Confucius and his 'golden age '
He shaped civilizations; his ancient values speak to us now
(This story first appeared in the Sunday Time Out section of the Japan Times, Sept. 10, 2006)
Is what Confucius said true? Can music, poetry and decorum govern the world? Does a ruler, by cultivating benevolence in himself, plant benevolence in his subjects, and harmony in his polity?
The chaos of our time hardly invites us to take such notions seriously. But Confucius' time was chaotic too. The ancient dynasty was crumbling, upstarts vied for power, and morality degenerated accordingly. In despair, a high government official proposed executing all miscreants. Confucius said, "In administering your government, what need is there for you to kill? Just desire the good yourself and the common people will be good."
The same official asked what to do about thieves. Confucius said, "If you yourself were not a man of desires"---not corrupt, in other words---"no one would steal even if stealing carried a reward."
Asked why he did not take office himself, Confucius replied, "Simply by being a good son and friendly to his brothers a man can exert an influence upon government."
A society, in Confucius' view, was an extended family in which, ideally, family relationships and family harmony prevailed. "A youth who does not respect his elders will achieve nothing when he grows up." A respectful son grows into a man worthy of respect and therefore a worthy ruler---of his family certainly, of society as a whole possibly. Rule meant, first and foremost, self-cultivation. The gentleman "cultivates himself," said Confucius, "and thereby brings peace and security to his fellow men."
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Confucius. The name is so familiar we are apt to forget how little we know the man, though thanks to cryptic snatches of his conversation recorded by his disciples in a book called the Analects (from a Greek word meaning collection) he is, though elusive, not entirely unknowable. As for his teachings, the general verdict throughout most of the revolutionary 20th century has been that they (or their derivatives, legitimate and bastard) accomplished their civilizing mission millennia ago and are best relegated to the remote past, having long since grown moldy in the service of Asian autocrats, 18th-century Japanese shoguns among them, who invoked him with relish, and continue to invoke him, for his supposed emphasis on unquestioning obedience. The latest in a long line is Chinese president Hu Jintao, who, stymied by social turmoil and the ruling Communist Party's intellectual bankruptcy, last year broke the party's anti-Confucian mold, reminding cadres, "Confucius said, 'Harmony is to be cherished.'"
The fragmentary nature of the Analects is conducive to the selective reading autocrats have habitually given it. "Never disobey," said Confucius---it is one of his several definitions of filial piety, and sounds categorical enough; but he also said, in a passage less frequently honored with official quotation, "If a man is correct in his own person, then there will be obedience without orders being given; but if he is not correct in his own person, there will not be obedience even though orders are given." "Correct" means, above all, benevolent. Benevolence is easy: "Is benevolence really far away? No sooner do I desire it than it is here"---but the desire for it, judging by its rarity, is difficult. It commits a ruler above all, but also human beings in general, to the quest for moral perfection, to a "return to the observance of the rites through overcoming the self." Few rulers in any era are up to such standards, and Confucius' impatience with those who are not is apparent in his advice to a disciple who has asked how best to serve a prince: "Tell him the truth even if it offends him." As for the rulers of his own day, "Oh," said Confucius, "they are of such limited capacity that they hardly count."
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Almost alone among the ancient teachers of mankind, Confucius (or K'ung Ch'iu, to give him, if only this once, his true name) was neither god nor prophet nor, in sharp contrast to his Taoist near-contemporary Lao-tzu, mystic.
"Chi-lu asked how the spirits of the dead and the gods should be served," we read in the Analects. "The Master said, 'You are not able even to serve man. How can you serve the spirits?'
"'May I ask about death?'
"'You do not even understand life. How can you understand death?'"
Revere the gods and spirits, he taught, "but keep them at a distance." They are not man's immediate concern. Moral perfection, whose outward manifestation is "work[ing] for the things the common people have a right to," is its own reward. There is no hint in his teaching of any other, natural or supernatural.
The China into which Confucius was born in 551 BC was not really China. That name derives from the imperial Ch'in dynasty, whose harsh though brief militarist, legalist, bureaucratic rule three centuries later (221-207 BC) represented everything Confucius abhorred. Confucius was a relatively humble citizen of the "state" of Lu, an eastern backwater, one of the least among 12 semi-independent, strife-ridden dukedoms of the aging, tottering Chou dynasty. It was the Chou dynasty's golden age, 500 years before his birth, that Confucius looked back to with longing, and dreamed of reviving. "I transmit but do not innovate," he said. What he sought to transmit were the rites, music and poetry that had prevailed in a time, semi-mythical perhaps, when rites, music and poetry – primarily the poetry preserved in the Book of Odes, originating in the golden age and expressing the innocence to which Confucius aspired---in effect ruled, because sage-kings like King Wen, King Wu and the Duke of Chou, the dynastic founders, were virtuous and wise. "When those above are given to the observance of the rites," Confucius taught, "the common people will be easy to command." Force is unnecessary. Law is superfluous. "There was nothing for him to do," said Confucius of the ruler of a state in which the Way of the sage-kings prevailed, "but to hold himself in a respectful posture and to face due south."
It was not the Way, however, but conditions approaching anarchy that prevailed in Confucius' own time. His father was a soldier, a daring and conspicuous figure in the numerous wars of the period. Confucius was orphaned early. "I was of humble station when young," he later told his disciples. "That is why I am skilled in many menial things. Should a gentleman be skilled in many things? No, not at all."
Very little is known of his childhood, but "At fifteen," he said, "I set my heart on learning." What the impetus was we don't know, but his absorbing interest, the special focus of his studies, was li – "the rites." It is a problematic term. No English translation quite does it justice, scholars say, and a tendency to render it "ritual" has helped fuel the modern impatience with Confucius. Some of the li-soaked sections of the Analects are undeniably tiresome to our thinking.
"On going through the outer gates to his lord's court, [Confucius] drew himself in, as though the entrance was too small to admit him. When he stood, he did not occupy the center of the gateway; when he walked, he did not step on the threshold. When he went past [his lord's empty throne], his face took on a serious expression... When he lifted the hem of his robe to ascend the hall, he drew himself in, stopped inhaling as if he had no need to breathe..."
And so on---it's a long passage, and there are numerous others like it. But, as David Hall and Roger Ames point out in an essay published in Confucianism for the Modern World (see accompanying story), "The Analects does not provide us with a catechism of prescribed formal conducts, but rather with the image of a particular historical person [i.e., Confucius] striving with imagination to exhibit the sensitivity to ritualized living that would ultimately make him the teacher of an entire civilization."
The outward manifestation matters less than the spirit animating it. "Appropriately performed," say Hall and Ames, "li elevates the commonplace and customary into something elegant and profoundly meaningful."
***
Once a disciple asked Confucius what he would do first if he were ever a ruler. "If something has to be put first," Confucius replied, "it is, perhaps, the rectification of names."
The disciple thought Confucius was joking; it seemed rather a trivial thing--- though it shouldn't to us, living as we do in an age of government by spokespersons and spin-doctors. Confucius (with some asperity at the disciple's "boorishness") explained: "When names are not correct, what is said will not sound reasonable; when what is said does not sound reasonable, affairs will not culminate in success; when affairs do not culminate in success, rites and music will not flourish; when rites and music do not flourish, punishments will not fit the crimes; when punishments do not fit the crimes, the common people will not know where to put hand and foot."
Note the absence of any mention, in connection with crime and punishment, of law. Confucius was profoundly distrustful of laws. "If you use laws to direct the people," he said, "and punishments to control them, they will merely try to evade the laws, and will have no sense of shame. But if by virtue you guide them, and by the rites you control them, there will be a sense of shame, and of right"---and social harmony will prevail.
Contemporaneous with Confucius were philosophers called Legalists. Their doctrine---the rule of law---seems, in light of future history, progressive, while Confucius' notion of the rule of "rites and music" strikes us as quaint, if not hopelessly reactionary.
But some modern psychologists are learning from the horrors of our time a new respect for Confucius. Simon Leys, in an accompanying commentary to his translation of the Analects, quotes French psychologist Boris Cyrulnik: "When families are no longer able to generate rites that can interpret the surrounding world and transmit the parental culture, children find themselves cut off from reality, and they have to create their own culture---a culture of archaic violence...
"Incidences of incest are increasing," Cyrulnik continues, "because too many men no longer feel that they are fathers. As family relationships have weakened and roles have changed, individuals do not see clearly what their proper place is. This is the symptom of a cultural breakdown."
***
"Can I not, perhaps," mused Confucius, "create another Chou in the east?"
This was his life's mission, to recreate in the east---that is, in his home state of Lu---his no doubt misty-eyed image of the golden age of the Chou dynasty founded by King Wen, King Wu and the Duke of Chou. Intermittently he assumed official positions under unsavory usurpers in order to further his goal. He gathered round him disciples---77 are known by name---who might in a sense be called co-conspirators. The conspiracy, in which trickery figured more than violence, was an attempt to undermine the usurpers and return power to the legitimate heirs of the House of Chou. It came undone, and Confucius fled. He spent most of his last years in exile in neighboring states, returning to Lu shortly before his death in 479 BC. "For 2000 years," says Leys, "Confucius was canonized as China's First and Supreme Teacher. This is a cruel irony. Of course, Confucius devoted much attention to education but he never considered teaching as his first and real calling. His first vocation was politics. He had a mystical faith in his political mission."
It failed. Never has the world known a Confucian state, if by that we mean what Confucius meant---a state governed by family relationships, nourished by benevolence and regulated by the poetry, music and rites of ancient sage-kings. Korea under the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) is often said to have come closest, but what much of Asia got instead was imperial Confucianism, a creation of China's Han dynasty (202 BC – AD 220). The Ch'in dynasty which the Han overthrew had burned manuscripts associated with Confucius, but some survived to be favored by a leading Han court philosopher---who, circa 196 BC, provoked his emperor's impatience by vigorously advocating their official adoption.
"I conquered my empire on horseback," snapped the emperor, "and I will rule my empire on horseback."
Replied the philosopher: "Your Majesty, one may conquer an empire on horseback but one may never rule an empire on horseback."
Very much struck by that, the emperor proceeded to offer the first official sacrifice---of an ox---to the tomb of Confucius. This may be said to mark the birth of official Confucianism, an unwieldy collage of Confucian principle, later reinterpretation, and imperial expediency. It had an awesome future ahead of it, spreading its influence well beyond China's borders and becoming one of the most extensive and durable systems of government in all history, perhaps second only to ancient Egypt's---but it generally fell short when it came to benevolence. "Confucius," says Leys bluntly, "was certainly not a Confucianist."
He apparently died suspecting such would be the case. "I suppose I should give up hope," he sighed. "I have yet to meet the man who is as fond of virtue as he is of beauty in women."
***
A man in the soul of Japan
The Analects and other Confucian texts were first brought to Japan by the Korean envoy and scholar Wani in the fourth or fifth century AD, some 800 years after Confucius' death. Buddhist sutras were also among the gifts he bore. What kind of pupils he found the courtiers of pre-literate Japan to be is not recorded. But the first fruits of Japan's early education are summarized in the 17 articles of the "Constitution" of Prince Shotoku, dated 604. Its very first words, "Harmony is to be valued," are Confucian to the core. So is the encomium to official decorum in Article Four: "The Ministers and functionaries should make decorous behavior their leading principle, for the leading principle of the government of the people consists in decorous behavior. If the superiors do not behave with decorum, the inferiors are disorderly: if inferiors are wanting in proper behavior, there must necessarily be offences."
A palace revolution in 645, known as the Taika Reform, aimed to fuse the loose assemblage of rival clans that Japan then was into the centralized Confucian state envisioned by Prince Shotoku in Article Twelve: " In a country there are not two lords; the people cannot have two masters. The sovereign is the master of the people of the whole country."
Japan's cultural and political infancy, then, bears a strong Confucian stamp. A Chinese visitor to Nara at the height of the Nara Period (710—784) would have seen a model in little of his own society, and though the scale would scarcely have impressed him, the faithfulness of the imitation might have.
The Heian Period (794-1185) was a different story---a purely Japanese cultural flowering that had little use for Confucianism. In Murasaki Shikibu's classic Tale of Genji, the towering masterpiece of the age, Confucian scholars are figures of fun, their stuffy solemnity and stilted language provoking "gusts of laughter" among the guests at Genji's son's matriculation ceremony.
The close of the Heian Period coincided with a Chinese recasting of the Confucian legacy by a group of scholars known to posterity as neo-Confucianists. The outstanding name as far as Japan is concerned is Chu Hsi (1130-1200), for whom the quality of benevolence, very dear to Confucius' heart and central to his doctrine, is not only a human quality pertaining to society but a natural force underpinning the physical universe. Man learns virtue, therefore, by contemplating the natural order. It is only a short leap from here to the notion that the given social hierarchy is ordained by nature itself. Perhaps we need look no further for an explanation of why Chu Hsi's thinking was so attractive to the ultra-conservative Tokugawa regime of the Edo Period (1600-1867). Insecure regarding the legitimacy of their tenure, the Tokugawa shoguns closed the country to all but the most limited foreign intercourse and froze, to the greatest extent possible (it proved ultimately impossible, of course), the social system in its 17th-century mold. Throughout this period, Chu Hsi Confucianism was the official state dogma.
***
"Many Japanese Confucian scholars are truly frogs who know nothing outside their own small wells," wrote the satirist Hiraga Gennai (1728-1779). "They slavishly copy everything Chinese and refer to Japan as a nation of 'Eastern Barbarians.'"
Hiraga was a jack-of-all-trades, an accomplished dabbler in Western arts and sciences whose impatience with the quibbles and quiddities of hidebound Confucian scholar-officials is understandable in view of the festering social problems---poverty, peasant riots, the first hints of dangerous foreign resentment over Japan's intractable isolationism---to which they had no solutions beyond pedantic appeals for greater Confucian rectitude.
"The fact that people today will frivolously walk down a road from which there is no return is due to the existence of the Tale of Genji and the [more overtly erotic] Tales of Ise," huffed the orthodox Chu Hsi scholar Yamazaki Ansai (1618-1682). "It is said that the Tale of Genji was written as an admonishment for men and women. It is extremely doubtful, however, that such frivolity could serve to admonish anyone."
But the Confucian camp was less united than its outward ceremonial gravity made it appear. Had not Confucius himself treasured the Book of Odes, a poetry and song collection from the ancient golden age he longed to recreate? Was it not one of the five Confucian classics? Did not that suggest there was a place for literature dealing not only with moral rectitude but with human emotions?
Disgust with the austere sanctimony of the Chu Hsi scholars drove other Confucianists back to their original sources. Had Confucius really been such a stuffed shirt? On the contrary, the Analects show him a warm and at times a passionate man, whose Way is rooted less in the Cosmos, as it was for Chu Hsi, than in the ordinary feelings of ordinary people---family sentiment in particular.
The endorsement of "ordinary feelings" has dangerous implications for a regime that survives by suppressing those feelings. Everything about the Tokugawa was unnatural---the closed country, the social immobility, the very structure of the regime. "In a country there are not two lords," Prince Shotoku had admonished, but in Tokugawa Japan there were---the shogun and the emperor. Which of them had the sanction of heaven?
"Unlike in Japan," continued Hiraga in his irrepressibly mischievous way, "the Chinese emperor is basically nothing more than temporary hired help. If they don't like him, they change him." Which was true; heaven's sanction was granted and withdrawn, not eternal. Regimes rose and fell. But at any one time, power was assumed to be indivisible, concentrated in one ruler. In Japan, hereditary official Confucian historians like Hayashi Razan (1583-1657) and his son and successor, Hayashi Gaho (1618-1680), bent over backwards to justify the overshadowing of the emperor by the shogun.
"Evildoers and bandits were vanquished," wrote Gaho in 1664 of the Battle of Sekigahara, won by the Tokugawa in 1600, "and the entire realm submitted to Lord [Tokugawa] Ieyasu, praising the establishment of peace and extolling his martial virtue. That this glorious era that he founded may continue for ten thousands upon ten thousands of generations, coeval with heaven and earth!"
The tone is bombastic, but Gaho himself seems to have had his doubts, for he wrote elsewhere, "In a book intended for the shogun's eyes it is incumbent upon one to be circumspect."
Tokugawa rule withered, but not Confucianism. In the succeeding Meiji Period (1868-1912) it merged with the native Shinto religion to buttress the most powerful state apparatus that had ever oppressed the Japanese people. Loyalty, duty, filial piety and harmony were the virtues to be cultivated---by force if necessary. Confucius would have been appalled, but he had long since ceased to matter, his name having been co-opted as a symbol, his teachings reduced to slogans and commands.
After World War Two, the Occupation authorities removed Confucian teachings from the Japanese school curriculum.
"Nonetheless," comments the Encyclopedia of Relgion, "to the extent that such ideals as harmony and loyalty can be said to belong to Confucianism, these qualities may be fundamental to Japanese culture and are likely to survive"---as Hiraga had known all along they would. "In Japan," he wrote, tongue-in-cheek as always, "benevolence and righteousness have been spontaneously followed. Peace has prevailed even without sages."
Is Confucius Dead?
Is Confucius dead?
He walked the earth more than 2500 years ago, his thinking focused even then on the remote past. Why bother with him today?
The eminence of his name, combined with certain aspects of his teachings that seem to favor absolute rule and unconditional obedience, have made him a convenient prop for Asian tyrants seeking to justify their dictatorship.
But does he have anything meaningful to say to the rest of us? Confucius, after all, knew little of technological change. We know nothing of stasis. To us, yesterday's wisdom seems obsolete today. To him, a filial son was one who made no change to his father's ways until the father had been dead at least three years. What can our globalized universe possibly learn from such a sage?
A good deal, argues a book called Confucianism for the Modern World. The volume is a collection of essays by 18 scholars, Asian and Western, who evaluate the master's legacy in terms of its contemporary relevance. Their point is that the incoherences and dissonances of our time have more in common than outward appearance might suggest with those that troubled Confucius two and a half millenia ago, and that we too would be the better for a stiff dose of li.
The overall point is that the incoherences and dissonances of our time, different in form of course from those that troubled Confucius two and a half millenia ago, are in essence much the same, and that we, no less than his contemporaries, would be the better for a stiff dose of li.
Li is generally translated as rites or rituals, but that, with its connotation of empty forms, strikes the wrong note. Think of it instead, suggests South Korea's Yonsei University professor Hahm Chaihark, as "a marvelous combination of education, self-cultivation, training, discipline, restraint, authority and legitimacy." For Hahm, li served as a kind of unwritten premodern Constitution, a constraint on government absolutism rather than an encouragement of it. "For example," he writes, "during the Choson dynasty in Korea (1392-1910), the central bureaucracy included many offices"---staffed by experts in li---"whose explicit duties were to educate, correct and criticize the behavior of the ruler."
It's a model worthy of careful study, Hahm maintains, for "once the citizens of modern East Asian countries begin to emulate their Confucian scholar-official ancestors, who first disciplined themselves with ritual propriety and then demanded the ruler's discipline, their countries will become constitutionalist states."
Globalization is too recent and too sudden a phenomenon for us to agree yet on what it means, or whom it benefits at whose expense. Skeptics doubt a globalized regime's capacity to nourish civilized values beyond mass entertainment and mass consumption. Geir Helgesen, senior researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, fears globalization's tendency to overwhelm the individual and trigger "a retreat into personal, private spheres of interest..." Accordingly, he says, "globalization might turn out to be a much more effective enemy of democracy than the totalitarian ideologies of the recent past ever were."
Should we disembark from the Internet and dust off our copies of The Analects, then?
Maybe we should. Helgesen cites a recent South Korean survey showing 89 percent of respondents agreeing with Confucius that "A leader should care for the people as parents for their children." Ninety-one percent feel comfortable with the orthodox Confucian notion that "The objective of good government is to maintain harmonious social relations." For 87 percent, as of course for Confucius, "The ideal society is like a family."
Well, that's South Korea, the Confucian nation par excellence. But Helgesen's Institute conducted a similar survey in Demnark. "To our surprise," he reports, "75 percent of Danish respondents agreed" that "The ideal society is like a family."
What should we conclude from that? This at least, says Helgesen: "By teaching a social morality which stresses proper rituals based on the emotional pattern people recognize from family life, Confucianism may well have something to offer [our] 'runaway world.'"