Confucianism Research Paper

Confucianism, a social and ethical philosophy rather than a religion, originated with Confucius (551–479 BCE), whose name represents a Latinized version of the title Kong Fuzi (Kong the Grand Master). With Daoism and Buddhism, it was one of the three ways of thought in traditional China. The era in which Confucius lived was one in which other major philosophers and founders of religious traditions also lived, including Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha, c. 563–c. 483 BCE) in India, Zoroaster (c. 628–c. 551 BCE) in Iran, the Hebrew prophets in Palestine, and Thales (627?–547 BCE.) in Greece. He shares with these figures the role of defining the classical heritage of the subsequent civilizations in those regions. In response to conditions of large-scale warfare, diasporas, and rapid social change, all five eras produced humankind’s first conscious responses to factors of global impact. The responses were ethical in nature and shared a human-centered belief in the human ability to forge new answers. The parallelism of developments in these five areas, constituting as it does a distinctive world epoch (which the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age) intrigues the historical imagination to this day.

Early Confucianism

Confucius first sought ministerial rank in Lu, one of numerous states constituting a not-yet-unified China. Failure at that turned him toward teaching. It is as a teacher that he was remembered, and a philosophy of statehood (sponsored by the state) formed around his teachings. He initiated three traditions: teaching any who would learn (the democratic temper), being a private teacher (education for its own sake), and valuing the transforming influences of history, arts, letters, and music (liberal education).

Confucius wrote no books, but his teachings are gathered in the Analects (Lunyu), a collection of 479 sections of sayings attributed to him by three generations of students and disciples. Disparate in subject, timeframe, and personal nuance, the work is unified by the fact that all its utterances have to do with Confucius. This work stands at the center of the Confucian tradition, not only in China but in the entire eastern Asian context. The seventeenth-century Japanese Confucian thinker Ito Jinsai called it the most profound book in the universe.

Basic Principles

The three principal ideas in the Analects are ren, yi, and li. Ren means interpersonal humane regard, from which flows the entire Confucian social philosophy, in which a person sees his or her own humanity in another person. Yi is the impulse to do the right thing, to be ren. Li (social ritual) is the composite of all decorum and manners from the mundane to the loftiest of rites, the outward manifestations of ren and yi. These qualities underlie the Confucian interpersonal philosophy, and, along with the important qualities of trustworthiness (xin) and loyalty (zhong), give life to his view of state and society as consisting of the five cardinal relationships: ruler-ruled, father-son, husband-wife, elder brother-younger brother, and friend-friend. Confucius viewed the family as the microcosm of the state and the state as the macrocosm of the family. His philosophy is this-worldly. When queried about his view of religion and the spirits, he said, “Not yet serving humans, how can one speak of serving the spirits” (Lunyu [analects], xianjin [chapter]).

Mencius and Xunzi

Early Confucianism depended on the thinking of two other philosophers: Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Xunzi c. 298–c. 230 BCE), disciples of Confucius who lived some two hundred years after the master. Each with a work carrying his name, the two propounded the idealistic and realistic tendencies, respectively, inherent in the master’s teachings. Both works are examples of elegant Chinese prose. Mencius argued philosophically that human nature was innately good. From this premise, the Mencian program for humanity valued persuasion over coercion, exemplary action over dictated rules, and moral factors over utilitarian motives. Mencius appreciated the people as arbiter of moral rule, and in a three-tier order of importance, ranked them above the agrarian economy and the ruler. From this ordering, subsequent generations derived justification for a right of the people to rebel.

Mencius’s contemporary, Xunzi, on the other hand, argued that human nature was rapacious and untrustworthy and that morality was acquired by imposing the strictest rules of decorum and control. Good action was to be ritually coerced. Xunzi’s teachings encouraged a view of Confucius as a transmitter of ancient norms rather than as a moral exemplar. This realistic strain of Confucianism lends encouragement to Legalism, another philosophy that flourished in China at this time. Legalism, however, demanded strict laws and harsh punishments without hesitation.

State Confucianism

With the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), China went from a multi-state arrangement of power based on private and personal loyalties to centralized, bureaucratic rule based on public law. With the changeover from the Qin dynasty to the Han dynasty (206 BCE– 220 CE), early Han rulers looked for change from the brutal legalism on which the Qin was based. The first Han emperor (Han Gaozu, reigned 206–195 BCE), a powerful and illiterate wielder of power, had the acuity to ask the Confucian scholar Lu Jia (d. 170 BCE) to discourse on why the Qin failed and Gaozu had succeeded. Lu Jia presented him with twelve lectures (Xin yu, or New Discourses), the burden of which was that the Qin ruled with inhumanity and that Gaozu could enjoy a long rule by observing moral scruples. In 195 BCE, Gaozu paid a ceremonial visit to the grave of Confucius, a symbolic union of brute power and Confucian reasoning. Another Confucian scholar, Jia Yi (201–168? BCE), was asked by the Han emperor Wen (Han Wendi, reigned 179–157 BCE) to propound on the same theme. Jia Yi’s efforts (Xin shu, or New Writings) brilliantly discussed the faults of the Qin and a vast range of topics on the art of ruling. Thus Confucian ethics and moral behavior entered Chinese politics of state. The grand fusion of moral and political power came when Emperor Wu (or Han Wudi, reigned 140–87 BCE), listening to Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE), fully instituted Confucianism as a state religion. Dong’s work (Chunqiu fanlu, or Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals) expounded on the role of the scholar in government, whom he claimed was the only appropriate person—not the priest and not the people—to know the ways of heaven, earth, and man. Dong envisaged the ruler, advised by the scholar, as the link between those three realms. He incorporated ancient yin–yang thought (a system based on complementary opposites, as in positive-negative or male-female) into the emerging Han intellectual universe, giving Confucianism properties of a secular religion. The Chinese son of heaven (the emperor), as the first scholar of the land, from then on performed solemn Confucian rites of state. For the next two millennia, by virtue of such institutions as the civil-service examination system, censorial admonition, and imperial universities, the Chinese government fully deserved the adjective Confucian.

China after the Han was divided, politically and geographically. The north supported Buddhism, and the Confucian state could only survive in the south, and there only intermittently. China was reunited under the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618 CE), which favored Buddhism. The Sui, which reunified China in the name of Confucianism, exhibited strong Buddhist features in its ideological outlook. For six hundred years, from the late Han to the Tang dynasty (618– 907 CE), Buddhism and Daoism permeated Chinese life. Intellectual, aesthetic, and religious impulses were greatly stirred by these two outlooks, which competed robustly with Confucianism. In those centuries, these three persuasions together shaped the eventual Chinese cultural outlook: Confucianism supporting a successful public life, Buddhism supporting a religious life of compassion, and Daoism satisfying a psyche freed for imaginative excursions. But in the late ninth century, with the success of the Tang state and government, attention was focused once again on Confucianism.

Neo-Confucianism

Beginning with such late Tang thinkers as Han Yu (d. 824) and Li Ao (d. 844), philosophical attention turned to human nature. Centuries of Buddhist and Daoist influences awakened within Confucianists an interest in the languages of metaphysics and metempsychosis (the movement of the soul after death into a new body). A series of thinkers appeared during the Song dynasty (960–1279) to take up the task of explaining the universe, a task that had hitherto been the province of Buddhism and Daoism. Song thinkers like Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), Shao Yong (1011–1077), Zhang Zai (1021–1073), the brothers Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Cheng Hao (1032–1085), Lu Jiuyuan (1139–1193), and finally Zhu Xi (1130– 1200) excited their age with intellectual vigor and perspicacity. Two schools emerged in Neo-Confucianism. One, the Cheng-Zhu named for Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, who did the most for it, saw a phenomenal world of disparate objects and appearances, which they labeled qi and a noumenal world of ultimate organizing principles (li) behind the qi. The other school (xin), led by Cheng Hao and Lu Jiuyuan, viewed the universe as a organism, whole in itself, with the organizing principle of qi (matter-energy or mind; a different word from the previous qi) explaining micro- and macrolevels of human existence. The first school propounded a dualism that explained the seeming disparities between phenomena and their ultimate principles; the latter dispenses with the dualism and offers the mind, or matter-energy, as the means of uniting the knower and the known, thereby stressing human intuitive faculties. The two schools are known also as the li (principle) and xin (mind) schools.

Song philosophical efforts imbued Confucianism with metaphysics and a way to explore one’s mind and psyche. Buddhist and Daoist influences ebbed, and Neo-Confucianism supported Chinese state and society for the next seven hundred years. Metaphysics and metempsychosis, however, were not the real goal of this Confucian revival, which aimed primarily at appropriating elements of Buddhism and Daoism to buttress its emphasis on human ethics. Using the new dualism, Neo-Confucianism could now point to individual human nature (qi) and ideal human nature (li), thus exhorting moral action throughout Chinese society toward higher ideals. Chinese society at all levels—whether manifested in village rules or in the imperial civil-service examinations, and in all intellectual endeavors, whether literary composition or historical inquiry—now emulated a Confucian norm. Thus, while Neo-Confucianism was dynamic in the making, it produced subsequent centuries of intellectual, ideological, and pedagogical formalism in China, and its influences were pervasive in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.

Modern Fate and New Confucianism

As China met the onrush of modern civilization from mid-nineteenth century on, Confucianism came under attack for having supported the entire Chinese body politic and social hierarchy. Intellectuals such as Hu Shi (1891–1962), Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), Wu Yu (1872–1949), and Lu Xun (1881–1936) called for its abolition, chanting “Crush the Confucian Establishment (Dadao Kongjiadian)!” and hailing “Science” and “Democracy.” This iconoclasm produced in reaction a twentieth-century neo-traditionalism, nurtured by the call of Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) in 1898, when China was at the nadir of national strength in face of foreign encroachments, to preserve Chinese culture for substance (ti) and exploit Western culture for application (yong). While the logic of this saying is faulty in reserving for one culture only morality and for another only instrumentality, it was eminently satisfying emotionally. Chinese who feared and bewailed the passing of Confucian efficacy embraced the sentiment. Thinkers in the twentieth century such as Liang Soumin (1893–1988) and Xiong Shili (1884–1968) constituted the first generation of the New Confucianism (Xin rujia).

After 1950, a second generation of New Confucianists arose in Hong Kong in contradistinction to intellectuals both on the Communist mainland and in Nationalist Taiwan. Amidst manifestos and educational endeavors, scholars such as Tang Junyi, Xu Fuguan, and Mou Zongsan envisaged a new Confucian synthesis combining Confucian moral life with Western modes of living. Their message brought forth a third generation of intellectuals, mostly university professors who wrote in the public sphere from the 1970s. This trend coincided and sometimes coalesced with the rise of an enthusiastic belief that Confucianism was compatible with capitalism. Economic leaps in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan—all nations historically touched by Confucianism—gave them the sobriquet of tigers or dragons of capitalist success. The position was that they were successful capitalist economies because of Confucianism. Whether mainland China for two millennia did not develop capitalism in spite or because of Confucianism has not been satisfactorily answered by the claimants. The bursting of the economic bubble in the late 1990s somewhat shook their faith in this belief.

As modern society’s rampant individualism has taken its toll on the collective conscience, New Confucianism has gained adherents who defend its collective ethic against individualism and debate its merits with proponents of individualistic human rights. The debate continues.

Bibliography:

1. Chan, W. (1963). Source book in Chinese philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2. Chang, C. (1957). The development of Neo-Confucian thought. New York: Bookman Associates.
3. de Bary, W. T., & Bloom, I. (Ed.). (1999). Sources of Chinese tradition: Vol. 1 (2nd ed). New York: Columbia University Press.
4. de Bary, W. T., & Lufrano, R. (Ed.). (2000). Sources of Chinese tradition: Vol. 2 (2nd ed). New York: Columbia University Press.
5. de Bary, W. T., & Weimin, T. (Ed.). (1998). Confucianism and human rights. New York: Columbia University Press.
6. Fingarette, H. (1972). Confucius: The secular as sacred. New York: Harper & Row.
7. Fung, Y. (1952–53). A history of Chinese philosophy (D. Bodde, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
8. Legge, J. (1960). The Chinese classics: Vol. 1. Confucian Analects, the great learning, the doctrine of the mean. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. (Original work 1893–1895)
9. Legge, J. (1960). The Chinese Classics: Vol. 2. The works of Mencius. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. (Original work 1893–1895)
10. Mote, F. (1971). The intellectual foundations of China. New York: Knopf.
11. Nivison, D. S., & Wright, A. F. (Eds.). (1959). Confucianism in action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
12. Schrecker, J. (1991). The Chinese revolution in historical perspective. New York: Praeger.
13. Shryock, J. (1932). The origin of the state cult of Confucius: An introductory study. New York and London: The Century Co.
14. Weber, M. (1951). The religion of China (H. H. Gerth, Trans.). Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
15. Wright, A. F. (Ed.). (1960). The Confucian persuasion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.