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camwyn'lo, folks. It's been a HELL of a long time since I actually wrote any of the Chinese history lessons, so I figured I'd better get back into gear. Ages and ages ago (okay, back in March) I promised you philosophers. We're gonna start with arguably the biggest of them all - the Old Master himself, Confucius.
Before we launch into the Sage, though, today's pulp survival tip is #97: Don't participate in any religious ceremonies until you find out exactly how they end for EVERYONE concerned.
Our time frame is the late Eastern Zhou dynasty. The kings of the dynasty had long since fled their original capital and moved to a more defensible position from which they could continue to rule in name and conduct their sacrifices for the sake of the kingdom, but nobody really believed in their power or rulership any more. I mean, let's face it, who're you going to hasten to obey: the duke who rules your local state with an iron fist and could squash you like a grape, or some guy way the heck off down south who says he's the Son of Heaven but who your local duke pretty much ignores except a couple times a year when he sends gifts as per official procedure and request? Right. Most of the old power structures had fallen apart, and what you had was a bunch of local aristocrats who spent their time beating up on each other and periodically oppressing peasants, just because they could. If this sounds like any of the previous lessons you really shouldn't be surprised. It's a cycle that repeats itself in Chinese history almost as often as 'good leader, mediocre leader, bad leader, rivers flooding, new leader'. Country unites, country goes to pieces, country unites again. Like clockwork.
Thing is, it's absolutely no fun to be on the receiving end of one of these cycles. The aristcrats have all the fun and everybody else takes it in the teeth. Our lesson subject for the day was one of these unfortunate recipients of forcible dentistry, at least as far as anybody else could see when he was born. The story begins in a village called Qufu in the state of Lu, the modern province of Shandong, in the Year of the Rooster, 551 BCE, on the twenty-seventh day of the eighth month. (It doesn't translate all that well to the Western calendar - in 1999, that was 5 October, and in 2000, it was 24 September.) His family was of aristocratic ancestry, but long since deposed and pretty darn poor. His dad was a former magistrate and soldier, and his mom was supposedly descended from the son of a duke. He was named Kong Qiu by his parents - the title we know him by didn't come along until a LOT later. As a kid he was something of a perfectionist - temper tantrums against his toys when things didn't come out exactly right, for example - and held pretend temple rituals for fun. (Before you make any comments about this, go and track down a Roman Catholic born before about 1955 or so and ask them if they ever played 'pretend Mass'. You'll get plenty of stories.) Dad died when the boy was three, so he was pretty much raised by a single mother. Took a lot of jobs as a young man so as to support the family. Shepherd, cowherd, bookkeeper, clerk, you name it, he did it.
Not exactly the kind of background you expect for a philosopher, huh? Let's have some credit where credit is due, though: at least he got a good grounding in the practicalities of everyday life. Unlike SOME philosophers I could mention, HE didn't spend all his time hanging around in the marketplace chatting with a bunch of idle young Greek men, or settling out in the countryside well away from anything that might have anything to do with the real world. Nope. He worked his fingers to the bone, and I'm guessing this got to him pretty quickly, because it's recorded that he'd decided by age fifteen to devote as much of his life as he could to the pursuit of learning.
See, kids? Even back in ANCIENT CHINA, people knew the way out of a really crappy economic situation was to go to school.
He got married at nineteen to a girl named Chi-Kuan; their eldest son, Kong Li, was born a year later.The family is still going strong, mind you. Descendants of theirs have lived in the same village ever since. One of them, the first to be born outside the region of Qufu, is currently a hip-hop star and R&B singer named Kung Ling Chi, or Jeffrey Kung. (It should be noted that Jeffrey is intent on school as well as music - in his own words, "School is very important to me. If I am a singer, how long can I sing, maybe 10 or 15 years? I feel like I need a diploma, then I will feel like I have a brain. And if I don't graduate my parents will kill me.") It took him a while to get his professional gears in motion after that. Wound up getting himself a position as a stable manager (see? See what I mean about practicalities?) for the family that ran his state's everyday affairs.
Not, understand, the actual family with the title and the official positions and stuff. Nope. Lu, his home state, had a duke and all, but as is so depressingly common the world over, there was a power-behind-the-throne family lurking in the background. This would be the Ji family, and that's who Kong Qiu was working for. In the process he wound up meeting the actual Duke of Lu, and impressed him pretty strongly. Gave him a nice chunk of advice, too, mostly about how to get the better of the Ji family and be a REAL duke, but... well, the Ji family were his employers... and people get ticky when you start talking about them like that... so, you know, when the duke and the prime minister got in a fight and the prime minister, who happened to be from the Ji family, got REALLY angry and managed to chase the duke out of Lu, guess who was out of a job and followed the duke the heck out of Dodge? Right.
Okay, so, what you've got here is a thirty-five-year-old exile with the ancient Chinese equivalent of the Kennedys mad at him. He's interested in government, he believes the only way to make his country better is by making sure that everybody is educated enough to know what they, personally, need to do and how to do it exactly right, and he's nowhere near anything he ever really knew. Stinks to be him, doesn't it? Yup. So what's he do? Settles himself down and takes up a position as a freelance editor right there in the state of Qi. It gives him time to study music, which is not as frivolous as it sounds - we're talking serious study here, like all the ancient forms and uses of music. Hymns, folk songs, ritual pieces, you name it. Also to study literature and poetry, dating back just as far as possible. It wasn't the best life there was, but it at least got him somewhere - he continued to advise the duke even with the two of them in exile, and when he returned to Lu after the Duke's death (most of the Jis had bitten it by then) he finally got recognized by the new ruler at the age of fifty. Got made a city magistrate. He approached his job with the same sort of perfectionism he approached his studies, and the city prospered under his administration. Over the next few years the duke got to like him even more; he got to be Grand Secretary of Justice, and finally got made Prime Minister at age 56.
We're talking seriously happy philosopher here. The position meant that he got to do things like rectify titles throughout the state, ensuring that absolutely everybody knew who they were supposed to bow to and who they were supposed to order around - thereby avoiding gory messes like that whole cock-up with the Ji family. Rites and rituals and other religious observances had to be put in proper order, too. He wasn't very big on religion himself - as far as he was concerned, doing things right and living a moral life constituted enough religion for him - but anything that was going to be done ought to be done well, and by the right people. It helped ensure harmony throughout the state and contributed to the strength of the people, so it mattered. Same deal with music and dance, since the right song at the right time could make all the difference in society functioning properly. (I'd give examples here, but all I can think of are Vietnam protest songs, and all those ever seemed to do was make people mad.)
All of this went over pretty well with the duke, to the point where it cheesed off the next state over. They were used to Lu, which was a pretty small state, being a bit of a pushover. It was functioning smoothly now, and getting pretty darn strong - couldn't have THAT, now, could they? (I will refrain from remarks here about the US government toppling Central American governments to make life easier for US fruit companies to make a profit.) During one of the sacrificial holidays they sent a bunch of horses and dancing girls to Lu, and the duke was so thrilled he abandoned his duties to go and receive the presents - that is, watch women until he drooled, get people to ride the horses for hours to show how wonderful they were, etc. This was the equivalent of showing up in, say, a medieval court in a Catholic country during Lent with a couple thousand pounds of roast beef and getting the king to say 'nah, I didn't need to do that whole religious fasting obligation thing anyway', at least to the prime minister's way of thinking, so he pitched a fit and resigned at age fifty-six.
He spent years wandering through China followed by people who'd come to admire his teachings over the years, disciples who'd been studying everything he'd said or written for ages. This bunch of folks called him Old Master Kong, which is rendered Kongfuzi in Pinyin or K'ung Fu-tzu in Wade-Giles, and this is where we get the name Confucius from - the Jesuits who first hit China in later years Latinized it, like they did everything else. Like so many people who advocate fundamental change at the roots of a system of government, he found out in a hurry that he wasn't popular. Nobles and other folks who had a heavy investment in the old, rotten way of doing things heard he was coming, saw what he was doing, and started plotting to kick his sorry butt six ways from Sunday. He got arrested and thrown in jail for five days once and almost got starved to death when he and his followers were basically put under siege by soldiers from nobles hostile to his teachings. (Managed to get a messenger out to a friendly king who sent his own soldiers. It helped. A lot.) He made it back to Lu at age 67 and spent the rest of his life teaching everybody he could, then writing down everything he knew. He eventually died at age 72.
Okay. Now that we've gone over the Old Master's biography, let's just spend a bit going over the stuff that mattered so much to him. All social order, he believed, was dependent upon human relationships. Basic human relationships were key to absolutely everything else, and if the five that mattered most were not strictly observed, nothing else right could ever possibly proceed from them. These were the relations between: parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and subjects, elder and younger siblings, and friends. Each relation was slightly different, but the basics were the same. The superior member of the relationship - the father, or the husband, or the ruler, or whatever - was supposed to be benevolent, caring, just and fair; the inferior was supposed to obey and serve reverently. Note the word 'supposed'. We're in social contract territory here. If the superior fails in their responsibilities, the inferior's highest duty is to doing what is right, not to upholding a relationship that's essentially shot to hell. Remember when we talked about the Mandate of Heaven? It's the same thing. DON'T SCREW UP.
Especially don't screw up your kids, either. All social order is based on right relations within the family. If the parent-child and husband-wife relations aren't right, the child can't grow up right, and nothing that they do can come out properly right, and eventually society just goes COMPLETELY ALL TO HELL. Larry Gonick uses this as an excuse to refer to Confucius as 'the Old Republican' - family values, anyone? - but that's not really right, because the Old Master didn't think a whole lot of trade and commerce. That kind of thing was an invitation to fraud and chicanery - he didn't object to profit and wealth per se, just to what the pursuit thereof could do to a person, leading them into dishonesty, fraud, and other nasty ways of being. It was a source of temptation to do wrong. (Ahem. "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Thenk yew.)
The virtues he prized and taught to be fundamental were benevolence (ren), morality (yi), propriety/good manners (li), filial piety (xiao - a big one, understandably), conscientiousness/loyalty (zhong), and altruism or consideration for others (shu). All of these were things the gentleman or 'superior man' ought to understand, take to heart, and practice. Particularly ren, the love of others, and shu, altruism. Love others, honor one's parents, do what is right rather than what is advantageous, refrain from doing to other people what you would not want done to yourself, rule by moral example instead of by violence, fulfil your role in each of the Five Relationships to the utmost of your abilities, and you get to be considered a person of virtue and do well in the world. Maybe not the most flexible system in the world, and it defnitely doesn't allow for the kind of individual liberty and 'pursuit of happiness' that Americans value so much, but all in all really not a bad deal. Throw in the fact that unlike a lot of other philosophers and religious figures, the Old Master believed that human nature was fundamentally decent and in need of education and guidance rather than punishment, and it's definitely got a leg up on a lot of the other ways out there.
We'll go over how it got to be so widespread and popular in another lesson. Next one, however, will be on another chap from the same general time frame - Lao Tzu, the voice of Taoism best known in the West.
Having said that, allow me to suggest the following sources to you for information on Confucius himself and his way of thinking:
An English-language biography of the sage, from the people at confucius.org.
Another biography, with a few notes that may point towards a slightly different understanding of his later career.
A really marvellous write-up on Confucius' moral teachings.
And some quotes from the Master on the Five Basic Relationships.
Before we launch into the Sage, though, today's pulp survival tip is #97: Don't participate in any religious ceremonies until you find out exactly how they end for EVERYONE concerned.
Our time frame is the late Eastern Zhou dynasty. The kings of the dynasty had long since fled their original capital and moved to a more defensible position from which they could continue to rule in name and conduct their sacrifices for the sake of the kingdom, but nobody really believed in their power or rulership any more. I mean, let's face it, who're you going to hasten to obey: the duke who rules your local state with an iron fist and could squash you like a grape, or some guy way the heck off down south who says he's the Son of Heaven but who your local duke pretty much ignores except a couple times a year when he sends gifts as per official procedure and request? Right. Most of the old power structures had fallen apart, and what you had was a bunch of local aristocrats who spent their time beating up on each other and periodically oppressing peasants, just because they could. If this sounds like any of the previous lessons you really shouldn't be surprised. It's a cycle that repeats itself in Chinese history almost as often as 'good leader, mediocre leader, bad leader, rivers flooding, new leader'. Country unites, country goes to pieces, country unites again. Like clockwork.
Thing is, it's absolutely no fun to be on the receiving end of one of these cycles. The aristcrats have all the fun and everybody else takes it in the teeth. Our lesson subject for the day was one of these unfortunate recipients of forcible dentistry, at least as far as anybody else could see when he was born. The story begins in a village called Qufu in the state of Lu, the modern province of Shandong, in the Year of the Rooster, 551 BCE, on the twenty-seventh day of the eighth month. (It doesn't translate all that well to the Western calendar - in 1999, that was 5 October, and in 2000, it was 24 September.) His family was of aristocratic ancestry, but long since deposed and pretty darn poor. His dad was a former magistrate and soldier, and his mom was supposedly descended from the son of a duke. He was named Kong Qiu by his parents - the title we know him by didn't come along until a LOT later. As a kid he was something of a perfectionist - temper tantrums against his toys when things didn't come out exactly right, for example - and held pretend temple rituals for fun. (Before you make any comments about this, go and track down a Roman Catholic born before about 1955 or so and ask them if they ever played 'pretend Mass'. You'll get plenty of stories.) Dad died when the boy was three, so he was pretty much raised by a single mother. Took a lot of jobs as a young man so as to support the family. Shepherd, cowherd, bookkeeper, clerk, you name it, he did it.
Not exactly the kind of background you expect for a philosopher, huh? Let's have some credit where credit is due, though: at least he got a good grounding in the practicalities of everyday life. Unlike SOME philosophers I could mention, HE didn't spend all his time hanging around in the marketplace chatting with a bunch of idle young Greek men, or settling out in the countryside well away from anything that might have anything to do with the real world. Nope. He worked his fingers to the bone, and I'm guessing this got to him pretty quickly, because it's recorded that he'd decided by age fifteen to devote as much of his life as he could to the pursuit of learning.
See, kids? Even back in ANCIENT CHINA, people knew the way out of a really crappy economic situation was to go to school.
He got married at nineteen to a girl named Chi-Kuan; their eldest son, Kong Li, was born a year later.The family is still going strong, mind you. Descendants of theirs have lived in the same village ever since. One of them, the first to be born outside the region of Qufu, is currently a hip-hop star and R&B singer named Kung Ling Chi, or Jeffrey Kung. (It should be noted that Jeffrey is intent on school as well as music - in his own words, "School is very important to me. If I am a singer, how long can I sing, maybe 10 or 15 years? I feel like I need a diploma, then I will feel like I have a brain. And if I don't graduate my parents will kill me.") It took him a while to get his professional gears in motion after that. Wound up getting himself a position as a stable manager (see? See what I mean about practicalities?) for the family that ran his state's everyday affairs.
Not, understand, the actual family with the title and the official positions and stuff. Nope. Lu, his home state, had a duke and all, but as is so depressingly common the world over, there was a power-behind-the-throne family lurking in the background. This would be the Ji family, and that's who Kong Qiu was working for. In the process he wound up meeting the actual Duke of Lu, and impressed him pretty strongly. Gave him a nice chunk of advice, too, mostly about how to get the better of the Ji family and be a REAL duke, but... well, the Ji family were his employers... and people get ticky when you start talking about them like that... so, you know, when the duke and the prime minister got in a fight and the prime minister, who happened to be from the Ji family, got REALLY angry and managed to chase the duke out of Lu, guess who was out of a job and followed the duke the heck out of Dodge? Right.
Okay, so, what you've got here is a thirty-five-year-old exile with the ancient Chinese equivalent of the Kennedys mad at him. He's interested in government, he believes the only way to make his country better is by making sure that everybody is educated enough to know what they, personally, need to do and how to do it exactly right, and he's nowhere near anything he ever really knew. Stinks to be him, doesn't it? Yup. So what's he do? Settles himself down and takes up a position as a freelance editor right there in the state of Qi. It gives him time to study music, which is not as frivolous as it sounds - we're talking serious study here, like all the ancient forms and uses of music. Hymns, folk songs, ritual pieces, you name it. Also to study literature and poetry, dating back just as far as possible. It wasn't the best life there was, but it at least got him somewhere - he continued to advise the duke even with the two of them in exile, and when he returned to Lu after the Duke's death (most of the Jis had bitten it by then) he finally got recognized by the new ruler at the age of fifty. Got made a city magistrate. He approached his job with the same sort of perfectionism he approached his studies, and the city prospered under his administration. Over the next few years the duke got to like him even more; he got to be Grand Secretary of Justice, and finally got made Prime Minister at age 56.
We're talking seriously happy philosopher here. The position meant that he got to do things like rectify titles throughout the state, ensuring that absolutely everybody knew who they were supposed to bow to and who they were supposed to order around - thereby avoiding gory messes like that whole cock-up with the Ji family. Rites and rituals and other religious observances had to be put in proper order, too. He wasn't very big on religion himself - as far as he was concerned, doing things right and living a moral life constituted enough religion for him - but anything that was going to be done ought to be done well, and by the right people. It helped ensure harmony throughout the state and contributed to the strength of the people, so it mattered. Same deal with music and dance, since the right song at the right time could make all the difference in society functioning properly. (I'd give examples here, but all I can think of are Vietnam protest songs, and all those ever seemed to do was make people mad.)
All of this went over pretty well with the duke, to the point where it cheesed off the next state over. They were used to Lu, which was a pretty small state, being a bit of a pushover. It was functioning smoothly now, and getting pretty darn strong - couldn't have THAT, now, could they? (I will refrain from remarks here about the US government toppling Central American governments to make life easier for US fruit companies to make a profit.) During one of the sacrificial holidays they sent a bunch of horses and dancing girls to Lu, and the duke was so thrilled he abandoned his duties to go and receive the presents - that is, watch women until he drooled, get people to ride the horses for hours to show how wonderful they were, etc. This was the equivalent of showing up in, say, a medieval court in a Catholic country during Lent with a couple thousand pounds of roast beef and getting the king to say 'nah, I didn't need to do that whole religious fasting obligation thing anyway', at least to the prime minister's way of thinking, so he pitched a fit and resigned at age fifty-six.
He spent years wandering through China followed by people who'd come to admire his teachings over the years, disciples who'd been studying everything he'd said or written for ages. This bunch of folks called him Old Master Kong, which is rendered Kongfuzi in Pinyin or K'ung Fu-tzu in Wade-Giles, and this is where we get the name Confucius from - the Jesuits who first hit China in later years Latinized it, like they did everything else. Like so many people who advocate fundamental change at the roots of a system of government, he found out in a hurry that he wasn't popular. Nobles and other folks who had a heavy investment in the old, rotten way of doing things heard he was coming, saw what he was doing, and started plotting to kick his sorry butt six ways from Sunday. He got arrested and thrown in jail for five days once and almost got starved to death when he and his followers were basically put under siege by soldiers from nobles hostile to his teachings. (Managed to get a messenger out to a friendly king who sent his own soldiers. It helped. A lot.) He made it back to Lu at age 67 and spent the rest of his life teaching everybody he could, then writing down everything he knew. He eventually died at age 72.
Okay. Now that we've gone over the Old Master's biography, let's just spend a bit going over the stuff that mattered so much to him. All social order, he believed, was dependent upon human relationships. Basic human relationships were key to absolutely everything else, and if the five that mattered most were not strictly observed, nothing else right could ever possibly proceed from them. These were the relations between: parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and subjects, elder and younger siblings, and friends. Each relation was slightly different, but the basics were the same. The superior member of the relationship - the father, or the husband, or the ruler, or whatever - was supposed to be benevolent, caring, just and fair; the inferior was supposed to obey and serve reverently. Note the word 'supposed'. We're in social contract territory here. If the superior fails in their responsibilities, the inferior's highest duty is to doing what is right, not to upholding a relationship that's essentially shot to hell. Remember when we talked about the Mandate of Heaven? It's the same thing. DON'T SCREW UP.
Especially don't screw up your kids, either. All social order is based on right relations within the family. If the parent-child and husband-wife relations aren't right, the child can't grow up right, and nothing that they do can come out properly right, and eventually society just goes COMPLETELY ALL TO HELL. Larry Gonick uses this as an excuse to refer to Confucius as 'the Old Republican' - family values, anyone? - but that's not really right, because the Old Master didn't think a whole lot of trade and commerce. That kind of thing was an invitation to fraud and chicanery - he didn't object to profit and wealth per se, just to what the pursuit thereof could do to a person, leading them into dishonesty, fraud, and other nasty ways of being. It was a source of temptation to do wrong. (Ahem. "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Thenk yew.)
The virtues he prized and taught to be fundamental were benevolence (ren), morality (yi), propriety/good manners (li), filial piety (xiao - a big one, understandably), conscientiousness/loyalty (zhong), and altruism or consideration for others (shu). All of these were things the gentleman or 'superior man' ought to understand, take to heart, and practice. Particularly ren, the love of others, and shu, altruism. Love others, honor one's parents, do what is right rather than what is advantageous, refrain from doing to other people what you would not want done to yourself, rule by moral example instead of by violence, fulfil your role in each of the Five Relationships to the utmost of your abilities, and you get to be considered a person of virtue and do well in the world. Maybe not the most flexible system in the world, and it defnitely doesn't allow for the kind of individual liberty and 'pursuit of happiness' that Americans value so much, but all in all really not a bad deal. Throw in the fact that unlike a lot of other philosophers and religious figures, the Old Master believed that human nature was fundamentally decent and in need of education and guidance rather than punishment, and it's definitely got a leg up on a lot of the other ways out there.
We'll go over how it got to be so widespread and popular in another lesson. Next one, however, will be on another chap from the same general time frame - Lao Tzu, the voice of Taoism best known in the West.
Having said that, allow me to suggest the following sources to you for information on Confucius himself and his way of thinking:
An English-language biography of the sage, from the people at confucius.org.
Another biography, with a few notes that may point towards a slightly different understanding of his later career.
A really marvellous write-up on Confucius' moral teachings.
And some quotes from the Master on the Five Basic Relationships.
