BOOK III: Classical Chinese Thought
I
The Classical Period
1. BEGINNINGS
The people of Yin [the Shang] honor spiritual beings, serve them, and put them ahead of ceremonies . . . The People of Zhou honor ceremonies and value highly the conferral of favors. They serve the spiritual beings and respect them, but keep them at a distance. They remain near to man and loyal to him.
Book of Rites, “Record of Example,” part 2.
Heaven produces the teeming multitude:
As there are things, there are their specific principles (tse).
When the people keep to their normal nature,
They will love excellent virtue.
Heaven, looking down upon the house of Zhou
Sees that its light reaches the people below . . .
Book of Odes, no. 260.
Don’t you mind your ancestor!
Cultivate your virtue.
Always strive to be in harmony with Heaven’s Mandate.
Seek for yourselves the many blessings.
Before Yin [the Shang] lost its army,
Its kings were able to be counterparts to the Lord on High.
In Yin you should see as in a mirror
that the great mandate is not easy to keep.
Book of Odes, no. 235.
At the beginning of the tradition of Chinese philosophical thought, around 500-550 bce, stands the figure of Kong Qiu , known in the West as Confucius, and a political problem—how could the perpetual warfare between the states contending for the rule of China be brought to an end? The Chinese never imagined, as did the Greek Heraclitus, that warfare might be a natural state within which one must contrive one’s life, nor did they ever imagine that peace might come through mutual toleration among equal powers. The official ideology of the contending states power demanded a single ruler for all of China, just as Heaven was one for all the Earth. The official view reflected the Chinese inability, shared with other Ancient cultures, to feel secure in the presence of rivals. The only alternative to hegemony was continuous warfare. The official view also held that no ruler would be able to maintain this universal rule without the “Mandate of Heaven.” The problem then, was conceived in these terms—what must a state and its ruler do in order to gain the Mandate of Heaven, that is, the solitary rule of China, successfully pacifying its rivals, and establishing lasting tranquillity and prosperity among the people?
The issue was addressed by a number of different guilds within a literate, professional bureaucratic class, each with its own theory how it ought to be done, and the story of the Classical period in Chinese thought begins with the debate among these guilds and their critics, and the resounding victory of one of them, which, like some others with rather different views, took Kong Qiu (Confucius) as its founder. The Confucian philosophy became the official philosophy of the Chinese civil service, maintaining its rule unbroken into the early years of the 20th century, always convincing China’s successive conquerors of its indispensability within the government. Only with the introduction of Western political thought did the Chinese come to think an indefensible alliance had been formed between the Confucian bureaucracy and the Emperor and his aristocracy to pacify and exploit the peasant classes.
The philosophy of Kong Qiu is rooted in the political ideology of the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou established itself about 1040 bce, overthrowing the Shang, which already had a sophisticated aristocratic government depending on chariot armies, and used an early version of the ideographic writing current in China today. In 770 the Zhou withdrew the capital to Loyang under the pressure of western barbarians, their fiefs established themselves as de facto independent states, and they no longer dominated Qu and Yue in the South. China remained divided into small states, with occasional hegemonies, until 476, and after that, with the consolidation into a smaller number of large states, hope arose for the reestablishment of the Empire. Several centuries of increasingly destructive warfare, the “Period of Contending States,” finally ended in 256 bce with the Qin annexation of the Zhou state, and, in 221, China was united again on a permanent basis under the first Emperor, Shihuangdi.
The Zhou were a bronze age people, organized like the bronze age peoples of the Mediterranean, with a hereditary, feudal military aristocracy in control of all branches of the government. By the end of the Zhou dominance the old Aristocratic armies had been replaced with peasant levies, the old fortresses and administrative centers had become commercial cities supporting a commercial class, and the rule of the great families had given way to bureaucratic structures under the thumb of the very greatest families, within which the qi, the knightly class, sought employment. With the brief Qin dynasty, and then under the Han, the knightly class became a class of literate civil servants, giving their loyalty to various ideologies developed by Confucians, Mohists, Taoists, and other scholars we think of as forming the Classical Chinese schools of philosophy.
The religious and political ideology of the Zhou was very different from anything found in the
Mediterranean. China never developed the Mediterranean vision of the gods as rulers of the world and owners
of the lands, the king serving as the god’s viceroy. Chinese religion centered on ancestor and nature worship,
and various practices of divination associated with it. The Shang had a vaguely conceived creator God, Ti,
whom the Zhou replaced with Tian, “Heaven,” a god with even less personality scarcely distinguishable from
the sky itself.
The details of explanation of the great natural forces and the structure of the world in terms of
“nature gods” was relatively unimportant to them, though it was a fundamental assumption that the natural
world, generally favorable to human beings, who had their own place in it, could become disordered if human
relations and political society became sufficiently disordered. Hence divination was practiced to determine if
major policy decisions were in accord with the natural balance of things or might upset it.
Despite their ancestor worship, the Chinese had no active belief in an afterlife, good or bad. Ancestor
worship became so dominant so early in Chinese religious thought that even the origins of the world came to
be viewed as the work of human ancestors, of Kings and officials such as Yao and Shun, and Yu, who carved
out the rivers to drain the flooded land. Heaven was conceived to be filled with the great ancestral spirits of
the royal family. People were conceived to have three sorts of soul within them when alive, the hun, which
joined the hun of one’s ancestors in Heaven, the po, which remained at the grave, becoming weaker and weaker
until it sank down to the Yellow Springs below the earth, where it eventually ceased to exist, and the qi, the
life-breath which rejoined the qi of the whole universe at death.
The po came closest to being the individual
self carrying the individual’s history with it. Philosophers tended to identify the self with the qi, and so not to
consider a personal survival after death as a meaningful option at all. The po and hun were both objects of the
ancestor cult, which aimed to keep the former from turning resentful and harming people, and to gain the favor
of the latter, and with it the favor of Heaven. We shall see only Mozi, the great populist among the
philosophers, talking about the po, and even he ignored the hun. Philosophers insisted either that favor with
Heaven was a matter of being in harmony with nature, and had nothing to do with the intercession of one’s
ancestors, or else that such intercession depended entirely on one’s virtue and not on one’s particular behests.
These two views were functionally equivalent.
It is characteristic of ancestor cults that the spirits, after they die, have no further history, and
mythology involving living gods is replaced with a mythology isolated in a mythical past, when those things that
establish the characters and powers of the ancestral spirits were done by them while still alive. The more or
less rationalist Chinese thinkers recast this mythical past as history, and so converted Yu to an official famous
for his efforts at flood control. In the end the particular events of the ancestors’ lives even cease to matter, and
the spirit is defined entirely by his role as the family elder, and the family’s envoy in the heavenly court.
The
Chinese tend to make genuinely notable ancestors the objects of public cult, erecting shrines to philosophers
such as Kong Qiu, the general, Kuan Yu, and innumerable others of various degrees of popularity. An
exceptional person easily takes on something of a numinous aura even before his death. As for the nature gods
who play the central role in the Mediterranean, it seems clear that they had been more highly developed at one
time, but their cult had come to be of secondary importance, and so their mythology had degenerated. Indeed,
their mythology tended to be assimilated to ancestor worship, and among the Zhou Tian was identified in one
myth as the ancestor of the Zhou people, although his transformation was by no means complete, for he was
still clearly the supreme god of nature, and had never lived a human life.
The Zhou Emperors, following practices developed in the late Shang, opposed “communicating with the spirits,” that is, they suppressed ancestor worship and the priests who consult the spirits in divination as a state cult, though they did not attack ancestor worship in general, even holding that it was each family’s duty to maintain its own cult. They substituted worship of the nature gods, in particular Tian, for ancestor worship, or perhaps merely promoted it to sole authority, thereby claiming that nature itself supported their reign. Thus they referred to their empire as “all below Heaven,” and reserved for the Emperor, Tian’s chief priest, the title, “Son of Heaven.” This had some inconvenient consequences, as they noted, for the core of their doctrine was that Heaven could choose whom it wanted to give the mandate, and the choice would not always fall on the same family. If a family declined in virtue, it could be expected that it would be overthrown, with Heaven’s approval, by another family, as the Shang had been overthrown by the Zhou. It is difficult to construct a rationale for regime change that does not leave it open that the new regime might also some time fall.
It seems from the recorded histories that the Early Zhou maintained peace within the Empire, waging
war only with barbarians, for perhaps 200 years. ‘Feudal government’, that is, a fief system allocating
considerable authority to local aristocratic families, was supplemented with a bureaucratic system in which
expert advice and external regulation was provided by officials from the Emperor’s court, which seems to have
worked quite well, preserving peace and unity within the state. We should imagine something like the pax
romana, and just as the notion persisted long after the fall of Rome that it was somehow natural that the Roman
Emperor should rule, and that the time of Rome was a golden age of peace, so in the Later Zhou and
afterwards, the Early Zhou was seen as an ideal government from which things had declined. Zhou customs
and institutions would have enjoyed the same high regard as Roman law did in medieval Europe.
The Chinese
came to view the Emperor as the natural ruler of the entire world, and, like the Romans, consistently
maintained that all those outside their polity were uncivilized “barbarians” not fully a part of the world order.
If they did not send tribute to the Emperor, such barbarians were in rebellion against Heaven itself. (Face was
generally preserved by regarding diplomatic gifts as ‘tribute.’) In contrast, the Mediterranean peoples before
Rome each had its own patron god, and generally viewed the god ruling them all as having direct authority only
over the other gods, not over their human servants, and so recognized the political autonomy of their neighbors
as long as they could not conquer them or force tribute from them. The later Roman Empire, of course,
adopted a universalist religion, and insisted that only Christians under the authority of Rome were genuinely
in harmony with God, taking much the same view as the Chinese did of their own position in the scheme of
things.
China, unlike the Western and Indian civilizations, never saw the gods as the source of ethical standards, since it never conceived the gods as legislating for human beings. Rather, it took nature to provide ethical standards, so that it is natural that good should happen to the good, bad to the bad. Those who act in accord with their own nature (ze), or virtue (de), the highest development of the powers and competence natural to them, will be good. “Man and Heaven are one”—human beings are a natural part of the world, not, as often assumed in the early Middle East and Greece, somehow alien to and opposed to nature and its gods. Some men are bad, but then some trees are bad—not everything attains to its proper virtue, but some, due to the unfavorable conditions under which they develop, turn out badly. The assumption that one’s virtue (de) is a consequence of the appropriate development of one’s nature (ze) is present in the Odes, a collection of songs from the time of the early Zhou. The assumption is also explicit in The Doctrine of the Mean, which reflects Confucian influence, and again, in “the Great Norm,” from the earliest, Zhou documents in the Book of History. The upshot is that spiritual beings (one’s ancestors) should be served, but this means keeping them happy and out of mischief. The spirits have some concern with ethics, and respond favorably to virtue rather than sacrifices, as would be expected if they act in accord with their ze, but they have no particular authority that justifies consulting them, and they do not legislate. One knows what is to be done from one’s own ze if one has attained to de, not from the spirits.
The Chinese never believed in an afterlife with any ethical import, and never attached much personal importance to survival after death. So, in the documents from the Zhou in the Book of History, we are told that
the best course is to establish virtue, the next best is to establish achievement, and still the
next best is to establish words. When these are not abandoned with time, it may be called
immortality. As to the preservation of family name and bestowment of membership in the clan
branch in order to preserve ancestral sacrifices uninterrupted from age to age, no state is
without these practices. But even those with great emolument cannot be said to be immortal.
The spiritual beings in the doctrine of the Mohists are po, ghosts, a persisting drive such as the lust for revenge
that carries on after a person’s death, not the full personality of the dead person.
The Mohists used ghost
stories to bolster their Utilitarian ethics with the expectation of revenge for wrong-doing even when the victims
were dead, but they never suggested, as, for instance, Plato did, that we should behave ourselves so as to gain
a favorable afterlife. The hun, which goes to Heaven, goes to Heaven in every case, and has the same fate
regardless of one’s level of virtue or vice. Before the introduction of Buddhism the Chinese never considered
the notion that the character of the individual’s own afterlife could be shaped by his moral character.
The Zhou justified their rise to power by claiming that the Shang had forfeited the Mandate of Heaven.
There is even some evidence that the last Shang ruler may have been responsible for a secularizing tendency,
which gave an opening to his opponents, who claimed that he lost his rule because he “did not make himself
manifest to Heaven.”
Perhaps his religious policy emphasized his familial ancestral cult, and neglected the
nature gods. The mandate of heaven, Heaven’s command to rule, not merely its permission, goes to the
government that reverences heaven, and does good for the people, and the dynasty falls if aristocrats outside
it gain the support of heaven and the people.
It is not that the people choose, or that the legitimate power of
the ruler depends on the consent of the governed. Rather, they are a natural force to which one must adapt.
The Zhou claimed to put ceremonies, li, ahead of the honoring of spiritual beings, unlike the Shang. Li should
be used to make the people virtuous, and then Heaven will be pleased. To attempt to please Heaven by
sacrifices betrays an irrational and superstitious attempt to bribe the world to give us good results when we
have done what naturally produces bad results. In all this the people are viewed as essentially passive, so that
virtue flows downward from the aristocrats, who have a natural right to rule.
This is not to say that the King
is always right, or the only one whose opinion counts, for a minister may correct a King, though he must be
very respectful in doing so, but commoners, though they may complain, and their complaints should be
heeded, should give no advice to those above them. They are not parties in the discussion, and have no standing
to correct their betters.
The nature of the ruler’s virtue is to reconcile opposed interests and opposed factions,
and thus to benefit all.
In Kong Qiu there is frequent reference to the “sage king,” wang, governing through ceremonial alone,
which is rooted historically in the notion of a priest-King, rather like the Pharaoh in Egypt, who functions
magically to bring prosperity and order to the Empire. Such notions may make the King indispensable, but they
are also used by lower orders in the government to make him irrelevant, relegating him to an elaborate, all-absorbing court ceremonial that leaves them free to run things as they please. Kong Qiu does not seem to think
that anyone except the true emperor appointed by heaven would have the power to regulate all things by his
ritual acts, and the true emperor is expected as a Messiah or savior, emerging at some indefinite point in the
future. In practice, we have to live with a bo, leader of a hegemony whose power rests on military force, rather
than a magical personal virtue. A bo can accomplish a great deal, and Kong Qiu remarks that were it not for
one such pragmatic ruler, China would have been overrun by western barbarians.
Kong Qiu thought such a
ruler ought to attempt to follow the way of a wang as far as he can, accomplishing things through ritual and the
influence of his virtue rather than force, in somewhat the way that a Christian Bishop might urge on his King
that he follow the way of Christ as far as he can.
By the time of the Qin, the feudal structure of the Zhou had been in part supplanted by reliance on a guild of “scholars,” administrators educated in the art of writing (which had become widespread only in the beginning of the period of disunion), who ruled the administrative divisions of the Empire in place of the old feudal chiefs. In fact the scholars represented the lower and middle echelons of the old aristocracy, though they developed into a separate class over time. A similar strategy was attempted in Medieval Europe, using the Church as its source of literate administrators, but it never quite succeeded there, for the feudal lords were able to seize the chief offices for their own relatives, and the Church had become accustomed to regarding itself as an independent entity, and was unwilling to acquiesce in its conversion to a secular civil service. The feudal aristocracy was only broken in Europe in the course of the 18th century, with the establishment of secular civil services dependent on the state for their existence. In China, to tell the truth, things were not so different from this as the Confucian orthodoxy might suggest. The power of the aristocracy always vied with that of the civil service, and in most times the civil service was firmly under the thumb of the hereditary nobility.
Nonetheless, a civil service was established, and it gradually became the case that one entered on its lower rungs, at least, by examination in the Confucian classics. One can compare the Roman Empire, with its system of education in its own classics, and the emphasis on literary culture in the civil service. The classical disputes between the various philosophical schools in China should be viewed first of all as disputes between rival guilds of civil servants, and a state might choose early on to draw its officers from, say, the Mohists, or the Confucians. Those that sought a more private kind of salvation, like Zhuangzi, felt compelled to argue that a preference for the private life was good and permissible, and they often turned to criticism of the entire system of government, suggesting it would be better to get by with as little government as possible. The central question for the orthodox Chinese philosopher, then, is how to govern, that is, what is the Way of Heaven which should be followed. The attempt of the Qin to break loose from dependence on this guild and its values ended in what was later viewed as disaster, and the Chinese “civil service” settled in under the Han dynasty for a lifetime of more than a millennium. The Confucian orthodoxy represents the official philosophical justification for the power of this class of scholar-administrators.
The contribution of the Chinese philosophical outlook to the stability of this long-lived political system
is to be found first of all in
an ethic rooted in social and emotional bonds produced not by reason, but in
family relationships and custom reinforced by ceremony and literature. This ethic emphasized duty and
consideration for others as well as a reverence for the past and the established ways, and undermined personal
aggrandizement and “individualism” in thought and action. It was complemented by pragmatic, rational political
policy, often officially disavowed when it seemed to clash with ethical concerns, but followed nonetheless. It
was supported by the view that human beings are a part of nature, reflecting in their lives the structure of the
world. Thus a justification was provided for the way things are, and emphasis placed on the harmony of
opposed forces, and cooperation, rather than a conflict between good and evil. The public ethic was
supplemented by plausible salvationist personal philosophies, Taoism, and, later, Buddhism, which were
tolerant of social norms even as they criticized them, and permitted those members of the civil servant class
who felt the need an ideological basis for escaping from public duties. In these philosophies idealism was a
personal matter rather than publicly disruptive ideology, and the sage expected to bring about reform, if at all,
by example rather than activism. The whole system of belief displays a determinedly pragmatic bent, judging
thought by its social usefulness, and refusing to explore rational foundations and presuppositions in the skeptical
and speculative manner characteristic of European and Indian thought.
There were drawbacks to all this, of course. The Chinese world view, we shall argue, provided no foundation for the development of the speculative sciences, for it eschewed the sort of explanation that depends on seeing how a thing is structured from its parts, and never developed mathematics or its associated logic, relying instead on analogical argumentation rooted in literary pursuits. In the political realm, the Chinese style of thought could not provide a basis for a radical social critique, and the stability in social institutions it contributed to might be viewed as stagnation in the light of the development of Western democracy. But whether one approves or criticizes, Chinese philosophy is different enough in its background and presuppositions from Western and Indian thought to provide a fascinating basis for comparative study, and we shall find that the Chinese were quite capable of critical thought.
Chronology of Classical Chinese Writings
Before Kong Qiu—(1) Book of History, to 626 bce, a collection of sources with introductions, arranged in chronological order, from the legendary Emperors Yao, Shun and Yü (3rd millennium bce), the Xia Dynasty, ending with the monumentally degenerate Chieh, the Shang or Yin founded by Tang, to the early Zhou, founded by Wen and his son Wu. Most of this is a collection of forgeries from as late as the 3rd or 4th century C.E., but it is built up around a core of genuine Zhou documents, together with middle and late Zhou forgeries attributed to earlier dynasties. Supposedly Kong Qiu wrote a brief introduction to each document. (2) The Yi Jing, or Book of Changes—the basic text gives clues to the interpretation of divination by means of bones and tortoise shells. The “wings” of the brief interpretations were supposed to have been written by Kong Qiu, but is in fact Qin or early Han.
550–500 bce Kong Qiu. (2) Analects. (3) The Li Ji, Book of Rites, a collection of texts on a wide variety of topics, from the late Chou and early Han. (4) Spring and Autumn Annals — chronicles covering 722–481, without continuous narrative, sometimes later attributed to Kong Qiu, since they center on his home state of Lu. These records are extremely brief and obscure, and so were provided with commentaries of which the Zuo Zhuan, the Gungyang, and the Guliang commentaries from the early Han are the most important. (5) Book of Odes, a collection of poetry, much of it associated with the state cult, from the Early Zhou, but some of it popular songs which were given interpretations with political import. Five of the songs are believed to come from the Shang. It was later said to have been collected by Kong Qiu, a view now rejected, though many of the poems are contemporary with Kong Qiu. (1) – (5) are the five “Confucian Classics.” A sixth, the “Music,” is apparently lost.
479–381 bce Mozi.
403–221 bce Zuo Zhuan (commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, containing much literary fiction, romances, speeches, provision of background and simplified accounts, and excellent source for the life of the upper classes); Guo Yu (records of trials, with arguments on both sides, and a brief account of the decision made and outcome); Guanzi (a collection of essays on how to do various things, including one section that amounts to an utopian historical novel).
ca. 400–300 bce Laozi, Zhuangzi, Mohism, Mengzi (371–289), Hui Shih.
ca. 300–250 bce Hsunzi, Han Feizi, Gongsun Long, Zou Yen and the Yin Yang school.
221 bce The end of the period of contending states, unification of China under the Qin. With the Qin and the Han, the initial creative period of Chinese philosophy comes to an end, and Confucianism becomes entrenched.
206 bce The beginning of the Han dynasty. The Taoist, Huai–nan Tzu. Book of Rites, which includes The Doctrine of the Mean and the Great Learning. These last two, together with the Analects and the Mengzi, form the "Four Books" selected by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) as basic texts, together with Zhu Xi’s commentaries on them, for civil service examinations after 1313. Intrigues of the Warring States, which covers 475–221, is a somewhat cynical historical novel, reacting against the moralizing histories, about the exploits of a hero leading an alliance of Wei Han and Zhu against Qin.
100 bce Shi Ji (Records of the Grand Historian) of Si Ma Chien (145–85) (a work of synthesis, attempting to organize all the various historical traditions of the different states, and squaring their chronologies with one another) — 12 chapters of annals, 10 chapters of chronological tables for various states, 8 chapters of treatises, including material on rites, music, the calendar, astrology, various sacrifices, rivers and canals, standards of commerce and economic developments, 30 chapters of history of the states of Chou times and some fiefs of the Han, and 70 chapters of biography of famous statesmen, generals, philosophers and such, and accounts of foreign lands. An autobiography of Si Ma Chien ends the work. The point of history up to this time had been the aggrandizement of ancestors, and consequent validation of the current rulers, while making moral points through analyses of great rulers. Si Ma Chien, in contrast, claims to produce an accurate account, rescuing notable men from oblivion and doing justice to famous men of the past. He was the first author to take any interest in cultural matters, and the affairs and customs of the common people. It is only at about this time that Confucianism becomes completely dominant.
2. KONG QIU (CONFUCIUS) IN THE ANALECTS
Changju and Jieni were cultivating their fields together. Kong Qiu was passing that way and told Zilu to go and ask them where the river could be forded. Changju said: “Who is that holding the reins in the carriage?” Zilu said: “It is Kong Qiu.” “You mean Kong Qiu of the state of Lu?” “Yes” “If it is he, then he already knows where the ford is.” Zilu then turned to Jieni. Jieni asked: “Who are you, sir?” “”Changju is my name.” “You are a follower of Kong Qiu of Lu, are you not?” “That is so.” “The whole world is swept as by a torrential flood, and who can change it? As for you, instead of following one who flees from this man and that, you would do better to follow one who flees the whole world.” And with that he went on covering the seed without stopping. Zilu went and told Kong Qiu, who said ruefully: “One cannot herd together with birds and beasts. If I am not to be a man among other men, then what am I to be? If the Way prevailed in the world, I should not be trying to alter things.”
Analects XVIII 6
Kong Qiu of the state of Lu, called Confucius in the West,
was a government functionary in a state
that prided itself on preserving the heritage of the Zhou in music and rites. His thought is rooted in that of the
Zhou civil service. There are many details in his traditional biography, including exact dates (551–479), but
it is so encrusted with legendary material that it is very difficult to put together an accurate picture of his life.
The oldest and most reliable material is in the Lunyu, the “assorted sayings,” or Analects. There must have been
other early records, drawn on by Xunzi and Mencius, for instance, most of whose quotations of the Master are
missing from the Analects, but we don’t possess them now. It seems the last five chapters of the Analects (16–20)
are later additions to the text, and Chapter 10 is perhaps a ritual text with no connection to Kong Qiu at all,
though a Confucian would view it as a text describing the Master’s own style in matters of ritual and etiquette,
something to observe and imitate, at least in spirit.
Chapters 3-9 and 11-15 form the most authentic and
coherent representation of early Confucianism, or at least one school of it, that we have.
The Analects portrays a teacher who cannot obtain the high office necessary for him to reform the
government. He travels from state to state with his disciples seeking a ruler who will employ him. He was
perhaps at first a teacher of the culture of the Zhou, so respected in Lu, and gained some reputation as such.
He claims to preserve a tradition rather than presenting new doctrines, teaching li, the etiquette, customs and
ceremonial of the Zhou, and yue, the dance and music of the sacred rites. He was reputed to have edited the
Songs, a collection of poetry, much of it reflecting the views of common people, and its inclusion in the
curriculum may have been his innovation.
The audience for Kong Qiu’s teaching is the aristocracy,
and the topic is government. He represents
a class of wandering scholars of the ways of Zhou, the ru. It seems that unemployed lower nobility, often
rendered jobless by the ever-shifting political situation, took up the profession, and sought its aid in finding
preferment. Instead of teaching rhetoric, as did the Sophists in Greece, a skill suited to gaining power within
the democratic constitutions of the Greek city-states, the ru taught the old court etiquette, and their students
no doubt represented themselves as naturals for administrative positions in part because of their family
background. They argued that a state would do well to employ them, for they held the secret to the success
of the Zhou. Not everyone agreed, and we shall see that other schools used other approaches to find work in
the government. So a statesman of the time is recorded in the biography of Kong Qiu in the Book of History as
saying:
The ru are sophists and cannot be taken as a model or norm. Arrogant and following only their
own opinions, they cannot be made subordinates. They attach great importance to the
mourning rites, give themselves over to grief, and ruin great fortunes in funerals, a practice
which cannot become common usage. Sophists who travel from place to place begging for
loans, they are incapable of directing a state.
By the time of Mengzi, a century or so later, the ru had become so established that they often received patronage from princes, and considered themselves worthy of this attention.
It is not unreasonable to speculate that the ru were originally a priestly caste. This would explain their penchant for record-keeping, and their attachment to funeral rites, which would have evolved out of ancestral sacrifices like the Hero cults of Greece, at which they originally presided. It would also explain their insistence that a certain kind of holiness be recognized as a qualification to advise the ruler. They are Shamanistic figures, and originally their contact with the world of spirits, requiring ritual and moral purity not entirely consistent with common life, was the key to their wisdom and suitability as advisors to the King. Comparing the ru to Greece, again, we find the priests of Apollo and other gods qualified there to give advice, often of a moral sort, to rulers. The ru, of course, had an interest in divination, indicated by their study of the Yi Jing. Like the priests of Amun in Egypt, they often recommend that the King leave the details of administration to them, focusing on ritual rather than running the country. It is not hard to see here a priestly group, experts in ritual, striving to hold onto power despite the demotion of their function to the level of keeping the Spirits “at a distance.” If the religious side of the ritual is not essential to running the country, then it might be argued that purely as ritual it is essential.
The ru may originally have been priests and prophets, but by Kong Qiu’s time they had become a guild
of teachers, whose curriculum by the time of the Han covered the Six Arts: ceremony, music, archery,
charioteering, writing and mathematics. The Six Classics were the core of the literary curriculum, and
constituted the basic texts of Chinese culture. These were the Zhou texts that had been preserved in Lu, the
Book of History, the Songs, the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Yi Jing, the Book of Rites, and the Book of Music (now
lost). The ru, then, were in the same position as the classical teachers of rhetoric after Christianity established
itself in Rome. Even if one disagreed with them, not to work through their curriculum meant that one was not
educated in the traditions of one’s culture. Of the other philosophical schools generally identified from the
Classical period, only the Mohists could be considered as providing real competition, with their own methods
of teaching. Indeed, it seems that the ru were early on not conceived as a school of philosophy at all, but simply
as teachers of the old tradition, who, as it happened, had some characteristic views. The Mohists were a radical
movement, the other schools ephemeral manifestations of thought, the ru a profession. It was conceivable that
the ru should have been converted to one or another philosophical view, and later Confucians, of course,
absorbed all sorts of influences from other schools. Moreover, Confucians had serious disagreements among
themselves, as the affair of the Legalists and Mengzi demonstrate. Nonetheless, it was not conceivable that the
ru should have been displaced by a philosophical school, any more than it is nowadays conceivable that English
teachers should be displaced by Wittgensteinian philosophers. Only twice have the Confucians been seriously
challenged, and both times it was by rulers who were determined to raze all that had gone before and make
a fresh start. The first was the first Emperor of Qin, a Legalist, who at first flirted with the ru, but became
disgusted with their traditionalist squabbles, and finally banned the Classics and established punishments for
any who “appealed to the past to condemn the present.” Tradition even has it that he burned 460 scholars alive
in 212 bce, on suspicion of sedition. Even he retained seventy scholars in the capital, though—whether as a
sop to conservatives or to educate the sons of the nobility, we do not know. The second was Mao Ze Dong,
the founder of the current Communist regime.
Kong Qiu assigns the loss of the Mandate of Heaven to the failure to function within the natural order,
which includes the ethical. His technique is to describe the perfect sage, which is the real noblemen, the one
who knows what is important and has the highest virtue. He discusses the sage’s virtues and the acts
characteristic of his virtues, rather than laying down a code of behavior.
The natural order to be followed is
the dao, the ‘way’. A dao at its broadest is a way of life, although the word is used for much narrower ways,
such as the way of the carpenter. Confucius is concerned with a way of life, and when he speaks of the dao he
means the correct way of life, the best way, in conformity with our ze, our nature, and expressing de, the
power and virtue that comes from a fully developed ze. The dao of Heaven is the natural order, which is never
violated, of course, but the dao of human beings, for all that it is natural to them, can be lost or
violated—human beings, for whatever reason (later Confucians give different accounts) can deviate from their
dao. Often he speaks of the individual’s way of life as his dao, and so speaks of it as being born, growing, being
strengthened, a small or a great dao, and so forth.
More often he speaks of the ideal dao, which was actually
followed by the Xia, Shang, and Zhou Empires in the beginning of their careers, and which he wishes to restore
to the world.
One can describe the way and so it can be heard, studied, and, of course, modeled or walked.
Dao might be viewed as an eternal thing, since there is only one right way for human beings to live in general,
given the sameness of their nature, but an actual dao is an historical entity, an actual way followed by a given
society, with its appropriate, but not inevitable conventional components, and can be developed and
elaborated, improved and adorned with the various arts. Indeed, the dao is something invented and developed
by human beings, even if it is a natural invention, and there was a time before it had been discovered. The dao
must be learned, and one who has not studied and learned a culture following the dao cannot himself follow
the dao. Kong Qiu studied the Zhou, for its culture embodied the dao, and it was the only culture about which
he had relatively full information that did so. Thus, if one loves and pursues it without learning, he will go
astray—love of ren is clouded by ignorance, love of understanding by loose and inaccurate thinking, love of qi
by rudeness, love of sincerity by harmful actions, love of courage by recklessness, love of firmness by cruelty.
One cannot rationally discover or construct dao from whole cloth—it must be rooted in a tradition.
Behaving well is a matter of performing social rituals, and one’s social roles, well. Fundamentally one has to be trained to behave well, and one may be persuaded to undergo the training, but the training won’t take if one is forced do so. Ritual (li) is performed like drama, not followed like rules of etiquette. Thus one’s actions are looked at not so much as the outcome of rational calculation, or free decisions revealing respect for the rules, or for one standard or another of judgment, but rather as performances to be judged in somewhat the way one judges musical or theatrical performances. Ritual can be performed sincerely or without sincerity, expressively or drily, with individual expression or effacing oneself in favor the tradition, with inappropriate or appropriate expression, elegantly or clumsily, with too little or too much emotion, and a performance can be authentic or inauthentic, authentic to one’s nature and experience, or authentic to the tradition, or even to the author’s intentions if an author can be identified. One is responsible for a performance, of course, but one cannot pull off a good performance simply by deciding to do so, and if one is responsible for a bad performance it may be because one did not train oneself well enough for it, or perhaps because of one’s bad taste, insensitivity, or lack of insight, or one’s insincerity or lack of knowledge of the tradition. The notion that we always know what it is right to do, and then simply choose to do it or not, and are virtuous or not depending on our free choice, is simply alien to the Chinese tradition. This does not mean that decision and rational calculation does not play a role, of course. The teacher can point out the advantage of practice, and one can decide to practice.
Punishment is viewed by Kong Qiu as a means to get people to behave well, but a relatively ineffectual
one, and Kong Qiu does not think it reasonable to treat punishment as something required by the person’s act,
as moral desert, when dealing with the common people. The attitude is somewhat different toward the upper
classes, where it seems the view is that the person has had the opportunity to shape themselves to virtue, and
Heaven may require punishment of those who behave badly, though even here the punishment is viewed very
much as a natural consequence of one’s bad actions. There are wrong, and not merely shameful, actions, and
a person is responsible for her actions, but those who do wrong need education, not punishment, to change.
They need to get better at the performance of their roles and rituals, not change their plans in response to an
altered schedule of sanctions. Education may be gained, above all, from the example of a superior
—the chief
job of the superior is to model wisdom through the expert and sensitive performance of social ritual, a difficult
task.
Everyone first learns the rituals in the family setting, and the virtuous person is raised well, and then
transfers the rituals and roles he has learned in the family to the larger sphere.
Proper friendships help, since
we imitate one another and skill and virtue is contagious.
Influence over one’s superiors (elders) is rooted in
respect for them, as is respect for oneself from one’s inferiors, and influence over one’s inferiors is rooted in
concern for their welfare and respect for their rights, that is, ren,
which is expressed by the sage in his expert
performance of social ritual. A true ruler rules for the benefit of his subjects. Ren is the most basic virtue,
because it recognizes the intrinsic worth of people, the most basic value.
Nothing else justifies the societal
structure, and, in particular, nothing else can justify the role of the nobleman or his claim to rule. “If the
nobleman departs from ren, how can he fulfill that name of ‘nobleman’?”
In general, activity is seen as a sign of the ineffective. So the virtuous fellow attracts the best men,
he does not go out and get them. It is not by managing, especially micro–managing, but by inspiring others to
do their work well, that one is effective. The law is necessary in government, but it is best to use it as little as
possible.
The notion is not that human nature is intrinsically good, as in Mengzi later, but that it is subject to
influence.
There is a trust in the other fellow to know his job, and the ruler does not do other people’s work,
or direct them, but makes them virtuous so that they do their job seriously and well. This is connected to the
anti–utilitarian stance.
The man of yi does not calculate advantages. For one thing, if others see him doing
that they will begin to do it, and society depends on our acting in accord with the rules even when it is not to
our advantage. One who seeks advantage gives up doing his job well. One needs to trust others, which one can
do if he trusts himself.
There is a form of magic lying behind all this, at least historically speaking.
The ruler
accomplishes an aim through ceremonial and pre–enactment, and through his de, and no doubt did this as
genuine magical activity at one time. Kong Qiu has transmuted the magic into a matter of psychological
influence, but the sense of ceremonial and respect for superior mana remains as a residue of the old practice,
and just a little of the sense that something miraculous in this line could be performed by someone of truly
great de. In the same way, Kong Qiu transmutes the code of the aristocrat into ethical doctrine.
For Kong Qiu virtue is the art that governs all others, and lays the foundation for social cooperation.
It is an art for bringing people to cooperate with and benefit one another.
Kong Qiu found a human life
possible only within society,
and so, like Aristotle, he views the social development of a human being, the
mastery of ritual and role, as a part of the natural course of development into a full adult. Human virtue is
natural to human beings, due to their ze, even though it is necessarily developed within a social context, and
as a result of social training. An analysis of the chief virtues from the Confucian point of view will serve to fill
in his thought.
Zhi is a certain straightforwardness in one’s approach to duty, not using his role or office for ulterior
purposes, not just time–serving.
A judge is a judge when he has zhi. The word is generally translated as
“uprightness.” The virtue is associated with one’s “basic stuff,” (also zhi, but a different ideogram), it is the
underlying, which is directed and refined by rites and music. So when someone speaks of an upright fellow
in his country who bore witness against his father, who had stolen a sheep, Kong Qiu remarks that in his
country upright people are not like that, and there is uprightness in protecting one’s father from justice.
The
underlying is respect for one’s father, and one has to ask whether respect for the law here builds on that
underlying virtue, or undermines it through an excessive concern for the opinions of others. So when another
fellow, out of concern for what others might think, borrowed vinegar himself so that he could give some to
a neighbor who asked him for it, he was judged by Kong Qiu to be lacking in uprightness.
Uprightness is
acquired through a study of the Odes, and Kong Qiu said that the meaning of all the poems in the collection can
be covered with a single quotation, ‘let there be no swerving aside,’ i.e. no deviation from zhi.
But zhi
without li, ritual, sinks into rudeness.
Without the basic stuff, one is a mere clerk, but without ritual, one
is a rustic—the two need to be balanced against one another.