World Literature Program

Dr. Robert Churchill, Confucius

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HANDBOOK FOR THE STUDY OF EASTERN LITERATURES

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Background

In poem # 242 from the Book of Songs (pp. 785-86), the speaker celebrates the ascendancy of the Chou Dynasty (ca. 1120 B. C.), suggesting that the dissolute behavior of the Shang-Yin rulers gradually deprived them of the Mandate of Heaven and transferred legitimacy to Chou. Though Chou had been a vassal border state and somewhat less culturally refined than Shang, early Chou monarchs viewed themselves not as alien conquerors but as divinely ordained inheritors and propagators of Shang civilization, which they had emulated since long before the conquest. The Chou thus presented themselves and the Shang as sprung from the same cultural rootstock, suggesting that both dynastic lines were legitimate descendants of the mythical Sage-Kings who had ruled in antiquity.

Moving resolutely, the first three Chou rulers consolidated their domain by parceling out about seventy strategic fiefs to family, clan members, and political allies. Even the Shang, since they too once had been granted Heaven's Mandate to rule, were awarded an important state (Sung), wherein they continued to practice their ancestral rites. Through this pervasive and powerful network, the Chou court successfully imposed its language, rituals, political institutions, and the common cultural heritage of Shang and Chou throughout its domain.

For nearly four hundred years, the Chou kings held military superiority, but all during that time, many vassal states were increasing in size and power. Locked in frequent wars with one another, they added to their holdings by defeating and annexing smaller neighbors. Thus, by 771 B. C., the state army of Royal Chou was so diminished that it easily fell before barbarian invaders, who sacked the capital city and murdered the king. When the capital was relocated farther to the east in the next year, the new King's military presence was insignificant.

For awhile, peace was intermittently preserved by a coalition of the most powerful vassal lords, who honored the Chou king in spirit and ceremony, but otherwise did as they pleased. By the fourth century, Royal Chou was pretty much at the mercy of seven of its alleged vassals. Large, powerful, and virtually autonomous, these states embarked upon a final, bitter bloodletting, in which one lord after another took the title of king. Eventually, in 256 B. C., Ch'in (another semi-barbarian border state) deposed the reigning Chou monarch and annexed what remained of his royal domain. Within the next thirty years, the country was pacified, and, in 221 B. C., unified under the "First Emperor" of Ch'in (Ch'in Shih-huang-ti).

And yet, despite Chou's position of attenuated authority during these chaotic centuries, the symbolic importance of the dynasty did not lessen until its very end. In fact, as Fredrick Mote says, in Intellectual Foundations of China, "the Chou court continued to exercise a nominal hegemony for five hundred years more; its power derived from a mystique of legitimacy that the founding Chou figures had carefully established and that Chou civilization nurtured and enhanced" (p. 11).

What the foregoing might suggest to the perceptive reader, one familiar with the Chou which Confucius reveres, is the tremendous distance separating what we might call "legendary Chou" from the dynasty that actually existed. In the people's memory, early Chou was enshrined as a Golden Age when the Empire was united under the Emperor, and all the descendants of his vassals remained faithful to their lord. And yet, as we have seen, from rather early in its history, the Chou Dynasty was marked by the slow erosion of central power and the growth of more than a score of rival states. As rivalries waxed, successful diplomacy waned, and the Era of Warring States (ca. 464-221 B. C.) brought incessant warfare, misery, and death. Looking back to better times, the people surely felt, as the ghost of King Hamlet tells his son, "Oh, . . . what a falling-off was there" (Hamlet, I, V, l. 47).

And just this discrepancy--between the goodness that had been, and the evil that was now--stimulated a truly golden age of thought in Chou's twilight years. Indeed, during this chaotic era, a time Karl Jaspers labels the "Axial Period" (in his The Origin and Goal of History), thinkers were developing written history, philosophy, and sophisticated ethical arguments--ideas that have molded all subsequent Chinese history.

This intellectual awakening seems a response to the breakdown of the Chou--a moral and political order which had claimed to be guided by Heaven's authority. And each thinker--whether Confucian, Legalist, or Taoist--asks the same question: "Where is The Way?", the way to re-order the state and conduct a meaningful personal life. And, as A. C. Graham says, despite differing answers to this question, most of the competing schools looked backwards--"from present disruption towards an empire and culture that flourished in the immediate past." Behind their theories, most thinkers of the period share "the purpose of attracting rulers to a project for recovering the lost and longed-for political and social cohesion" (Disputers of the Tao, p. 4).

Confucius was one of those thinkers who looked to the past for answers, and his great reverence for antiquity seems to have been shaped early. In fact, intense respect for Chou civilization characterized his homeland, Lu--a small state created in northeastern China as Chou solidarity was dissolving into the Era of Warring States. Lu had originated as the ducal fief of Chou Kung (Tan, the Duke of Chou, died ca. 1094 B. C.), younger brother of the Dynasty's founder (King Wu).

According to tradition, the Duke assumed imperial power during the minority of his nephew Ch'eng, the heir-apparent. During his regency, the Duke suppressed rebellions against the rightful successor, used his position to establish new institutions that promoted stabilty, and regularized the government before returning authority to his brother's son (probably the last great Chou ruler).

The Duke's most important contribution seems to have been the clan inheritance system, which regulated imperial succession and created familial solidarity within the Chou dynasty. In this plan, the kingship passed to the principal wife's eldest son. Younger sons and sons of concubines founded their own noble houses and were granted feudal domains by the ruler. Such lords thus enjoyed a dual relationship with the king--a political bond (as a feudal vassal), and a familial connection (as blood relative and head of a branch of the royal clan). So, political allegiance was grounded on, and stabilized by, family ties, by an elaborate system of mutual dependence that initially created great social solidarity. Resting on a shared belief in the authority of the heaven-mandated ruler, reinforced and connected by a matrix of efficacious religious observance, family loyalty, and feudal obligations, the early Chou ruled not through legal constraint or oppression, but through the suasive force of their superior virtue, the natural force of the loving duties that bind families together.

Following the Duke of Chou's example, Confucius elaborated a social ethic, a political vision, and a scholarly tradition--all based on familial relationships and the rituals that sustained them. Such rituals created harmony; indeed, they mirrored the harmony of the universe and were thus indispensible for the proper order of society. This system stretched back through the Chou, he believed, included the best of the Shang and Hsia dynasties, and had begun with the legendary sage-kings Yao and Shun, who shaped a civilized world by their righteous moral example and enlightened rule. Confucius hoped to rediscover this tradition, thereby bringing about two effects: (1) reanimating the vitiated rituals that once had helped create and sustain the Golden Age; and, (2) reordering his own chaotic world by returning it to rectitude.

Thus, Confucius views himself not as the founder of a belief system, but as a preserver or conservator of institutions (family, school. village, state, kingdom) that for centuries had fostered political stability and social order. In this regard, he says, "I transmit but do not innovate; I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity" (Analects, VII, 1.).

And yet, Confucius is not exactly truthful here, for he emphasizes only some of the old ideals of aristocratic conduct. For one thing, he rejects the idea that nobility (gentility) is a matter of heredity. For him, the "superior man" is formed by education and marked by his conduct. Thus, men of lowly birth, with natural aptitude and the right education, can become "gentlemen," or chun-tzu--"superior men" who give evidence of having achieved a personal excellence of ethical and intellectual training.

The marks of such gentility are goodness (jen), wisdom (chih), and courage (yung). Practicing jen, the superior man expresses concern for the well-being of others and possesses a humane understanding of their lives' conditions. While chih implies the importance of possessing both native intelligence and knowledge of the world, the concept also includes the ability to decide on the correct action in each situation and then perform it, even though it might be difficult and/or unpopular. (Obviously, courage [yung] comes in here as well.

In addition, these virtues require that we moderate both external actions and internal emotions, that we know and honor traditional rites and manners (because they promote harmony), that we keep our promises, honor our superiors, treat inferiors kindly, and stay away from those who do not follow such practices.

 

last updated: 8/5/2003