One of the fundamental Confucian values that ensures the integrity of ritual performance is xiao (filial piety). Indeed, Confucius saw filial piety as the first step toward moral excellence, which he believed lay in the attainment of the cardinal virtue, ren (humanity). To learn to embody the family in the mind and the heart is to become able to move beyond self-centredness or, to borrow from modern psychology, to transform the enclosed private ego into an open self. Filial piety, however, does not demand unconditional submissiveness to parental authority but recognition of and reverence for the source of life. The purpose of filial piety, as the ancient Greeks expressed it, is to enable both parent and child to flourish. Confucians see it as an essential way of learning to be human.
Confucians, moreover, are fond of applying the family metaphor to the community, the country, and the cosmos. They prefer to address the emperor as the son of heaven (tianzi), the king as ruler-father, and the magistrate as the “father-mother official,” because to them the family-centred nomenclature implies a political vision. When Confucius said that taking care of family affairs is itself active participation in politics, he had already made it clear that family ethics is not merely a private concern; the public good is realized by and through it.
Confucius defined the process of becoming human as being able to “discipline yourself and return to ritual” (12:1). The dual focus on the transformation of the self (Confucius is said to have freed himself from four things: “opinionatedness, dogmatism, obstinacy, and egoism” [9:4]) and on social participation enabled Confucius to be loyal (zhong) to himself and considerate (shu) of others (4:15). It is easy to understand why the Confucian “golden rule” is “Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you!” (15:23). Confucius’s legacy, laden with profound ethical implications, is captured by his “plain and real” appreciation that learning to be human is a communal enterprise:
Persons of humanity, in wishing to establish themselves, also establish others, and in wishing to enlarge themselves, also enlarge others. The ability to take as analogy what is near at hand can be called the method of humanity. (6:30) Formation of the classical Confucian tradition
According to Han Feizi (died 233 bce), shortly after Confucius’s death his followers split into eight distinct schools, all claiming to be the legitimate heir to the Confucian legacy. Presumably each school was associated with or inspired by one or more of Confucius’s disciples. Yet the Confucians did not exert much influence in the 5th century bce. Although the reverent Yan Yuan (or Yan Hui), the faithful Zengzi, the talented Zigong, the erudite Zixia, and others may have generated a great deal of enthusiasm among the second generation of Confucius’s students, it was not at all clear at the time that the Confucian tradition was to emerge as the most-powerful one in Chinese history.
Mencius (c. 371–c. 289 bce) complained that the world of thought in the early Warring States period (475–221 bce) was dominated by the collectivism of Mozi and the individualism of Yang Zhu (440–c. 360 bce). The historical situation a century after Confucius’s death clearly shows that the Confucian attempt to moralize politics was not working; the disintegration of the Zhou feudal ritual system and the rise of powerful hegemonic states reveal that wealth and power spoke the loudest. The hermits (the early Daoists), who left the world to create a sanctuary in nature in order to lead a contemplative life, and the realists (proto-Legalists), who played the dangerous game of assisting ambitious kings to gain wealth and power so that they could influence the political process, were actually determining the intellectual agenda. The Confucians refused to be identified with the interests of the ruling minority, because their social consciousness impelled them to serve as the conscience of the people. They were in a dilemma. Although they wanted to be actively involved in politics, they could not accept the status quo as the legitimate arena in which to exercise authority and power. In short, they were in the world but not of it; they could not leave the world, nor could they effectively change it.
Mencius, detail, ink and colour on silk; in the National Palace Museum, TaipeiCourtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China
Mencius: The paradigmatic Confucian intellectual
Mencius is known as the self-styled transmitter of the Confucian Way. Educated first by his mother and then allegedly by a student of Confucius’s grandson, Mencius brilliantly performed his role as a social critic, a moral philosopher, and a political activist. He argued that cultivating a class of scholar-officials who would not be directly involved in agriculture, industry, and commerce was vital to the well-being of the state. In his sophisticated argument against the physiocrats (those who advocated the supremacy of agriculture), he intelligently employed the idea of the division of labour to defend those who labour with their minds, observing that service is as important as productivity. To him Confucians served the vital interests of the state as scholars not by becoming bureaucratic functionaries but by assuming the responsibility of teaching the ruling minority humane government (renzheng) and the kingly way (wangdao). In dealing with feudal lords, Mencius conducted himself not merely as a political adviser but also as a teacher of kings. Mencius made it explicit that a true person cannot be corrupted by wealth, subdued by power, or affected by poverty.
To articulate the relationship between Confucian moral idealism and the concrete social and political realities of his time, Mencius began by exposing as impractical the prevailing ideologies of Mozi’s collectivism and Yang Zhu’s individualism. Mozi, a former Confucian who had become disaffected with rituals that he viewed as too time-consuming to be practical, promoted a mode of collectivism that rested on the principle of loving everyone (jianai) without respect to social status or personal relationship. Mencius contended, however, that the result of the Mohist admonition to treat a stranger as intimately as one’s own father would be to treat one’s own father as indifferently as one would treat a stranger. Yang Zhu, on the other hand, advocated the primacy of the self and the nourishment (yang) of one’s nature (xing) rather than investing one’s time and energy in social concerns and institutions that (Yang suggested) violated that nature. Yang Zhu gained infamy among Confucians for declaring that he would not sacrifice one eyelash to save the world. His point was arguably that people all too often waste their own lives in the service of social arrangements that actually undermine their best interests. Mencius, however, who as a good Confucian viewed the family as the natural paradigm of social organization, contended that excessive attention to self-interest would lead to political disorder. Indeed, Mencius argued, in Mohist collectivism fatherhood becomes a meaningless concept, and so does kingship in Yang Zhu’s individualism.
Mencius’s strategy for social reform was to change the language of profit, self-interest, wealth, and power by making it part of a moral discourse, with emphasis on rightness, public-spiritedness, welfare, and influence. Mencius, however, was not arguing against profit. Rather, he instructed the feudal lords to look beyond the narrow horizon of their palaces and to cultivate a common bond with their ministers, officers, clerks, and the seemingly undifferentiated masses. Only then, Mencius contended, would they be able to preserve their profit, self-interest, wealth, and power. He encouraged them to extend their benevolence (his interpretation of ren) and warned them that this was crucial for the protection of their families.