Confucianism in the Ancient World

Related civilization: China.

Date: coined after 479 b.c.e.

Locale: China, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam

Confucianism

Confucius (551-479 b.c.e.) was a product of the Chinese Warring States period, which despite its social and political upheaval, was one of the most productive periods of Chinese philosophy. Confucius is most accurately described as an itinerant teacher, although he may have held one or more minor political posts. He sought a role as a government adviser but did not convince the local authorities of his value. Regarding himself as a failure, he returned to his home in what became the province of Shandong and ended his years teaching his disciples. After his death, his disciples began compiling his thought in the Lunyu (later sixth-early fifth centuries b.c.e.; The Analects, 1861) and amplifying them—and his legend—in a process that may not yet have ended.

Hierarchy and legitimacy

Fundamentally, Confucianism deals with people’s social relationships by stressing harmony flowing from five key virtues: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness. Confucianism sees the family as a microcosm of the state, in which harmony is based on a hierarchy whose legitimacy is shared by all. If everyone acts according to his or her position in the hierarchy, harmony and peace will exist. This hierarchy rests on several relationships, of which the five most important are emperor-subject, father-son, older brother-younger brother, husband-wife, and friend-friend. Women are subordinate in this hierarchy, but so is everyone else but the emperor. The especially repressive Chinese measures toward women did not develop until footbinding and neo-Confucianism evolved after 1100 c.e. in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Confucius had relatively little to say about women.

The friend-friend relationship is nominally equal, but even within it, hierarchy based on seniority exists, with the older friend having higher status than the younger. Seniority creates a stable, self-regulating, even backward-looking society. However, society can become so stable as to resist important innovations. In later periods, when contact with the technological West required critical change, China’s imperial examinations emphasized the slavish copying of Confucian texts.

That seniority is a basis for hierarchy is no accident, for it is bound up with legitimacy. Confucian legitimacy rests on long-standing historical practice, not reason as in Western philosophy nor revelation as in many religions. Confucius never claimed to be a god nor even a prophet. Although his followers and descendants may have erected shrines where they worship in his honor, Confucius made no claim of divinity nor of contact with divinity. Confucius rejected even the common Chinese practices of divination and superstition, finding them beneath the dignity of the educated person. Confucianism, the least religious of all great religions, is unclear about an afterlife or the existence of a supreme being beyond a vague sense of “heaven.” This lack of a clear divinity left a void that Daoism and later Buddhism attempted to fill. Neo-Confucianism ultimately resulted in a syncretic religious practice combining Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.

Confucius also rejected the practice common to Western philosophy of relying on reason, or at least abstract reasoning, to legitimize what he espoused. The reasoning of any one person might fail, but the collective reason of generations of people was unlikely to do so—the thought underlying the Confucian aphorism about “transmitting but not creating.” This historical legitimacy helps explain the concern for ancestors and the reverence for the elderly, who are those most likely to next become ancestors. The elderly may be weak physically, but they are at their peak of wisdom.

Good government

The reverence for the old helps explain a worldview different from that of the West. In religious terms, Christianity contains a millenarian streak with the expectation of decline in society that ultimately brings on the second coming of Christ. For secular Westerners who do not follow such a devout Christian view, there is the contrary belief in the ever-improving onward march of history. Neither view is Confucian. Instead, Confucius posits an idealized high standard that he says was reached in China’s ancient Shang Dynasty (1600-1066 b.c.e.) or at the founding of the subsequent Zhou Dynasty (1066-256 b.c.e.). The change from the Shang to the Zhou Dynasty was the first of the famous dynastic cycles—the rise, maturation, and fall of a dynasty, leading to a new dynasty that subsequently rose, matured, and fell. Thinking of history in terms of dynastic cycles is an important corrective to the Western view of history as an upward march of progress. It favors the status quo, which sustained China until the Western intrusion in the nineteenth century.

For Confucius, to govern well was to return to that great and glorious past. Yet Confucius was not a blind antiquarian and may be thought of as a closet reformer. His view of China’s past is selective and idealized. The Shang believed in sacrifice of humans for entombment with a departed king or lord, and the Zhou humanely substituted clay models and replicas: Confucius rejected both.

There is more than a little subtlety in Confucius’s concern with rectification, or finding the proper names for things. Rectifying the title of the emperor means the emperor must be a good emperor—a good person, a gentleman, an exemplar for the people—or the emperor is not really an emperor at all. A century later, Mencius (c. 372-c. 289 b.c.e.), one of Confucius’s followers, pushed the argument further, refining the notion of the mandate of heaven—a concept first appearing to justify the overthrow of the Shang Dynasty by the Zhou—into a clearer standard for evaluating emperors. If the emperor did not behave properly, so that the title did not suit him well, heaven might withdraw its mandate. From this, it is just a short step to giving the people the right to rebel. Such a concept is difficult to institutionalize or put into operation, and this cannot be said to have evolved under either Confucius or Mencius.

Confucianism is hierarchical and monarchial. The ideal is to have a great emperor. The emperor, however, is not a tyrant oblivious to the welfare of the people; indeed, should he become such, he risks losing the mandate of heaven. The emperor’s goal should be just and proper government. Rule should not be by brute force but by moral example. If the emperor ceases to serve the people and loses the mandate of heaven, this loss may give the people the right to rebel. This clearly shows a fundamental respect for the ordinary citizen in Confucianism, although it does not make Confucius a “democrat” as some have implied. The Confucian goal is to replace the bad emperor with the good, but to have an emperor nonetheless.

Confucius was unclear as to whether people’s basic nature was good or bad, and his followers were divided on the question. Mencius thought people were basically good, and Xunzi (c. 298-c. 230 b.c.e.), living in darker times, thought them inherently evil. Confucius turned the concept of ren (human kindness or benevolence) into a reciprocal value with this precept: “Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do unto you.”

Needing a mandate of heaven creates a certain moralism in politics. Because there is only one emperor, there is only one right view. Dissent is not tolerated. A person occupying the throne can be wrong but only because he is no longer—under Confucian terminology—a real emperor. Such a person is morally wrong, will lose the throne, and will be replaced by a new emperor. This gives a moral cast to politics and removes the option of dissent and debate. These options are wrong in any case because they disrupt the unity and harmony of China. Dissent based on the possibility of more than one right answer also implies equality, which cannot be accepted in such a hierarchical scheme.

Influence of Confucianism

Confucianism became the state-sanctioned belief system in the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e. to 220 c.e.). It also became the basis for Chinese culture and was used to civilize its neighbors. Gradually the Han incorporated larger and larger areas, spreading Confucianism to the Chinese-dominated societies of Vietnam and Korea. From Korea, where it was adopted through conquer and assimilation, Confucianism spread to Japan. In Japan, it was adopted by choice, initiating the long-enduring Japanese practice of borrowing from China in language, art, architecture, and government. Because Korea had Confucianism imposed on it, the Koreans do not feel the special sense of ownership that the Chinese do, and they depart from its requirements as they see fit. The Japanese feel even less sense of ownership but do not react against Confucianism because it was never imposed on them.

Neither the Japanese nor Koreans have felt the need to have an officialdom based on pure meritocracy as have the Chinese. Confucius invented the notion that those who govern should do so because of merit and not inherited status, setting in motion the creation of the imperial examinations and bureaucracies open only to those who passed these tests. In China, the test taking was open to anyone. In Korea and Japan, only the hereditary nobility were allowed to take the tests that enabled them to become governmental officials.

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