Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  One instance in which archaeology has independently verified preexisting textual knowledge is the revelation of an extremely close connection between the social order and the ritual practices required by the ancestral cult of the Zhou elite-a connection abundantly attested by the material a nexus is, of course, a common phenomenon in early societies. Yet a direct linkage of social status to ritual privilege may very well have been taken more for granted in early China than in other early civilizations.’

  The ritual reform of about 850 BCE was an elaborate effort to stabilize the political ranking of the aristocratic lineages by dictating the forms and implements appropriate to each lineage level in its sacrificial rituals devoted to the ancestors. Certain forms were reserved only for the Zhou king; others for the great branch lineages of the royal family and its highest ranking allies that had been established in various parts of north China; and still others for subsidiary lineages in the service of the king or the rulers of the various domains.

  It is probable that the standardization that the ritual reform created with remarkable thoroughness was an effort to bring order into a disorderly situation. After two centuries of Zhou rule, dozens of small domains and a few larger ones were increasingly independent. Culturally there was remarkable unity among the elite-the widespread success of the Reform shows that but politically it was more and more difficult for the Zhou king to organize any kind of concerted action among polities that were increasingly independent. Further, as in many aristocratic societies, one’s honor and, through one’s actions, the honor of one’s ancestors, was a major concern. War was one of the great ritual services and was often brought on by some real or imagined slight to the honor of one’s lineage.

  Lewis notes “the highly ceremonial character of military campaigns. Every stage of the campaign was marked by special rituals that linked the actions in the field to the state cults and guaranteed the sacred character of battle.“9 Critically important was the formal declaration of the reasons for the campaign:

  Before every battle the warriors would assemble and be told why the will of Heaven, the imperatives of duty, the honor of the state, and the spirits of the ancestors demanded that this battle be fought. Together with the divination before the tablets of the ancestors, the battle prayer, and the ceremonial command (ming), this oath fixed the day’s carnage within the political and religious framework. It stipulated the rules of discipline, but did so in a form which bound both the commanders and the warriors to the common service of their ancestors and the gods.10

  As one might expect in such ritualized combat, there were rules that gave warfare a formal quality: an invading army was to be greeted with gifts; a time and place for combat was set; if an army had to cross a stream and was in disarray, the opposing force would wait until order had been restored before attacking; if the lord of a state had died, an invading army was supposed to withdraw in order not to “increase mourning.”” It goes without saying that this kind of warfare was fought by an aristocratic elite. Commoners might be involved in supportive roles, but they did not participate in the fighting. Similarly, though commoners might fish and hunt for small animals, only the ceremonial hunts of the aristocrats had as their quarry large or dangerous animals. Because our texts concern the warrior elite virtually exclusively, we know little about the farmer and artisan classes. Some of these latter may have been of non-Huaxia cultural background, and in any case they were attached to the territory they inhabited and “belonged” to those who controlled the territory. Early Zhou society was, then, in many ways very different from what later Chinese society would be like. And though ritual would be central both early and late, its meaning would change dramatically over time.

  The early Zhou establishment of branch and allied lineages in various parts of the country was a way to spread their dominion over a greater territory than the Shang had ever controlled. But in the sparsely settled and largely uncultivated countryside, the lineage heads would be established in towns and controlled only the closely surrounding territory. The original meaning of the term guo, which later came to mean “state,” was the “capital,” if that is not too grandiose a term, of such a lineage, namely, the location of the ruler’s “palace” and, above all, of the ancestral temple, the locus of the allimportant sacrifices. As population grew and more and more land was brought into cultivation, something more like a territorially defined state gradually developed.12 Warfare that originally had been largely ceremonial became more in earnest, and small states began to be annexed by larger ones. In this process, and especially in the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu) period, the capacity of the Zhou kings to bring about any semblance of order collapsed. Not only was there fighting between incipient states, there was serious dissension within lineages (there had always been succession struggles), but also between lineages in a single state, and even between the sublineages within the lineages. The ritual system that was supposed to bring order to the society was increasingly violated, and although honor would never cease to be a source of conflict, wars were now fought for power, even hegemony, and not just for the ancestors. As Yuri Pines puts it: “Indeed, the Chunqiu was the age of disintegration. The continuous usurpation of superiors’ prerogatives by their underlings resulted in incessant strife among the states, among the major lineages within each state, and often within the lineages. The history of Chunqiu political thought may be summarized as the statesmen’s painstaking efforts to put an end to the disintegration, prevent anarchy, and restore hierarchical order.“13 But as Pines goes on to say, the restoration of ritual (li), which still meant the hierarchical forms of the Zhou system we have described above and not yet the conceptual reformulation of the Confucians, was the “universal panacea” offered to achieve these ends, a panacea, however, that never seemed to work. Confucius, living at the very end of the Chunqiu period, symbolizes the moment when the need for a dramatic reformulation emerged, even though it would be couched in terms of a return to the time of the early kings.

  Before we summarize the legacy of Spring and Autumn thought for the emergence of philosophical reflection in the following period, it would be well to look at some deep underlying socioreligious changes that had occurred before the Warring States period, which can help us understand the new developments then. Falkenhausen argues that these changes are more obvious in the archaeological record than in the texts. There were two major shifts, each succinctly summarized in the titles of chapters 8 and 9 of Falkenhausen’s book: “The Separation of the Higher and Lower Elites (ca. 750-221 BCE)” and “The Merging of the Lower Elite with the Commoner Classes (ca. 600-221 The Late Western Zhou Ritual Reform of around 850 BCE “had the effect of demoting the vast majority of the ranked elite from the upper stratum of a two-tiered society, dominated by the contrast between the ranked and commoner members of its constituent lineages, to a newly created middle layer sandwiched between the increasingly powerful rulers above and the unranked commoners Part of the problem of the Chunqiu period was that the increasingly powerful elite was deeply divided between ever more powerful states and within these states between ruling lineages and ministerial lineages-it was these divisions that made the society so unstable.

  The Middle Spring and Autumn Ritual Restructuring of around 600 BCE had the further consequence of augmenting even more the privileges of the upper ranks while reducing the privileges of the lower elite, to the point where their very difference from commoners was nearly obliterated and would be obliterated in the Warring States period.16 As Falkenhausen puts it, “The formation of a specially privileged subgroup within the elite preceded, and no doubt paved the way for, the full emergence of despotic rulers during the Warring States.“17 What this double shift downward of the lower elite meant was that the very nature of the warrior society that we described as existing in early Western Zhou gradually ceased to exist, and the meaning of the three services that defined that society was gradually lost.

  One feature of the earlier warrior society noted especially by Le
wis was particularly vulnerable to these shifts, namely the basic egalitarianism of the warrior elite. Lewis remarks that the carefully graded ranks of the warrior nobility should not obscure to us the fact that “these gradations were based on incremental additions to a fundamental nobility common to all members of the elite on the basis of their kinship and joint participation in the `great Further, the shi, the lowest level of the noble hierarchy, was nonetheless a generic term for nobleman, so that higher ranks were “added on” so to speak, to one’s basic definition as a shi. “The king was at the top of the nobility and the shi at the bottom, but the language and ritual procedures of the period insisted that the two shared a common noble nature, that they were divided in degree but not in kind.“9 Confucius was probably a shi in a time when the term was, as we shall see, taking on new meanings. If the newly powerful rulers of the Warring States ruled a society of equals, it was because all would be equally subject to the ruler. Confucius would make new distinctions, but on the basis of moral qualities, not lineage.

  It is now time to sum up what the immediately preceding period gave Confucius to work with as he rethought the cultural basis of Chinese society. Here we face a dilemma concerning our principal textual source for the Chunqiu period, the Zuo zhuan. This text is one of the three canonical commentaries on the Chunqiu, the so-called Spring andAutumn Annals, actually the Annals of the state of Lu, which attained primary canonical status because, almost assuredly mistakenly, its compilation was attributed to Confucius. The Zuo zhuan, unlike the other commentaries, is a large continuous history of the period, only uncomfortably and partially unsuccessfully accommodated to the form of a commentary on the Chunqiu. Although it is generally agreed that it was compiled only in the fourth century BCE, there is disagreement as to the authenticity of the sources from which it was compiled.20 If it was written or rewritten extensively by Confucians in the fourth century, it can hardly be used as describing the historical “background” from which Confucian thought derived. If, however, the speeches contained in it really do predate Confucius, they give us a sense of the cultural resources available to Confucius. I am in no position to make an independent judgment of this technical issue, although the arguments for the authenticity of at least some of the Zuo zhuan seem convincing to me. But for my purposes whether the Zuo zhuan recounts what preceded Confucius or only the views of the early Confucians is less important than the developments themselves.

  Two changes in the terminology of social status that are compatible with the long-term changes described by Falkenhausen largely on the basis of archaeology are the shift in meaning of the term shi, described above as the lowest level of the ranked aristocracy but now taking on the meaning of “official,” even low-ranking official, on the basis of status rather than birth. At a time when in the larger Warring States, officials were chosen on the basis of merit rather than birth, and we know of instances where merchants were given high office, this is an indication of the declining significance of hereditary lineages at all but the highest levels of status. The term shi gets further generalized to apply simply to an educated person, or even to scholars as a class.

  Another term that we have not mentioned so far shows a similar development from late Spring and Autumn times to early Warring States times, the term junzi. Etymologically the term means “son of a lord,” and thus a noble. But in the Zuo zhuan we find even high ministers using the term with moral overtones, using the term to distinguish ethically outstanding nobles from those who, though noble by birth, were not junzi in their actions. The standard translation ofjunzi in the Analects is “gentleman,” though other translations, such as “superior man,” are sometimes found. In any case the term in the Analects is invariably used to refer to ethical, not lineal, distinction. What these two terminological shifts indicate is a society in which noble lineage, except at the highest level, has largely lost its significance, but one in which to a considerable extent the lineally unranked population can now share the cultural forms previously the exclusive prerogative of the elite, though altering their meaning in so doing.21

  One interesting phenomenon of the late Chunqiu period, one that provides just a flicker of resemblance to the Greek polis, was the brief emergence of the capital population in the various states as a political actor. The capital populace (guo ren) consisted of the shi as well as of merchants and artisans. According to Lewis, “The capital’s inhabitants came to play a decisive role in the internecine struggles between the various lineages of the nobility and often decided the succession to the throne … In times of crisis the entire populace could be assembled in order to decide the policy of the state.“22 Once the centralizing tendencies of the Warring States period took hold, with stronger rulers and weaker ministerial lineages, the capital populace is no longer heard from.

  If terminological and other changes associated with them, which will be described below, were already “in the air” a century or more before Confu cius, this lends further credibility to his claim to be a transmitter rather than a creator.23 Nonetheless, the Zuo zhuan provides us only with anecdotal accounts. There was no formal discussion of these changes before the Analects, indeed no “private thinkers” or “peripatetic philosophers” before Confucius.24 Whatever changes were under way, he was the first to think of them systematically or, as it were, “objectively.” Even though the Analects is more aphoristic than systematic, it is surely right to see Confucius as inaugurating the Chinese axial age.

  Still, the extent to which Confucius thought of himself as embodying the traditional culture of Zhou, and the record seems to indicate that some of what we think of as his innovations may have been developing well before him, suggests that Benjamin Schwartz was right in asserting that Confucius and his followers “more truly represented some of the dominant cultural orientations of the past than did some of their later rivals.“25

  Confucius

  We began this chapter with a contrast between Greece and China with respect to continuity with the archaic past. We begin our discussion of Confucius with another contrast with Greece: if there is any figure in Chinese history who has exerted influence comparable to that of Plato in the West, it is surely Confucius. Whitehead famously said that all Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato; we could say the same of Confucius: all Chinese philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Confucius. Although all Chinese thought is surely not Confucian any more than all Western thought is Platonic, it is still true that every major Chinese thinker of whatever “school” has had to come to terms with Confucius. The contrast is where the two are located in the unfolding of their respective axial transformations: Plato at the end of a long development beginning with Thales, the first Greek thinker whose name we know; Confucius at the beginning of a long development, but occupying the position of Thales, that is, the first Chinese thinker whose name we know, though with the influence of Plato.

  How to understand this, at first glance, striking contrast will become easier if we look more closely at the Lun yu, the Analects, the only book we have of Confucius and virtually our only source of knowledge about him. The Analects surely resembles in size and style one of the early pre-Socratics, say Heraclitus, particularly if we had the whole text of Heraclitus. The Analects isn’t very long, much of it is aphoristic, and it is surpassed as sustained argument by several later Warring States texts: Mozi, Mencius (Mengzi), Zhuangzi, Xunzi, as well as by collective books such as the Guanzi and the Lushi chunqiu. So, formally, the Analects does indeed look “early,” even if its influence has been enormous. But we are not even sure how early the text is. The conventional dates for Confucius are 551-479 BCE, but we have no reason to think that Confucius wrote anything. What we have was written down by his disciples, perhaps in his lifetime, perhaps after his death, and it is almost universally agreed that the book as we have it is not all from the same period. Books 3- 10 or 4-9, or generally the early books, are widely believed to be closest to the time of Confucius himself; the later bo
oks, 11-20, but often including books 1-2 or 1-3, are felt to be later additions by disciples or disciples of disciples, but how much later is in dispute, some believing that the whole text is from a generation or two after Confucius, or, the extreme case, E. Bruce and Taeko A. Brooks, in their The Original Analects, argue that the text extends over most of the Warring States period with later additions only ceasing with the Qin conquest of Lu in 249 BCE.26

  Brooks and Brooks see in the later books of the Analects responses to much of the later development of Warring States thought. The chief objection to this idea is that the later books never attain the quality of sustained argument characteristic of late Warring States thought. While noting these differences of opinion and occasionally referring to them, I do not need to take a position on them. That the Analects is a central text, perhaps the central text, is not in dispute, and all later Chinese thinkers treated the text as a whole, constructing a “Confucius” who may never have existed except in the minds of all literate Chinese for over 2,000 years.

  Looking at the Analects, our only secure source, we are still not sure who exactly Confucius was. If he was a noble, he was surely a shi, the lowest level of nobility, at a time when the distinction between shi and commoner was fading. He was a teacher, for he had students, disciples. What he taught was probably some version of what came to be known as the Six Arts-rites, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and arithmetic-“the polite arts of the and that educated commoners were at that time also interested in learning. The Six Arts would much later be eclipsed by the Five (or Six) Classics, but it is clear that they were not texts, but skills. For example, one did not learn about ritual and music, but how to perform ritual and music, actually two closely related activities. Archery and charioteering were military arts, and Brooks and Brooks argue that the earliest level of the Analects, book 4, has a military ethos, though that is not obvious to me.