The History of China - #14 - E. Zhou 3: Confucius Says...

Episode Date: March 7, 2014

This episode we chronicle the life of Master Kong A.K.A. Confucius, as well as detail his socio-political philosophies which would shape the future of China, as well as those of much of the rest of East Asia.Less fighting, more thinking, in the first of two interim episodes before plunging headlong into the chaos of the Warring States... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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By using the web address audibletrial.com slash china, you can receive a free audiobook Thank you. the nation's leading seller and producer of spoken audio content. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 13, Confucius says, its history, and whose ramifications can still be felt in China and much of East Asia today. I speak of the man the West would come to know as Confucius, and whose sociopolitical system of philosophy would also come to be known as Confucianism. At the conclusion of episode 12, I had intimated that I would be able to cover both Confucius and Sun Tzu in one half-hour block. And oh, how wrong I was. In order to cram both of these titans and their philosophies into one

block of time, I would have either had to skeletonize both to a pointless extent, or have a podcast episode running an hour or more. For my own sanity's sake, then, I've chosen to go with option C and expand these mini-biographies out to two installments. So now that we're on the same page, on with the show. The name Confucius is, as will by now come as no surprise, the anglicized version of the man's most frequently heard name, Kong Fu Zi. Like so many of the Chinese figures we've looked at so far, though, Kong Fu Zi was not his birth name, and in fact is more of a title, literally, Master Kong. He was born in 551 BCE in Zhou City, in the minor state of Lu, near modern Qufu, in Shandong province, and

at birth, he was named Kongqiu. Over the course of his life, and especially after his death, though, young Kongqiu would bear many, many honorific names, including Great Sage, Extremely Sage Departed Teacher, First Teacher, and, my personal favorite, Model Teacher for Ten Thousand Ages. Yeah, real subtle. Three generations prior to his birth, his family is said to have moved to Lu from Song, and traditional tellings assert that he was descended from the Shang kings themselves. Regardless, however, Confucius' father served as an officer in the Lu military, allowing

them a decent lifestyle of the Shi Pei nobility. That stability would be shattered, however, when Confucius was only three years old and his father suddenly died. This left his mother to raise the toddler alone and in dire poverty. Growing up, young Kongqiu held down a variety of jobs to support his household, including shepherd, cowherd, clerk, and bookkeeper. His real goal, though, was much the same as most of the other Shi youths at the time, to rise into officialdom. At 19, he married a young woman surnamed Qi Guan,

and within a year, the couple had produced a son named Kong Li. At 23, his mother passed away, and as was customary at the time, he observed a mourning period of three years. Through the next several decades, as he climbed his way slowly up the rungs of positions, he developed, expanded, and began to teach to others his particular vision of power and society. In his fiftieth year, in 501 BCE, his big opportunity presented itself. Following a failed rebellion in Lu and the subsequent Austro-Hovitz supporters, Confucius' fame and teachings were well regarded enough that he was appointed to the governorship

of a small town, which was a minor position, to be sure, but considerably better than a cowherd. At this time, Lu was a politically divided state, with power decentralized in the hands of three prominent families. The Jis, who held the prime ministry, the Mengs, who held the ministry of works, and the Xu family, which held the Ministry of War. It is important to remember that, while the positions have been given somewhat modern terminologies as they have been translated, they were in fact inherited positions

that were passed down within the family for generations. The rebellion had consisted of one of the Xu family's vassals, the governor of the city He, who had shut the gates of the fortified and walled city and declared his holding independent. Both the Shu and the Meng families had responded with their personal armies to besiege the city, but to no avail. The city's fortifications were too strong, and its provisions too well stocked to force capitulation. And indeed, it was not until loyalist elements within the city launched a counter-revolt against the governor and ejected him from power that the city was finally retaken. This difficulty in retaking one of their own holdfasts revealed a major problem in the

state's current setup, and Confucius and his disciples worked tirelessly to bend the ears of anyone who would listen that tearing down the fortified city walls would be the only way to stop these recurrent uprisings. Of course, what Confucius did not tell the three families was his actual objective, the recentralization of power under the Duke of Lu. Though he had been able to convince the lords of several holdings to raise their fortifications, and convince several more lords to march their armies on other fortifications to raise them, in the end, he found himself unable to complete the process and restore the state to

its duke. Moreover, he had earned himself powerful enemies for his meddlings, especially with the Viscount Ji Huan. Thus, in 497 BCE, Confucius was forced to flee in shame into a self-imposed exile from his home state, and he found himself unable to return until the Viscount's eventual death. His travels abroad took Confucius to many of the smaller states of the Zhou Kingdom, among them Wei, Song, Chen, and Cai. In each, he took every opportunity to expound his political philosophies and attempt to get the lords of the respective realms to implement his reforms. Alas, he would never live to see them implemented. After nearly a decade and a half of wandering, word reached Confucius

and his disciples that Viscount Ji Huan had finally died, and it was once again safe for the master to return to Lu. In 483 BCE, the 68-year-old made his way back to the state and spent his remaining years teaching his dozens of disciples, as many as 77 of them in fact, using a series of five ancient texts which would come to be known as the Five Classics. The Classic of Poetry, or Shijing, is a collection of 305 poems, divided into 160 folk songs, 105 festival songs, and 40 hymns. The Book of Documents, or Shang Shu, were speeches and documents from the early Zhou kings, dating as far back as the 6th century BCE, and is possibly the oldest Chinese narrative.

The Book of Rights, or Li Ji, a compilation of earlier texts describing ancient rites, court ceremonies, and social customs. The Book of Changes, or Yiching, has previously discussed a system of divination roughly analogous to Western geomancy. And finally, the Spring and Autumn Annals, or Chunqiu, Confucius' own terse narrative of his home state's history ranging from 722 to 481 BCE. He taught, spoke, and continued to advance his ideology until his death in 479 at the age of 72. So, what was the philosophy he spent his entire life developing,

teaching, and working to see put into action? Confusionism, though its founder never saw it implemented, would eventually come to be one of the most important and long-lasting set of societal principles not only within China but much of East Asia, and eventually even becoming influential in the Western world. In spite of its wide-ranging effects, there is still quite a bit of confusion regarding Confucianism. First and foremost, is it a religion? Well, the short answer is, not really.

Certainly, it has come to contain many of the trappings of a religion, and its adherents have often followed its tenets religiously. But Confucius himself, along with his most influential disciples, claimed nothing spiritual or supernatural about any of the ideas they put forth. They constructed the system simply and solely as a socio-political system of ethics. It wouldn't even be until the Han Dynasty of the 2nd century BCE through the 3rd century CE that the more mystical and cosmological elements were incorporated into the philosophy. Early Western interaction with China and Confucianism, coming in the form of the Jesuit missionaries arriving in the 16th and 17th centuries,

also saw it merely as a secular system of ethics fundamentally compatible with their own religious teachings. But in the 18th century, that all changed when the Franciscan and Dominican sects of Roman Catholicism rejected the Jesuits' findings and argued that ancestor worship was, in effect, pagan idolatry. This shift culminated in the papacy banning Chinese rituals in 1704 under Clement IX, and with Benedict XIV reaffirming that ban in 1742, which would last until 1939. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Though Confucianism can be seen as a religion per se, in many respects it is both unhelpful and really missing the point to do so.

Fundamentally, Confucius was interested in humanity and society, and as such, the core of his philosophy is humanist and secular. It neither requires nor endorses a belief in a supernatural or personal god. The master summed up his position on spiritualism and Confucianism best when he answered the question of his disciple Chi You. You are not yet able to serve men. How can you seek to serve the spirits? End quote. As noted and objected to by the Catholic Church, though, the line between secular and spiritual can be rather fuzzy in certain portions of the philosophy. Ancestor worship, sacrifices, and rituals can all be construed as quasi-religious practices. But such practices were deemed important not for any overtly spiritual reasons, but rather

their ability to harmonize and cohere societies. After all, the society that makes sacrifices and conducts rituals together stays together. Certainly, in the fractious period into which Confucius was born and lived, the idea of a harmonious and unified society would have been an extremely important goal. Moreover, the practices it did end up adopting were not central components to the philosophy, but more likely simply co-opted the already existing religious customs of Taoism, Buddhism, and the local folk religions that lived alongside. In short, the only way we can really look at Confucianism and call it a religion is if we're willing to

define a religion as a non-theistic, secular, sociopolitical set of ethics that happen to incorporate a number of semi-religious factors to act as social glue, and I'm not aware of too many religious organizations willing to accept that definition. Though it is a deeply Chinese philosophy, the word Confucianism is actually a Western construct. And by that, I mean there is no Chinese word directly corresponding to that English term. In China, it is frequently referred to as rujia, rujiao, and rushui,

or school of the scholars, teachings of the scholars, and study of the scholars, respectively. More recently, several neologisms have also sprung up, which do more closely fit with the Western term, specifically kongjiao, or the teachings of Confucius, and the more pithy kongjiajian, meaning the Kong family business. Several modern Western scholars avoid the term Confucianism entirely, arguing that the term has been burdened with ambiguities and irrelevant traditional associations. Instead, they have opted to adapt the Chinese word for scholar,

into the term and its adherents, to more closely follow the Chinese name of the philosophy. Regardless, I'll be sticking with the more traditional Confucianism in order to avoid throwing even more unfamiliar terms into the mix unnecessarily. Alright, so we've covered some of the confusions and controversies surrounding the philosophy. But now let's get into the meat of Confucianism. What it is, what it is not, and why it's so darn confusing for many. At its core, Confucian thought operates through and is concerned with

the examination of the world through the mechanism of human logic. This examination leads its adherence toward an ethical and moral framework applicable to all individuals within society. This framework is based around five main principles, the five constants. or humaneness, yì, righteousness or justice, lì, propriety or etiquette, zhì, knowledge, and finally xīn, integrity. These five constants are further supplemented by the four virtues, loyalty, filial piety, self-control, and the virtue so nice they listed it twice. Once again, righteousness. Let's go ahead and unpack these terms, one by one. Ren, or humaneness, is undoubtedly the prime ethos of Confucianism. Along with righteousness,

it forms the central pillar of morality, around which everything else is built. The concept is probably best expressed by, who else, Confucius and his own golden rule, quote, do not do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself, end quote. Simple, see? But underlying that pretty basic principle lies the question, what is the natural state of man? Is he fundamentally good or evil? Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions, a tyrant and a reformer, a liberator and an oppressor, a revolutionary and a reactionary. His biography reads like a novel, and his influence is almost beyond measure. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the

Age of Napoleon podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in history, and explore the world that shaped him in all its glory and tragedy. It's a story of great battles and campaigns, political intrigue, and massive social and economic change, but it's also a story about people, populated with remarkable characters. I hope you'll join me as I examine this fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. Confucius never directly came to a conclusion one way or the other. What was probably the

closest he ever came was obliquely stating, quote, by nature men are similar, by practice men are wide apart, end quote. In other words, when it came to the question of nature versus nurture, Confucius was staunchly in the nurture camp. Everyone is born with a similar set of dispositions, and it is their subsequent experiences, education, and environment that shape them toward good or ill. Though they would all ultimately come to the same conclusion regarding the importance of environment and education,

his disciples had wide-ranging opinions on this same innate nature of mankind. Xunzi, for instance, came to the understanding that man was an instinctive creature whose base desires, if not properly ruled, would want whatever they wanted, regardless of their positive or negative outcomes. Thus, cultivation, refinement, and self-control were necessary to guard against those baser instinctual drives. Mencius, on the other hand, regarded men as fundamentally born to goodness, though through their experience and decisions, could become wicked. In addition, there is also a political element buried in the ethic of humaneness.

Indeed, it forms the basis of Confucian political theory. And that is, if a ruler displays a lack of ren, it will reverberate through his entire sphere of influence and ultimately all will succumb to inhumanity towards one another thus the ruler is exhorted to remain humane to his subjects and serve as a shining example lest through his cruelty he lose the mandate of heaven and incite both his downfall and that of his subjects. Moving on, etiquette is the next idea that truly needs unpacking. Though that, etiquette, is its most common translation into English, the Chinese word li actually has a broad range of meaning and nuance. It encompasses rituals, customs, r rights, etiquettes, and morals,

and, well, basically any of the secular social functions of daily life and culture. For instance, both music and poetry would fall under the purview of Li. To clear up any potential confusion that might occur when I use rightsites, rituals, and secular in the same sentence, rites and rituals as detailed within Confucian thought are distinct from their common religious connotations. Instead, Confucianism holds that any regularized daily task or activity are, or at least can be, ritualistic. Or to put it another way, routines. Therefore, we can think of the Confucian preoccupation with rituals instead as working

to shape routines and daily behavior toward a moral, healthy, and content society. Next, loyalty. It is important to remember that the majority of Confucius's students, and the students of the students, and so on, were members of the Shi class of scholarly petty nobility. For these almost but not quite lordlings, the quickest and surest path into the upper echelons of society was to enter into their lord's civil service and, hopefully, rise to the ranks. As such, it's no surprise that one of the main tenets of the Confucian ethos deals with the relationship between the ruler and his minions. This is also called zhong, loyalty.

Unlike the feeling that the English term unfortunately inspires, loyalty in Confucian thought was neither about subservience nor a one-way flow of that loyalty. Instead, the relationship was inherently and necessarily reciprocal. Confucius explicitly denied the philosophy of might making right, and neither held the notion that an adviser or magistrate must remain subservient in all situations instead the loyalty and deference displayed toward a ruler was contingent on that ruler's moral righteousness if a ruler displayed morality, humaneness, and proper conduct, well, then of course it was the duty of his subjects and advisors to follow his commands. Mencius, who is the second most well-known Confucian scholar, though two generations removed from the master himself, had to say on the subject,

When a prince regards his ministers as his hands and his feet, his ministers will regard their prince as their belly and heart. When he regards them as his dogs and horses, they regard him as another man. When he regards them as the ground or as grass, they regard him as a robber and an enemy. It was therefore the duty of the ministers to serve the best interests of their lord, but more importantly, of the realm. Up to and including disagreeing with, or even chastising their lord when necessary, and to obey only as long as their lord fulfilled their half of the bargain by ruling justly and benevolently. Along the same line is the concept of filial piety, which, if you've heard anything about Confucianism before now, you've likely heard

the term and then been rather confused, or at least I was, because it doesn't get much denser than those two words. Literally, the phrase means duties of a son to his father. In practice, though, it encompasses the policy of reverence and deference for all of one's ancestors, extending back into antiquity. This is where we get the Confucian tradition of ancestor worship and veneration. Most simply, we can think of filial piety as loyalty and respect to one's family in a very similar vein as the mutually reciprocal relationship between lord and subject and like political loyalty the nature of familial loyalty changes based on the nature of the relative in question far Far from blind obedience, Confucius' thoughts on the matter were, quote, When there is a son to dispute him, a father will not fall into unrighteousness.

So when there is unrighteousness, then the son must not refrain from disputing his father, and the subordinate must not refrain from disputing his lord. End quote. Again, it is the larger good that must be served, rather than the wishes of a superior who has lost his way. The overriding goal of Confucianism, which will come as no surprise, is social harmony, peace, and stability since a society is formed by the web of relationships among its individuals those goals can be best achieved not by anarchy mind you but rather there being effective government when the prince is the prince the minister is the minister the father is the father, the father is the father, and the son is the son. End quote. Junior or lesser members of any social relationship were and are expected to show reverence to their elders,

and in turn, the elder members were obligated to show concern for and benevolence toward their junior partners. Among the myriad relationships, Confucius deemed five to be the most important to achieving social harmony, known as the five bonds. They are, in order of importance, ruler to ruled, father to son, husband to wife, elder brother to younger brother, and friend to friend. It is notable that among the five bonds, only the final relationship, friend to friend, is considered a relationship of equals. If two people had a relationship of friendship, they were equals in that exchange, regardless of potential age difference, and no deference was due to either party. The dead were also included in these

relationship bonds, and since they were invariably those who came before, they were venerated as the eldest possible party, and the living their sons, one and all. One of the most dramatic societal shifts put forth by Confucius was in advocating for a meritocratic system of advancement rather than patrilineal succession and feudal caste systems. He arrived at this conclusion in part through the notion that those placed into positions of powers above others should, and indeed must, serve as moral paragons and guides to the rest of society. And let's face it, succession by bloodline had proved itself time and again to be nothing more than a genetic dice roll. Is this prince going to be great? Okay. Or awful?

Who knows, but on the throne he goes. Confucius co-opted two terms to describe what he saw as the two kinds of people in society, junzi and xiaoren. Junzi literally means lord's son, which was defined as he who stood above the rest of society morally, cultivated himself, and displayed the virtues of filial piety, loyalty, and benevolence. In other words, a gentleman. The other term, xiaoren, means small person,

though in this context, stature has nothing to do with it. Rather, Confucius meant small in terms of small-mindedness and narrow, greedy, materialistic, and self-interested thought. The new idea put forth was that Junzi did not literally have to be a lord's son to be a gentleman. Moral paragons could and did come from all walks of life, and there was more than a few examples of literal princes and lord'ssons being nothing more than xiaoren, incapable of effective rule. Thus, for society to function best, birth could not determine placement in society.

If the son of a farmer displayed better moral qualities than the son of a minister, well then that farmer's son ought to be promoted to authority, while the minister's son stripped of it, thereby replacing the idea of nobility of blood with that of the nobility of virtue from the Shi class, it was open to anyone who demonstrated interest and aptitude, a level of openness absolutely unheard of in pre-imperial feudal China. Though he would not live to see it implemented at a wide scale, the idea of a meritocratic system of advancement would ultimately become one of the most enduring reforms of the following eras, the imperial examination system, which would allow anyone, regardless of birth, to become a government official,

provided he passed the required set of examinations. There are more than a few parallels between this 5th century BCE set of principles and those put forth more than 2200 years later in Enlightenment Europe, and those put forth more than 2,200 years later in Enlightenment Europe, and eventually put into experimental practice in the rebellious British colonies of North America in the 18th century. Meritocracy, disinterested moral paragons, rising through government, does that sound familiar? And to an extent, this is no accident. The Philosophorum Synonym Principus Confucii Vita, also known as The Life and Works of the Chinese Philosopher Confucius, was released in 1687, right at the beginning of Europe's Age of Enlightenment. It became widely read throughout

Europe and influenced such thinkers as Gottfried Leibniz and Voltaire, who opined, quote, Confucius has no interest in falsehood. He did not pretend to be a prophet. He claimed no inspiration. He taught no new religion. He used no delusions. He flattered not the emperor under whom he lived. Though, as we are now well aware, flattering the five kings of Zhou under which Confucius nominally lived —Ling, Jing, Zhao, another Jing, and Yuan, for anyone curious— would have been a waste of time. Confucius was far too busy to the holders of actual powers in his day, the regional lords. Still, Voltaire's point, and more importantly, his admiration of the philosopher, is well taken.

In terms of actual governance, Confucianism advocates a surprisingly hands-off approach, although when we fit it into the larger context of its ethos, perhaps not all that surprising after all. The Analects of Confucius detail, quote, to govern by virtue, let us compare it to the north star. It stays in its place, while the myriad stars wait upon it. End quote. By properly governing oneself and acting according to one's station, proper government and morality would naturally flow from the upper echelons of power through the whole of society, with each tier reinforcing and amplifying the positivity in turn.

A trickle-down theory for morality, this concept is tightly linked to the Taoist philosophy of wu-wei, meaning inaction. If properly moral and benevolent, with ministers also sufficiently so, all a ruler ought need to do to accomplish good governance was to sit, motionless, on his throne and lead by example. By being the calm center around which all else turned, he would allow everything to run smoother

and wouldn't need to muck up the works by tinkering with individual components. Therefore, the less a king does, the more gets done in the end, an idea later echoed by Henry David Thoreau when he famously said, Under this line of thought, the need for a complicated system of laws and coercive measures to enforce them was actually the mark of a dysfunctional society and an insufficiently benevolent leadership. The more-than-a-little utopian vision of Confucius would find itself coming into direct conflict with one of the other prominent political philosophies to spring up during the Warring States period, a philosophy whose name pretty much tells you everything you need to know about its priorities, legalism.

Confucius has been, and in many respects remains to this day, one of the underlying constants of Chinese political theory, as well as many of the other states of East Asia. Probably the single greatest tragedy for Confucius was that he was never able to see his philosophy put into practice himself, as he was never able to acquire the high officialdom from which he could implement it. Ultimately, it wouldn't be until the establishment of the Han Dynasty, after the failure of legalism under Qin, that his long-percolating ideas would finally find place to take root in Chinese society. But looking back, his legacy is undeniable,

and his status as one of the great philosophers of humanity assured. And as such, we conclude our analysis of Master Kong and his school of thought. Next time, we will go over the other great figure of the age, the master tactician and military strategist of the spring and autumn, Sun Tzu. Thank you for listening. an ocean away to dread the idea of going to the post office. The lines, the jostling, it's a real bother. Thankfully, there's Stamps.com to save you the hassle. By using Stamps.com, you can easily print your own approved and exact U.S. postage right from your home computer and printer, to be mailed anywhere in the world, even China.

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