCE) gave the avaricious Marquis of Shu a stone ox that defecates gold as a gift in exchange for the permission to build a road through the precipitous mountainous area between Qin and Shu.  With the road built, Qin was able to conquer Shu without any difficulties.  Don could not control himself from laughing as he related the legend.  Known to have a quick wit, Ken Lieberthal quipped, “This must be the origin of the English expression ‘bullshit’!”

Shuen-fu Lin
Professor Emeritus of Chinese Literature
Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Michigan
University Place, WA
June 19, 2023

I am grateful to Don for many things, but will just mention two: When he was chair of ALC and I was approaching my tenure decision, he gave me a pretty strong direction (he was once a Navy officer) to finish my book manuscript (like my graduate advisor, David Roy. I was giving, to all and sundry, the impression that I was going to work on it forever), and I did. The second is, that when I was a young parent, he confided in me that once, when his daughter was fussing without end in her high chair, he threw a glass of milk in her face. The effect of hearing this from a philosopher and a man who was the very voice of reason for me, and always seemed in control, was great on me.

David Rolston
Professor of Chinese Language and Literature
Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Michigan

Don Munro was a mentor, an exemplar, an inspiration, and a friend--to me personally, but also I think to everyone who had the good fortune to get to know and work with him over his long and illustrious career.

When I first met him as a prospective graduate student in Ann Arbor, back in the 1980s, unsure about whether it was even possible to study Chinese philosophy in an American academic institution in the way I was hoping to do so--carrying on the eccentric explorations that had begun to occupy me over the previous few years of unaffiliated intellectual rambles in Taiwan--the direction of my future life was changed not only by his warm personal welcome and the example of his own work, but by his broad-minded willingness to entertain my own unschooled ruminations with what can only be described as a grandmaster level of charitableness. It was the example of his own wholly sui generis manner of doing comparative philosophy--outside of any box, unconstrained by allegiance to any presupposed methodological dogmas, endowed with a preternatural openmindedness and freedom from prejudice, trusting his own intellectual instincts and standing only on the strength of his own formidable intellectual gifts--that opened up the way for me to imagine there was a possible place for me at this table. It is no exaggeration to say that I would not have had a career if he had not somehow been able to see something worth taming and teaching in me—and I doubt there would have been anyone else who would have done so if he had not. It has become almost a cliché among Don’s former students that he is one of the rare instances of someone who not only was doing deeply learned and insightful work in the field of philosophical ethics, but who was also—mirabile dictu!-- a genuinely admirable human being.

I remember him best, on the one hand, walking in the woods, the frost-breath chugging out wisdom both personal and philosophical, and on the other hand reclining amiably for the long haul in the reading chair in his office as he led his students through another hour of a long reading group session. It’s astonishing that all that was now almost 40 years ago. But my debt to Donald Munro, and my admiration and affection for him, remain undiminished.

Brook Ziporyn
Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy and Comparative Thought
University of Chicago