God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (17 page)

Although unapologetically communitarian, Confucianism is not opposed to self-cultivation. In fact, self-cultivation is essential to the Confucian project. Confucians insist, however, that we become ourselves, and transform society, through others. The path to social harmony runs through human flourishing, and human flourishing is made possible through right relations with other human beings.

These relations are, according to Confucians, hierarchical by necessity. As John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was about to disembark from his ship, the
Arabella
, and transform himself and his passengers into New Englanders, he spoke of the importance of knowing your place and staying in it. “God Almighty, in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection,” Winthrop said. The New World’s wilderness was wild enough without the anarchy of social climbing. Here rich would stay rich, and poor would stay poor, but all would be “knit together in this work as one man.”
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Confucians, too, see hierarchy as an essential ingredient of social harmony.

When asked what he would do first if called to administer a state, Confucius said he would start by rectifying names. The phrase
rectification of names
actually points to two principles: first, things should be called what they really are; second, things should conform to what they are called. “Let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son.”
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Much disharmony and disorder in a society, Confucius argues, comes when people either do not know their roles or do not act in keeping with them.

Confucians typically break down these roles into Five Relationships: ruler/subject; parent/child; husband/wife; elder brother/younger brother; and friend/friend. Each of these Five Relationships is supposed to be characterized by two-way mutuality and reciprocity rather than one-way obedience. Parents and rulers are to care for their children and subjects, while children and subjects owe loyalty and respect to parents and rulers.

Just as important as the Five Relationships are the Five Virtues: human-heartedness; justice; propriety; wisdom; and faithfulness. Careful cultivation of these Five Relationships and Five Virtues is supposed to produce social order, but according to Confucians these relationships and virtues also produce fully human beings. Here, too, it takes a village.

Confucius

Confucius (from Kung-fu-tzu, or “Master Kung”: 551–479
B.C.E.
) is often described as Confucianism’s founder, but he regarded himself as a transmitter of ancient truths rather than an inventor of new ones. He lived his remarkable life during China’s Age of the Hundred Schools and, in global terms, during the Axial Age in which Socrates and the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at roughly the same time as the Buddha.

Biographical details about the life of Confucius are hard to come by, but it is widely agreed that he was born in 551
B.C.E.
in Qufu in the state of Lu (in today’s Shandong province) to a family of little means. He responded to the death of his father, and the poverty it produced, by plowing himself into his studies. Renowned when young as a polymath—China’s Jefferson—he used his expertise in ritual, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, mathematics, poetry, history, and music (he played a stringed instrument called the zither) to set himself up as the first private teacher in China. His instruction, which focused on the Five Classics, aimed at character building and self-cultivation. Like Socrates, he taught through conversation, and his students reported that he was particularly good at posing the provocative question.

Confucius is typically credited with editing and writing portions of the Five Classics, but the work people most associate with him, the Analects (literally, “conversations”) was put together by his students. In the Analects, Confucius identifies chaos as the human problem and order as the solution. The techniques he employs to move from sickness to cure are ethics and ritual.

Confucius taught each of his students to try to become a junzi (“exemplary person”) by learning to cultivate
ren
(“human-heartedness”) and
li
(ritual/etiquette/propriety). The purpose of education in his view was not to turn out workers who could turn out widgets but to empower students to transform themselves into complete human beings—people who both understand and embody the virtues.

Confucius also tried to become a player in politics, but his efforts in this arena would not bear fruit until long after his death, when in the Han dynasty (206
B.C.E.–
220
C.E.
) Confucianism became the state orthodoxy. As his efforts in politics and education indicate, Confucius was neither an ascetic nor a contemplative. He liked to fish, hunt, and sing. He was an aficionado of the arts. And he enjoyed a good drink and a good meal. Married with children, he was a practical person who, according to one of the most celebrated passages in the Analects, had by the age of seventy attuned duty and desire into one clear voice.

Confucius died in his early seventies, under circumstances that to a lesser man would surely have been disappointing. Although he is said to have earned the loyalty of thousands of students, he was a failure in politics. So it should not be surprising that his last words ring with resignation bordering on bitterness: “No intelligent monarch arises; there is not one in the kingdom that will make me his master. My time has come to die.” Confucius’s voice was both stronger and more poetic a few days before his death, possessed of both more yang and more yin. Looking out over Tai Shan, one of China’s most sacred peaks, he said:

The great mountain must crumble;

The strong beam must break;

And the wise man wither away like a plant.
¹⁶

Although sacrifices are offered in his name every day in Confucian temples across the world, Confucius is remembered as neither a saint nor a miracle worker. Some Daoists revere him as a god, but he has never been deified by Confucians. Just as Theravada Buddhists remember the Buddha as a pathfinder rather than a deity, Confucians see Confucius as a great moral teacher. They even debate whether he ever achieved the standing of sage (an honorific he never claimed for himself). However, Confucius was by acclamation an exemplary student and teacher who looked to the past, especially to the ancient sage ruler the Duke of Zhou, for lessons on how to cultivate character and secure peace. Ever humble, he claimed he was doing nothing more than faithfully passing down the teachings of greater thinkers. “I have transmitted what was taught to me without making up anything of my own,” Confucius said.
¹⁷
In this sense the role he plays in Confucianism is more like Muhammad, who transmitted the Quran to Muslims, and Moses, who transmitted the Law to the Israelites, than like founders such as Jesus or the Buddha, whose own insights formed the basis for their respective scriptures.

But Confucius was also a transformer who helped to redirect the ancient Chinese culture he plainly revered from a hierarchy of birth to a hierarchy of merit. He accepted students who were not able to pay him with anything other than dried meat and gratitude—his greatest student was a commoner—and he insisted that it was possible for anyone, not just the high born, to cultivate the virtues and become a sage. So while there were transmitters such as Moses and Muhammad in this man, there were also transformers such as Jesus and the Buddha.

Human-Heartedness and Propriety

What teachings, then, did Confucius transmit, and transform? How did he mix the old and the new in responding to the challenges of an age in which, as the Book of Poetry puts it, “there is no end to the disorder”?
¹⁸

Any answer to these questions must begin, as did Confucius himself, with learning. For Confucius, studying the Five Classics was essential. But this study then needed to be put into motion, translated from thought to action. The point of learning was to produce virtue and propriety—to turn yourself into a junzi, an exemplar who exhibits the virtues, knows his social roles, performs the rituals, and otherwise traverses the Way of Heaven. While the tendency to reduce Christianity to its ethical precepts is a modern invention, ethics has always stood at the heart of the Confucian project, and at the heart of Confucian ethics is the virtue of ren, which perhaps more than any other quality exemplifies the exemplary person. Mentioned over one hundred times in the Analects, the term
ren
has been variously translated as humaneness, humanity, benevolence, altruism, love, and compassion, but it is perhaps best rendered as “human-heartedness.”
¹⁹
Its Chinese character combines the image of “human being” with the image of “two,” so
ren
refers to right relations among people. Before Confucius, it was believed that only sage rulers and other elites could cultivate this virtue. But Confucius held it out as a possibility for all human beings and as the last, great hope for social harmony and political order. Virtue, he argued, was the foundation of civilization, and the foundational virtue was ren.

One of Confucius’s chief rivals, Mo-zi, argued on behalf of the so-called Mohists that human beings should extend their human-heartedness to all regardless of relation. In other words, he anticipated Jesus’s emphasis on agape love, which, seeing no distinction between friend and enemy, seeks to love all equally. But Confucius, far more concerned about “family values” than was Jesus, said that ren should be cultivated first and foremost inside the family.

Filial piety matters in Judaism, but honoring your parents is even more central to Confucianism. The opening lines of the Analects refer to filial piety as the “root” of ren.
²⁰
Of the Five Relationships, the first each of us learns (or fails to learn) is that between parent and child. It is in this relationship that we take our first baby steps away from self-centeredness and toward moral excellence. Families teach us how to be human, how to follow and to lead. If families are well ordered, human interactions will be harmonious, and if human interactions are harmonious, society will be harmonious too.

But how are we to cultivate this human-heartedness? How might the lessons of empathy and fellow-feeling learned in the family move out into the wider world? In a word,
li
. Before Confucius,
li
, which literally means “to arrange in order,” referred fairly narrowly to ritual. But with Confucius and his followers it became a multifunctional term referring as well to etiquette, customs, manners, ceremony, courtesy, civility, and propriety.

Li is so crucial to Confucians that the Chinese sometimes refer to Confucianism as
lijiao
, or the religion of li. Today li means doing the proper thing in the proper way under any given set of circumstances—to act, in short, in keeping with the Way of Heaven. Li stands alongside ren as one of the two key concepts in Confucius’s thought, since both ren and li contribute to both self-cultivation and social harmony. But whereas ren is inward and subjective, li is outward and objective—ren put into practice.

An exceedingly broad concept, li comprises both ritual, as in how to perform a wedding, and ritualized behavior, which is to say manners, etiquette, and even body language. When U.S. president Barack Obama met Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace just a few weeks after his 2009 inauguration, he gave her an iPod—a widely criticized gaffe that demonstrated a severe lack of li. Li also governs proper behavior toward parents: “When your parents are alive, comply with the rites in serving them; when they die, comply with the rites in burying them.”
²¹
It also extends to such seemingly mundane matters as how to look, listen, speak, and move: ”Do not look unless it is in accordance with the rites (li); do not listen unless it is in accordance with the rites; do not speak unless it is in accordance with the rites; do not move unless it is in accordance with the rites.”
²²
Li is to ask tactfully about your parent’s health. It is to stand up straight. It is to seek wealth within the rules. It is to allow your teacher to speak first. It is to treat a guest with hospitality. It is to put the arrow to pride.

In keeping with the Doctrine of the Mean, li includes avoiding extremes in both thought and behavior, taking your pleasures in moderation, and otherwise following the balanced and harmonious Way of Heaven. It is to incline yourself toward listening rather than speaking (the character for
sage
in Chinese is a large ear and a small mouth). It is to eat slowly, to pour tea just so, to avoid slurping your soup. Knowing what to wear at a wedding, or a funeral, is li. Being considerate of others—not blasting your boombox on the subway or cutting into line at the cinema—is li. In sum, li is to make space for reverence in all things, treating seemingly ordinary interactions as if they were sacred ceremonies.
²³

Just as Muslims look to Muhammad as an example of how to live a human life, Confucians look to Confucius. When Confucians read the Analects, they consider not only what Confucius said but also what he did—how he “presented gifts, taught, ate, visited a temple, or how he performed simple mundane acts.”
²⁴
All of these things cultivate our human-heartedness and in the process act as the social glue that creates and sustains social order. It is li that turns an ordinary person into a superior person. It is li that makes society run smoothly, harmonizing Heaven and humanity.