The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (3 page)

While the aim of the Christian faithful would be “eternal Life,” the aim of the Hindu was to be uncreated. Yoga, or “union,” was the disciplined effort to reverse creation and return to the perfect Oneness from which the world had been fragmented.

I
N
some parts of the world even the most profound thinking people have not been worried by the mystery of creation. Everyday concerns have consumed their thought and focused their philosophy. They have paid little attention to the puzzles of origin and destiny. Nor have they been troubled by the possibility of other worlds before or after this one. Are they the worse for it? Their indifference to the mysteries of creation has saved their energy for the work of this world. But it has been a symptom, too, of a suspicion of change, a reluctance to imagine the new.

“We do not yet know how to serve man,” Confucius (c.551–479
B.C.
) warned, “how can we know about serving the spirits?” When asked “What about death,” he retorted, “We don’t know yet about life, how can we know about death?” Is it any wonder that the Chinese have left us a thin stock of creation myths? The lone creation myth that has survived in Chinese lore appears to have been a late borrowing from Sumeria or the Rig-Veda.

Among the great creators, the great spokesmen of ethical ideals, none is more miraculous than Confucius himself. He claimed no divine source for his teachings, nor any inspiration not open to everyone. Unlike Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed, he proclaimed no Commandments. Just as Hinduism is a name for the religions of India, so Confucianism is a name for the traditional beliefs of the Chinese family. Their “religious” rituals or sacrifices were presided over not by a professional priest but by the head of the family and state sacrifices were led by the head of the state. Confucius insisted that he was only reviving ancient teachings.

Confucius was never crucified, never martyred. He never led a people out of a wilderness nor commanded forces in battle. He left little mark on the life of his time and aroused few disciples in his day. Pursuing the career of an ambitious reform-minded bureaucrat, he ended his life in frustration. It is easy to see him as an ancient Don Quixote. But his lifelong unsuccessful tilting against the evils of the chaotic Chinese states of his day somehow
awakened his people, and eventually commanded two thousand years of Chinese culture.

Born into the impoverished nobility, Confucius was left an orphan at an early age. Educated only in the traditional aristocratic pursuits of archery and music, he began in a low clerical position overseeing the pasture of oxen and sheep. As he slowly climbed in the public service of his native state of Lu he acquired a reputation for learning. He was said to have memorized the whole
Book of Poetry
, the classic anthology of three hundred poems. He began preaching reform of the oppressive taxes of his time. He urged no new system of government but a new kind of leader, a “superior person” who would aim to benefit the people.

By the time he was fifty-three, in 498
B.C.
, Confucius’ disciples were active in the government of the Chi family who had seized the government of Lu. But in Lu, plagued by insurrection, Confucius saw little hope for his reforms. He left for greener fields. Trying his powers of persuasion, for the next dozen years he wandered from state to state. But he was no politician, and everywhere he failed.

Confucius was only one of a new class of vagrant scholars who exploited the political chaos of their time, using ancient learning to cover their ambitions. Most were more adept at palace intrigue than at palace wisdom. A scholar who found his native state ruled by an upstart alien usurper offered his wisdom to any neighboring prince who would listen. These uprooted scholars became a new Machiavellian class. But Confucius carried no Machiavellian message. To every prince, Confucius preached his cliché sermon: Govern for the benefit of the people, reduce taxes, recruit “superior men” of any origin.

After his frustrating years of vagrancy, he returned to his old sinecure in his native Lu. There among his early disciples he spent the last years of his life. Nowhere had he attained high office or achieved reforms. Still, he had never lost the reverence of his small band of students. Legend reported that when Confucius died in 479 his disciples spent three whole years and Tzu-kung, his leading disciple, spent another three years mourning at his grave. “From the birth of mankind until now,” declared Tzu-kung, “there has never been the equal of Confucius.”

While Confucius failed as a politician, as a teacher he was a spectacular success. His simple, open-ended maxims speak to us today. He offered no dogma but a way of learning that remained congenial to John Dewey and our most experimental modern American philosophers. In China before Confucius there seem to have been no schools except those to teach archery. Historians credit Confucius with the first effort to organize an educational program to train young men for roles in government. His classic question asked, “What has one who is not able to govern himself to do with governing others?”

His Socratic method never ended in dogmatic conclusions. When he found his disciple Tzu-kung arrogantly critical of students, “The Master said, ‘Obviously Tzu-kung has become quite perfect himself, to have time to spare for this; I do not have this much leisure.’ ” Wisdom was “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.” “The mistakes of a gentleman may be compared to the eclipses of the sun or the moon. When he makes a mistake, all men see it; when he corrects it, all men look up to him.” Truth was always to be pursued but never possessed. “Study as if you were following someone you could not overtake, and were afraid of losing.” “When walking in a party of three, I always have teachers. I can select the good qualities of the one for imitation, and the bad ones of the other and correct them in myself.” (
Analects
, VII:21)

Confucius never pretended to have a divine message of which he was the chosen vehicle. People’s problems could be solved not by supernatural forces but only by their own and their ancestors’ experience. And “Heaven” was Confucius’ name for the natural cosmic order that matched the ethical sense in every man. He would not appeal to any ruling Being up there. He was naturally suspicious of prayer. When he was near death, his earnest disciples asked permission to pray for him. But Confucius objected, “My kind of praying was done long ago”—not in words but in deeds. The example of all the great ancestors should govern a virtuous man. The “will of Heaven” was discovered not through theology but in “the collective experience of the ancestors,” another name for history. In Confucius’ world each man had to find the path for himself.

Still, there is no way of thought so experimental, and no philosopher so tentative that his suggestions cannot be frozen into a dogma by self-seeking disciples. Confucius was no exception. In the West his simple messages survived in fragmentary, easily remembered maxims. The practical wisdom of Confucius has become so proverbial that the “sayings” of Confucius are found in daily newspapers to whose readers Confucius is a mystery. Alexander Pope described this popular Western Confucius in his
Temple of Fame
(1714):

The teachings of Confucius have come down to us through his
Analects
(Conversations), in twenty chapters and 497 verses, a miscellany of aphorisms, maxims, and episodes. Probably compiled by the disciples of Confucius’ disciples, it is not known by that name before the Han dynasty (202
B.C.
–
A.D
. 220). A version compiled near the end of the Han dynasty displaced
the earlier ones, and about
A.D
. 175 the text was carved on stone tablets. Fragments of those stones have survived, and innumerable editions have since appeared. The
Analects
were one of four Confucian texts given authoritative new editions in 1190 by the Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi. Along with the
Book of Mencius
, the
Great Learning
, and the
Doctrine of the Mean
, it was one of the Four Books, the Chinese Classics that until 1905 were the subject of the Chinese civil service examinations. The
Analects
offered Confucius’ basic notions, including the idea of benevolence (
jen
) as the leading quality of the superior man, the mean (
chung yung
) or moderation in all things, the will of Heaven (
T’ien
) or the harmony of nature, filial piety or propriety (
li
), and the “rectification of names” (
cheng ming
), or recognizing the nature of things by giving them their right names.

As the centuries passed, the fragmentary teachings of Confucius were petrified into “Confucianism.” The very word, which would have horrified Confucius, seems to have been invented about 1862 by European Christians and fit their simplistic view of the “religions” of the non-Christian world. Under the Han Empire the teachings of the Master were shaped into an ideology, and became state dogma. Over the next centuries, countless “schools” rose and fell, shaping Chinese culture for the twenty-five hundred years after Confucius.

But the Confucian emphasis on the family, morals, and the role of the good ruler did not satisfy the popular need for the explanation of man and his place in the universe. Another school grew out of the effort to account for the mystery of the world, the spontaneity of man, and the wondrous variety of nature. This came to be known as Taoism—after Tao or “the way”—drawing on folk currents and building on the writings of a mysterious master, Lao-tzu (c.604–531
B.C.
). An antidote—and a complement—to the rigid moralism of the later Confucians and their state religion, Taoism became both an elevated philosophy and a popular religion. Developing over the years, its doctrines encouraged a sense of freedom in thinkers and artists, and eventually Taoist ideas were incorporated into Confucianism. While the Taoists were interested in man’s relation to the cosmos and to nature, their subtle philosophy had no place for a Creator. As we read in the work attributed to Lao-tzu:

With their belief in “oneness” and “nonbeing” the Taoist poetic imagination was more interested in the unity of experience than in any conceivable power of a Creator to make the new. As Chuang-tzu (flourished fourth century
B.C.
), the great follower of Lao-tzu, recalled:

This feeling for the unity of the world’s processes gave the Taoist Chuang-tzu a stoic power to face his personal afflictions. A friend who came to console him on the death of his beloved wife of many years found Chuang-tzu not grieving or weeping but placidly seated on a mat singing and beating time on a basin. Reproached for his callous behavior, Chuang-tzu replied:

At the point of death, he rejected the burial plans of his disciples for an elaborate outer coffin. Without such protection, they said, his corpse might be torn apart by birds of prey. His response was another morbid reminder of the unity of nature, of the oneness of the Tao. “Above the ground,” he said, “it’s the crows and the kites who will eat me; below the ground it’s the worms and the ants. What prejudice is this, that you wish to take from the one to give to the other?” This subservience to nature was repugnant to the moralistic Confucians.

It is not surprising that the later Taoists could not be troubled by the
mystery of creation from nothing (
ex nihilo
). For, although constantly referring to a state of “non-being,” they said, there was no such thing as “nothing”; the void of chaos in the beginning was packed with the material force of
ch’i
. “What came into existence before there were things?” asked Kuo Hsiang (died 312), in his commentary on the book by Chuang-tzu. “If I say yin and yang came first, then since yin and yang are themselves, what came before them?… There must be another thing, and so on
ad infinitum
. We must understand that things are what they are spontaneously and not caused by something else.” “But let us ask whether there is a Creator or not. If not, how can he create things? If there is he is incapable of materializing all the forms. Therefore, before we can talk about creation, we must understand the fact that all forms materialize by themselves. Hence everything creates itself without the direction of any Creator. Since things create themselves, they are unconditioned. This is the norm of the universe.” Nothing like the days of Creation in the Book of Genesis, this was an endless continuous process all stages of which are always present. There was no Creator, exhausted by making the world once and for all, and so no need to interrupt the process by a Day of Rest.