Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  People are to be valued most, the altars of the grain and land next, the ruler least. Hence by winning the favor of the common people you become king; by winning the favor of the king you become lord of a fief; by winning the favor of the lord you become grandee. If the lord endangers the altars, replace him; if proper sacrifices were made at the altars but there is still drought and flood, replace the altar.

  What if the king violates his people? Mencius did not say “replace the king” because he was talking to the king, but he says that there are the examples of three dynasties where evil kings were replaced by good ones. The critically important point here is that Mencius did not say that the king derived his power from Heaven, but from the favor given him by the common people. In this regard, Mencius was the first philosopher to have discovered a new source of legitimacy of political power in a time when Heaven’s Mandate no longer conferred on a ruler the right to rule, thus coming quite close to the modern democratic political thought on the source of sovereignty. As the ruler derived the legitimacy of his power from the common people, as Mencius duly advises, he could enjoy it longer if he were willing to share his pleasure with the people.

  On the final account of Mencius, he was thoroughly Confucian in the sense that he found the foundation of good government in the willing heart of the ruler, not as something which the ruler had no choice but to take on. This brings us to a conversation between Mencius and King Xuan of Qi who on a previous occasion had shown sympathy towards an ox that was about to be killed for sacrificial purposes. Mencius pointed out that this was an indication of the king’s moral potential to become a virtuous king as long as he could extend his compassion from what he could see immediately to what he could not, and from what was close to him to what was far. If he could apply his love for his family to the families of others, and develop his compassion into a universal care for his people, he would be the one to bring good order to the world. In Mencius’ view, this can be easily done because the good deed is already found in the king’s heart. The issue is only that he needs to be willing to do so.

  The Daoist Search for Natural Order

  However, there were people who viewed the world in strikingly different ways and had a different remedy for the sociopolitical problems in China – philosophers whose theses were centered on one key concept: “Way” (Dao). According to the distinguished historian of Chinese philosophy, Feng Yu-lan, there were three stages in the development of Daoist philosophy: the early stage is represented by Yang Zhu, the middle period by the Classic of Way and Virtue (Daodejing, or more commonly known as Laozi), and the later stage by the philosophy of Zhuangzi.12

  No date or life story is transmitted of the earliest Daoist philosopher Yang Zhu, but he must have lived sometime before Mencius. Since Mencius once lamented at the fact that in his days the world of philosophy was divided equally between the theories of Yang Zhu and Mozi, he must have been well known during the early fourth century BC. However, no works can be attributed to Yang Zhu and all that we know of him comprises a few lines of comments by other philosophers. Mencius said: “The principle of Yang Zhu is: Each one for himself. He would not pull off even a single hair from his shank if that can benefit the whole world!” By the Legalist philosopher Han Fei he was ridiculed in the same way. However, in the Daoist tradition Yang Zhu is respected as the one who had established the principle of “Preserving life and maintaining what is genuine in it.” Since none would pluck out his hair for the benefit of the world, none would take the world as his gain. The real essence of Yang Zhu’s philosophy is to preserve one’s genuine nature and not let it be entangled with and injured by worldly things. According to A. C. Graham, rather than Egoism, Yang Zhu’s philosophy can be considered complete Individualism concerned with benefiting one’s own body and simply leaving others to do the same.13

  What we learn from the tradition about the philosopher “Old Master” (Laozi), the alleged author of the Classic of Way and Virtue, is entirely fictional. One piece of such accounts had Laozi as the archivist at the royal court of Zhou where he virtually lectured Confucius during the latter’s visit to the Zhou capital in Luoyang. Feng Yu-lan felt that there may have been a historical Laozi who was a contemporary of Confucius, but the text Classic of Way and Virtue that came to bear his name was probably composed much later, likely towards the end of the Warring States period, if not after the unification by Qin in 221 BC.14 However, the discovery at Guodian in 1993 has overturned this late date and suggests that the text must have had a much longer history of circulation in the fourth century and must not be later than 320 BC (see below). The text begins with the following lines:

  Dao that can be spoken of is not the constant Dao; Name that can be named is not the constant name. Nameless was the beginning of Heaven and Earth; having a name is the mother of myriad of things. Always with no desire, we can see the subtlety (of things); always with desire, we can see their material outcome. These two things derived from the same origin but have different names. Profound and profound, this is the gate of subtleties!

  The central teaching of the Classic of Way and Virtue is about Dao, the eternal “Way,” the “non-being,” but eternal existence which preceded “being” (see below). This is certainly not the way of the sages (as in Confucianism), but the cosmological way that existed long before the sage. Dao is the unseen, unspoken true “Way” of the universe. “Virtue” (De), the manifestation of Dao, is the quality which each individual thing received from it, and is what it naturally is. Despite the use of the same words, the concepts of “Way” and “Virtue” in Daoist philosophy depart radically from their meanings in Confucian philosophy. Although Daoism, at least in the received form of the Classic of Way and Virtue, has a very strong metaphysical if not naturalistic appearance when compared to Confucianism, it is fundamentally still a political philosophy. According to the text, the Dao, the superior “Way,” has long been obscured in China:

  When the great Dao is abandoned, therefore there are the doctrines of Benevolence and Righteousness; when wisdom and knowledge emerged, therefore there is perjury; when the six family relations were not in harmony, therefore there is the need for Filial Piety; when a state is in disorder, therefore there is the need for Loyalty.

  (Section 18)

  Here, the world is perceived as being continuously declining from its original perfect condition, and as the result of the decline, if not the cause of it, there emerged a whole range of doctrines such as “Benevolence,” “Righteousness,” “Filial Piety,” and “Loyalty,” all moral values upheld by the Confucian philosophers. Thus, the real sage will be the one who would abandon all of these artificial wisdoms. He would not treasure valuables so people will not steal, and he would not promote goodness so people would not compete. He would always “empty the people’s heart, fill their stomach, weaken their ambition, and strengthen their bones.” Quite obviously much of this was written with Confucian doctrines as the targets because the latter’s idea of a sage had given too much to be done to the world; the Daoist sage, by contrast, would have to undo all this, or he would not do anything in the first place. By “No Action” (Wuwei), all things will return in good order.

  This is the Daoist answer to the issue of political order in China. Accordingly, the best government is the government that would not govern, and the ideal society is the primitive society where material goods were abundant, writing was put to no use, and people were strictly tied to their locales and would not communicate with one another. This is the perfect natural order of society to which the world should return, and this contrasts sharply with the Confucian (at least that of Confucius) ideal world as a layered social web with all relations in perfect harmony facilitated through the practice of ritual and music.

  However, this concept of the “Way” (Dao) as the superior cosmological order and origin of the universe had clearly undergone significant transformation in the philosophy of Zhuangzi, a long Warring States text. Zhuangzi (369–286 BC), the reputed author o
f the text that goes by his name, or at least a core part of it, might have been a younger contemporary of Mencius, and perhaps well acquainted with the philosophical ideas of other thinkers of his own time. However, the text, particularly the outer-chapter group of it, contains materials of different origins and some of them apparently date long after his death. In Zhuangzi, the “Way” is no longer the “untouchable,” the eternal “Way” which only the real sage, not even the ordinary sages, can possibly understand; instead, the “Way” has submerged into everything and everywhere reachable in the personal experience of each individual, if one does it right. As illustrated by the famous story of “Butcher Ding” and the story of the “Wheel-Maker,” everyone, if he conducts himself correctly, may have the opportunity to experience the “Way.” And the way to do so is to go beyond the level of technique to reach the realm of spontaneity which Zhuangzi describes as “Naturally So” or “Being Natural” (Ziran) – this is the way to nurture life. In fact, a parallel development can be found in Confucianism where “Ritual” (Li), which was the superior social order in Confucius, had become more or less a personal manner in Mencius.

  This notion of “Naturally So” also relates to Zhuangzi’s underscoring of “Virtue” (De) which is the “Nature” each individual received from the “Way” which, he argues strongly, is omnipresent. Different creatures possess different natures, and going against the Nature would inevitably lead to disasters. Thus, Zhuangzi tells the story of the ruler of Lu who wished to honor a seabird that happened to have stopped at his court. He placed it in the temple, slaughtered a bullock to feed it, and played grand music to entertain it. As the result, the seabird died in three days after its capture. A later chapter in Zhuangzi also tells the story of Zhuangzi himself being invited by the king of Chu to serve in his government. Upon hearing the message brought by two officers from the Chu court, Zhuangzi responded by asking: “I have heard that there is a sacred turtle in the state of Chu that had been dead for three thousand years. The king wrapped it with silk and kept it in his ancestral temple. Would this turtle like to be dead to leave its bones being treasured by the king, or would it like to live and drag its tail in the mud?” The officers answered that of course it would like to be alive. Then, Zhuangzi said in a strong voice: “Go! I will drag my tail in the mud!” These are instances that indicate that Nature may be violated by human interference, in the worst form of government, and human happiness is obtained only when one’s distinctive Nature is fully preserved and properly entertained.

  If there is anything in Zhuangzi that can be called a political philosophy, it is this notion of Nature which led the philosopher to “violently oppose the idea of government through the formal machinery of government.”15 Activist government, which Confucianism endorses, is particularly harmful and even resented because it represents the triumph of the artificial institutions over the given natural condition of mankind, and it is the source of misery and unhappiness:

  I have heard of letting mankind alone, but not of governing them. Letting alone springs from the fear that the people would pollute their innate nature and set aside their De. When people do not pollute their inner nature and set aside their De, then is there need for the government of mankind?

  This notion of “No Do” in relation with “Do” is fully developed at the metaphysical level into the “Theory of Relativity” according to which the two things are actually one. Zhuangzi explicated this relationship in terms of “Usefulness” and “Uselessness” as he tells the story of the oak tree in the state of Lu. Once people thought about cutting it down to make timbers to be used to build a house, but they did not do so because the tree was not straight; another time people wanted to cut it down to make a coffin, but the tree was hollow inside. So they all took the tree to be useless and let it grow for three hundred years, to its age assigned by Heaven. So its uselessness is at the same time usefulness. A parable from Chapter 2 of Zhuangzi interestingly has the philosopher himself as the embodiment of this point:

  Once upon a time Zhuang Zhou had a dream in which he became a butterfly. Flitting and fluttering as a butterfly, he was happy and going as he pleased! He did not know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and was surprised to find that he was still Zhuang Zhou. He did not know if he was Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamed he was Zhuang Zhou? Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly there must be a distinction. This is called the transformation of things.

  To the modern mind that is used to rational thinking, this would appear as the demonstration of a mind that is in anarchy and cannot think by reasoning. But as pointed out by A. C. Graham, Zhuangzi had his reasons for not listening to our reason.16

  The Discovery at Guodian and Its Place in Early Chinese Intellectual History

  The above discussion highlights the radically different positions of Confucianism and Daoism with respect to the issue of social order and the proper ways to achieve it. These positions contrast still more sharply with the views of the third major intellectual stream of the Warring States period, Legalism, to be discussed later in this chapter. However, it should be noted that our understanding of these intellectual traditions has never been simple and static, fixed on the transmitted philosophical texts whose date and authorship are always open to question.17 Instead, particularly over the last two decades, our view of the formation of the respective traditions in Early China has always been challenged and often improved by the new textual manuscripts excavated from tombs of the Warring States and Han periods. This is especially true and significant with regard to Confucianism and Daoism.

  To offer a historical perspective, philosophical texts began to be discovered from underground not too long after they were buried. As early as AD 279, a version of the Book of Changes together with other smaller texts of philosophical nature had been excavated from the tomb of a Warring States king in northern Henan.18 In modern times, the most famous case was the discovery in 1973 of three tombs at Mawangdui, Hunan (see Chapter 14). Although the texts from the tombs were buried in 168 BC during the Western Han Dynasty, many doubtless had had a long history of transmission before Han. The discovery made at Guodian in 1993 from a relatively smaller tomb that yielded as many as eighteen texts of exclusively philosophical nature, is such that we need to rethink not only some of the fundamental premises in Chinese philosophy, but also the prominent position of philosophy in the social life of Early China. The area has been home to numerous archaeological discoveries associated with the former capital of the state of Chu near present-day Jiangling in Hubei Province.

  The significance of the discovery at Guodian arises first from the fact that the tomb was excavated by trained archaeologists and is securely dated to the late fourth century, falling somewhere between 320 BC and 300 BC, thus before the late Warring States period, the time-frame into which modern scholars conventionally put most transmitted pre-Qin texts, not just philosophical ones. This was the time, the mid Warring States period, when great philosophers like Mencius and Zhuangzi were still alive, and the two competing traditions represented by them were both still at their formative stage.19 As such, the strength of the Guodian texts lies also in the fact that both philosophical traditions are evidently represented in them, although the balance in which the two traditions are present in the tomb is still debated among scholars. In fact, a few texts from the tomb seem actually to blur the distinction between the two traditions. But except for four that have their counterparts among the transmitted texts, the other fourteen are all new texts critical to any tradition to which they can be possibly associated at such an early time.

  First, a core group of some six texts seems to have been associated with Zi Si, a grandson of Confucius and teacher of Mencius’ own teacher, thus possibly providing a key intellectual link between Confucius and Mencius.20 Within these texts, we can see a clear shift of focus in the Confucian tradition from the pursuit of superior social order to a persistent inquiry into the very quality and potential of man as
individual agent. Concepts such as “Righteousness” and “Wisdom” that have been traditionally thought of as having characterized Mencius’ philosophy were already the subjects of discussion in a text called the “Five Conducts” from Guodian. And the inquiry into the origin of “Nature” in the “Nature Derives from Mandate” both adheres to Confucius’ belief in “Mandate” and anticipates the argument Mencius built around the concept to form the foundation of his philosophy. Because of this link, we now also have a new ground for understanding the goodness of “Human Nature” in Mencius because in Guodian it is said to have been derived from “Mandate” which commands a fundamental sense of righteousness and superiority, and it cannot be bad.

  On the Daoist side, the most important elements have been three mid-fourth-century versions of the Classic of Way and Virtue together with a new text called “The Great One Gives Birth to Water” (Taiyi sheng shui) (Box 10.1). It is first of all significant that the Guodian Classic and Way and Virtue suggests that the so-called anti-Confucian sentiment seen in late Warring States to Han period versions of the text was likely a later addition to Daoism (which was the base for dating the text to the late Warring States period in previous scholarship) – in the three compilations of the Classic of Way and Virtue from Guodian, the targets of criticism were indeed certain qualities like “Wisdom” (Zhi), “Disputation” (Bian), “Craftiness” (Qiao), “Profit” (Li). And in one place these concepts are actually considered as opposing the ideas of “Benevolence” and “Righteousness,” core Confucian concepts as they were understood in Daoism.21