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The Great Divide

Page 41

by Peter Watson


  But Di, the supreme deity, and the ancestors, could be unpredictable and if dissatisfied could bring about drought, flooding, and other disasters. As a result, the Chinese were not at all squeamish about sacrificing as many as a hundred victims in a single ceremony. On occasion, a Son of Heaven might have hundreds of retainers slaughtered with him at his death.

  Several of these beliefs and practices are not at all dissimilar to the rituals followed in the New World, as we shall see in chapters twenty and twenty-one but, in 1045 BC, the Zhou dynasty took over from the Shang and China began to diverge towards an Axial Age sensibility. During the Zhou reign, iron was introduced to China which helped them become the longest-serving dynasty in Chinese history. The Zhou spread the view that the Shang had been corrupt, so that heaven had been ‘filled with pity for the suffering of the people’. The ‘gaze’ of Di, the supreme deity, had fallen on the Zhou kings, they said, and they had introduced an ethical ideal into a religion that had been hitherto unconcerned about morality. Heaven, the Zhou insisted, in a quote that is reminiscent of similar ones in the Hebrew bible, was not influenced by the slaughter of pigs and oxen but by compassion and justice.27

  But we must be careful of making Chinese religion too much like religions elsewhere. The early Iron Age was a time of great weakness in China, with Zhou territory under constant attack from pastoral nomads. This meant that the paramount king was not so paramount after all – he could exert little control over the cities ranged across the central plain. In fact, says Karen Armstrong, the only thing that held these cities together was the cult. And this cult, under the Zhou, had a special character. ‘The Chinese would never be interested in a god who transcended the natural order. They were less interested in finding something holy “out there” than in making this world fully divine by ensuring that it conformed to Heaven’s prototype.’ The king had supreme power most of the time, but only up to a point. At all times, he had to conform to the celestial model.28

  Towards the end of the ninth century, however, further changes did begin to appear. The decline in the importance of the monarchy was perhaps the most unsettling development and may have had something to do with the fact that, as the poets noted, there was in those days one natural disaster after another.29 Other changes were self-inflicted. Under the Zhou the Chinese had made great advances in cutting down woods and forests, clearing more and more land for cultivation. But this meant there was now less territory for hunting and for breeding sheep and cattle. The Shang and the Zhou had slaughtered hundreds of animals at their lavish sacrifices and gift-giving ceremonies, but all this was taking its toll on the rich wildlife of the countryside. As a result, the first step towards the Axial Age was taken when ritual laws were introduced to limit the amount of indiscriminate killing. This had the knock-on effect of spreading a new spirit of moderation among noble families. As a result, over time all the activities of the elite were gradually transformed into elaborate ceremony: whatever you did, there was a ‘correct’ way of doing it. ‘Everything had a religious value and there was a ritual attached to it.’

  The particular importance of ritual in China was that it led to an important school of ritual, located in the state of Lu. There the ritualists understood well the importance of moderation and self-surrender. For instance, they greatly revered Yao and Shun, legendary sage kings of remote antiquity who, it was said, governed by charisma alone, but a charisma quite different from that of the warrior class. Yao was regarded as a gentle man, whose rule had brought about the Great Peace (dai ping). Yao and Shun together had produced the Classic of Documents,a tacit criticism of earlier rule based on force and coercion and in this way the idea of kingship in China began to change, from fearsome practices to more ethical ones.30

  The seventh century was a turbulent time in the Yellow River region, but the ritual reform initiated by the literati of Lu had far-reaching significance: the li, as the ritualistic approach was known, forced warriors more and more to behave like gentlemen. As a result, wars were usually quite short ‘and could not be fought for personal gain’, becoming in effect courtesy contests. ‘A nobleman lost status if he killed too many people, never more than three fugitives and even then [he] was supposed to shoot with his eyes shut.’ Gloating in victory was outlawed. At court all nobles had to make sure they helped improve the beauty and elegance of the ceremonies, and as a consequence they must always be perfectly dressed, well-mannered, and at all times humble. ‘By the seventh century these ideals do seem to have transformed Zhou China from a society addicted to rough extravagance into one that prized moderation and self control.’31

  Then it all changed a second time. During the second half of the seventh century there was another wave of attacks from the pastoral nomads of the north. The uncertainty and turbulence caused by these attacks brought about the rise of the Chu people (722–481 BC), in the central and southern areas of China and they introduced a new kind of aggression. They had no time for the old ritualised warfare; instead, their ferocity was such that, in 593 BC, during a lengthy siege, the people of Song were reduced to eating their own children.32

  In this chaos, several things (by definition) were happening at once. Amid the new round of violence, noble warriors, although certainly motivated by greed and ambition, were also trying to free themselves from the domination of older families. This was the Chinese way of moving painfully towards a more egalitarian polity. In line with this, and despite the ascendancy of the noble warriors, at least for a time, in Cheng (central China) and Lu (the south-west) fiscal reforms were introduced that improved the conditions for peasants. In the second half of the sixth century law codes were published, which all citizens could use to challenge arbitrary authority. This was accompanied by growing contempt for ritual, and a new taste for luxury, putting an unsustainable strain on the economy, with demand outstripping resources. One result of this was that there was a growth in the number of poor aristocrats.33

  And it was against this background, at about this time, that a young man called Kong Qiu (551–479 BC) was completing his studies and about to take up a minor post in the administration of the state of Lu. His family were minor aristocrats and newcomers to Lu, who had been forced out of their previous home. Kong Qiu was a clever student who had mastered the study of the li by the time he was thirty. By the time he reached forty he had become by the standards of the day a learned man, convinced that he grasped the deeper meaning of the rites he was trained in. Moreover, he believed that, properly expressed, li could bring China back to the ‘Way of Heaven’. Kong Qiu’s disciples would later refer to him as Kongfuzi, ‘our Master Kong’. In the west he is known as Confucius.34

  Confucius, Karen Armstrong tells us, was no solitary ascetic but a man of the world, ‘who enjoyed a good dinner, fine wine, a joke and good conversation’. Like Socrates, he did not lock himself away but instead developed his insights in conversation with others. (The famous Analects of Confucius were put together by his disciples long after his death.)

  Like many others in the Axial Age, Confucius felt deeply alienated from his time, and he convinced himself that in China the root cause of the current disorder and the constant wars that threatened, was a neglect of the traditional rites. If he was like Socrates in being a man of the world, he was like Gotama in not being interested in metaphysics – Confucius always discouraged ‘theological chatter’. Instead, he took the view that ‘people should imitate the reticence of Heaven and keep a reverent silence’. An undue concern with the afterlife was not necessary, he felt: the point was that people must ‘learn to be good here below’. His ultimate concern, and that of his disciples, was not heaven but ‘the Way’, to tread carefully, not towards a place or a person but to ‘a condition of transcendent goodness . . . The rituals were the road map that would put them on course.’35

  Confucius thought that people could become much more fully conscious of themselves and their lives, that self-cultivation was the all-important process in life, and reciprocal in natur
e. In order to enlarge oneself, one should try to enlarge others. ‘The Way’ was nothing less than a ‘dedicated ceaseless effort to nourish the holiness of others’. This also implied egalitarianism. Until Confucianism only the aristocracy had performed the li. Now, he insisted, the Way was available to anybody.

  Confucius’s approach was as much psychological, and individualistic, as political. He wanted dignity, nobility, and holiness to be at the centre of life, and was convinced this could be achieved only by daily struggle. ‘Enhanced humanity’ was the goal, something that could not be achieved by coercion. Instead, living a compassionate, empathic life took you beyond yourself.36

  China’s Axial Age had some way to go yet. Confucius died in 479 BC and at around that time the country entered another disturbing and frightening era, which historians call the period of the warring states (475–221 BC). Life on the central plain was suddenly more turbulent than ever before, when seven states and pastoral nomads from the north seemed to be constantly at loggerheads, using ever more terrible iron weapons. One result of this horror was a further intensified quest for a new religious understanding. Given that hundreds of thousands of peasants were being conscripted into the new infantries, and that more and more land had to be drained to pay for these expensive campaigns (crops were grown on the newly created fields, crops which could be traded), warrior-peasants became a major factor in economic-political life (as they were to be in Greece, discussed in the next chapter). As elsewhere, aristocratic chariot teams were phased out. By the fourth century BC, cavalry had totally replaced chariots and soldiering became more of a lower-class activity, lessons being learned from the nomads of the steppes. The Chinese also adopted the weapons the pastoral nomads had invented: the sword and the crossbow. This too made the period of the warring states especially fearsome. As a result of all this terrible ‘unrestraint’, with moderation cast aside, with kings and aristocrats fighting each other, aligning themselves with first one former adversary, then another, no one set of warriors could trust any other, and kings turned increasingly to the ‘men of worth’, scholars who were literate and specialists in protocol and ethics.37

  And in these circumstances, there emerged one other teacher in particular who turned his back on militancy and favoured a message of non-violence. Mozi, or ‘Master Mo’, (c. 480–390 BC), headed a brotherhood of about 180 men, a school with strict rules and with a rigorously egalitarian ethic, in which its members dressed like peasants or craftsmen. Instead of fighting, however, they saw it as their mission to intervene to stop wars. Mozi argued it was possible to persuade people to love instead of hate and his aim was to replace the ferocious egotism of the warriors with a generalised altruism. The central concept was Ai, a deliberately cultivated attitude of wishing everybody well: ‘Others must be regarded like the self.’ The Mohists were different from others in that they were more interested in doing good than in being good. Not for them the slow process of self-cultivation; they put their practical skills, logic and willpower at the service of society. Not surprisingly perhaps, during the warring states period Mozi was more widely revered than Confucius.38

  Despite this period of endemic war, by the fourth century BC the economic and political transformation of China was progressing at a remarkable rate. The cities in particular were no longer the political and religious capitals they had started out as, but had by now become centres of trade and industry, home to thousands of citizens. In this busy, untidy, unprecedented world, other new philosophies/ideologies emerged, one of which was attributed to a Master Yang. His approach was ‘every man for himself ’, a modern-sounding attitude which fitted city life, but in turn it provoked what might be called a neo-Confucian riposte, in particular the notion of ren, ‘meditation to check the passions and empty the mind’.39 This was one of the background factors in the development of the Chinese form of yoga, based on the idea of qi, understood as the basic energy of life, ‘the primal spirit’. Zhuangzi (c. 370–311 BC) adopted this idea, arguing that life is constant transformation, something we cannot avoid and that the more things change, the more they stay the same – change, death and disillusion being normal. The Way was inexpressible, the Great Knowledge could never be defined but, Zhuangzi said, egotism was the greatest obstacle to enlightenment.40

  Meng Ke (371–288 BC), known in the West as Mencius, saw a pattern in history. China, he insisted, had changed for the worse, partly because people had tried to govern by force, whereas for him goodness had a ‘transformative power’. He admired practical action and thought everyone had four fundamental ‘impulses’ (tuan) that could grow into the four cardinal virtues: benevolence, justice, courtesy and ‘the wisdom to distinguish right from wrong’. He too believed in the golden rule – treat others as you would wish to be treated. ‘A sage was simply one who had fully realized his humanity and become one with heaven.’41

  By the third century BC, as we shall see, the ideas of the Axial Age were more or less in place in other areas of the world. In China, however, the period of the warring states was still in full flood and there was a great longing for peace. Indeed, the political situation was so serious that the Chinese were not interested in scientific, metaphysical and logical matters, as the Greeks or the Indians or the Israelites were: such notions to them in their turmoil seemed trivial. In these circumstances, the last great Chinese sage of the Axial Age emerged, Laozi (‘the old master’), or Lao-tzu (whose dates are uncertain, some time between the fifth and first centuries being favoured, though there are those who think he was a legendary figure only). But he too advocated ‘Emptiness, unity and stillness’, the giving up of desire, the loss of ego, the virtue of non-violence.42

  The Axial Age in China had many parallels with elsewhere, as should now be apparent, but the Chinese also absorbed one other important lesson – that no school could have a monopoly on truth: the dao, the way, was ultimately indescribable. Nevertheless, the merits of Confucianism gradually became clear and in 136 BC the court scholar Dong Zhongshu, mindful that there were too many competing schools, recommended that the six classics, taught by Confucians, should become the official teaching. Even so, in China, it is often said, one can be a Confucian by day and a Daoist at night.43

  FROM BAAL TO YAHWEH: THE EVOLUTION OF THE JEWISH GOD

  Arguably, the Axial Age in and around ancient Israel was the most influential of all. Not immediately but eventually, and so far as the ‘Western’ world is concerned. Also, more is known about Israel, because much of the trajectory of its ideological development at that time is recorded in the bible which, as is discussed further in the following chapter, was one of the first books to be written in an alphabetic script.

  If the bible is to be believed, the Israelites said that they always felt different from other peoples, and though this may be post-hoc reasoning, there was some truth to it in that they were a semi-nomadic pastoral people, herding ‘small stock’ sheep and goats, unlike many of the people they came into contact with, such as the Egyptians and the Phoenicians and Canaanites, who were settled. In the early days, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob worshipped El, the High God of Canaan but he was gradually replaced, after about the fourteenth century BC, by Baal, pictured as a divine warrior ‘who rode on the clouds of heaven in a chariot’, who fought with other gods, often in hand-to-hand combat, and brought rain. In other words, he was a (male) god with many of the same characteristics as Indra. In the very early days Yahweh, who would in time become the great God of Israel, and the model for the great monotheisms of the world, was very similar to Baal. The Israelites would later turn against Baal, just as they turned against other gods, but to begin with they found him inspiring, though they also worshipped other deities. (Yahweh, who to begin with was a god of war, would not become their only god until the sixth century BC).

  As befitted a semi-nomadic pastoral people, the Israelites had no central sanctuary but carried the Ark of Covenant from one shrine to another at a variety of temples, at Shechem, Gilgal, Shiloh, Bethel, Sinai and
Hebron.44 The Ark of the Covenant famously contained the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written, which had replaced the Golden Calf that Aaron had made out of the gold of the Israelites’ earrings and jewellery, when they had waited forty days and forty nights in the wilderness while Moses communed with God. This story may well reflect the change the Israelites made from earlier forms of worship, of the bull or cow, to later ideas.

  But Yahweh was, to begin with, a warrior god (and would always remain a ‘jealous’ god), who had no expertise or knowledge of agriculture or fertility, which further suggests that, in their past, the Israelites were pastoral nomads of the steppe kind. (Or, it would underline the theory discussed in chapter seven, that Genesis records the transition from horticulture to agriculture.) Fierce warrior gods, storm and wind gods, also bring rain. Yahweh had these elements too but was not worshipped exclusively (most Israelites had local gods they worshipped as well, and Yahweh was himself surrounded by lesser deities). There was only a small minority who always regarded Yahweh as their sole deity.45

  India had its ‘renouncers’, China its ‘men of worth’, while in the Near East – more or less coincidentally – there arose the tradition of the prophet. A prophet is not someone who can foretell the future but someone who speaks for a deity, who is graced by revelation from on high. It was a widespread tradition that flourished from Canaan in the west to the Euphrates in the east but more of it was made by the Israelites, possibly because their fortunes were decidedly mixed.

  In Palestine, prophets often formed part of the royal court where one of their functions was to criticise the monarch, ensuring he conformed to the pure aims of what was to begin with a ‘Yahweh-alone’ cult.

 

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