Confucius - China Tradition and Truth
Twenty-five hundred years ago there was born in China a child Whose life was to influence human history as few have done. Tradition says that he came of noble ancestry and was the descendant of kings. At his birth, it is related, dragons and "spirit maidens" hovered in the air. But Confucius himself said, "When young, I was without rank and in humble circumstances."
Tradition paints him as a strict pedant, laying down precise inks for men to follow in their conduct and their thinking. The truth is that he carefully avoided laying down rules, because he believed that no creed formulated by another person can excuse any man from the duty of thinking for himself.
He is often called a reactionary, whose primary aim was to restore the ways of antiquity and to bolster the authority of the hereditary aristocracy. In fact, he advocated and helped to bring about such sweeping social and political reforms that he must counted among the great revolutionaries. Within a few centuries after his death hereditary aristocracy had virtually ceased to exist in China, and Confucius had contributed more than any other man to its destruction.
As a young man he had to earn his living at tasks that bordered on the menial. From this he gained, and never lost, a deep sympathy for the common people. Their problems and sufferings were many. Centralized government had broken down. The feudal lords acknowledged only nominal allegiance to the king. Yet they could not be called independent, for some of them were no more than puppets in the hands of their own swashbuckling underlings. Public and private wars raged unchecked. There was very little law and order save what each man could enforce by his own right arm, his armed followers, or his powers of intrigue. Even the greatest noble could not be sure that he would not be ruined and perhaps assassinated. The position of the common people was tragic. Whoever won the wars, they lost. Even when there was peace they had no security, for they had no power. They were virtual pawns of the aristocrats, whose principal interests had come to be hunting, war, and extravagant living. To pay for these pastimes they taxed the people beyond what the traffic could bear, and suppressed all protest ruthlessly.
To the young Confucius these conditions seemed intolerable, and he resolved to devote his life to trying to right them. He talked to others about the way in which the world might be made a better place to live in. Gradually he gathered about himself a group of young men to study his doctrines, and so he became known as a teacher.
The essentials of his teaching were simple. Everywhere about him he saw men struggling against each other, but he refused to believe that that was the natural state of society. He thought it was normal for men to cooperate; to strive, not to get the better of each other, but to promote the common welfare. In his opinion a ruler's success should be measured by his ability, not to amass wealth and power for himself, but to bring about the welfare and happiness of his people.
Confucius realized that the world of which he dreamed would never exist so long as the kind of rulers who occupied the thrones were directing government. There is reason to believe that if it had been possible he would gladly have dispensed with hereditary rulers, but that was out of the question. Instead, he tried to persuade the rulers to turn over their administrative functions to ministers who were virtuous, capable, and properly trained. He tried to educate young men to be such ministers. For such education he accepted the poor and humble on exactly the same basis as the rich and well born. He demanded only two qualifications: intelligence and industry.
He was trying to produce a bloodless revolution. He wanted to take the actual power from rulers who inherited thrones and give it to ministers chosen on the basis of merit, and to change the aim of government from the aggrandizement of a few to the welfare and happiness of the whole people. He knew that mere intellectual conviction is not enough for revolution, and he I tried to kindle in his disciples a veritable passion for the cause to which his life was dedicated. In this he had a large measure of success. This group of "Knights of the Way" (to borrow Arthur Waley's felicitous phrase) was inspired by a measure of devotion not less than that later found in Christian chivalry.
Yet for Confucius it was not enough to be a teacher. He Wanted to direct the government of a state and to see the world of which he dreamed come to life under his hand. It is clear, however, that the rulers of the day cannot have seriously considered putting real power into his hands. At best they must have thought him a harmless eccentric, but one who could be-come dangerous if given power. They did, however, give rather high posts to some of his disciples. It was doubtless at the insitence of these students that Confucius was finally given an . in his native state of Lu, that carried a respectable title But probably involved no real authority.
When he saw that he could accomplish nothing he resigned his post, and set off on travels which took him to a number of states, in search of a ruler who would use his Way. He never found one. These journeyings lasted a decade or more. They accomplished little, but they did prove that he was willing to
undergo great hardship and abuse for his principles. Returning to Lu he resumed his teaching. Five years later he died. His life had had about it very little of the dramatic. There was. no climax and no martyrdom. None of his chief ambitions had been fulfilled. There is little doubt that when he died everyone considered him a failure. Certainly he himself did.
After his death, as his teachings were handed down from one generation of disciples to another, the Confucian group gradually grew in size and influence. The doctrine was changed and elaborated until Confucius himself would scarcely have recognized it, yet two principles remained: the insistence that those who govern should be chosen not for their birth but for their virtue and ability, and that the true end of government is the welfare and happiness of the people. This latter principle made Confucianism popular with the common people, as war and oppression increased and life became more and more difficult.
In 221 b.c. the relatively barbarous state of Ch'in overran China and converted it into a totalitarian empire. The Confucians refused to collaborate. Circulation of their books and teachings was forbidden, and some of them were put to death. Within less than two decades Ch'in was destroyed by a revolution in which the Confucians took a prominent part.
The Han dynasty, which succeeded, was on the whole much more favorable to the Confucians. A number of them came into conflict, however, with its sixth emperor, Wu, who had totalitarian ambitions. He was far too clever to oppose Confucianism openly; instead he posed as its patron and subsidized it. By putting large numbers of Confucians on the government payroll, and personally manipulating the examinations by which officials were beginning to be selected, he exercised considerable influence over the development of Confucian doctrine. From about this time there dates the misuse of Confucianism to justify despotism. This was a perversion of everything that Confucius stood for, against which enlightened and courageous Confucians have never ceased to protest.
Most of the information about Confucius that is current today derives from the Han period or later. This is true of his biography and of those commentaries that seek to put flesh and blood on the dry bones of the classical books. Confucius was scarcely dead before the embroidering of traditions about him began. It seemed unthinkable that one whose ideas were so important could have been unappreciated in his own day; his biography was so written as to make him a powerful statesman. Rival schools of thought at first attacked and ridiculed him; later, they adopted him. Even the totalitarian Legalists converted Confucius to totalitarianism. Most effective of all, they put totalitarian sentiments into his mouth, in passages written into the most venerated scriptures of Confucianism.
All this was useful to those who found the democratic sentiments of Confucius embarrassing and wished to represent him as a supporter of unlimited imperial authority. They needed only to stress these false additions to his supposed sayings, to interpret others, and to forget the rest. Thus they built up a facade behind which it has been very hard, for two thousand years, to find the real Confucius.
There were almost always a few scholars, however, who were capable of discernment. So were a number of the Jesuit missionaries who entered China and became scholars and even officials at the Chinese court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They brushed aside as so much chaff the accumulation of recent interpretation, and sought to go back to Confucius himself. In letter after letter to Europe they told of the wonderful new philosopher they had discovered.
Thus Confucius became known to Europe just at the beginning of the philosophic movement known as the Enlightenment. A large number of philosophers, including Leibniz, Wolff, and Voltaire, as well as statesmen and men of letters, used his name .ind his ideas to further their arguments, and they themselves were influenced in the process. Both in France and in England the fact that China, under the impulsion of Confucianism, had long since virtually abolished hereditary aristocracy, was used as a weapon in the attack on hereditary privilege. The philosophy of Confucius played a role of some importance in the development of democratic ideals in Europe and in the background of the French Revolution. Through French thought it indirectly influenced the development of democracy in America. It is of Interest that Thomas Jefferson proposed, as "the key-stone of the arch of our government," an educational system that shows remarkable similarities to the Chinese examination system. The extent to which Confucianism contributed to the development of Western democracy is often forgotten, for rather curious reasons that we must examine in their proper place.
In China the story was similar. Confucius was an important intellectual ancestor of the Chinese Revolution. Sun Yat-sen declared that "both Confucius and Mencius were exponents of democracy," and gave to the Republic of China a constitution that bears the deep impress of Confucian principles. Yet some of his countrymen today think of Confucius as a reactionary who helped to forge the chains of despotism, and regard him with hostility or indifference.
In a book concerned only with Europe, W. E. H. Lecky wrote a description that applies to Confucius with remarkable aptness:
There arise from time to time men who bear to the moral condition of their age much the same relations as men of genius bear to its intellectual condition. They anticipate the moral standard of a later age, cast abroad conceptions of disinterested virtue, of philanthropy, or of self-denial that seem to have no relation to the spirit of their time, inculcate duties and suggest motives of action that appear to most men altogether chimerical. Yet the magnetism of their perfection tells powerfully upon their contemporaries. An enthusiasm is kindled, a group of adherents is formed, and many are emancipated from the moral condition of their age. Yet the full effects of such a movement are but transient. The first enthusiasm dies away, surrounding circumstances resume their ascendancy, the pure faith is materialised, encrusted with conceptions that are alien to its nature, dislocated, and distorted, till its first features have almost disappeared. The moral teaching, being unsuited to the time, becomes inoperative until its appropriate civilization has dawned; or at most it faintly and imperfectly filters through an accumulation of dogmas, and thus accelerates in some measure the arrival of the condition it requires.*
All of this is true of Confucius. It helps to explain why, as he himself said, no one fully understood him even in his own day, and why later generations have often seriously misunderstood him. It helps to explain the fact that this man, who lived so long ago and was so obscure in his lifetime, left behind him an influence that continues to affect men's thoughts and actions even in our own day.
Author: H.G CREEL - Confucius and the Chinese Way
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