Confucianism
Almost all empires
were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal
rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise,
the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their
dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future,
which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if
repression gives way to consensus.
So it was with China.
The methods by which it was unified, and periodically overturned
and reunified again, were occasionally brutal. Chinese history
witnessed its share of sanguinary rebellions and dynastic tyrants.
Yet China owed its millennial survival far less to the punishments
meted out by its Emperors than to the community of values fostered
among its population and its government of
scholar-officials.
Not the least
exceptional aspect of Chinese culture is that these values were
essentially secular in nature. At the time when Buddhism appeared
in Indian culture stressing contemplation and inner peace, and
monotheism was proclaimed by the Jewish—and, later, Christian and
Islamic—prophets with an evocation of a life after death, China
produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The
Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation. Their universe
was created by the Chinese themselves, whose values, even when
declared of universal applicability, were conceived of as Chinese
in origin.
The predominant
values of Chinese society were derived from the prescriptions of an
ancient philosopher known to posterity as Kong Fu-zi (or
“Confucius” in the Latinized version). Confucius (551–479 B.C.)
lived at the end of the so-called Spring and Autumn period (770–476
B.C.), a time of political upheaval that led to the brutal
struggles of the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.). The ruling
House of Zhou was in decline, unable to exert its authority over
rebellious princes competing for political power. Greed and
violence went unchecked. All Under Heaven was again in
disarray.
Like Machiavelli,
Confucius was an itinerant in his country, hoping to be retained as
an advisor to one of the princes then contending for survival. But
unlike Machiavelli, Confucius was concerned more with the
cultivation of social harmony than with the machinations of power.
His themes were the principles of compassionate rule, the
performance of correct rituals, and the inculcation of filial
piety. Perhaps because he offered his prospective employers no
short-term route to wealth or power, Confucius died without
achieving his goal: he never found a prince to implement his
maxims, and China continued its slide toward political collapse and
war.16
But Confucius’s
teachings, recorded by his disciples, survived. When the
bloodletting ended and China again stood unified, the Han Dynasty
(206 B.C.–A.D. 220) adopted Confucian thought as an official state
philosophy. Compiled into a central collection of Confucius’s
sayings (the Analects) and subsequent
books of learned commentary, the Confucian canon would evolve into
something akin to China’s Bible and its Constitution combined.
Expertise in these texts became the central qualification for
service in China’s imperial bureaucracy—a priesthood of literary
scholar-officials selected by nationwide competitive examinations
and charged with maintaining harmony in the Emperor’s vast
realms.
Confucius’s answer to
the chaos of his era was the “Way” of the just and harmonious
society, which, he taught, had once been realized before—in a
distant Chinese golden age. Mankind’s central spiritual task was to
re-create this proper order already on the verge of being lost.
Spiritual fulfillment was a task not so much of revelation or
liberation but patient recovery of forgotten principles of
self-restraint. The goal was rectification, not progress.17 Learning was the
key to advancement in a Confucian society. Thus Confucius taught
that
[l]ove of kindness, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by foolishness. Love of knowledge, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by loose speculation. Love of honesty, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by harmful candour. Love of straightforwardness, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by misdirected judgment. Love of daring, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by insubordination. And love for strength of character, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by intractability.18
Confucius preached a
hierarchical social creed: the fundamental duty was to “Know thy
place.” To its adherents the Confucian order offered the
inspiration of service in pursuit of a greater harmony. Unlike the
prophets of monotheistic religions, Confucius preached no teleology
of history pointing mankind to personal redemption. His philosophy
sought the redemption of the state through righteous individual
behavior. Oriented toward this world, his thinking affirmed a code
of social conduct, not a roadmap to the afterlife.
At the pinnacle of
the Chinese order stood the Emperor, a figure with no parallels in
the Western experience. He combined the spiritual as well as the
secular claims of the social order. The Chinese Emperor was both a
political ruler and a metaphysical concept. In his political role,
the Emperor was conceived as mankind’s supreme sovereign—the
Emperor of Humanity, standing atop a world political hierarchy that
mirrored China’s hierarchical Confucian social structure. Chinese
protocol insisted on recognizing his overlordship via the
kowtow—the act of complete prostration, with the forehead touching
the ground three times on each prostration.
The Emperor’s second,
metaphysical, role was his status as the “Son of Heaven,” the
symbolic intermediary between Heaven, Earth, and humanity. This
role also implied moral obligation on the Emperor’s part. Through
humane conduct, performance of correct rituals, and occasional
stern punishments, the Emperor was perceived as the linchpin of the
“Great Harmony” of all things great and small. If the Emperor
strayed from the path of virtue, All Under Heaven would fall into
chaos. Even natural catastrophes might signify that disharmony had
beset the universe. The existing dynasty would be seen to have lost
the “Mandate of Heaven” by which it possessed the right to govern:
rebellions would break out, and a new dynasty would restore the
Great Harmony of the universe.19