ChinaX Transcript Week 5: Confucius and Confucianism Historical Overview In the year 771 BCE, invading tribal groups from the west captured the Zhou capital and killed the Zhou king. His heir apparent fled to the east and reestablished the Zhou in an area by modern Luoyang on the fertile plain of the Yellow River Valley. This is the beginning of what is commonly called the Eastern Zhou Period. The Eastern Zhou lasted for 500 years and was a time of near constant warfare. It is commonly divided into two sub-periods. The first three centuries are called the Spring and Autumn Period, a name which takes after a famous chronicle documenting events from the time, the Spring and Autumns Annuls. The second major subdivision, usually dated from the end of the fifth century BCE to 221 BCE is called the Warring States Period, referring to the ever-escalating wars that characterized the times. In truth, one way to conceptualize the Eastern Zhou generally is to imagine it as an ongoing battle royale. The Zhou court never regained its former influence. And around 200 vassal states, both large and small, were left to fight for territory and dominance. At the beginning of the Warring States period, only seven major players remain standing. One of those states, named Qin, will be the ultimate winner, conquering all under heaven in 221 BCE. The upheavals of the Eastern Zhou took place over the course of the waning of the Bronze Age. Iron technology was reshaping the face of the earth, as the sharper and more durable tools and weapons led to large expansions of cultivated land and new types of warfare. Not surprisingly, the Zhou system of legitimization, built upon the control of bronze ritual objects, grew hollow in the transformed landscape of the Iron Age. By the Warring States period, the Zhou court controlled only a tiny territory, and the Zhou king's status as son of heaven was all but nominal. By the mid-fourth century BCE, momentous reforms were spreading like wildfire, beginning with Shang Yang's reform and Qin. By abolishing the aristocrat system of Zhou in favor of tightly controlled and centralized bureaucracy, Shang Yang turned Qin into the most productive and organized state of its time. And other states had no choice but to follow suit. Accompanying these dramatic political and military developments was also an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual inquiry. When the traditional order of things could no longer be taken for granted, thinkers debated over what ought to be the Dao, that is the correct way or path for going forward. They argued over how a ruler ought to rule and how an individual ought to be educated. Later historiography speaks of 100 different schools vying for influence, of thinkers and throngs of disciples wandering from state to state in search of the ruler who would adopt their vision. The writings attributed to these figures became the basic component of elite education over the next two millennia. And perhaps the greatest figure of them all was a man called Kongzi or Zhongni. You might know him as Confucius.
ChinaX Transcript Week 5: Confucius and Confucianism
Mar 16, 2023
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Historical Overview In the year 771 BCE, invading tribal groups from the west captured the Zhou capital and killed the Zhou king. His heir apparent fled to the east and reestablished the Zhou in an area by modern Luoyang on the fertile plain of the Yellow River Valley. This is the beginning of what is commonly called the Eastern Zhou Period.
The Eastern Zhou lasted for 500 years and was a time of near constant warfare. It is commonly divided into two sub-periods. The first three centuries are called the Spring and Autumn Period, a name which takes after a famous chronicle documenting events from the time, the Spring and Autumns Annuls. The second major subdivision, usually dated from the end of the fifth century BCE to 221 BCE is called the Warring States Period, referring to the ever-escalating wars that characterized the times.
In truth, one way to conceptualize the Eastern Zhou generally is to imagine it as an ongoing battle royale. The Zhou court never regained its former influence. And around 200 vassal states, both large and small, were left to fight for territory and dominance. At the beginning of the Warring States period, only seven major players remain standing.
One of those states, named Qin, will be the ultimate winner, conquering all under heaven in 221 BCE. The upheavals of the Eastern Zhou took place over the course of the waning of the Bronze Age. Iron technology was reshaping the face of the earth, as the sharper and more durable tools and weapons led to large expansions of cultivated land and new types of warfare.
Not surprisingly, the Zhou system of legitimization, built upon the control of bronze ritual objects, grew hollow in the transformed landscape of the Iron Age. By the Warring States period, the Zhou court controlled only a tiny territory, and the Zhou king's status as son of heaven was all but nominal. By the mid-fourth century BCE, momentous reforms were spreading like wildfire, beginning with Shang Yang's reform and Qin.
By abolishing the aristocrat system of Zhou in favor of tightly controlled and centralized bureaucracy, Shang Yang turned Qin into the most productive and organized state of its time. And other states had no choice but to follow suit. Accompanying these dramatic political and military developments was also an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual inquiry.
When the traditional order of things could no longer be taken for granted, thinkers debated over what ought to be the Dao, that is the correct way or path for going forward. They argued over how a ruler ought to rule and how an individual ought to be educated. Later historiography speaks of 100 different schools vying for influence, of thinkers and throngs of disciples wandering from state to state in search of the ruler who would adopt their vision.
The writings attributed to these figures became the basic component of elite education over the next two millennia. And perhaps the greatest figure of them all was a man called Kongzi or Zhongni. You might know him as Confucius.
Section 1: The Many Faces of Confucianism
1. Introduction
I'm here, in front of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and you'll notice right here is a piece of calligraphy by Rao Zongyi. Rao Zongyi is probably the greatest living calligrapher of China. And he writes here, [siwen zaizi], which simply says something like this, "This culture of ours resides here."
But what he's referring to is a passage from the Analects of Confucius. And Confucius was one day trapped between two states, and he was under threat, his disciples all very worried. And Confucius says, [Wenwang jimo, wen buzai zi hu]. The founder of the Zhou dynasty is long gone, but is not his culture here with me? And he's looking to Heaven and saying, Heaven protects me. Heaven protects me to make it possible for people born after me to participate in this culture.
So Rao Zongyi, in doing this calligraphy, is saying, even today, to participate in this culture in a foreign country, in a foreign place, this is something that matters. We're going to go downstairs now to the Harvard Yenching Library and talk a bit more about Confucius. But on the way, I want to show you another piece of calligraphy, this one from the 17th century.
This was done by the famous calligrapher, Dong Qichang, from the late Ming dynasty. Great artist, great calligrapher, a theorist of the arts as well. But what he's writing with his calligraphy is not something that he himself wrote. He's actually copying something that somebody in the 11th century wrote. A man named Zhou Dunyi. And Zhou Dunyi begins by saying, [Sheng ke xue hu? Yue: ke]. Can you learn how to be a sage? And the answer is, yes.
Well, when they're talking about a sage, they're talking about Confucius. Confucius, not as somebody with innate gifts, but somebody who is a model that we can learn from. And we can learn to be sages just like Confucius. And so there, from Rao Zongyi in the 21st century, back to Confucius in the sixth century BC, to the 11th century, to the 16th century, Confucius has remained a figure in Chinese history. And trying to understand why, and what he was saying, and what he meant, is our job for today.
2. Many Faces of Confucius
Confucius the sage, the man who was born with an innate knowledge; Confucius the philosopher who understood human nature; Confucius the paragon of education; at one point, in the People's Republic, he was criticized as being a reactionary.
But there's also the Confucius of The Analects, this little book of sayings in 20 chapters in which Confucius interacts with and is described by his students. And I have a bunch of editions of The Analects here. There's a wonderful translation by DC Lau, Confucius-- The Analects. Here's a modern People's Republic of China edition in simplified characters.
The texts we have in this course are coming out of the sources of Chinese tradition, which Columbia University Press has very kindly allowed us to use. This is a very nice edition from the 16th century. The person who owned it punctuated it with all this red ink. And then above, in very fine calligraphy, he wrote comments on what he was reading.
Here's another example of doing that, printed with two kinds of ink, with marks to show where the emphasis is-- in this case, he's emphasizing almost everything-- with some commentaries between the lines, above the margins, and so on.
This is from Japan. And it's actually a reprint of a 13th century edition. A Korean book, going further, from the 16th century, which is, in fact, glosses on various terms in The Analects and other Confucian classics. It this case, it's the eight rows of dancers. If this can be tolerated, what cannot be tolerated? I'll explain that rather obscure reference in a bit-- but again, Chinese characters, and then Korean Hangul with explanation.
Finally, an edition of The Analects which is in Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu. So The Analects is a text that's been made in many countries from very early on, has been explained in many ways. And that's the text we're going to use to try to understand Confucius better.
3. The Time of Confucius
I want to talk a bit about how we're going to approach Confucius. I want to talk about Confucius in context. Now, that's a choice. I'm thinking of Confucius as somebody who lived in a certain place and time, who's responding to events as he perceives events, rather than Confucius purely as a philosopher.
Confucius is living in a time when states are competing for wealth and power. There's a switch now from the charioteering of the nobility as a form of warfare, to infantry with iron weapons. States need revenues to pay for large armies. They're competing for power with each other. And they're beginning to employ specialists-- low-level nobility would no longer have a job-- and become literate and can work as retainers for the powerful. The Chinese word for this is shi, and it's a word we'll be coming back to a number of times.
Confucius is one of these professional administrator class people, but he begins as a somewhat marginal figure. He's orphaned when young. He doesn't have powerful relatives to get him into high position. He could have become a military officer. He could have made a career as an administrator, a ritual specialist, they're all sorts of things he could have done. And he chooses to do none of them.
He chooses instead to devote his life for learning. As he says in The Analects, when I was 15, I made my commitment to learning. And the kind of learning he devotes himself to is the useless kind of learning. It has no skills to offer. He's not going to make people rich or powerful.
At one point he says, the learning of antiquity was for oneself. The problem today is that the learning of today is to please others. The kind of learning he's interested in is the learning for oneself.
Confucius is also loyal to the Zhou dynasty. He's living in sixth century BC. The Zhou King is very weak. He's loyal to the Zhou King. He sees the founding of the Zhou dynasty as a source of models. He worries that he hasn't dreamt of the Duke of Zhou, the early regent to the Zhou dynasty. He dreams of the Duke of Zhou. He dreams of the Zhou dynasty.
Section 2: Confucius of The Analects
1. The Confucius of The Analects
Confucius wants to serve. He wants to be used. And his disciples say, "Master, if you had a beautiful jewel locked at home in a box, would you just leave it in the box forever? Or would you take it to the market and sell it?"
And Confucius said, "Oh, of course, I'd take it to the market and sell it"-- and then he pauses and says, "but only for the right price." So it's not that Confucius wasn't willing to sell himself, but he wanted to decide what he was worth.
Confucius is there saying to his students, do what's right, not what's profitable, not what's advantageous. Be a superior scholar, not a petty scholar. And in some sense, he's always dividing the loyalties of his followers, loyalties to him and his teachings versus loyalty to family and state.
And there's something here, I think, an undercurrent that is very important for Chinese history, the notion that to be devoted to learning is, in fact, to put oneself in tension with the demands of one's family, with the demands of the state, which are constantly calling on you to compromise, to serve their interests rather than your own. And remember that, for Confucius, it's learning for oneself, not to please others, that's most important.
2. We’ve Lost the Way
Confucius defines the problem of his day. And he defines it in a very simple way. He says, we have lost the way. We've lost the way.
If there's a path, somebody must have walked it before you. You know that it has to go somewhere. It has a destination. And you know if you're on it or not.
And Confucius's way of saying we've lost the way is to say, we are not on the right path. And so his job is to say what that path is, how to be on the right path.
There's a larger problem here, perhaps, a contrast with the Western tradition or the Mediterranean tradition or Plato, who keeps saying that the ideas, the forms, that we represent in the world can never really be equal to the real and true form. In the Western tradition, there is necessarily going to be a gap between "is" and "ought." And we will not recover. After Adam and Eve bit the apple, people fell in the Judeo Christian tradition and can never fully recover.
But for Confucius, he granted that there was a gap between how we ought to be and how we are. We're not on the path, and we should be on the path. But he was convinced that we could get back to the right place, that there did not need to be any gap between "is" and "ought," that at a certain moment, we could act spontaneously and do what was right, that we could be entirely on the right path. He says, at one point, "I was 15 when I set my will on learning." And then he says, "At 70, I could follow my desires without overstepping the bounds." I could live this spontaneous, real life, and yet a proper and moral life.
3. How to Find the Way Back
If Confucius says, I know the problem but I can solve it. We're not on the way, but I know what the way is. How does he know what the way is? And I'm actually not going to answer that question, because I don't think Confucius really can ask the question, how I know what the way is. But what he can answer is where I know the way from.
He's saying, there's a source from which we can know how we have to be today. And what's the source? This source is antiquity. His antiquity. Confucius is one of the first people to say, the answers lie in antiquity. Even though, for Confucius, antiquity was 500 years before the founding of the Zhou dynasty, they knew something then. They were doing something then that guaranteed that they would be on the right path.
Confucius says, [Haogu, minyiqiuzhi]. I like antiquity, and I am good at seeking it. At another point, he says, [Shu er buzuo]. I transmit, I do not innovate. Confucius is convinced that he is taking something that was real, that was in the past, and bringing it into the present, and pointing us our direction to it. And what is it? And here, I'm going to give you the answer that Confucius has, and you're not going to find it very exciting.
Well, his answer is, that is ritual. Not very exciting. The Chinese word, li. And he means rituals very much in the sense of rituals. For example, a ceremony, a marriage ceremony, where people have roles they practice. They learn the roles. And by carrying out the ritual, they actually change the situation. They now become married to each other.
Or think of a larger ceremony, a church service, or a commencement at a university. Think of ceremonies as occasions where people have many different roles to play. And each person learns their proper role and carries it out in harmony with others, and thus, together, they make something happen. They complete something. That's ritual.
Now, extend that concept of ritual to daily life. Think of it in terms of your relationship with your parents, with your siblings, with your colleagues, with your friends. Think of that as an occasion where we have roles to play, and the other party has roles to play. And that ritual enactment, they're all through our lives. Those rituals of daily practice are, in fact, what keeps us together as people, and keeps us, so to speak, out of harm's way in our relationships with others.
So Confucius, at one point, takes up this issue of ritual, and he applies to government. Well, if somebody ask him, what's the key to good government? He says, ah, no problem at all. He says, let the ruler act as a ruler should act, the father act as a father should act, the son act as a son should act, and so on. That's all it takes to have a good society. Let people play their roles, even though he could recognize that, perhaps, they weren't playing those roles in the present.
4. Confucian Magic
Prof. Bol: By the way, we're getting some noise from the back room. Chris, could you just close that back door?
Chris: OK. Yeah.
Prof. Bol: OK. Thanks. There's something more, and this is what we didn't want people to see, necessarily. We're going to do something. We're going to show you the magic in Confucianism. It turns out that there is something that we might call Confucian magic in which you can make things happen. In this case, I'm going to ask for two volunteers from our crew here, Jennifer Yum and Xuan Li.
And Jennifer, if you'll come and stand in front of the table over here, right around here, right. And Xuan, if you'll come over here. And I'm going to give Xuan an instruction, and you're going to carry out the instruction. (WHISPERING)
Xuan: Hello, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Hello.
Prof. Bol: Thank you. That was it. You're done. You can go sit down now. So what was the magic? What was the magic? Of course, when you do this in a large auditorium and class, the students are just as flummoxed as they are. What did he do, and why does it matter?
Well, you notice that when Xuan made Jennifer talk and raise her hand, she didn't put a knife to her throat? She just went over and stuck her hand out, and said something to her, and Jennifer responded. Did you see that? That was magic. And that's what we mean by ritual. Ritual has the power to make people behave in certain ways, to make them behave in civilized ways. But it's only because Xuan had virtue in herself that she knew how to behave, that she could exercise that power over Jennifer.
But there was another piece of magic that happened, too. And I bet you didn't see it. Does anyone know here the other piece of magic that took place.
Student: The door is closed.
Prof. Bol: I closed the door. Did you see me close the door? You say no, but I closed the door. I closed the door by command. I told Chris to close the door, and he closed the door.
So in fact, there are two kinds of magic in ritual. One is this very lateral relationship, where one person gets another person to respond. But the other is a hierarchical relationship, where somebody of superior authority can order somebody else to do something. Both of those are parts of magic. Both of those are parts of ritual. Both of those are parts of a Confucian society.
5. Ritual with Attitude
I told you that in this Korean text that glosses on the classics, there is a phrase about eight dancers. This actually comes from a passage in The Analects where Confucius is talking about one of the noble families of his own state, the Ji family. And he says, the Ji family uses eight rows of dancers in the courtyard. If this can be tolerated, what can not be tolerated?
Well, you would know, I guess, if you lived at those times, that eight rows of dancers in the courtyard was a prerogative reserved for the lord, not for any old noble family. And he was using ritual, the ritual of a performance, to usurp the authority of somebody higher than him, or the Ji family was doing this. It was their way of encroaching on the authority of their superiors, which means that ritual can be used hypocritically.
You can use ritual…
Historical Overview In the year 771 BCE, invading tribal groups from the west captured the Zhou capital and killed the Zhou king. His heir apparent fled to the east and reestablished the Zhou in an area by modern Luoyang on the fertile plain of the Yellow River Valley. This is the beginning of what is commonly called the Eastern Zhou Period.
The Eastern Zhou lasted for 500 years and was a time of near constant warfare. It is commonly divided into two sub-periods. The first three centuries are called the Spring and Autumn Period, a name which takes after a famous chronicle documenting events from the time, the Spring and Autumns Annuls. The second major subdivision, usually dated from the end of the fifth century BCE to 221 BCE is called the Warring States Period, referring to the ever-escalating wars that characterized the times.
In truth, one way to conceptualize the Eastern Zhou generally is to imagine it as an ongoing battle royale. The Zhou court never regained its former influence. And around 200 vassal states, both large and small, were left to fight for territory and dominance. At the beginning of the Warring States period, only seven major players remain standing.
One of those states, named Qin, will be the ultimate winner, conquering all under heaven in 221 BCE. The upheavals of the Eastern Zhou took place over the course of the waning of the Bronze Age. Iron technology was reshaping the face of the earth, as the sharper and more durable tools and weapons led to large expansions of cultivated land and new types of warfare.
Not surprisingly, the Zhou system of legitimization, built upon the control of bronze ritual objects, grew hollow in the transformed landscape of the Iron Age. By the Warring States period, the Zhou court controlled only a tiny territory, and the Zhou king's status as son of heaven was all but nominal. By the mid-fourth century BCE, momentous reforms were spreading like wildfire, beginning with Shang Yang's reform and Qin.
By abolishing the aristocrat system of Zhou in favor of tightly controlled and centralized bureaucracy, Shang Yang turned Qin into the most productive and organized state of its time. And other states had no choice but to follow suit. Accompanying these dramatic political and military developments was also an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual inquiry.
When the traditional order of things could no longer be taken for granted, thinkers debated over what ought to be the Dao, that is the correct way or path for going forward. They argued over how a ruler ought to rule and how an individual ought to be educated. Later historiography speaks of 100 different schools vying for influence, of thinkers and throngs of disciples wandering from state to state in search of the ruler who would adopt their vision.
The writings attributed to these figures became the basic component of elite education over the next two millennia. And perhaps the greatest figure of them all was a man called Kongzi or Zhongni. You might know him as Confucius.
Section 1: The Many Faces of Confucianism
1. Introduction
I'm here, in front of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and you'll notice right here is a piece of calligraphy by Rao Zongyi. Rao Zongyi is probably the greatest living calligrapher of China. And he writes here, [siwen zaizi], which simply says something like this, "This culture of ours resides here."
But what he's referring to is a passage from the Analects of Confucius. And Confucius was one day trapped between two states, and he was under threat, his disciples all very worried. And Confucius says, [Wenwang jimo, wen buzai zi hu]. The founder of the Zhou dynasty is long gone, but is not his culture here with me? And he's looking to Heaven and saying, Heaven protects me. Heaven protects me to make it possible for people born after me to participate in this culture.
So Rao Zongyi, in doing this calligraphy, is saying, even today, to participate in this culture in a foreign country, in a foreign place, this is something that matters. We're going to go downstairs now to the Harvard Yenching Library and talk a bit more about Confucius. But on the way, I want to show you another piece of calligraphy, this one from the 17th century.
This was done by the famous calligrapher, Dong Qichang, from the late Ming dynasty. Great artist, great calligrapher, a theorist of the arts as well. But what he's writing with his calligraphy is not something that he himself wrote. He's actually copying something that somebody in the 11th century wrote. A man named Zhou Dunyi. And Zhou Dunyi begins by saying, [Sheng ke xue hu? Yue: ke]. Can you learn how to be a sage? And the answer is, yes.
Well, when they're talking about a sage, they're talking about Confucius. Confucius, not as somebody with innate gifts, but somebody who is a model that we can learn from. And we can learn to be sages just like Confucius. And so there, from Rao Zongyi in the 21st century, back to Confucius in the sixth century BC, to the 11th century, to the 16th century, Confucius has remained a figure in Chinese history. And trying to understand why, and what he was saying, and what he meant, is our job for today.
2. Many Faces of Confucius
Confucius the sage, the man who was born with an innate knowledge; Confucius the philosopher who understood human nature; Confucius the paragon of education; at one point, in the People's Republic, he was criticized as being a reactionary.
But there's also the Confucius of The Analects, this little book of sayings in 20 chapters in which Confucius interacts with and is described by his students. And I have a bunch of editions of The Analects here. There's a wonderful translation by DC Lau, Confucius-- The Analects. Here's a modern People's Republic of China edition in simplified characters.
The texts we have in this course are coming out of the sources of Chinese tradition, which Columbia University Press has very kindly allowed us to use. This is a very nice edition from the 16th century. The person who owned it punctuated it with all this red ink. And then above, in very fine calligraphy, he wrote comments on what he was reading.
Here's another example of doing that, printed with two kinds of ink, with marks to show where the emphasis is-- in this case, he's emphasizing almost everything-- with some commentaries between the lines, above the margins, and so on.
This is from Japan. And it's actually a reprint of a 13th century edition. A Korean book, going further, from the 16th century, which is, in fact, glosses on various terms in The Analects and other Confucian classics. It this case, it's the eight rows of dancers. If this can be tolerated, what cannot be tolerated? I'll explain that rather obscure reference in a bit-- but again, Chinese characters, and then Korean Hangul with explanation.
Finally, an edition of The Analects which is in Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu. So The Analects is a text that's been made in many countries from very early on, has been explained in many ways. And that's the text we're going to use to try to understand Confucius better.
3. The Time of Confucius
I want to talk a bit about how we're going to approach Confucius. I want to talk about Confucius in context. Now, that's a choice. I'm thinking of Confucius as somebody who lived in a certain place and time, who's responding to events as he perceives events, rather than Confucius purely as a philosopher.
Confucius is living in a time when states are competing for wealth and power. There's a switch now from the charioteering of the nobility as a form of warfare, to infantry with iron weapons. States need revenues to pay for large armies. They're competing for power with each other. And they're beginning to employ specialists-- low-level nobility would no longer have a job-- and become literate and can work as retainers for the powerful. The Chinese word for this is shi, and it's a word we'll be coming back to a number of times.
Confucius is one of these professional administrator class people, but he begins as a somewhat marginal figure. He's orphaned when young. He doesn't have powerful relatives to get him into high position. He could have become a military officer. He could have made a career as an administrator, a ritual specialist, they're all sorts of things he could have done. And he chooses to do none of them.
He chooses instead to devote his life for learning. As he says in The Analects, when I was 15, I made my commitment to learning. And the kind of learning he devotes himself to is the useless kind of learning. It has no skills to offer. He's not going to make people rich or powerful.
At one point he says, the learning of antiquity was for oneself. The problem today is that the learning of today is to please others. The kind of learning he's interested in is the learning for oneself.
Confucius is also loyal to the Zhou dynasty. He's living in sixth century BC. The Zhou King is very weak. He's loyal to the Zhou King. He sees the founding of the Zhou dynasty as a source of models. He worries that he hasn't dreamt of the Duke of Zhou, the early regent to the Zhou dynasty. He dreams of the Duke of Zhou. He dreams of the Zhou dynasty.
Section 2: Confucius of The Analects
1. The Confucius of The Analects
Confucius wants to serve. He wants to be used. And his disciples say, "Master, if you had a beautiful jewel locked at home in a box, would you just leave it in the box forever? Or would you take it to the market and sell it?"
And Confucius said, "Oh, of course, I'd take it to the market and sell it"-- and then he pauses and says, "but only for the right price." So it's not that Confucius wasn't willing to sell himself, but he wanted to decide what he was worth.
Confucius is there saying to his students, do what's right, not what's profitable, not what's advantageous. Be a superior scholar, not a petty scholar. And in some sense, he's always dividing the loyalties of his followers, loyalties to him and his teachings versus loyalty to family and state.
And there's something here, I think, an undercurrent that is very important for Chinese history, the notion that to be devoted to learning is, in fact, to put oneself in tension with the demands of one's family, with the demands of the state, which are constantly calling on you to compromise, to serve their interests rather than your own. And remember that, for Confucius, it's learning for oneself, not to please others, that's most important.
2. We’ve Lost the Way
Confucius defines the problem of his day. And he defines it in a very simple way. He says, we have lost the way. We've lost the way.
If there's a path, somebody must have walked it before you. You know that it has to go somewhere. It has a destination. And you know if you're on it or not.
And Confucius's way of saying we've lost the way is to say, we are not on the right path. And so his job is to say what that path is, how to be on the right path.
There's a larger problem here, perhaps, a contrast with the Western tradition or the Mediterranean tradition or Plato, who keeps saying that the ideas, the forms, that we represent in the world can never really be equal to the real and true form. In the Western tradition, there is necessarily going to be a gap between "is" and "ought." And we will not recover. After Adam and Eve bit the apple, people fell in the Judeo Christian tradition and can never fully recover.
But for Confucius, he granted that there was a gap between how we ought to be and how we are. We're not on the path, and we should be on the path. But he was convinced that we could get back to the right place, that there did not need to be any gap between "is" and "ought," that at a certain moment, we could act spontaneously and do what was right, that we could be entirely on the right path. He says, at one point, "I was 15 when I set my will on learning." And then he says, "At 70, I could follow my desires without overstepping the bounds." I could live this spontaneous, real life, and yet a proper and moral life.
3. How to Find the Way Back
If Confucius says, I know the problem but I can solve it. We're not on the way, but I know what the way is. How does he know what the way is? And I'm actually not going to answer that question, because I don't think Confucius really can ask the question, how I know what the way is. But what he can answer is where I know the way from.
He's saying, there's a source from which we can know how we have to be today. And what's the source? This source is antiquity. His antiquity. Confucius is one of the first people to say, the answers lie in antiquity. Even though, for Confucius, antiquity was 500 years before the founding of the Zhou dynasty, they knew something then. They were doing something then that guaranteed that they would be on the right path.
Confucius says, [Haogu, minyiqiuzhi]. I like antiquity, and I am good at seeking it. At another point, he says, [Shu er buzuo]. I transmit, I do not innovate. Confucius is convinced that he is taking something that was real, that was in the past, and bringing it into the present, and pointing us our direction to it. And what is it? And here, I'm going to give you the answer that Confucius has, and you're not going to find it very exciting.
Well, his answer is, that is ritual. Not very exciting. The Chinese word, li. And he means rituals very much in the sense of rituals. For example, a ceremony, a marriage ceremony, where people have roles they practice. They learn the roles. And by carrying out the ritual, they actually change the situation. They now become married to each other.
Or think of a larger ceremony, a church service, or a commencement at a university. Think of ceremonies as occasions where people have many different roles to play. And each person learns their proper role and carries it out in harmony with others, and thus, together, they make something happen. They complete something. That's ritual.
Now, extend that concept of ritual to daily life. Think of it in terms of your relationship with your parents, with your siblings, with your colleagues, with your friends. Think of that as an occasion where we have roles to play, and the other party has roles to play. And that ritual enactment, they're all through our lives. Those rituals of daily practice are, in fact, what keeps us together as people, and keeps us, so to speak, out of harm's way in our relationships with others.
So Confucius, at one point, takes up this issue of ritual, and he applies to government. Well, if somebody ask him, what's the key to good government? He says, ah, no problem at all. He says, let the ruler act as a ruler should act, the father act as a father should act, the son act as a son should act, and so on. That's all it takes to have a good society. Let people play their roles, even though he could recognize that, perhaps, they weren't playing those roles in the present.
4. Confucian Magic
Prof. Bol: By the way, we're getting some noise from the back room. Chris, could you just close that back door?
Chris: OK. Yeah.
Prof. Bol: OK. Thanks. There's something more, and this is what we didn't want people to see, necessarily. We're going to do something. We're going to show you the magic in Confucianism. It turns out that there is something that we might call Confucian magic in which you can make things happen. In this case, I'm going to ask for two volunteers from our crew here, Jennifer Yum and Xuan Li.
And Jennifer, if you'll come and stand in front of the table over here, right around here, right. And Xuan, if you'll come over here. And I'm going to give Xuan an instruction, and you're going to carry out the instruction. (WHISPERING)
Xuan: Hello, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Hello.
Prof. Bol: Thank you. That was it. You're done. You can go sit down now. So what was the magic? What was the magic? Of course, when you do this in a large auditorium and class, the students are just as flummoxed as they are. What did he do, and why does it matter?
Well, you notice that when Xuan made Jennifer talk and raise her hand, she didn't put a knife to her throat? She just went over and stuck her hand out, and said something to her, and Jennifer responded. Did you see that? That was magic. And that's what we mean by ritual. Ritual has the power to make people behave in certain ways, to make them behave in civilized ways. But it's only because Xuan had virtue in herself that she knew how to behave, that she could exercise that power over Jennifer.
But there was another piece of magic that happened, too. And I bet you didn't see it. Does anyone know here the other piece of magic that took place.
Student: The door is closed.
Prof. Bol: I closed the door. Did you see me close the door? You say no, but I closed the door. I closed the door by command. I told Chris to close the door, and he closed the door.
So in fact, there are two kinds of magic in ritual. One is this very lateral relationship, where one person gets another person to respond. But the other is a hierarchical relationship, where somebody of superior authority can order somebody else to do something. Both of those are parts of magic. Both of those are parts of ritual. Both of those are parts of a Confucian society.
5. Ritual with Attitude
I told you that in this Korean text that glosses on the classics, there is a phrase about eight dancers. This actually comes from a passage in The Analects where Confucius is talking about one of the noble families of his own state, the Ji family. And he says, the Ji family uses eight rows of dancers in the courtyard. If this can be tolerated, what can not be tolerated?
Well, you would know, I guess, if you lived at those times, that eight rows of dancers in the courtyard was a prerogative reserved for the lord, not for any old noble family. And he was using ritual, the ritual of a performance, to usurp the authority of somebody higher than him, or the Ji family was doing this. It was their way of encroaching on the authority of their superiors, which means that ritual can be used hypocritically.
You can use ritual…
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