The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Confucius

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

The Covid pandemic has robbed us of many rituals and ceremonies we took for granted - from simple handshakes to elaborate graduation ceremonies. Their loss is important - rituals contribute to our happiness in so many ways. Something the ancient Chinese teacher Confucius contemplated deeply.Harvard professor Peter Bol (who teaches ChinaX at edx.org) explains why Confucius thought that ritual behaviours can bring us and our communities peace and joy - but why we need to create traditions and rules and customs that serve others, not just ourselves. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that many of us have missed is all the social stuff. Those little family, friendship, and relationship traditions. Going bowling on your boyfriend's birthday. Or that monthly sit-down dinner at grandma's. Or Friday night drinks with your work buddies. Many of us have also missed all those public events that we're obliged to attend. They've all been changed or canceled. I've seen this firsthand as a professor

and head of college here at Yale. Those time-honored Ivy League commencement rituals that have been practiced for hundreds of years, they all got axed last year. If you had asked me before the pandemic, I might not have thought of that as such a bad thing. I mean, graduation rituals can be a bit dorky, but what have many of us realized over the last year? It turns out we really miss this stuff. Now, I am not a pomp and circumstance kind of person, but these rituals have a way of making you stuff. Now, I am not a pomp and circumstance kind of person, but these rituals have a way of making you feel more connected, like you're a real part of family or community,

like you're a bit less out of step with life. But another reason I started to appreciate all these formal rituals was because of a class I stumbled on during COVID. Can you sing that song? I cannot sing it as well as you can. Well, shall we sing that song? I cannot sing it as well as you can. Well, shall we sing it together? It's a free online class from my alma mater, Harvard, called China X, taught by the amazing Peter Boll, the Charles H. Carlswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

the Charles H. Carlswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Let China sleep, the mighty Napoleon is supposed to have said in a cautious moment at the turn into the 19th century. But when China awakens, she will shake the world. As I listened to Peter's China X lectures, it became clear that my present-day situation was also the preoccupation of a great Chinese thinker, one who lived more than 2,000 years ago, Confucius. And so, welcome again to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. I can't recommend Peter Boal's China X-Class enough.

I'm a huge Peter Boal fangirl. I was totally blown away when he told me he'd taken the time to go back through the teachings of Confucius to see what the great philosopher had to say about my field of study, happiness. It's hard to overstate how important Confucius is in China, but his ideas are less well-known elsewhere. So I asked Peter to start us off with Confucius 101. So let's place him in time, which is around 500 BC, which is also around 500 years after the founding of the Zhou Dynasty.

Chinese history is organized by dynasties when there's a particular ruling house on the throne. And at a moment when all of the smaller states that the dynasty supposedly is in charge of are beginning to fight with each other and make claims on each other. And the nominal king, Zhou Qing, has lost power. And so the local lords are after it. And of course, once the lord of your state is after power vis-a-vis other states, then his underlings are seeking power from each other. And it just goes all the way down. That's the world Confucius lives in.

We know of no thinker, no one who's thinking about values, who's thinking about the human condition in the same way before Confucius. He's the first. And yet, he is not somebody who's born to power. He's from the lowest levels of the nobility. And he talks about this as well. You know, I could be a chariot driver. I could be a steward for a noble family. I could go into the army. And he doesn't do any of those things. He becomes a teacher. That's extraordinary because it's not as if there were people out there who were being teachers, who were engaging in this thing that he called shui in Chinese, that we translate into learning. Somebody who made his life through learning. And he says at one point, at 15, I set my heart on learning. And of course,

if you're going to spend your life learning, you're going to have students, right? And so, it's not only a life of learning, it's a life of teaching. And that immediately raises a problem, because the students say to him, Master, don't you want to go out and serve and become an important person? And so they give him an analogy. They say, suppose you had a jewel in a box at home. Would you take it to the market and sell it? And Confucius said, but of course I would, but only for the right price. I'm willing to sell myself to the right ruler, but they have to pay my price, not me, their price. He has things to teach and he has a vision of the past. Because if the world is in bad shape now, where do we turn to

find proper models? And his answer, we're going to turn back to the beginning of the Zhou dynasty 500 years before. And we're going to see that at that point, under those founding kings, the world worked right. And that's what he's loyal to. He's not loyal so much to the states. a Zhou dynasty, and he has an interpretation of what made that dynasty successful, what made it a moral world at the beginning. And so what's amazing is he's had such an influence over Chinese history in China today, but we don't actually have a lot from Confucius himself in terms of writing, right? It's just this one book, right? It's just this one book, right? Nothing. We have quotations of him that must come from other people who are quoting him and who sometimes put some of their own quotations in as well, but we don't have any writing by him. We have Confucius of the Analects, this one book we have, which is a series of quotations from Confucius, often very enigmatic. Confucius says one of that when he's talking about

the kind of student he wants. He says, you know, I want people who are really committed, who really put their energy into it. He said, when I lift up one corner, they have to come back with the other three. Otherwise, I don't go on teaching them. The great difference between the Greek philosophers who are so wordy, who keep writing stuff, right? So loquacious. And there's Confucius giving us these enigmatic sentences like, I lift up one corner, you come back with the other three. That's what learning is all about. What is this? What is this, right? What he does, he gives us, in some sense, sayings that we have to figure out. We have to think. The problem is we have Confucius of the Analects, but we have many Confuciuses, because later on, Confucius being

somebody who turns to antiquity, who looks to the text of antiquity, who apparently knows about some text of antiquity, gets credited with being the editor of what are called today the Confucian classics, which are to a large extent about state building. So you have many different kinds of Confucius. And so every period in Chinese history where we see a major shift in intellectual values involves a new interpretation of the classics. And there's yet another one taking place in the present. So think of Confucius as both a moral philosopher, a sage, a model of ethical state building, and so on. He can be all those things.

But in the end, he begins as a teacher. In some ways, it's kind of ironic to be including Confucius in the series that we have on Wisdom of the Ancients. Because I, it's kind of ironic to be including Confucius in the series that we have on Wisdom of the Ancients, because I feel like if anyone was going to be really supportive of talking about the Wisdom of the Ancients, it probably would have been Confucius, right? I mean, we think of Confucius himself as being ancient, but if he had a podcast, he'd probably have a whole series of episodes on the Wisdom of the Ancients, right? Indeed. And yet, in some ways, the ancients don't

speak. He sees the ancients through their actions, through the records of their past, perhaps through some of the poems of the Book of Poems that he knows. And yet, he says of himself, he says, I transmit, I do not innovate. Now, we look at that and say, you know, when you transmit, you're selective. So, you're innovating by selecting. But he wants to make that claim that I don't. I don't innovate. I transmit. I transmit the past. And then he goes on, he said, I like antiquity and I'm clever at seeking it or I'm diligent at seeking it. And so Confucius talked about so many things as I'm learning in your China X class. But one of the things he didn't talk too much about, interestingly, was happiness per se, right? In Confucius's time, when you think about sort of like Confucian

Chinese, like what would be the concept of happiness? What would be the terms they used to talk about it? There's some passing references to happiness, right? Or joy or taking pleasure in something. But it's not a big and central concept. It seems to me that there are two other related concepts which are going to help us get at that. Or get at something that you've been concerned with in your work and these podcasts. And the first is the idea of ritual and living a life within the context of ritual. And the second is the notion of the Chinese word is Ren. And it's been translated as benevolence, goodness, humaneness. We'll stick with humaneness. And it seems to me that that

combination of the idea of ritual, and then after discussing that, the idea of humaneness, gets us to something that I think you're going to say, but that's happiness. But it's not as if this is the term that's chosen by Confucius to hammer away at. The reason I want to begin with ritual is because, first of all, it's something that we today don't value very much, right? We tend to say, well, being authentic is important. Speaking your mind is important. Ritual behavior is just ritualistic. It's just false. It's not authentic. And what Confucius does, when he looks to antiquity, he says, well, what made them successful? He says, the answer is ritual. And we look at that and say, well, how could that be? But if you start to think about ritual, it's many levels of meaning.

Let's begin with a ceremony. And ceremonies accomplish things, right? A wedding ceremony does something. A graduation ceremony does something, right? They accomplish these things. Just like language accomplishes things, ceremonies do things, but ceremonies bring people together in ways that bind them together around common activity. So ritual is doing, not thinking, not speaking, ritual is doing. If we extend that to everyday experience,

we're teachers, we have students. There are ways in which teachers are expected to act, and there are ways in which students are expected to act, and we expect it of each other. Well, Confucius says the same thing, how a ruler acts towards his officials, and how officials act towards rulers. Let them act as they're supposed to act. Let the parent act as a parent should act, the child as a child, and so on. So everything from this perspective can be seen within the context of ritual, that there are ways of right behavior.

And these are very effective. One of the challenges these days of teaching about ritual is that everyone thinks rituals are kind of hokey. It's hard to see the power and what they can help us achieve. But you actually use a technique with your students, a demo where you sort of show them the power of ritual, right? Right. So any of you can do this, and it's called Confucian magic. And this magic is so strong that you will not notice it, and yet it will take place. So imagine a class, all these people in the class, and I ask one person, go over to one person, one side of the room, whisper to them, go over and to the other person, right, who's going to walk up on the stage and put your hand out and shake their hand. That's all you have to do, right?

So they do that. And of course, the other person who doesn't know what's going to happen. This is why it's magic. The other person says, oh, hello. They shake hands. And we say, you see, look at that. And everyone in the class goes, what was that? You promised us something great. We promised you something great. And it's the greatest of all things, the ability through your own behavior to bring out the behavior of others. And you could do this, of course, the next step is to say you could do this for evil and you could do this for good. That's our choice. And to bring out good behavior in others, that's virtue. And

virtue is the ability to perform Confucian magic. And, you know, psychologists talk about this Confucian magic because it's easy to miss it, right? It's easy to miss how powerful ritual is in making us feel connected and kind of giving us a routine, right, which just reduces the choice that we face, right? But even the small things we do from, you know, saying God bless you when someone sneezes to, you know, shaking hands back when people put their hand out, like these things are affecting our social connection. They're affecting our sense of community. They're affecting our sense of order, all of which are so important for our happiness. They are. They are. That's ritual. That's the greatness of ritual. One of the amazing things when I heard about the importance of ritual for Confucius is to realize that this is like the big topic in modern science for improving happiness, that if you really want to boost your well-being and all kinds of things, you actually need to pay attention to ritual. You know, it is the thing that we kind of think like, oh, this is clunky. Like, you know, I don't want to wear this coat to dinner.

I don't want to put my fork here. This seems stupid. But psychologically, it turns out ritual is doing so much for us. This actually comes from your colleagues at Harvard, Mike Norton and Francesca Gino. They found that using rituals can cause people to feel less grief after a sort of traumatic event. It can make families feel closer. It can make partners feel more commitment to one another. It can make teams perform better. And what I thought was particularly interesting is there's all kinds of work showing that ritual can give you back a sense of control. When things feel out of control in your life, ritual can make things feel like they're back and ordered and kind of going well. And I thought this was particularly important for Confucius, right?

Because he's saying rituals are super important at a time in Chinese history when everything must have felt out of control, right? Exactly. And yet, and here we get to the problem. I think ritual is really key to so much of life and we don't see it until we look. Then we start to recognize that it's actually part of us. And of course, Confucius keeps saying, you have to accept this. You need to really think about it. You need to enact this. But then he says, and this is a line I bet you've

heard of. He says, you know, this family, this noble family in my state, they have eight rows of dancers in their courtyard. And then he says, if this can be born, if this can be accepted, what can't be accepted? You read that and you say, what's he talking about? Until you realize that having eight rows of dancers was a privilege reserved for the king. And so what this noble lord was doing was claiming a prerogative, a ritual prerogative of the king and enacting it himself. And so he was using it out of total self-interest to advance himself. And that, of course, is the problem of ritual. Very often, we do things in order to be self-aggrandizing. We do things that look proper, but are really about serving ourselves. And what do you do then? I think another thing that Confucius realized was that you can use ritual to maintain order

in a society in this really important way, right? And that's an alternative to a different way we think about maintaining law and order, which is through punishment. Right. So Confucius takes this up directly. He says, well, can you govern through punishment? Yes, but you'll have to keep controlling people. If you govern through ritual, people will have a sense of shame and they'll control themselves. They will govern themselves. And that's the ideal government. Because ritual, after all, is about how I act and how you act and how we act together. And it follows then for Confucius that one who is,

and this is one of the places where he uses the word cultivate the self. You cultivate yourself. You learn in order to cultivate yourself. And is that all? The person says, oh, no. He says, and also to bring peace and security to others. And is that all? And he says, no, no.

Take it a step further for everybody. So if Confucius lives in a world where people sort of know that the right thing to do is to act according to the rituals and the rules, then how do you get people to do it for the right reasons? So the benefits of ritualized behavior are clear. They help us bond. They save us from making endless, tiring choices. And they can help us process both positive and negative emotions. endless tiring choices, and they can help us process both positive and negative emotions. But as Confucius realized thousands of years ago, the motivation behind our rituals needs to be right. Using rituals solely to impress other people, or worse, to oppress them, can remove

many of the benefits. So after the break, I'll have Peter explain what Confucius said about the right way to use ritual. The Happiness Lab will be right back. As you heard in the first half of the show, Confucius is a teacher who makes his students work. If he lifts up one corner, you as the learner have to pick up the other three. So we're going to have to work a bit to understand Confucius' nuanced insights into the importance of ritual as a way to enrich our lives. Confucius said that ritual is good for us. It can bring us peace and joy, but only in certain circumstances. So what are those circumstances?

Well, even to his disciples, Confucius never gave a complete answer. He says to one of his students, he says, do you think I know a lot? Is that it? Do you think I've just, I study a lot, know a lot? And the student said, yeah, isn't that it? And he says, no, he says, my way has one thread running through it. And so we're sort of left with a conundrum, which is, if there's one thread that runs through all this, what is it? Is it ritual? But ritual has problems. And so maybe it's not just ritual. Maybe there's something more. And that's where we

get Confucius' great discovery. And so his great discovery was this idea of Ren. So what is this concept of Ren? So Confucius gets asked that a lot by his disciples. This morning, I went through the Analects and looked at all the places where a disciple says to Confucius, hey, is so-and-so Ren? And Confucius says, well, he'd be good at managing military levies, but I don't know if I can call him Ren. He'd be good as the steward of a town, but I don't know if I can call him Ren. He could be good at conversing with guests at court, but I don't know if I could call him Ren. And somebody says, well, how about saving the world? Give to the common people, help everybody.

And Confucius says, well, even sages had trouble with that, but that's not Ren. So that gets us this problem for Ren. He says, the wise take joy, happiness, joy, in water. The Ren take joy in mountains. The wise are active. The Ren are tranquil. The wise enjoy. of the Ren are tranquil, the wise enjoy, the Ren endure. So wisdom versus Ren, water versus mountains, activity versus tranquility, enjoyment versus endurance. That's one way of getting the Ren. Then he says, you know, if you want Ren, it's right here, right here. All you have to do is want it, right? What does that mean? The Ren find peace in being Ren. That person will be free of evil. The person who is Ren can deal with poverty and adversity and never be upset. The person who is Ren has no anxiety.

So I've puzzled over this a long time. I kept thinking, well, it's something clearly that's very, very important. And there are lots of passages in the Analects. If you think about passages in the Analects that talk about things, there's lots of passages on learning, on ritual, on ren. And yet, he can't really define it positively. What's the direct translation of it? Does it have a direct translation?

No, no. If we look at ancient graphs before the modern Chinese writing, the most ancient graphs, the word comes with a character for person and then the character for two, the number two, together. There's another one which seems to be showing the heart showing on a body or something. That's why there's so many translations for it. Can I give you my favorite passage?

Yes, please. This is called what he calls the method of red. I'm happiest with this as a way of gaining insight. And so his disciple says to him, if there was a person who gave extensively to the common people and brought help to the multitude, what would you think of him? Could he be called Red? And Confucius says, well, it's no longer a matter of men with such a person. You could probably call him a sage, but even the sages, the most ancient rulers who created civilization through government in highest antiquity, even they would have found it difficult to accomplish that much. Now, on the

other hand, he says, a run person helps others to take their stand in so far as he himself wishes to take his stand, and he gets others there so far as he himself wishes to get there. And there, it seems to me, you get to that ancient style of the character, a person with two, the number two. That the attitude of Ren is one where we recognize not the idea of sacrificing ourselves for the sake of others, but that we are in it together. And of course, when you say, but that's ritual, right? Yes, that's ritual, but there's a passage where Confucius makes this challenge. How can you be human and not be Ren to make ritual effective? not be Ren to make ritual effective. Ritual without Ren is inhumane. It just rules. It's dead.

So it's the attitude we bring to our conduct of the rituals we have with each other that makes all the difference. So it seems like what Confucius is saying is that the importance of ritual isn't just that you're kind of doing these rules. It's that ritual is really a process of kind of building up your community. It's the way that you become in sort of two-ness as a human, right? It's the thing that we most care about in modern psychology of happiness, which is social connection, right? The biggest feature is that we're kind of getting along as a society, you know, we're doing for others, we're sort of part of a common humanity. These are the kinds of things that sort of build up our well-being, I think, in ways that Confucius would really support. is highly defined, where ritual also fits to social ranks and things like this, where ritual involves ceremonies and sacrifices and going to the ancestral temples and doing all sorts of things, that for people to have the proper reverence and sincerity in acting, they needed to bring an

attitude to bear on their conduct of ritual. And he's trying to figure that out. And that's where I think Wren comes in, that that's what he figured out, that we need to bring this attitude of concern for self and other to our conduct of daily life and to the rites and rituals of daily life. And if we don't do that, then ritual will simply be an encumbrance, a constraint, will limit our humanity rather than enable our humanity. And he was really interested in this idea of enabling our humanity in part because he had this belief that I think the science shares, which is we not only can self-cultivate and become better people,

but we need to self-cultivate and become better people. This was really central to his philosophy, right? Indeed, indeed. So this notion of cultivating the self has become such an important part of Confucian learning. I went back and looked and said, does Confucius actually use that term? He does once use the term self-cultivate. He says, those who learned in antiquity learned for themselves. Today, in this fallen world we live in, people learn for the sake of others. So what does this mean? It means that do I learn in order to get a grade, to make highest form of learning is to learn for oneself, to develop oneself. And there's no assumption with Confucius that who you are is who you always will be. If you make the effort, if you set out on the process, you can become a noble person.

become a noble person. And you know, there's a, this, there's a very, this Chinese term, Junzi, which actually means the son of a Lord, which means nobility. And Confucius redefines that nobility is something you gain through your behavior. It's not what you're born as. And so he's taken it directly to the nobility and said, no, no, your claims to privilege and rightness don't wash unless you make the effort to become a noble person. So nobility from birth to nobility of merit, the nobility of moral merit is really his concern. I mean, this is so cool because, you know, this is a topic that we talk about a lot on the Happiness Lab. You know, this idea that what you need to do is you need to pay attention to your own happiness levels, but you need to

recognize that you can also change. We actually devoted our whole first episode of the podcast to this idea that you can change over time. Sonja Lubomirsky, the psychologist we interview, says, you know, we recognize that most good things in life psychologist we interview, says, you know, we recognize that most good things in life take a lot of work, you know, just like learning the piano or, you know, raising a child. This is going to take a lot of work. But cultivating your happiness, cultivating your flourishing, cultivating, you know, maybe in some sense your ren, right? That's going to take a lot of work, too. And we have to recognize that and put the work into. And it feels like Confucius would have resonated with this idea. Oh, I think entirely. He sees people who misbehave, and he thinks they can get to the

point of behaving well. And of course, that's why he's a teacher. That's the assumption behind being a teacher and believing that learning matters. And his own characterization of himself, that at 15, I set my mind on learning and then that established my will and then got to the point that I could follow my desires, that overstepping the bounds, is a story of self-cultivation. So do you follow that Confucian tradition yourself? So I think that the way in which we care about other people is something we have to do in all our work. My work is teaching. When I set out to learn about China, I was young, I was a high school student. And the reason I learned about China was because I thought we in America were ignoring it. We pretended as if it didn't exist, and this is back in the 1960s.

And how could we be a truly great country and not recognize a fourth or fifth of humanity? And so my goal in learning about China was actually to get to the point where we learned something that we would, outside of China, learn to care about too. So learning to care about others is certainly fundamental. So I'm not just trying to figure out how we can take advantage of China or how we can have great power politics. I'm interested in how we understand other people. But I'm also interested in reminding ourselves and reminding our colleagues in China who believe, those of them who believe that power is everything, and who have this philosophy of make China great at the expense of the rest of the world or make China great again at the expense of the rest of the world, that China also had a tradition of humaneness

and of ritual and of justice and that this is also part of China's civilization. Yeah, but have I fallen off the way? Yes, many, many times. Staying on the Tao, on the way, is hard work. But, you know, one of the things about this word, the Chinese word Tao, the way, is we know certain things about it. It goes somewhere, right?

And so I may be here, but I know the way goes somewhere. I know it's been walked before. It's not unique to me. I'm not one in, well, in China, if you're one in a million, there are a thousand other people just like you, but it's not unique to me. And the other thing is I can tell whether I'm on the way or not, whether I've strayed from the path or not. So yeah, I guess that's all about self-condemnation. And I think just being a teacher, given the status of universities, we have to build in ritual to do what we do. You want to teach everyone about Confucius, but you need to

have exams and they need to have problem sets and we need to kind of give degrees and diplomas. So I guess the path of teaching the way these days comes with a certain amount of ritual too. This comes up in a passage. Confucius says, you must broaden learning. But he said, you have to tie it together. You have to constrain it with ritual. It's not going to be enough to know a lot. You also have to have a thread that runs through it. So I think what we've talked about is that Confucius, I'm not sure we found a single thread, but I think we found threads, threads of antiquity, of ritual, of humaneness, of nobility, that all intersect and they're all weaved together. And one of the ways in the Confucian tradition through Chinese history that's been talked about is this notion of weaving threads together, reweaving them when they've been torn apart.

The fabric of society has been torn apart. It was an absolute honor to talk with Peter Bohl. You should really check out his online class on the history of China, which you can find at edX.org. Now, I know from reading all our reviews that many listeners really value the clear and practical happiness takeaways that we try to include in every episode.

Confucius wasn't the kind of teacher that liked to give away simple conclusions. But I can tell you what I've taken away from Peter's explanations. And that's that rituals, from the simple handshakes to the elaborate commencement ceremonies, they all really matter. But we also have to approach these events with a sense of community and shared humanity. Doing so is one path to achieving Ren, that elusive and important virtue that allows us to feel like we belong and that we're making a difference in the lives of the people around us.

There's only one more episode in this season of Happiness Lessons of the Ancients, and we'll be staying in China to examine an old philosophy, one that balances out the self-improvement push of Confucius. It's a school of thought that suggests we take it easy and go with the flow. Taoism. That's next time on Happiness Lessons of the Ancients, with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire Pushkin crew, including Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Sophie Crane-McKibben, Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Thank you.