Confucianism

• 1. Introduction

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  Confucianism is a system of thought and behavior that began in ancient China, and people have argued for centuries about what to call it. Is it a philosophy? A religion? A theory of government? A way of life? It has been described as all of these. American philosopher Herbert Fingarette settled on a phrase that captures the puzzle. He called Confucianism a system that regards "the secular as sacred". That single line points at something strange. Here is a tradition with no omnipotent deity at its center, yet it treats everyday human relationships as expressions of sacred moral principles. It was founded by Confucius during an era so crowded with rival thinkers that historians call it the Hundred Schools of Thought. A state once tried to suppress it. Reformers in the early twentieth century blamed it for China's humiliation. And yet in 2015 a national Confucian Church was established in China. How does a way of thought survive being declared the enemy of an entire nation? Why does a man who insisted he invented nothing get credited with reshaping how millions of people raise their children, choose their officials, and bury their dead? And what does it mean to find the divine not in a heaven beyond the world, but in the way a son speaks to his father?

• 2. What To Call It

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  There is no term in Chinese that directly corresponds to the English word "Confucianism". The closest catch-all is a single word whose modern meanings include 'scholar', 'learned', or 'refined man'. In Old Chinese that same word carried a different cluster of meanings: 'to tame', 'to mould', 'to educate', and 'to refine'. The terms built from ru do not use the name "Confucius" at all. They point instead toward the ideal of the Confucian man. Some modern scholars have abandoned "Confucianism" entirely in favor of "Ruism" and "Ruists". Robert Eno argues that the older label has been burdened with ambiguities and irrelevant traditional associations, and that "Ruism" stays truer to the original Chinese name. David Schaberg suggested yet another translation, "Traditionalist", to stress the connection to the past and its inherited forms, a connection Confucius himself prized. According to Zhou Youguang, ru originally referred to shamanic methods of holding rites, and existed before Confucius lived. With Confucius the word shifted to mean devotion to spreading such teachings in order to bring civilisation to the people. One small detail reveals how differently the tradition reads from East to West. In the Western world, the character for water is often used as a symbol for Confucianism. In modern China, it is not.

• 3. The Five Visions

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  Five Classics formed the basic texts of the tradition, and Confucius was traditionally thought to be their author or editor. They were edited into their received versions roughly five hundred years later by the Imperial Librarian Liu Xin. A sixth book once stood beside them, the Classic of Music, lost during the Han dynasty. Music was no decoration. It was an internal key to harmonizing society, paired with the external key of rites. The scholar Tu Weiming describes the surviving classics as carrying five distinct visions. The I Ching, generally held to be the earliest, offers a metaphysical vision in which the cosmos is the interaction of two energies, yin and yang. The Classic of Poetry, the earliest anthology of Chinese poems and songs, holds the poetic vision that verse and music convey common human feelings. The Book of Documents carries the political vision, compiling speeches and records that show the work ethic of the mythical sage-emperors Yao, Shun, and Yu. Their virtue formed a covenant of social harmony that depended on neither punishment nor coercion. The Book of Rites supplies the social vision, defining society not as a contest of contracts but as a network of kinship groups bound by ritual. The Spring and Autumn Annals chronicles the Spring and Autumn period, from 771 to 481 BC, seen from Confucius's home state of Lu. The scholar Yao Xinzhong cautions that nothing can be taken for granted about the early versions of these texts.

• 4. Heaven Without Words

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  Tian, usually translated as "Heaven", sits at the center of the tradition, and it resists any single English word. It refers to the God of Heaven, to the northern culmen of the skies, to earthly nature and its laws, and to forces beyond human control. Confucius used the term in a mystical way. He wrote in the Analects that tian gave him life, and that tian watched and judged him. In passage 17.19 he says that tian spoke to him, though not in words. The scholar Ronnie Littlejohn warns against reading tian as a personal god in the manner of the Abrahamic faiths. It is closer to what Taoists meant by Dao, "the way things are". Promise Hsu, following Robert B. Louden, draws out Confucius's own riddle. "What does Tian ever say? Yet there are four seasons going round and there are the hundred things coming into being. What does Tian say?" Even without speaking, tian constantly does, through the rhythms of nature. Confucius was himself a ritual and sacrificial master. In Analects 3.12 he taught that one must offer sacrifices in person, acting in presence, otherwise "it is the same as not having sacrificed at all". Analects 10.11 records that he always set a small part of his food in the sacrificial bowls as an offering to his ancestors. Not every scholar agrees on how far his theism ran. Kelly James Clark argued that Confucius saw tian as an anthropomorphic god he calls the "Heavenly Supreme Emperor", a reading most other scholars reject.

• 5. The Web Of Virtue

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  Ren is the highest virtue in the tradition, and Confucius packed an entire moral world into it: benevolence, trustworthiness, courage, compassion, empathy, and reciprocity. It is the essence of a human being, endowed by Heaven, and the means by which a person may become one with Heaven. The late Qing reformer Kang Youwei, in his Book of Great Unity, called ren the power to form one body with all things, found when the self and others are not separated. Ren does not float free. It is cultivated through li, ritual, which guides behavior and regulates the bonds between parents and children, spouses, siblings, and friends. Confucius's most outstanding student, Yan Hui, once asked him to define ren. The master answered, "If contrary to ritual, do not look; if contrary to ritual, do not listen; if contrary to ritual, do not speak; if contrary to ritual, do not act." These virtues were eventually organized into the Five Constants by Confucian scholars during the Han dynasty: ren, yi (righteousness), li (propriety), zhi (wisdom), and xin (sincerity). Loyalty and filial piety stand among the classical four virtues. Loyalty was never meant as blind subservience. Confucius held that a superior earns obedience through moral rectitude, and that reciprocity is demanded of him too. Mencius pushed this further. When a prince treats his ministers as his hands and feet, he wrote, they regard him as their belly and heart; when he treats them as dirt or grass, they regard him as a robber and an enemy. If a ruler is evil, the people have the right to overthrow him. Many Confucians who fought unrighteous rulers suffered and sometimes died for it.

• 6. Naming Things Rightly

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  Confucius believed that social disorder often began with something deceptively small: the failure to call things by their proper names. He laid this out for his disciple Zi-lu, who scoffed that the master was wide off the mark to start a government by rectifying names. Confucius walked him through a chain of consequences. If names are not correct, language does not accord with the truth of things. If language does not accord with the truth of things, affairs cannot succeed. When affairs fail, proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments are not properly awarded, and "the people do not know how to move hand or foot". Xunzi devoted a chapter to this doctrine, arguing that the ancient sage-kings chose names that matched actualities. Later generations confused the terminology and coined new words, until they could no longer distinguish right from wrong. The remedy threaded through Confucian thought as well, in the figure of the junzi. The word literally means "son of a lord", and once signified the younger, non-inheriting offspring of a noble. Confucius redefined it in the Analects to mean a person of noble character rather than noble blood. The Song dynasty philosopher Zhu Xi ranked the junzi second only to the sage. Against him stands the xiaoren, the small-minded person who seeks only immediate gains and never weighs the consequences of his actions.

• 7. Empire And Examination

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  Confucius admitted students of different classes as disciples, a quiet rebellion against the feudal structures of pre-imperial China. Admirers as distant as Voltaire and Herrlee G. Creel singled out his most striking idea: replacing nobility of blood with nobility of virtue. From that idea grew meritocracy, and from meritocracy grew the imperial examination system, which began in the Sui dynasty. Over the centuries it expanded until almost anyone who wished to become an official had to prove his worth through written government examinations. A passing grade could bring wealth and honour to an entire family. The tradition's fortunes rose and fell with the dynasties. Suppressed under the Legalist Qin around 200 BCE, it flourished under the Han around 130 BCE, displacing the proto-Taoist Huang-Lao tradition and blending with Legalism. The Tang dynasty saw Neo-Confucianism emerge as a response to the rising influence of Buddhism and Taoism. That reformulated system became central to the examinations and the scholar-official class of the Song dynasty. The end came with the abolition of the examination system, in Korea in 1894, in China in 1905, and in Vietnam in 1919. Conformity to Confucian ideology was no longer required for a career in government, opening the way for rivals like Nationalism and Socialism. The argument over meritocracy never died. Thinkers from Daniel Bell to Tongdong Bai, Joseph Chan, and Jiang Qing still defend political meritocracy as an alternative to liberal democracy, debating institutional design, how meritocrats should be promoted, and whether the tradition can live alongside liberalism.

• 8. Enemy And Heir

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  Confucius was opposed from the very start. Laozi's philosophy challenged him, Mozi mounted a critique, and Legalists such as Han Fei ridiculed the idea that virtue could make people orderly. In modern times the attacks grew harsher. The tradition, once credited with the glories of Chinese civilisation, was made to take the blame for its failures. The Taiping Rebellion branded Confucian sages as devils. During the New Culture Movement, Lu Xun's story "Diary of a Madman" portrayed Confucian society as feudalistic, hypocritical, and socially cannibalistic, breeding a slave mentality and blind worship of authority. Leftists during the Cultural Revolution cast Confucius as the representative of the slave-owning class. The criticism crossed borders. In 1998 the South Korean writer Kim Kyong-il published a book whose title declared that Confucius must die for the nation to live, arguing that one-sided filial piety keeps generating social problems. The treatment of women drew its own reckoning. The Three Obediences and Four Virtues told a virtuous woman to follow her father, then her husband, then her sons. The Song Confucian Cheng Yi wrote that to starve to death is a small matter, but to lose one's chastity is a great matter. That cult of chastity condemned many widows to poverty, and some to suicide. Yet the picture is not simple. During the Han dynasty, Ban Zhao, who lived from 45 to 114 CE, wrote Lessons for Women, and while she accepted male dominance, she presented education and literary power as important for women. In later dynasties some women used that very acknowledgment to become independent in thought. The tradition that reformers tied to a Century of Humiliation has staged a revival, with Confucian schools, rites, and communities spreading, and "Confucian businessmen" applying its culture to their work. Its endurance is most visible in a single thread that historian Hugh D.R. Baker calls the only element common to almost all Chinese believers: respect for the family.