God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (18 page)

There is a longstanding (and ongoing) chicken-and-egg debate among Confucians about whether li or ren is more foundational. Does li cause ren? Or does ren cause li? There is widespread agreement, however, that these are the Confucian tradition’s two central concepts, so perhaps the middle way is to see them as part and parcel of each other—two sides of the same coin. Li is how ren expresses itself in the world. But ritual and propriety in turn makes us more human-hearted. Together li and ren produce harmony in the individual, the society, and the cosmos.

If Confucius sounds like a moralist, he was. His preoccupation was how to live. He believed that human nature is moral, so to become moral is to become ourselves. But there was a touch of the mystic in him too. Like Socrates, he was both humble and intelligent enough to recognize the limits of his own wisdom. Confucius once defined knowledge like this: “When you know a thing, to recognize that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it.”
²⁵
And on at least one occasion he seemed to bow in reverence to silence. After he confessed a preference for silence over speech, a worried student asked him what his fellow students would have to pass down if he refused to speak. Apparently silence had not struck Confucius yet, because he replied, “Heaven does not speak, yet the four seasons run their course thereby, the hundred creatures each after its kind, are born thereby. Heaven does no speaking.”
²⁶

Mencius and Xunzi

Following Confucius’s death, the Confucian conversation was dominated by two great competing thinkers, Mencius and Xunzi, who played in their tradition the roles that the dueling rabbis Hillel and Shammai would play a few centuries later in Judaism. Although Mencius is often referred to as an idealist, and Xunzi as a realist, this assessment begs the question that consumed them both: are human beings basically good? This question mattered because the entire Confucian project hung on the possibility of human improvement; its goals of social harmony and political order could not be reached if humans could not be improved. But could they? And if so, how? Mencius (371/2–c. 289
B.C.E.
) famously argued that human beings are originally good. We do good because we are hardwired to do so. And when we do evil, it is nurture, not nature, that short-circuits the good. Where is the person, Mencius asks, who, when he hears a child crying at the edge of a well, will not try to prevent him from falling in? Each of us harbors feelings of compassion, which breed benevolence; feelings of shame, which breed dutifulness; a sense of courtesy, which breeds propriety; and a sense of right and wrong, which breeds wisdom. To become human, we do not need to grasp after something outside and beyond ourselves. The germs of humanity are within.

Rejecting what he saw as Mencius’s naive optimism about human nature, the third-century-b.c.e. thinker Xunzi argued that human beings are basically wicked—“grasping, hungry, egotistical bastards.”
²⁷
In the Analects, Confucius had argued that government worked better by shame than by punishment: “Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”
²⁸
Xunzi disagreed. In this world of greed and envy and hate, our wickedness needs to be spanked out of us. Education doesn’t cultivate our nature; it changes it. Only through strict laws and severe punishments can humans learn to subdue their private passions in service of the public good (and their own). So whereas Mencius used gentle botanical metaphors of nurture and growth to describe our education to the human-heartedness already planted within us, Xunzi relied on harder metaphors from the workshop—metal shaped by hammering into a sword, wood bent by steam into a bow—to describe how the example of the junzi could emerge out of something so unvirtuous.

Neo-Confucianism, New Confucianism, and Boston Confucianism

After Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, the big three in the first Confucian wave, the influence of Confucianism rose and fell like a bell buoy on the Yellow Sea. Confucius never was able to win political friends and influence powerful people during his lifetime, and both Mencius and Xunzi were personae non grata under the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207
B.C.E.
). China’s first emperor, a ruthless Machiavellian besotted by Legalist preoccupations with punishment and power, wanted nothing to do with Confucius’s insistence that rulers treat their subjects like loving fathers treat their respectful sons. So he ordered the burning of Confucian books and the execution of Confucian scholars. During the Han dynasty, however, Confucianism had its Constantine moment, ascending in 136
B.C.E.
from a persecuted movement to the official state orthodoxy and becoming the dominant intellectual impulse in China. Under the Han, the Five Classics became required reading for Chinese students, and a Confucian education became the ticket to employment in the vast Chinese bureaucracy.

Confucianism lost ground to both Daoism and Buddhism in the Tang dynasty (618–907
C.E.
) but was revived in the Song dynasty (960–1279
C.E.
), when under the moniker of the “School of Principle” (Neo-Confucianism to Westerners) it once again became China’s preeminent intellectual impulse.

Two key developments put the “neo” in Neo-Confucianism. First was the willingness of Neo-Confucians to steal shamelessly from Buddhism and Daoism. Just as Muslims had rejected the asceticism of Christian monks, Neo-Confucians resisted the ascetic impulses of Buddhist and Daoist monastics. But they borrowed from the other Three Teachings various spiritual practices, including a meditative discipline known as “quiet sitting.” For these Neo-Confucians, cultivating reverence stood shoulder-to-shoulder with pursuing wisdom in Confucian education, which now included a wide array of mental, physical, and spiritual practices: “book reading, quiet sitting, ritual practice, physical exercise, calligraphy, arithmetic, and empirical observation.”
²⁹

The second key development rearranged the Confucian canon. Under the direction of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Confucianism’s foremost Song-dynasty thinker, Neo-Confucians now saw the “Four Books” rather than the Five Classics as the starting point for learning. From the fourteenth century until the twentieth, the Analects,
Mencius
, the
Great Learning
, and the
Doctrine of the Mean
would constitute the basis for China’s civil-service examinations. The cumulative effect of this reorientation was to direct greater attention to the sorts of metaphysical and spiritual questions that Confucius shooed away but were the bread and butter (or, in this case, the rice) of Buddhists and Daoists.

Neo-Confucians distinguished themselves from Buddhists and Daoists, however, by their continued emphasis on ethics and history and by their continued commitments to reason and humanism. While the spirituality of the Daoists directed them out of this world, all the leading thinkers in this formative period of Neo-Confucianism were also political officials.

Some find antecedents for the philosophy of American pragmatism in the next great Neo-Confucian after Zhu Xi, Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529). Previous Confucians had creatively confused the sacred and the secular, Heaven and humanity. Wang Yang-ming did the same for thought and action. You don’t really know something unless you act on it, and you can’t really act on it unless you know it, he insisted. “Knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the completion of knowledge.”
³⁰

For much of the twentieth century, Confucianism was left for dead. The centuries-old tradition of Confucian civil-service exams came to an end in 1905, and official state sacrifices to Confucius were discontinued in 1928. In the years immediately following the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there was some talk of integrating communism and Confucianism. But the political drama of the Cultural Revolution cast Confucius as the villain. Its anti-Confucian campaign of the 1970s attacked the “four olds” (Confucian culture, ideology, customs, and habits) in the name of the “four news” (proletarian culture, ideology, customs, and habits). Communist Party officials denounced Confucius as the “number one hooligan” and indicted Confucianism of all sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors against the new Marxist-Leninist creed of Chairman Mao.
³¹
Taking a page out of the playbook of the anti-Confucian Qin dynasty of two thousand years earlier, the Red Guard seized and burned Confucian books and smashed the statue of Confucius at the Confucian temple in his hometown of Qufu. What was once the heart and soul of Chinese civilization was recast under the communists as a feudal affront to progress, an antimodern system of superstition, and a reactionary instrument of sexism and class oppression.

Today the Confucian star is rising once again in China. Confucian Studies programs are springing up at universities across the country. Confucius is being quoted by Communist Party officials, not least by China’s president Hu Jintao, whose slogan, “To build a harmonious society,” is based on a saying by Confucius (“to aim always at harmony”).
³²
And
Confucius from the Heart
, a sort of Chicken Soup for the Confucian Soul by the media professor (and media darling) Yu Dan, has sold more than ten million copies.
³³
Pro-Confucian momentum is so strong in China today that some are beginning to imagine that Confucianism could soon replace Marxist-Leninism as the official state ideology. This fantasy of the Chinese Communist Party morphing into another sort of CCP (the Chinese Confucian Party) is doubtless still far off, but millions of students across China are now reading the classics of Confucius and Mencius alongside (and in some cases against) the classics of Marx and Mao.

Accompanying this popular revival is a more philosophical resurgence called New Confucianism. Some observers are describing this new development as Confucianism’s third wave, cresting unlike the first wave of the first millennium and the second wave of the second millennium and not just over China but across the globe. Taking aim at the stereotype of Confucianism as fixed and fossilized, New Confucians insist that, just as Confucius transformed the traditions he inherited, they have the right and the responsibility to transform Confucianism itself. According to my BU colleague John Berthrong, New Confucians attempt “to be faithful to the core teachings of Confucianism but to state them in modern, universal terms, and in dialogue with world cultures.”
³⁴
More specifically, New Confucians seek to bring the ancient wisdom of their tradition to bear on such current challenges as science, liberalism, democracy, and human rights, and to purge that tradition of sexism and patriarchy along the way. Popular in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, New Confucianism insists that while Confucianism has much to learn from the West (including Western philosophy and comparative religion), the West has much to learn from Confucianism. In their ongoing dialogue with Western philosophers and theologians, New Confucians are happy to laud liberty, fraternity, and equality, but they insist on adding community to the mix.

The New Confucians are also trying to gestate an authentically Confucian feminism. In books such as Chenyang Li’s
The Sage and the Second Sex
, they look back to the mothers of Confucius and Mencius as inspirations and construct their ethics around the egalitarian relationship of friend and friend rather than the hierarchical relationship of ruler and subject.
³⁵
They also observe that, while Plato and Aristotle debated whether women were fully human, the earliest Confucians always acknowledged that women could become not only junzi but also sages. Perhaps the greatest resource for Confucian feminism is the early Chinese cosmology of yin and yang, which insists that the feminine and the masculine are complementary and ever interpenetrating each other.

One manifestation of this New Confucianism is referred to as Boston Confucianism, because its leading advocates are Tu Weiming of Harvard and Robert Neville and John Berthrong of Boston University. In an ironic proof of the Confucian sense (shared with the Hebrew Bible) that there is nothing new under the sun, Neville and Tu are in many respects reprising the debate between Mencius and Xunzi. Neville, a United Methodist minister who describes himself as a Confucian Christian, has served as the Dean of BU’s School of Theology and as its university chaplain. In keeping with his Christian heritage, he echoes Xunzi both in his understanding of the sinfulness of human beings and in the key role played by li in disciplining this wickedness. Tu, by contrast, echoes Mencius in his understanding of humanity’s essential goodness. So while Neville traces the root of the Confucian project to Xunzi’s keyword of
li
, the keyword for Tu, who, like Mencius, focuses more on inner cultivation than ritual, is
ren
. What these two men share, however, is the conviction that there is no reason for Confucianism to restrict itself to China, or even to Asia. Confucianism successfully migrated from China to Japan and Korea and Vietnam. Why can’t it take up residence in Boston too?

The Tigers of Mount Tai

I must admit that I have never been much of a fan of Confucianism, which has long managed to both intrigue and horrify me. Like most Americans, I revel in individual freedom and rebel against the rhetoric of duty and obligation, particularly when that rhetoric comes from voices outside my own head. I don’t traffic in bumper stickers, either on my car or in my thinking, but if I did I’d be far more likely to display a bumper sticker reminding me to question authority than one reminding me to respect it. I ask my students, even my undergraduates, to refer to me by my first name.