In Our Time - Confucius

Episode Date: November 1, 2001

Melvyn Bragg examines the philosophy of Confucius. In the 5th century BC a wise man called Kung Fu Tzu said, 'study the past if you would divine the future'. This powerful maxim helped form the body of ideas, which more than Buddhism, more than Daoism, more even than Communism has defined what it is to be Chinese. It is a philosophy that we call Confucianism, and as well as asserting the importance of learning from the past it embodies a respect for heirachy, ritual and parents.But who was Confucius, what were his ideas and how did they succeed in becoming the bedrock for a civilisation? With Frances Wood, Curator of the Chinese section of the British Library, Tim Barrett Professor of East Asian History at SOAS, the School of African and Oriental Studies at London University, and Dr Tao Tao Liu, Tutorial Fellow in Oriental Studies at Wadham College, Oxford University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the 5th century BC, a wise man called Kung Fu Tshu said, study the past if you would divine the future. This powerful maxim helped form the body of ideas which more than Buddhism, more than Taoism, more even than communism, has defined what it is to be Chinese. It's a philosophy that we call Confucianism. Confucius is the Latinization of Kung Fu Tzu,

and as well as asserting the importance of learning from the past, it embodies a respect for hierarchy, ritual, and self-cultivation through learning. Confucius said, learning without thought is labour lost. Thought without learning is perilous. But who was Confucius, and how did his ideas manage to become the bedrock for a civilization?

With me, to go over 2,000 years of China's past in the hope of divining the future of Confucianism is Francis Wood, curator of the Chinese section of the British Library, Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, and Dr. Teotouliu, tutorial fellow in Oriental Studies at Wadham College, Oxford. I'd start with you, Dr. Teotelieu.

Just briefly, who was Confucius? What kind of manor? How did he start teaching? He was a kind of itinerant teacher at the time. He belonged to a class of people who were, were coming up to the fore of what we call in Chinese as the Shi, which is invariably translated, as the scribes, the knights. Anyway, people who were not actually inheriting a great deal from their family background, but belonged to the noble houses.

And they were well educated, and they went around trying to find a job of their own, and they propounded their own ideas. And he wasn't the only one. At that time, in fact, there were quite a lot of other people all propounding their own ideas. But his ideas, with the disciples that followed him, came to dominate China. But at that time, in the early days, it was just one of many. We're talking about very early days. We're talking about the end of the sixth beginning of the 5th century.

What's the evidence? What documents tell us about him? What you've said, are you sure of? Well, I think reasonably sure of what other people say. So much of the material has come down to us, written down, not by himself, by his disciples. And there are references in the works of other people, such as in Taoist texts,

and refer to him with his disciples, going around, and not always having a very good time. And some of the other schools would tend to laugh at him and say, well, he's not going to get anywhere anyway, but he did. How would you outline, and I like the other two to join on this, but how would you outline Confucianism for us? What sort of system is it?

Well, I think it put a great deal of emphasis on human interaction and a human society. He said actually he was a reformist and not really innovator, and he took up a lot of the ideas of the old allegedly idealized Zhou dynasty, which actually had overtaken and conquered the earlier dynasty, which was much more interested in the supernatural and worship. and so on. And he was less interest in that. He said that really people are the most important.

And you should think about how you treat people with love or humanity. The word ren, as has been called, is the sense of caringness, I suppose. We try to translate it in that way. I think one of the things that's interesting about him is that he wasn't. I mean, we now think of Confucianism, Confucius as the great innovator. I mean, he wasn't in any way, really, an innovator. he was expressing views that were fairly commonly held at the time. He was, it's simply because his disciples wrote down what he said

that we have this body of literature, which gives us the idea that this is something very important. I mean, he stressed the importance of family, family relations, relations with people within society and so on. But he was just saying what, in a sense, what pretty well everybody knew. He was reacting to what he saw as a breakdown of an ideal system. This ideal system lay in the past. Now, two things, Francis would. First of all, you say those were ideas around at the time,

and yet the time he was right, I'm from my swatting up for this programme, we're talking about a time of warring states. He was, we're told, ignored and rather scorned because people were getting on with killing each other and sort of going for territory and that sort of thing. So it would seem to me that to put that message across at that time would be rather radical and not just ideas that were in the air. I don't altogether agree.

I think what I was trying to say is that he's iterating what people, people knew. I mean, of course, the system had broken down and he's saying, let's get back to the system. And the system is very much one. I mean, there is this, Tata has put this nice gloss on it about it being reciprocity and people being nice to each other. But, I mean, he was very concerned with sort of statesmanship. And he believed in things, things should be right, let the ruler be a ruler, let the subject be a subject. And that you had to behave in the right sort of way. And that goes right the way down through society. A right way being a very strict hierarchy we're talking about, aren't we? Let the minister be the

minister, the ruler be the ruler, the minister be the father be the father, the son be the son and then the state is stable. Yes. All male by the way, but never mind. Absolutely. We can come to women. We can rescue your sister-in-law from drowning if it involves touching her hand. It was a big argument. I mean, the idea was it was actually so improper for a man to touch a woman's hand if he was not actually married to her that it would be better to leave her to drown. Yes, the second. So we've got a sort of almost Christ-like idea from Tower to 500 years before Christ, we've got a very strict hierarchical idea from you

and the exclusion of women. But there's a part of Confucianism is to do with government and governance, which is why he was so brought in by the bureaucracism. Now, Tim, can you give us some view of that? Then we might have three sort of, you know, grips on what the man was about. Yes, well, he certainly believed

that the key to good government was education. And in that he was very much in the mind, minority in his time, even if there were other people like him. The way the world was going at that time was more and more towards sheer efficiency, especially as rising powers in the regions in China. The dynasty was breaking up, and its former vassals were beginning to compete to take its place. These rising powers obviously put a premium on efficiency, especially military efficiency.

What worked was right and what succeeded in defeating one's enemies was right. So to talk about rituals, to talk about kindness in human relationships, this all seemed very remote. However, one of the ways

in which Confucius sought to achieve his educational ends was to, as we said earlier, look backwards towards the institutions, towards the texts concerning better times in the past. So he was laying the foundations of an educational curriculum which conveyed a cultural heritage. Now, in the short term, this looked to his, possibly to his contemporaries,

certainly for centuries thereafter, this looked plain silly. However, once China was unified and there were no more enemies to fight, how can you keep an empire together? The solution which took some time to emerge but seems to have held good for a couple of millennia almost thereafter was the idea of having an elite who were all brought up on the same sort of education, familiar with all the same texts and so forth who held together because of their cultural knowledge and who through their cultural knowledge

gained the kind of prestige which at least in settled times allowed them to dominate local society. Right, just before we talk about that, how did the Confucianism survive until it was taken up by the first Han emperor really in about 200 BC? So those 300 years, how did it?

keep going. As we were told, there are 100 schools in Confucius Day, there were many competing ideas. How did Confucianism get through, Francis? I think it was because of the work of the disciples in recording what he

said, and this didn't happen to other philosophers so they vanish. You don't have so much of a system. And there's really quite a large body of work written by his disciples, always in the form of these little, The Master said this, or in response to questions from so and so, he said this, that and the other. And he spoke about all sorts of things.

Some of the things have been mentioned. He also said odd things like, you know, a gentleman should never wear scarlet at home. And it was also lots of anecdotes about him were repeated. I mean, for example, it was said he couldn't sleep if his mat was not straight and all sorts of other details. So you have this body of material about him. And you have his nomic sayings, which did form, in the end, the basis for the examination system, which created the bureaucracy in China. So it's a body of material about him and what he said, written down by his disciples. So we have this great bureaucracy spring up in China before the Christian millennium began, run by the Confucian. Did they run it well?

Can you give us some brisk idea to him or what the principles were running it? Yes. The bureaucracy itself, funnily enough, came from the heritage of those who were striving for efficiency. and so the theory of bureaucratic management wasn't in itself confusion, but after the experience of autocracy under that terrible first emperor of China, the man with all those terracotta warriors, I think they were looking for something which would make that kind of totalitarian bureaucracy more bearable. And certainly to have people in the bureaucracy who had been examined and not for their ruthless efficiency,

but for their knowledge of the Chinese heritage, was probably a good way of achieving that goal. In the Tang Dynasty, the medieval period, so 600 to 900 AD, the Buddhism which had been very much around surged in, and as it were, for the purposes of this conversation, Tim, took over. Now, what was it doing that Confucianism wasn't doing? How did it push aside Confucianism?

Well, I think what it came down to is that the Tang Dynasty marked a period of unification after lengthy civil wars, or even when they weren't fighting, there was a standoff between North and South of China, which were independent regimes. So these civil wars had followed on the first period of unification. I think that people were perhaps. perhaps disappointed that they had had an imperial government, but it didn't at that stage seem to work. They were looking for different solutions, solutions that worked more on the personal level. So what did Buddhism offer them? It was more populous than Confucianism, wasn't it?

It went to the people more directly, as I understand it. Yes, it took some time to do that, but what it offered, above all, was an answer to questions as to what happens after death. A person salvation? salvation, a chance of remedying the situation, even if you end up killed in a battle, then there's a chance of a further incarnation or whatever. And in particular, I think, the number of people who died in the fighting who were not cared

for as ancestors within the kind of Confucian setting where even the dead, as it were, still part of the family, but the nameless dead, the wandering ghosts, who would take care of them? Buddhism certainly offered that possibility. I think one does need to stress that the Buddhism that we see in China, especially Tang China, is very different from the original, rather ascetic, preachings of the historic Buddha.

The Chinese did transform Buddhism enormously. so that it would fit in with the Confucian family system. Well, for example, I mean, the Buddhism should be a monastic religion. You should retire from this world and go and live in a monastery in order to practice it, cultivate your faith. Well, that, as Tim was saying, that means that takes you away from your family. And you've got the problem that you must stay within your family because you need to look after your elderly parents

and you also need to keep feeding the ancestral spirits back for three generations. Inside the Confucian family. Yes, you must stay. And that was what everybody was in, was in a Confucian family. And your obligations to your ancestors, which means being at home, offering sacrifices, offering food to them or incense and prayers and so on, informing them what's going on in the household. You can't do that if you're stuck away in a monastery. So you get things like, I mean, this is putting it very simplistically,

but you get the development of Zen, Chan in Chinese, which is sudden enlightenment, which is self-cultivation. You don't have to leave your home, go into a monastery, but you can become a Buddhist and you can achieve enlightenment through your own cultivation. But I'm sure Tim would have more to say on that because he's much more of a specialist. Yes, obviously the idea that you could achieve enlightenment in the here and now in the middle of everyday life is one of the great strengths of the Zen way of thinking. On the other hand, you can also see that the way Zen is presented,

the snappy interchange between masters and disciples, is paradoxically still very much in the tradition of Confucius speaking with his disciples. So something at the heart of the depiction of Chinese thought, which is not necessarily to do with explaining vast systems logically, because in fact where Chinese thought shows itself is in interaction between people. and the depiction of conversations is essential to the image of Zen that it wished to propagate. How did Confucianism as it were survive and then as it were reassert itself after this period of Buddhism? Had it taken in enough from Buddhism to give it the strength to reach for us?

But still what Tim was saying, that not the system, the conversation, the master pupil, that relationship, but that was the reinforced by the Buddhist experience. That marched on, as it were. And I think... Yes, later on after this period, after the Middle Ages. For a start, I think at first it was some reaction against that kind of foreignness. And it was sort of the Chinese retrenched a bit and said, you know, really this isn't working. We ought to get back to our basics.

But it had absorbed a lot of these ideas. And what's known as near confusions, which really started from about the late... about the late, yes, which didn't completely go back to the basics, but actually tried to incorporate a lot of the ideas that were floating around. That would be about starting from about the 10th century, onto 11th and 12th, culminating really in a great thinker, sort of Thomas Aquinas of Confucianism, people like, a man called Zhu Shi, who lived in the 12th century,

and he had a rather different interpretation. He made Confucius less of a state structure. and a state institution and made it much more the idea that everybody could participate. It became much more highly individualized. I think he tried to get from the much more sort of politically and politicized sort of ideas

of Confucianism as a state institution to the idea that individually, within each person and within each household, you could have a sense of what is right, everybody knowing their places and so on. What's the continuity here, Francis, What is the continuity that's happening with Tsangzi in the 12th century back to Confucius? And what are things that he's added by plucking different things out and so on?

One of the great things about China is the way that the body of literature builds up. I mean, China is the most wordy, written-wordy society, I think, that there's ever been. They started being written wordy very early, didn't they? They did indeed, and of course they invented printing, they invented paper and so on so that they could get their words further. And not reinforced Confucianism, of course, because they could do this. the business with the paper. And one of the great things I think that's interesting is that you get way back in the Han Dynasty

when Confucianism is first being adopted, as it were, as the state cult, if you like. Before they'd actually invented woodblock printing, they had the Confucian text carved in stone. And then you would take rubbings from that with paper so that people could have copies of it. But they always had this great thing about the correct text. And of course, since people disagreed about things,

you get a huge body of Confucian literature, which is people criticizing, people working, on it and so on, so that you've got whatever the fate of the cult at any time, you've got this continuous re-examination of the texts. And I think what's important, though, particularly is at times of crisis, again, you get a slightly, I mean, this is, you get it with the Song because they're being threatened by the northerners, eventually the Mongols take over, you get it again in the 19th century, this, again, this re-examination of one's heritage, one's past. And I think one of the interesting things about this sort of 10th, 11th,

12th century thing too, is that people in the decoration of their homes, in their dress and so on, were also looking back to the golden age. And there was a great fashion for having kind of ancient ritual bronzes of the sort that Confucius might have seen in your home. So Confucianism is getting into all sorts of aspects of home life, not just in the question of your rectitude and your moral conduct. It did affect the reading of everything, as I understand it. The book of songs, as I'm telling, was a key Confucian text, even though a lot of the songs are immoral and boredy or. I wouldn't say immoral. That's what my needs had you said.

Gordon. Yes, I mean, it dealt very frankly, very often with love and sex. Well, frankly, it's often a little camouflage. It depends. Fundamentalist interpretation would put it. But Confuters himself never actually denied that people's appetites, and that included sex and food and general shelter and everything else. No, I think he had a strong sense about, he had.

himself, in the old days, had a very strong sense about how the book of songs, which were really folk songs as well as other kinds of hymns and poems of all kinds, they really describe the whole of life. And as far as he was concerned, he thought that this really understood, it really took poetry and the arts as a kind of expression of things which are perhaps too deep emotionally to be expressed easily in verbal form. So it comes out in poetry, I mean, ordinary prose for. So I think he felt, he loved music as well. So I don't think once you get an idea that Confucius

was somehow rather a purely dull old stick. I mean, there's one record of him actually getting so enraptured by some music he heard that he didn't eat or sleep for three days. Now Zhu Xi, this neo-confusion, was quite clear that some of the songs in the book

of songs, which appear to be bawdy, which in fact earlier on they tried to interpret it about putting a gloss on it. And there's a love in which the young woman is urging her lover to get out of bed and get out before the household is up and about. He sort of interpreted as in an earlier period in the Han period as though it was the emperor's very virtuous consort, telling him to get up and get to work and go to court where everybody's waiting for him. A nice try, really, isn't it?

It's still a good interpretation, but probably the more boredy one was the real one. So I think there was a great spread of all of this and the way that the arts were seen was at the same time you could say that he was very keen on putting across the way, the Tao, which actually is the term he shared with Taoism as well. Yet that sense of the way was a way of righteousness in general. So by the time we come to the 19th century,

I mean, I don't know this is a Gallup, but there you go, We have a Confucianist China, which is the bureaucracy, the educational system, the ideas have been changed and transformed and so on. But it's still, there's recognisable two and a half thousand years on this man's disciples, maybe more than this man, have informed this enormous powerful civilization. Now, what effect, and it deeply bedded into it and women are excluded, but what effect did the arrival of, let us call it, the arrival of the industrial west in the 19th century, what effect did that have on, on China? China, and particularly on Confucianism, on the ideals that it carried. Well, one of the things which it did was it broke up the entire Confucian world. We have to see that China regarded itself as bestowing civilization on its neighbors like Korea and Japan, and indeed Vietnam. So when these countries either fell under colonial influence or went their own ways, this was a bit of a blow for Confucian self-esteem to start with.

Then obviously the introduction of Western values questioned the ability of Confucianism to create a society fit to survive in the modern world. And once again, we see some of the slogans which had dominated China in the terrible period after the life of Confucius as it moved towards unification by brute force. The same slogans start to come back again, originally perhaps in Japan, but then in China too, as these countries perceived themselves as under threat in an immensely competitive situation, the slogans that we must enrich the, the country, strengthen the army. These became once again dominant. So it's at the same time

an awful new world, but one which had echoes in East Asia of times long distant. Do Taranyu, can I ask you, moving on a bit further when Mao attacked Confucianism and in the Cultural Revolution attempted

to eliminate the past, which would mean eliminated Confucianism. How successful was he? Well, in some ways, he was very successful, I mean, getting rid of the old and the past, but he didn't really work because in many ways that Mao himself was a bit of a confusionist. He was a great believer in hierarchy, and not at all in the sort of the democratic principles. You knew your place, and as far as he was concerned, he was at the top of the tree, and everybody else was somewhere at different runs well below it. And I think he also actually went against the Confucian spirit of being fairly Catholic

and the ability to take on various aspects. He just decided everything had to be one politically correct voice. And that went against Confucianism. And as soon as Mao stopped his terrorizing ways of getting that done, of course it disappeared. But I think that in some ways, Confucianism under, during the... the Mao era was almost kind of strengthened because it was so obviously a lack of this reciprocal attitude towards each other and the sense of caringness for each other as well.

And do you find that it continued after Mao, it continued through Mao? Did Mao utilise Confucianism, but did it go by another name, as we were? Well, overtly at any rate, as we're all agreed, he was trying to suppress Confucianism. I think one of the areas where, in fact, Mao seems to have been trapped into, perhaps unbeknownst to himself in a Confucian way of thinking, was to take on this responsibility of trying to transform China through his own personal effort. Now, one of the distinctive aspects of Confucianism was its belief that great people can transform cultures. Confucius looked back to earlier Sage kings. and in his turn was looked back to as a sage himself.

However, in the only other case where somebody was, as it were, plucked from obscurity to become the ruler of China's millions, which was at the start of the Ming Dynasty after the expulsion of the Mongols, it's remarkable that the emperor at that time, who suddenly found himself after a life of poverty, in charge of China, exerted himself to make China a good country and when he failed to do so became more and more autocratic. So although Mao's idea of what China should be like

may have been more than coloured by Marxism, the effort single-handedly to transform China and the effects of failure on him personally in making him more and more autocratic, bear an uncanny echo of earlier problems in trying to act as a sage and single-handedly transform a whole society. Will that be a similar, Echard, Francis,

in the sense that, Francis would, in the sense that Confucianism will now, is it now beginning to strengthen and reassert itself? I think there are things, I mean, there are ways in which it's never vanished. from the sort of Chinese ethos, you know, the strength of family ties, the responsibility of family, even in things like, you know, the family has to pay for the bullet if one of its members is shot for, as a criminal, things like slander, you can't slander for three

generations back. That's all got all sorts of resonances which are very Confucian. It hasn't, I think, in, I haven't seen in China, it hasn't been used in any sort of self-strengthening yet. But they have started redoing the rituals at Confucius's birthplace. They play music which is 3,000 years old and dance to strange rituals. So that I think there will be another coming of Confucianism. As there has been already in places like Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, where there's a sense of upholding the old traditions and the old Chineseness. I think it is very identified still.

Yes, it's anti-global, isn't it? It's saying we're Chinese and therefore we're Confucian and it will spread to China. Thank you very much, to Tartou, to Tim Barrett and De Francis Wood, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.