Confucius died in his early seventies, under circumstances that to a lesser man would surely have been disappointing. Although he is said to have earned the loyalty of thousands of students, he was a failure in politics. So it should not be surprising that his last words ring with resignation bordering on bitterness: “No intelligent monarch arises; there is not one in the kingdom that will make me his master. My time has come to die.” Confucius’s voice was both stronger and more poetic a few days before his death, possessed of both more yang and more yin. Looking out over Tai Shan, one of China’s most sacred peaks, he said:
The great mountain must crumble;
The strong beam must break;
And the wise man wither away like a plant.16
Although sacrifices are offered in his name every day in Confucian temples across the world, Confucius is remembered as neither a saint nor a miracle worker. Some Daoists revere him as a god, but he has never been deified by Confucians. Just as Theravada Buddhists remember the Buddha as a pathfinder rather than a deity, Confucians see Confucius as a great moral teacher. They even debate whether he ever achieved the standing of sage (an honorific he never claimed for himself). However, Confucius was by acclamation an exemplary student and teacher who looked to the past, especially to the ancient sage ruler the Duke of Zhou, for lessons on how to cultivate character and secure peace. Ever humble, he claimed he was doing nothing more than faithfully passing down the teachings of greater thinkers. “I have transmitted what was taught to me without making up anything of my own,” Confucius said.17 In this sense the role he plays in Confucianism is more like Muhammad, who transmitted the Quran to Muslims, and Moses, who transmitted the Law to the Israelites, than like founders such as Jesus or the Buddha, whose own insights formed the basis for their respective scriptures.
But Confucius was also a transformer who helped to redirect the ancient Chinese culture he plainly revered from a hierarchy of birth to a hierarchy of merit. He accepted students who were not able to pay him with anything other than dried meat and gratitude—his greatest student was a commoner—and he insisted that it was possible for anyone, not just the high born, to cultivate the virtues and become a sage. So while there were transmitters such as Moses and Muhammad in this man, there were also transformers such as Jesus and the Buddha.
Human-Heartedness and Propriety
What teachings, then, did Confucius transmit, and transform? How did he mix the old and the new in responding to the challenges of an age in which, as the Book of Poetry puts it, “there is no end to the disorder”?18
Any answer to these questions must begin, as did Confucius himself, with learning. For Confucius, studying the Five Classics was essential. But this study then needed to be put into motion, translated from thought to action. The point of learning was to produce virtue and propriety—to turn yourself into a junzi, an exemplar who exhibits the virtues, knows his social roles, performs the rituals, and otherwise traverses the Way of Heaven. While the tendency to reduce Christianity to its ethical precepts is a modern invention, ethics has always stood at the heart of the Confucian project, and at the heart of Confucian ethics is the virtue of ren, which perhaps more than any other quality exemplifies the exemplary person. Mentioned over one hundred times in the Analects, the term ren has been variously translated as humaneness, humanity, benevolence, altruism, love, and compassion, but it is perhaps best rendered as “human-heartedness.”19 Its Chinese character combines the image of “human being” with the image of “two,” so ren refers to right relations among people. Before Confucius, it was believed that only sage rulers and other elites could cultivate this virtue. But Confucius held it out as a possibility for all human beings and as the last, great hope for social harmony and political order. Virtue, he argued, was the foundation of civilization, and the foundational virtue was ren.
One of Confucius’s chief rivals, Mo-zi, argued on behalf of the so-called Mohists that human beings should extend their human-heartedness to all regardless of relation. In other words, he anticipated Jesus’s emphasis on agape love, which, seeing no distinction between friend and enemy, seeks to love all equally. But Confucius, far more concerned about “family values” than was Jesus, said that ren should be cultivated first and foremost inside the family.
Filial piety matters in Judaism, but honoring your parents is even more central to Confucianism. The opening lines of the Analects refer to filial piety as the “root” of ren.20 Of the Five Relationships, the first each of us learns (or fails to learn) is that between parent and child. It is in this relationship that we take our first baby steps away from self-centeredness and toward moral excellence. Families teach us how to be human, how to follow and to lead. If families are well ordered, human interactions will be harmonious, and if human interactions are harmonious, society will be harmonious too.
But how are we to cultivate this human-heartedness? How might the lessons of empathy and fellow-feeling learned in the family move out into the wider world? In a word, li. Before Confucius, li, which literally means “to arrange in order,” referred fairly narrowly to ritual. But with Confucius and his followers it became a multifunctional term referring as well to etiquette, customs, manners, ceremony, courtesy, civility, and propriety.
Li is so crucial to Confucians that the Chinese sometimes refer to Confucianism as lijiao, or the religion of li. Today li means doing the proper thing in the proper way under any given set of circumstances—to act, in short, in keeping with the Way of Heaven. Li stands alongside ren as one of the two key concepts in Confucius’s thought, since both ren and li contribute to both self-cultivation and social harmony. But whereas ren is inward and subjective, li is outward and objective—ren put into practice.
An exceedingly broad concept, li comprises both ritual, as in how to perform a wedding, and ritualized behavior, which is to say manners, etiquette, and even body language. When U.S. president Barack Obama met Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace just a few weeks after his 2009 inauguration, he gave her an iPod—a widely criticized gaffe that demonstrated a severe lack of li. Li also governs proper behavior toward parents: “When your parents are alive, comply with the rites in serving them; when they die, comply with the rites in burying them.”21 It also extends to such seemingly mundane matters as how to look, listen, speak, and move: ”Do not look unless it is in accordance with the rites (li); do not listen unless it is in accordance with the rites; do not speak unless it is in accordance with the rites; do not move unless it is in accordance with the rites.”22 Li is to ask tactfully about your parent’s health. It is to stand up straight. It is to seek wealth within the rules. It is to allow your teacher to speak first. It is to treat a guest with hospitality. It is to put the arrow to pride.
In keeping with the Doctrine of the Mean, li includes avoiding extremes in both thought and behavior, taking your pleasures in moderation, and otherwise following the balanced and harmonious Way of Heaven. It is to incline yourself toward listening rather than speaking (the character for sage in Chinese is a large ear and a small mouth). It is to eat slowly, to pour tea just so, to avoid slurping your soup. Knowing what to wear at a wedding, or a funeral, is li. Being considerate of others—not blasting your boombox on the subway or cutting into line at the cinema—is li. In sum, li is to make space for reverence in all things, treating seemingly ordinary interactions as if they were sacred ceremonies.23
Just as Muslims look to Muhammad as an example of how to live a human life, Confucians look to Confucius. When Confucians read the Analects, they consider not only what Confucius said but also what he did—how he “presented gifts, taught, ate, visited a temple, or how he performed simple mundane acts.”24 All of these things cultivate our human-heartedness and in the process act as the social glue that creates and sustains social order. It is li that turns an ordinary person into a superior person. It is li that makes society run smoothly, harmonizing Heaven and humanity.
There is a longstanding (and ongoing) ch
icken-and-egg debate among Confucians about whether li or ren is more foundational. Does li cause ren? Or does ren cause li? There is widespread agreement, however, that these are the Confucian tradition’s two central concepts, so perhaps the middle way is to see them as part and parcel of each other—two sides of the same coin. Li is how ren expresses itself in the world. But ritual and propriety in turn makes us more human-hearted. Together li and ren produce harmony in the individual, the society, and the cosmos.
If Confucius sounds like a moralist, he was. His preoccupation was how to live. He believed that human nature is moral, so to become moral is to become ourselves. But there was a touch of the mystic in him too. Like Socrates, he was both humble and intelligent enough to recognize the limits of his own wisdom. Confucius once defined knowledge like this: “When you know a thing, to recognize that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it.”25 And on at least one occasion he seemed to bow in reverence to silence. After he confessed a preference for silence over speech, a worried student asked him what his fellow students would have to pass down if he refused to speak. Apparently silence had not struck Confucius yet, because he replied, “Heaven does not speak, yet the four seasons run their course thereby, the hundred creatures each after its kind, are born thereby. Heaven does no speaking.”26
Mencius and Xunzi
Following Confucius’s death, the Confucian conversation was dominated by two great competing thinkers, Mencius and Xunzi, who played in their tradition the roles that the dueling rabbis Hillel and Shammai would play a few centuries later in Judaism. Although Mencius is often referred to as an idealist, and Xunzi as a realist, this assessment begs the question that consumed them both: are human beings basically good? This question mattered because the entire Confucian project hung on the possibility of human improvement; its goals of social harmony and political order could not be reached if humans could not be improved. But could they? And if so, how? Mencius (371/2–c. 289 B.C.E.) famously argued that human beings are originally good. We do good because we are hardwired to do so. And when we do evil, it is nurture, not nature, that short-circuits the good. Where is the person, Mencius asks, who, when he hears a child crying at the edge of a well, will not try to prevent him from falling in? Each of us harbors feelings of compassion, which breed benevolence; feelings of shame, which breed dutifulness; a sense of courtesy, which breeds propriety; and a sense of right and wrong, which breeds wisdom. To become human, we do not need to grasp after something outside and beyond ourselves. The germs of humanity are within.
Rejecting what he saw as Mencius’s naive optimism about human nature, the third-century-b.c.e. thinker Xunzi argued that human beings are basically wicked—“grasping, hungry, egotistical bastards.”27 In the Analects, Confucius had argued that government worked better by shame than by punishment: “Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”28 Xunzi disagreed. In this world of greed and envy and hate, our wickedness needs to be spanked out of us. Education doesn’t cultivate our nature; it changes it. Only through strict laws and severe punishments can humans learn to subdue their private passions in service of the public good (and their own). So whereas Mencius used gentle botanical metaphors of nurture and growth to describe our education to the human-heartedness already planted within us, Xunzi relied on harder metaphors from the workshop—metal shaped by hammering into a sword, wood bent by steam into a bow—to describe how the example of the junzi could emerge out of something so unvirtuous.
Neo-Confucianism, New Confucianism, and Boston Confucianism
After Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, the big three in the first Confucian wave, the influence of Confucianism rose and fell like a bell buoy on the Yellow Sea. Confucius never was able to win political friends and influence powerful people during his lifetime, and both Mencius and Xunzi were personae non grata under the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 B.C.E.). China’s first emperor, a ruthless Machiavellian besotted by Legalist preoccupations with punishment and power, wanted nothing to do with Confucius’s insistence that rulers treat their subjects like loving fathers treat their respectful sons. So he ordered the burning of Confucian books and the execution of Confucian scholars. During the Han dynasty, however, Confucianism had its Constantine moment, ascending in 136 B.C.E. from a persecuted movement to the official state orthodoxy and becoming the dominant intellectual impulse in China. Under the Han, the Five Classics became required reading for Chinese students, and a Confucian education became the ticket to employment in the vast Chinese bureaucracy.
Confucianism lost ground to both Daoism and Buddhism in the Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.) but was revived in the Song dynasty (960–1279 C.E.), when under the moniker of the “School of Principle” (Neo-Confucianism to Westerners) it once again became China’s preeminent intellectual impulse.
Two key developments put the “neo” in Neo-Confucianism. First was the willingness of Neo-Confucians to steal shamelessly from Buddhism and Daoism. Just as Muslims had rejected the asceticism of Christian monks, Neo-Confucians resisted the ascetic impulses of Buddhist and Daoist monastics. But they borrowed from the other Three Teachings various spiritual practices, including a meditative discipline known as “quiet sitting.” For these Neo-Confucians, cultivating reverence stood shoulder-to-shoulder with pursuing wisdom in Confucian education, which now included a wide array of mental, physical, and spiritual practices: “book reading, quiet sitting, ritual practice, physical exercise, calligraphy, arithmetic, and empirical observation.”29
The second key development rearranged the Confucian canon. Under the direction of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Confucianism’s foremost Song-dynasty thinker, Neo-Confucians now saw the “Four Books” rather than the Five Classics as the starting point for learning. From the fourteenth century until the twentieth, the Analects, Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean would constitute the basis for China’s civil-service examinations. The cumulative effect of this reorientation was to direct greater attention to the sorts of metaphysical and spiritual questions that Confucius shooed away but were the bread and butter (or, in this case, the rice) of Buddhists and Daoists.
Neo-Confucians distinguished themselves from Buddhists and Daoists, however, by their continued emphasis on ethics and history and by their continued commitments to reason and humanism. While the spirituality of the Daoists directed them out of this world, all the leading thinkers in this formative period of Neo-Confucianism were also political officials.
Some find antecedents for the philosophy of American pragmatism in the next great Neo-Confucian after Zhu Xi, Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529). Previous Confucians had creatively confused the sacred and the secular, Heaven and humanity. Wang Yang-ming did the same for thought and action. You don’t really know something unless you act on it, and you can’t really act on it unless you know it, he insisted. “Knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the completion of knowledge.”30
For much of the twentieth century, Confucianism was left for dead. The centuries-old tradition of Confucian civil-service exams came to an end in 1905, and official state sacrifices to Confucius were discontinued in 1928. In the years immediately following the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there was some talk of integrating communism and Confucianism. But the political drama of the Cultural Revolution cast Confucius as the villain. Its anti-Confucian campaign of the 1970s attacked the “four olds” (Confucian culture, ideology, customs, and habits) in the name of the “four news” (proletarian culture, ideology, customs, and habits). Communist Party officials denounced Confucius as the “number one hooligan” and indicted Confucianism of all sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors against the new Marxist-Leninist creed of Chairman Mao.31 Taking a page out of the playbook of the anti-Confucian Qin dynasty of
two thousand years earlier, the Red Guard seized and burned Confucian books and smashed the statue of Confucius at the Confucian temple in his hometown of Qufu. What was once the heart and soul of Chinese civilization was recast under the communists as a feudal affront to progress, an antimodern system of superstition, and a reactionary instrument of sexism and class oppression.
Today the Confucian star is rising once again in China. Confucian Studies programs are springing up at universities across the country. Confucius is being quoted by Communist Party officials, not least by China’s president Hu Jintao, whose slogan, “To build a harmonious society,” is based on a saying by Confucius (“to aim always at harmony”).32 And Confucius from the Heart, a sort of Chicken Soup for the Confucian Soul by the media professor (and media darling) Yu Dan, has sold more than ten million copies.33 Pro-Confucian momentum is so strong in China today that some are beginning to imagine that Confucianism could soon replace Marxist-Leninism as the official state ideology. This fantasy of the Chinese Communist Party morphing into another sort of CCP (the Chinese Confucian Party) is doubtless still far off, but millions of students across China are now reading the classics of Confucius and Mencius alongside (and in some cases against) the classics of Marx and Mao.
Accompanying this popular revival is a more philosophical resurgence called New Confucianism. Some observers are describing this new development as Confucianism’s third wave, cresting unlike the first wave of the first millennium and the second wave of the second millennium and not just over China but across the globe. Taking aim at the stereotype of Confucianism as fixed and fossilized, New Confucians insist that, just as Confucius transformed the traditions he inherited, they have the right and the responsibility to transform Confucianism itself. According to my BU colleague John Berthrong, New Confucians attempt “to be faithful to the core teachings of Confucianism but to state them in modern, universal terms, and in dialogue with world cultures.”34 More specifically, New Confucians seek to bring the ancient wisdom of their tradition to bear on such current challenges as science, liberalism, democracy, and human rights, and to purge that tradition of sexism and patriarchy along the way. Popular in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, New Confucianism insists that while Confucianism has much to learn from the West (including Western philosophy and comparative religion), the West has much to learn from Confucianism. In their ongoing dialogue with Western philosophers and theologians, New Confucians are happy to laud liberty, fraternity, and equality, but they insist on adding community to the mix.
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