SOURCE: Jensen, Lionel M. “Introduction: Confucius, Kongzi, and the Modern Imagination.” In Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions & Universal Civilization, pp. 3-28. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Jensen traces the evolution of scholars's understanding of Confucian concepts over the centuries.]

A little more than four centuries ago, a detachment of seamen in service to Philip II of Spain (r. 1556-1598) and a few missionaries of a new order of the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus, sailed by Portuguese carrack to the south coast of China. We have lived the consequences of this passage ever since. Portuguese vessels, in particular, had been navigating this route for about three decades by the 1570s, calling twice a year at China's southern port of Guangzhou (Canton) for luxury items. Thus, there was nothing logistically unusual in the missionaries' arrival in 1579 on Chinese soil. The historical significance of their landing would not be apparent until several years later, when they would enter China as native priests (mendicant Buddhists, to be exact), and a conversation on indigenous ground was begun. From this dialogue of cultures at the far reaches of the known world, Christianity would assume a distinctive Chinese character and simultaneously a single Chinese teaching, and its founder would be translated through Latin into the language of contemporary moral science in Europe.

Before the European maritime expansion, China and Western Europe were isolated from each other. However, in the four centuries since the Jesuit contact, East and West have become bound by commerce and communication and joined, more importantly, in imagination. China and the West today are as near as they have ever been. Each is registered in the lexicon of the other: the Chinese are increasingly knowledgeable about the West, its culture as much as its technology, and Westerners are keenly aware of the politics, economy, and demography of China. The cultural vocabularies of both have been unselfconsciously enriched. For us in the West, the term “Confucianism” is richly familiar as an indigenous tradition translated by the Jesuits out of China. Indeed, China and the West have been bound in imagination by the concepts of Confucius and Confucianism since the late seventeenth century.

To any observer of the religions of China, it is evident that Confucianism holds a privileged place for us. Even to the casual browser of the local bookstore who finds works on Confucianism among the titles in “Eastern Religions” or “Eastern Thought/Mysticism” this is abundantly clear. In the West, Confucianism has long been considered the definitive ethos of the Chinese—their civil religion, their official cult, their intellectual tradition. Indeed, the term “Confucianism” has performed such varied service as a charter concept of Chinese culture for the West that it has become indistinguishable from what it signifies—China, especially the China of the ageless rhythms of family, field, and forebears.

In this particularity of reference also lies Confucianism's universality, for in its (Jesuit-created) role as the bearer of China's significance it was drawn into a seventeenth-century debate over truth, God, and representation that has continued to shape the cultural self-image of the West. Moreover, during the last century the linked history of Confucianism and Western thought has informed Chinese struggles to define culture, history, and identity by intellectuals who sought a conceptual vernacular that would unite the diverse cultural constituencies of a new nation.

As a native tradition it has also reached beyond the particularity of its local beginnings in that many of its followers and/or practitioners, known as ru, filled the ranks of an ever-expanding Chinese bureaucracy and served as advisers to the Supreme Lord (huangdi), or “Emperor.” Their cult, also known as ru, constituted one of China's three teachings (sanjiao). Along with dao (Daoism) and fo (Buddhism), ru doctrine appears in the Western taxonomic pantheon of world religions in the nineteenth century as one of three teachings that were given specific names: “Boudhism” in 1801, “Tauism” in 1839, and “Confucianism” in 1862. Of the three, only Confucianism is fully Latinized, while the others are represented as hybrid Anglo-Romanizations of native terms. The linguistic distinction accorded Confucianism is a vestige of the seventeenth-century European banishment of Daoism and Buddhism and its embrace of Confucianism. Of the three, only Confucianism has been integrated into Western self-consciousness to any degree.

Whether one calls Confucianism a “religion,” “philosophy,” “social ethic,” or “moral order,” it clearly is something more than a native Chinese tradition; it is a way of life that reflects how Westerners understand, or wish to understand, themselves. For four centuries and through varied circumstances it has figured prominently in the cultural consciousness of the West, especially now, with the ascendance of New Age philosophy and Asia's growing role in the world market.

Confucianism, whether it is seen as a contemporary strategy for self-discovery or as a tool for understanding the Asian economic “miracle,” is the consequence of centuries of relationship between China and the West. As such, it is a powerful and timely instrument for explaining how and why the early cultural intimacy of China and the West developed as it did.

The introduction of this book begins an extended meditation on Confucianism: how it was made, the Western and Chinese communities involved in its making, and the consequences of its invention. It begins with the premise that Confucianism is largely a Western invention, supposedly representing what is registered by the complex of terms rujia (ru family), rujiao (ru teaching), ruxue (ru learning), and ruzhe (the ru). Presuming that the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius (known to the Chinese as Kongzi) is the source of this complex, it takes his figure as its focus.

I propose that we resist the reflex to treat these entities, Confucianism and ru, as equivalent and consider rather that what we know of Confucius is not what the ancient Chinese knew as Kongzi (Master Kong). I suggest instead that Confucius assumed his present familiar features as the result of a prolonged, deliberate process of manufacture in which European intellectuals took a leading role. Our Confucius is a product fashioned over several centuries by many hands, ecclesiastical and lay, Western and Chinese.

In this century in China, Confucius, the largely Western invention, inspired a re-creation of the native hero, Kongzi, who was then absorbed into Chinese intellectuals' font of mythological material and proved critical to their endeavor of making a new Chinese nation through historical construction. The joint quality of this invention is the main concern of this book: how the sixteenth-century Chinese supplied the raw material with storied forms of Kongzi that inspired the Western celebrity of Confucius and lent novel form to a contested European representation of science and theology; and how the imported nineteenth-century Western conceptual vernacular of nationalism, evolution, and ethos lent dimension to the nativist imaginings of twentieth-century Chinese, who reinvented Kongzi as a historicized religious figure.

The reader should not conclude that to establish a Western provenance for Confucius suggests some kind of fraud. This book is not mere iconoclasm, a simple act of demythologization, consonant with a contemporary, postmodern criticism that dismantles accepted ideas. Nor does it imply that there can be no native heroes, only foreign-made ones, or attack the hegemony of Western culture. My story of Confucius and Confucianism is a reverent account of an ecumenical impulse or spirit, definitive of a modern temper formed in the Renaissance, forgotten since the seventeenth century in the West, and recovered in the twentieth century in China. It is a tale of two different centuries of turmoil and of two eras of cultural reformation in which pious communities disposed to reasonableness and toleration recognized in their local circumstances the prophetic intimations of the absolute.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, images of Confucius (Kongzi, 551?-479? b.c.e.) and of the religion or philosophy inspired by his memory, Confucianism, appear to grow in number and in salience. In the West, Confucius is seen, or rather represented, almost everywhere: in videotapes on conducting business with the cultures of the Far East; in software applications; in in-flight magazines; on T-shirts; in cartoons; in public television documentaries; on menus; in travel magazines; on yogurt containers; in recent efforts to portray Confucianism as a new world religion; on the World Wide Web; and in an increasing number of scholarly treatments of Chinese religion, Chinese thought, comparative philosophy, and the indigenous cultural roots of Asia's astonishing economic success. The number and variety of such images rival the array found in China in 136 b.c.e., when an imperial cult honoring Kongzi was purportedly inaugurated and when followers of his teaching in service to the emperor were too numerous to count.

Examples of Confucius's contemporary popularity range from the parody of “Confucius at the Office”—which shows the sage laboring to produce clichés—to the high regard in which Confucius is held by Freemasons. (A likeness of him, along with such other wise men of the East as Zoroaster and Mani, may be found on the interior walls of many Scottish Rites temples.) Other examples include the collection of witticisms “Cornfucius Say,”¹ or the self-help book How Would Confucius Ask for a Raise?² Confucius is part of the undigested mass of our modern cultural stock, one which has been accumulating since the seventeenth century, when European intellectuals appropriated the iconography of this figure and the native tradition identified with him and represented in the letterbooks, translations, and treatises of Jesuit missionaries stationed in southern China.

And it is with the work of this missionary community that the intertwined tales of Confucius the hero and Confucianism the religion begin, for it was from this community's mission among the Chinese that the man and the religion were made. Indeed, he was made, first fabricated in the late sixteenth century by a small, reverent band of “accommodationist”³ Jesuit fathers living in the wilderness of southern China, who had been especially inspired by the example of a culture hero revered by the Chinese as Kongzi. Following their arrival in China in 1583, the fathers quickly produced a volume of testimony in Latin, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese of the moral genius of their inspiration, Confucius, drawing on a thousand-year-long transmission of indigenous texts and tales about Kongzi.

Their Confucius was initially always paired with Kongzi. In fact, “Confucius” was invented as a Latinized equivalent for “Kong Fuzi,” a rare, respectful title for the Chinese sage Kongzi that could only be found on the spirit tablets (shenwei) of certain regional temples devoted to worship of this hallowed figure and his extended apostolic lineage.⁴ Thus for these sixteenth-century Jesuits, “Confucius”/“Kong Fuzi” was a dual symbol best likened to Janus, the Roman god whose two-headed face was identified with gates, doors, and beginnings.

This Jesuit-Chinese construct was formed at the beginning of what the Jesuits later termed “Christiana expeditio” (the Christian expedition) and served as a door through which the fathers passed into Chinese life, discarding in transit much of what defined them in their church's eyes as “soldiers of Christ.” Moreover, “Confucius”/“Kong Fuzi” marked the humble beginning of something these missionaries could not have anticipated, but with which we are familiar—sinology. From this beginning, where the native Kongzi and the foreign Confucius were joined in the minds of the makers on local Chinese ground, “Confucius” quickly acquired a universal character. It is this newer, solitary Latin incarnation that was conveyed across the globe in the spirit of the Enlightenment and has reached us today through the polymorphous passion of commerce as the icon Confucius.

THE MAKING OF THE ICON CONFUCIUS

Throughout the seventeenth century the fathers of the China Mission translated indigenous texts into Latin to demonstrate the inchoate monotheism of native Chinese faith. In the course of these labors, they provided their superiors and benefactors with encyclopedic documentation of Chinese habit and belief. Back home, an educated European laity excited by the intellectual passions of discovery—cartography, astronomy, mathematics, and linguistics—anxiously awaited the publication of the letterbooks and journals of the missionaries.⁵ Among these observers, dilettantes, and scientists, the Jesuit “Confucius” found an especially hospitable ground, where his writings were welcomed as containing a wisdom remarkably compatible with Western morality.

At the dawn of what was then an empirical mapping of the world, geographically, linguistically, culturally, and, most important of all, religiously, the reification of Confucius by members of Europe's Royal Society—now without his alter ego, Kongzi—dissolved one-half of a bivalent symbol. The power of Confucius as a symbol derived from the European presumption that he was the iconic representation of Chinese native otherness. Consequently, as Jesuit letterbooks containing the missionaries' accounts of life in China were published in the last decade of the sixteenth century, his popularity spread along separate, contiguous fronts, ecclesiastical and lay.

The icon Confucius served two distinct European communities, for which it functioned differently: for the Jesuits, who knew him as Kongzi, he was dear to a small group of missionaries living among, and increasingly sympathetic to, the Chinese; for cultivated Europeans he was a symbol of either the nobility of the savage or of the inherent rationality of the “natural,” known, as were most other admired intellectual figures of the day, by a Latin cognomen.

By the late eighteenth century, as Europe acquired an “Enlightened” cultural self-consciousness, Confucius was firmly entrenched in contemporary Western culture as a sage, and his Chinese followers were called “Confucians,” a term that evoked a panoply of associations: deference, urbanity, wisdom, moral probity, reasoned and not slavish classicism, and a learned, paternal authoritarianism. These qualities, like the figure who embodied them, were the desiderata of Europeans doubtful of the institution of monarchy and despairing of religious war.

Confucius, and the China metonymically captured in this symbol, appeared in the writings of many Enlightenment figures: Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Comte, Quesnay, Fontenelle, Diderot, Leibniz, Wolff, Malebranche, Bayle, even Defoe. Confucius's greatest moment came perhaps in 1758, when a French edition of Diogenes Laertius's work, The Lives of the Philosophers, published in Amsterdam, included a ninety-page exposition of his doctrines.⁶ Confucius, as symbol of things Chinese, was critical to an emerging political, social, and theological criticism that yielded such works as Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697-1702), Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (1756) and Dictionnaire philosophique (1757), Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) and De l'esprit des lois (1748), and Quesnay's Le Despotisme de la Chine (1767).⁷ At this moment of conflict between the anciens and the modernes, the image of the Chinese ancient helped shape the self-image of the modern, our modern.

The distribution of Confucius's name and image in Europe at this time may have been far-reaching because, like capital, his value was not bound by the conditions of his production. In this environment, Confucius simply existed as a finished product, a symbol of certain values, chief of which was otherness, and thus he could be appropriated by any person or group seeking to represent such values. For Voltaire, he could symbolize a genuine, non-European moral reason while for Montesquieu he represented despotism. This symbolic variability reflected contemporary European debates about self, society, and the sacred at the inception of the nation-state.

The wide popularity of Confucius was also coincident with global economic developments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that brought Europe and China closer than ever before. At the end of the sixteenth century, a rudimentary global economy was in place that linked China economically with Europe, with the Americas and sites like the silver mines of Potosí in the New World. By the beginning of the seventeenth century nearly 50 percent of the precious metals mined throughout the world found their way to China. A conceptual market developed alongside the spice, metals, and luxury trade, bearing many icons of the Chinese that circulated widely in Europe, among them the icon Confucius.⁸

In the simultaneous circulation of ideas and material goods that linked China and Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Confucius was a significant, and salient, artifact. The frequency with which his name and image appeared in letters, memoirs, treatises, travel literature, and histories suggests that he was moved like New World specie in an expanding market of new ideas joining Rome with Paris, London, Berlin, Prague and then, in turn, with the missionary outposts at Goa, Canton, Macao, and Beijing. According to Paul Rule, the first engraved portrait of Confucius, which appeared in 1687, was “plagiarized by countless works of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century,” including a popular memoir by the French Jesuit and royal mathematician Louis le Comte.⁹ The chief intellectual consequence for us of this conceptual commerce was that the Confucius/Kongzi of the Jesuits of the Zhaoqing mission became, simply, Confucius: the person whom we know as teacher, moral exemplar, sage, political philosopher, and, above all, the patriarch of China's civil religion.

Scholars and the public alike often presume that these many different roles correspond to traits of the native Kongzi; all are sure they know who “Confucius” is. But despite the array of images that supposedly represent him, this Confucius, detached from his native ground, is a figment of the Western imagination. The Confucius and Confucianism to which we have granted a compelling authority are conceptual products of foreign origin, made to articulate indigenous qualities of Chinese culture. Of Kongzi himself, little is known. It is this irony that accounts for the marvelous symbolic diversity of Confucius and of Kongzi.

Confucius, the celebrated etymon of our tradition, Confucianism, and Kongzi, the revered patriarch of the ru transmission, are tropes rather than persons. Confucius and Kongzi have, like all prophets, martyrs, and heroes, been granted an impressive collection of realia, vestiges of the many traditions made in the name of this hero. Indeed, in China and in the West, the making of such traditions displays an uncanny functional similarity, for in China for millennia Kongzi has been a popular focus of invention.

THE NATIVE RESTORATION OF KONGZI: COMMERCE AND FETISHISM

While the story of Confucius's popularity reveals much about the history of our culture, it also doubles back upon the Chinese today, where Kongzi, his native narrative substrate, has been restored to a prominence comparable to that of the Western invention. In present-day China, where tradition is again in (officially administered) vogue, Kongzi is quoted in public service advertisements warning of the perils of gambling; he is seen in television documentaries on such topics as Han minzu wenhua (the culture of the Han race) and as a symbol of the nobility of antique culture. For that matter, wenming (civilization) and wenhua (culture) are heard and seen everywhere—even on street signs (wenming weisheng lu, a civilized and sanitary street) and at work units (wenming weisheng danwei, a civilized and sanitary work unit). Both wenming and wenhua bear a single connotation—the proud superiority of Chinese tradition, of which Kongzi is increasingly the popular icon.

The Chinese, in the throes of hypergrowth and zealously promoted modernization, are borrowing from this indigenous ethos and have rediscovered their Kongzi—as Confucius. Characteristic of this national revaluation of Kongzi as a figure of international significance is a very recent work, titled Ruxue yu dongfang wenhua (Ruism and Eastern Culture), by Xu Yuanhe, who insists that East Asia's economic miracle is the epiphenomenon of what he calls fuxing ruxue de daolu (the moral road of revived Ruism).¹⁰ Scholarly and popular works touting the resources of tradition and culture, in particular Confucianism, are increasingly numerous in China. At the same time, publishing houses, most notably the Guji Chubanshe (Classic Publishers) in Shanghai, have spawned a steady growth in reprints—in traditional rather than the officially sanctioned simplified characters—of the classical texts of Kongzi's era. And the current global popularity of the East Asian Development Model ensures that the interest in Confucianism will be sustained.

Kongzi and his teaching have enjoyed a steady resurgence since the late 1970s, when earlier campaigns to shape national moral fiber through criticism of Lin Biao (1907-1971) and Kongzi receded.¹¹ It is now politically correct to appreciate Kongzi, whereas from 1973 to 1978 the fervor of the country's socialist consciousness, its “redness” (hong), was displayed through the grandly choreographed public excoriation of this cultural patriarch. The winds of change in Chinese political culture blow furiously and always to extremes—as the fluctuations of reform and repression following the Tian'anmen Square demonstrations in the spring of 1989 demonstrate. But since the Department of History at Shandong University sponsored a reevaluation of Kongzi and rujia sixiang (ruist thought) in the fall of 1978, the political climate has favored Kongzi decidedly.

The annual observances of his birth, which many believe date back to the Han dynasty (202 b.c.e.-220 c.e.), have resumed with great pomp and circumstance—a celebration keyed to a new “great leap forward” in domestic and international tourism. In 1980 the Kongzi Research Center (Kongzi Yanjiu Zhongxin) was founded in Qufu (three years later it was renamed the Kongzi Research Institute, Kongzi Yanjiusuo). In the same period the Chinese government authorized publication of Cai Shangsi's Kongzi sixiang de xitong (The System of Kongzi's Thought [1982]) and Zhong Zhaopeng's Kongzi yanjiu (Research on Kongzi [1983]).¹²

The New World Press of Beijing followed this revival of Kongzi and in 1984 published an intriguingly titled memoir, Kongfu neizhai yishi—Kongzi houyi de huiyi (Anecdotes from the Women's Quarters of the Kong Residence—The Reminiscences of Kongzi's Descendant), written by Ke Lan and Kong Demao, a seventy-seventh-generation descendant of Kongzi. In the same year, the book appeared in English translation as In the Mansion of Confucius' Descendants and claimed to reveal “the legends, stories, ceremonies and intrigues connected with the mansion of the main branch of the Kong clan—the lineal posterity of Confucius.”¹³

On September 22, 1984, when the 2,535th anniversary of Kongzi's putative birth was celebrated, three thousand selected Chinese and foreign guests presided over the ceremonies while the populace filled the temple grounds.¹⁴ The statue of Kongzi, which had been demolished when Red Guards, on a mission to destroy all symbols of China's “old culture,” ravaged Qufu during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, was restored to mark the occasion. The most telling evidence of Kongzi's rehabilitation came in June 1985 with the establishment of another Kongzi Research Institute (Kongzi Yanjiusuo)—this one located in the former imperial temple to Kongzi, just southeast of the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Once an outcast, he is again the sage and has been received as would be any mythic hero returned home. At Qufu, in Shandong Province (Kongzi's disputed home,¹⁵ the official locus of the ancient cult honoring him), shop owners proudly display bottles of San Kong Pijiu (Three Kongs Beer), “the number one beer in central Shandong,” and in the center of the city stand three twenty-foot-tall mockups of the celebrated local brew.¹⁶ Another beverage named for Kongzi has acquired an international following: the “Confucius Family Liquor” (Kong Fu Jia Jiu), made from sorghum, wheat, barley, and peas and produced by the Qufu Distillery, is now distributed in the United States by Conwell Import and Export, Inc., of South El Monte, California.¹⁷

On the streets of Beijing in 1984, the revered “Little Red Book” of Chairman Mao's selected quotations was not available, although several vendors proudly hawked Kongzi's Selected Sayings (Lunyu) in a handsomely bound vermilion-covered pocket book edition. A local publication of the Qufu Tanwenwu Guanli Weiyuanhui (Qufu Control Committee for Cultural Artifacts), the obviously imitative production contained all twenty chapters of the standard Lunyu printed in simplified characters. Its resemblance to the first editions of Mao Zedong's quotations is startling—which may account for its sudden disappearance and replacement with a second, jade-colored edition. A restauranteur in Beijing has even opened the Confucius Restaurant (Kong Shangtang), justifying his choice of name with the rhetorical query, “Why not the best?” Kongzi is simply good business, a fact not lost on the nation's postal system, which in 1990 issued a commemorative stamp set bearing his likeness. One stamp was valued at 1 yuan 60—the exact amount needed to post a card to the West in 1990—and portrays Kongzi, riding high in a scroll-laden chariot, attended by four disciples on foot. In an interesting reflection of contemporary Chinese prosperity and the popular association of Kongzi with success, he is depicted as heavy, even corpulent.

More impressive than Chinese popular culture's reinvention of Kongzi has been the steady growth of Sino-Western scholarly interest in Confucius and the religiophilosophical complexes of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism. While the Confucius of Gary Larson's cartoon and the Beijing restauranteur has attained universality at the expense of meaning, scholarship in Chinese intellectual history and philosophy has sought to confer global significance on Confucius and Confucianism on the basis of an uncanny relevance of the philosophy of the latter to contemporary problems, academic and social. These philosophical and religious claims to new universal status have been secured for Confucianism by East Asian scholars whose work reproduces in another form the interpretive predilections of the Jesuits while it reiterates the current commercial fetishization of Confucius.

CONFUCIUS, CONFUCIANISM, AND THE POLITICS OF SCHOLARSHIP

Asian politicians and scholars in the 1980s and 1990s have used images of Confucius and his teaching to counteract the spiritual and cultural consequences of rapid economic expansion. Engaging in an essentialist fetishization of Confucianism as a fundamental native value, such individuals, most prominently the former prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, have made Confucius the symbol of an Asia-specific religious ethos.¹⁸

Late in a century in which the integrity of the family—Western and Asian—is believed to be dissolving and in which alienation can no longer be assuaged with the balm of individualism, these scholars contend that the Confucian values of the home, moral self-discipline, reciprocity, mutual respect, and benevolence provide a way out of moral meaninglessness. They believe Confucianism to be both a defining ethos of Asian peoples and, not coincidentally, the spiritual force behind the Asian dominance of world economic markets. In this respect, Confucianism is less an intellectual or philosophical phenomenon and more a vital form of life, one reminiscent of the transformative impulses of Max Weber's Puritanism, though without Puritanism's otherworldly, transcendent yearnings.

East Asian scholars argue that there is a necessary generative relation between Asian “hypergrowth” and a fundamentalist Confucian culture.¹⁹ They claim that the economic success of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea (the “Four Little Dragons”) is emblematic of an alternative development paradigm wherein the “ancient” cultural claims of family, respect for education, compliance with authority, and religious faith will counteract the deleterious effects of modernization so common in the West. Pace Weber, who had claimed that Confucianism sought accommodation with, not transformation of, the world, the Four Little Dragons display an aggressive entrepreneurial spirit and an indefatigable work ethic, thanks to Confucianism. Thus tradition yields modernity on its own terms, and Chineseness provides the model for a new “age of the Pacific Rim.”

Tu Wei-ming is the principal spokesman for this creative reinvention of Confucianism as a form of religion. He claims that Confucianism is undergoing a “third wave” of rejuvenation. This contemporary incarnation of the tradition (which I call postmodern Confucianism) should, argues Tu Wei-ming, be recognized as a new world religion, on a par with Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, given to the same contemporary fundamentalist reactions:

[This] position envisions Confucianism … as a tradition of religious philosophy. Confucianism so conceived is a way of life which demands an existential commitment on the part of Confucians no less intensive and comprehensive than that demanded of the followers of other spiritual traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism.²⁰

Curiously, this universalist vision of postmodern Confucianism is grounded in the specific, parochial qualities definitive of the local tradition; both place especially strong emphasis on the family as a timeless ethical unit of labor. Ru, liberally reinterpreted as xin ruxue (new Confucian learning), is undergoing a revitalization that its advocates believe is continuous with a millennial cumulative tradition inaugurated with Kongzi. Claiming that their vision of a humane modernization requires a return to the fundamental virtues of Confucianism, these contemporary practitioners of Confucian religion are also involved in manufacturing a new moment of a tradition.²¹

The assertion that a Confucian resurgence in the form of the Asian family and work ethic is responsible for the preternatural economic growth of East Asia is more imaginative than empirical. Although quite different from American popular perceptions of Confucius, academic works such as these are no less manufactured and must be recognized as products of scholarly desire that mask their own status as fictions.

Within Western academic circles, another identifiable trend effected through the manufacture of Confucius and Confucianism is Neo-Confucianism, defined most fully by Wm. Theodore de Bary. The objective of this scholarly industry has been to establish incontrovertibly the vitality of the Confucian tradition, now defined as a direct line of intellectual affinitive transmission from Kongzi through the Song period (970-1279 c.e.) lixue (learning of principle) and Ming (1368-1644 c.e.) xinxue (learning of the heart) fellowships to the present. From the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries, as de Bary tells it, Neo-Confucianism was the culturally hegemonic force produced from the union of Buddhism and the native Confucian tradition. As a cultural force it encapsulated the profound social, intellectual, technological, and political changes of these seven centuries and yet remained fundamentally consistent with the tradition of learning put forward by Confucius, who stressed weiji (learning for oneself) as the ideal.

De Bary construes the Neo-Confucian—read Zhu Xi (1130-1200 c.e.)—emphasis on zide (getting it oneself) as a latter-day manifestation of the same heuristic instinct, an instinct which he identifies as both individualist and liberal. In a recent collection of his essays, de Bary justifies the application of these modern, Western terms because they correspond to what he finds in the native texts:

The question of the individual in Confucian thought is one I stumbled into some years ago while pursuing other lines of inquiry, historical and political, which, it turned out, could only be dealt with adequately by addressing first the problem of the Neo-Confucian self. In doing so, I found myself using terms like “individualism” or “liberalism,” not because of any predisposition to read Western values into Chinese thought but because, against my original assumptions and preconceptions, certain resemblances could not be ignored.²²

De Bary is not just concerned with providing an adequate description of Chinese thought, of course. He is also engaged in building a connection back to the world of the Neo-Confucians, a world whose culture was vibrant, innovative, and changing, and full of the very values that Westerners hold dear. It is the resemblance of the Western liberal self and the lixue disciple who discovers the meaning of a passage, for himself, zide, that is remarkable. All men, it seems, are brothers. Just as with classicists like Zhu Xi, who explicitly identified a responsibility to seize the moment of the past before it disappeared and to preserve it through transmission, de Bary, inspired by the humanity of ancient example, commends himself to the task of its recollection:

Today no people can look to their own traditions alone for this kind of learning and understanding, any more than could the Confucians earlier. The latter at least understood the need for dialogue and discussion as essential to “advancing the Way,” even though they were unable to sustain it, much less broaden it, in the given circumstances. Now the time has come for us to extend and expand the discourse, as a dialogue with the past, with other cultures, and even with future generations, who cannot speak for themselves but whose fate is in our hands.²³

Arguments such as these, with their message of the enduring relevance of medieval Chinese beliefs and of the continuing vitality of a tradition deemed dead earlier in this century, are inspiring in that they offer proof of the vitality of the ru tradition of scholar-officials. Nevertheless, such accounts also reveal much about the desire of the interpreter. All interpretations and translations involve intention, and accounts of ru or Confucianism have been no exception.²⁴ De Bary's account of the contemporary relevance of Zhu Xi's thought, then, is in this sense his own and not Zhu Xi's construction. Although such a construction may rescue lixue and Zhu from the contempt in which they were held by early-twentieth-century Chinese nationalists, what the account salvages should not be taken as simply restoring the tradition it purports to uphold.

Though we can never entirely restore the true principles of lixue, Neo-Confucianism is significant because of the demonstration of its contemporary relevance. After more than thirty years, de Bary's manufacture of an individualist, humane, and liberal Neo-Confucian tradition remains controversial, perhaps because it often seems to claim to be above intellectual debate, to have some special claim to authenticity or truth.²⁵

But even those who attempt to avoid claims of authenticity and truth find it difficult. In Thinking through Confucius, David Hall and Roger Ames have provided an intriguing construction of Confucius through an “experimental dialogue” in comparative philosophy.²⁶ While the authors make it clear that their endeavor to reveal the thinking of Confucius requires the translation of concepts across differing cultural contexts and times, they do not see that their enterprise is in fact fabricated. Their book, however, is a significant rejoinder both to previous contemporary interpreters/translators of Confucian texts such as de Bary and Wing-tsit Chan and to the Anglo-European philosophical tradition.

Their result in thinking through Confucius is, first, an understanding of the principal issues in his thought and, second, the application of his “take” on these issues to a reshaping of the philosophical premises that ground our way of thinking in the West. In announcing their comparative interpretive advantage, Hall and Ames state:

We are convinced that our exercise in cross-cultural anachronism will provide us a truer account of Confucius for the following reason: current Western understandings of Confucius are the consequence of the mostly unconscious importation of philosophical and theological assumptions into primary translations that have served to introduce Confucius' thinking to the West. These assumptions are associated with the mainstream of the Anglo-European classical tradition. In point of fact, as we shall demonstrate directly, these assumptions have seriously distorted the thinking of Confucius. Our thinking through Confucius therefore must be in its initial phases an unthinking of certain of the interpretive categories that by now have come to be presupposed in understanding Confucius.²⁷

The authors' objective is an accurate linguistic and conceptual translation; thus, they presume it is possible hermeneutically to recover the “true” Confucius. By considering their account of Confucius to be truer than preceding ones, Ames and Hall fall victim to the Anglo-European philosophical paradigm of commensurability against which Richard Rorty, whom they hold in high regard, has so eloquently written.²⁸ The consequences of this thought experiment are the elevation of Confucius to world-philosophical significance and a message of Deweyan moral rebuke to contemporary Western philosophy—philosophy has no meaning if ripped from its moorings in public life.

Looking back over this high- and low-culture catalogue of the imaginative constructions of Confucius/Kongzi and Confucianism/ru it may seem obvious which are fabricated and which are fictitious. Surely Confucius was not the author of the platitudes he is portrayed as creating in Gary Larson's cartoon. Nor did the Confucius of Warring States (479-221 b.c.e.) China appear with the darkened skin and white robes of a man from the Levant (least of all because his wearing white would suggest that he was in mourning) or the headpiece of an ancient Egyptian ruler, as he does in the iconography of Freemason orientalism. The Confucius of these two imaginations is an invention, more obvious, perhaps, to our eye than the views of a Beijing businessman or the thoughts of the teeming throngs at the national shrine of China's Zhongguo wenhua de daren, “the great man of Chinese culture.”

We are right to consider these as examples of a commoditizing manufacture of Confucius, and believe that postmodern Confucianism, de Bary's Neo-Confucianism, and Ames and Hall's rethought Confucius are less so. The latter examples are, however, no less manufactured, regardless of claims of continuity with the tradition as handed down from Zhu Xi, or of the contention that one offers an “understanding of Confucius's thinking.” Each of these interpretations is a metaphorical wager on coherence and succeeds insofar as it is able to command contemporary assent.

Thus, in juxtaposing these very different cultural phenomena, low-brow and high-brow, as examples of invention, I am suggesting that they are functionally similar. They are reminiscent, moreover, of a plasticity evidenced by Kongzi himself in antiquity. Throughout Chinese history, Kongzi and the name assumed by the followers inspired by his example, ru, ran a similar gamut of parodic extremes that may be observed in native texts from the pre-Qin (579-221 b.c.e.) to the Tang (618-906 c.e.) eras.

RU: STORIED TRUTH AND SYMBOLIC PLASTICITY

For early followers of the ru tradition, Kongzi was the sage exemplar of a proper life. Praise of the sort uttered by Mengzi (Mencius) when recalling the virtues of Kongzi, Bo Yi, and Yi Yin (all sage heroes) is neither uncharacteristic nor inordinately fulsome: “All were wise men of antiquity. I as yet have been unable to follow their path; still, what I desire is to emulate Kongzi. … Since the birth of humanity there has been no one like Kongzi.”²⁹ Kongzi and ru, however, much as they were honored by such latter-day followers, were ridiculed and denounced by contemporary adversaries. Indeed, ru and Kongzi traveled widely through the imaginations of other literary traditions, as hypocrites, shallow thinkers, liars, and panderers. We find them in the texts of adversarial groups like the Daoist, Mohist, Legalist, Eclectic, and Utilitarian schools, where they stand for sentiments consistent with, as well as contrary to, those expressed in the Lunyu.³⁰ From the frequent citations of Kongzi and ru in traditions antithetical to them it is clear that in the late Warring States period, Kongzi and ru functioned as tropes of excessive ritualism, or traditionalism.

By calling them “tropes” I mean that they were figurative expressions of diverse symbolic character and a certain authority, as shown in this passage from the philosophical Daoist Zhuangzi, typical in its treatment of Kongzi and ru as coded concepts:

On water it is most convenient to travel by boat, on dry land in a carriage; if you were to try to push a boat on land because it goes well on water, you could last out the age without traveling an inch. Are not the past and the present [Kongzi's] water and his dry land? And Zhou and Lu his boat and carriage? At the present day, to have an urge to get the institutions of Zhou running in Lu is like pushing a boat on dry land, there's no result for all your labor, you're certain to bring disaster on yourself.³¹

Inspired by the morbidity of ru ritual service at funerals, these same adversaries used grave robbing as a grisly metaphor for the ru's obsession with antiquity, as in this memorable vignette:

Ru, taking up the [Book of] Odes and the [Record of the] Rites, rob graves. The big ru announces to his subordinates: “In the East, the day begins, how is the work going?” The little ru reply: “We have yet to remove the graveclothes, but there's a pearl in his mouth!” … [They] push back his sidelocks, pull down his beard, and then one ru, using a metal gimlet, pries into his chin, [and] delicately draws open the jaws, never injuring the pearl in his mouth.³²

Kongzi and ru, as tropes, could be worked to denigrate as well as to lionize, and thus were instantly recognizable to aficionado and adversary.

The effectiveness of this trope, like that of any other, depended entirely on the reader's familiarity with Kongzi and ru—an obvious presumption of the Zhuangzi authors. And from the frequency of their appearance in these texts it is evident that Kongzi and ru were very well known, although their significance was not uniform. At the same time that Kongzi was bandied about in this way by rhetorical proponents and opponents, cycles of stories grew around him that were repeated generation after generation and came to resemble a transmission text inscribed on the memories of raconteur and audience. A collected body of lore attested before the Han era included stories of Kongzi's magical birth, the heroics of his father (Shu Liang He), the travail of his mother, the illicit nature of his parents' union, the physical deformity of his older brother, and tales relating to his later travels among the kingdoms of the Zhan'guo era. Indeed, fragments of this legend cycle can be found in a number of such early literary works as Mozi, Lüshi chunqiu, Mengzi, Yanzi chunqiu, Lunyu, Huainanzi, and Zhuangzi and were authoritatively assembled in the first official biography of Kongzi in the Shiji.³³

In the book of Mozi, for example, there is an entire chapter, “Fei ru,” or “Contra-ru,” one of many disputations of principal rhetorical categories. Here ru ritual obsession, extolled in their texts as devotion to gu (antiquity), is represented as self-serving and, like the Zhuangzi passage above, this Mozi text declares that the real motivation for ru insistence on elaborate funerals and a three-year mourning rite is not the preservation of ancient practice, but the collection of revenue. Near the end of this “Contra-ru” chapter, Kongmou, or “So-and-so Kong,” appears with increasing frequency, usually in connection with the telling of a tale that we also know from the ru story traditions. In these instances Kongmou is a narrative marker, and it identifies the single figure from Lunyu lore, Kongzi, as a congeneric invention of the era. By comparison of these two tellings of the same story, we can observe the semiotics of Kongzi as trope and glimpse some of the symbolic plasticity common to our postmodern culture.

In a well-known account from Lunyu 15.1 that depicts the fledgling fellowship on the edge of extinction in the course of one of their many sojourns following Kongzi's exile from his native kingdom of Lu, the ru narrative reads:

In Chen when provisions ran out, the followers became so sick that they were unable to stand upright. Zilu approached him [Kongzi] and said querulously: “Is it proper for lordlings [junzi] to be reduced to straitened circumstances [as we are]?” He said, “A lordling can endure hardship; however, it is the lesser man who, when subjected [to such hardship], dissolves.”³⁴

Now compare this passage with a parallel account from the Mozi, where the tale of ru destitution is told with the same raw story material worked up to a very different effect:

Once, So-and-so Kong was destitute between Cai and Chen having only vegetable soup without rice to eat. [After] ten days, Zilu roasted a pig for him. So-and-so Kong did not inquire from whence the meat came and simply ate. [Zilu, then] took a person's clothing and bartered it for wine. So-and-so Kong did not inquire from whence the libation came and simply drank. [Yet when] Ai Gong [Duke Ai of Lu] received Kongzi, Kongzi refused to sit on a mat that was not properly placed and would not eat [meat] that was not properly sliced. Zilu approached [him] and asked: Why the obverse of what was done between Chen and Cai? So-and-so Kong replied, “Come, I will tell you. Then our objective was to remain alive [while] today our objective is righteousness.”³⁵

Using the same tale, the Mozi passage emphasizes a situational ethic and lampoons the application of an uncompromising ethical standard that could result in death with honor. In this account, two separate events are condensed into the one retelling to achieve an effect of insincerity and falsehood. This “Fei ru” chapter of the Mozi was assembled circa 375 b.c.e.—at least a century following the putative death of Kongzi. Therefore, it is significant that its account would so accurately reproduce the story from the Lunyu. As a narrative device “Kongmou” testifies to the existence of a larger collection of stories or at least of multiple renderings of the same story.

In fact, portions of the Lunyu and later hagiographic works like the School Sayings of Kongzi (Kongzi jiayu) and the Kong Transmission Record (Kong congzi), though replete with remarks attributed to Kongzi, were nonetheless produced from just such a wider, popular lore. In other words, in native texts Kongzi was not simply the ancestral teacher of classically educated followers, called ru, as Han redactors believed and as we have conventionally assumed. Indeed, by the Tang dynasty he was a well-worn tool of narrative invention, in virtually the same manner that Emperor Yang of the Sui (589-617 c.e.) served as a protagonist in the historical romances of the seventeenth-century Chinese novel.³⁶ Thus Kongzi appeared, as Arthur Waley has shown, as a protagonist in satirical and even pornographic popular ballads, some of which have been preserved in the grottoes of Dunhuang.³⁷ In his study of Chinese scholars and the state in the Tang, David McMullen notes that Kongzi was the focus of “an official cult of satire and ribaldry” associated with court entertainment by the mid-ninth century.³⁸ Moreover, in a dramatic example of the loosening of sectarian ties, Kongzi, along with his most cherished disciple, Yan Hui, entered into popular Buddhist cults as a bodhisatta (pusa), a compassionate semidivine being—an honor visited most recently on the late Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976).

As we see from these and many other examples, the name “Kongzi” may recur over time, but the individual it designates is anything but consistent or continuous; the history of Kongzi, like that of Confucius, is one of differential invention and local manufacture.

IN DEFENSE OF A TITLE: THE MEANING OF “MANUFACTURE”

A question that I have deliberately hesitated in answering is, why “manufacture”? There are many reasons why “manufacture” is an appropriate term for describing the processes of conceptual invention with which I am concerned and of which we have already considered some examples, past and present.

“Manufacture” conventionally means “make by hand.” It derives from the Latin “manufactus,” literally, “handmade.” And “handmade” is an apt term for a tradition, that discrete transmission of custom, habit, stories, and the rights to the telling of them. In this way, “manufacture,” with its connotation of “manyhandedness,” captures the palimpsestic labors of a cumulative tradition of local knowledge of rite, text, and the strategies for using them that we associate with Confucianism.

Although “manufacture” was widely used in the West in the eighteenth century because of the increasing definition of industrial work as manufacture, the word first appeared in the final decades of the sixteenth century, when it was used to describe a product of “the artificer's hand”—an image formed by human agency, rather than something naturally occurring.³⁹ Less than two decades later, two continents away, Chinese provincial officials were considering granting several Jesuit fathers in Macao the right to build their first mission in southern China.

“Manufacture” functions as a temporal marker in a cultural chronology that, in defining me (for example) as an interpreter living in the era of industrial civilization, identifies my place in relation to the texts of the works and lives I have elected to study. I am a latecomer to these texts, but then so were the Jesuits in studying Kongzi, and as Kongzi was in studying the Zhou.

But more than chronology and handmadeness favor my use of “manufacture”; it is the doubleness of its meaning that makes it suitable for disclosing the construction of communities of sense that emerges from these texts. The early meaning of “manufacture” emerged from the interstice between something made by hand and the natural object. What was made by hand was, ipso facto, not God-given. Such an artifact, while it was not natural, was no less real than nature. The significance of “manufacture,” like so many other words, comes from the ambiguity of its cognate associations, in this case from the slippery distinction between natural and artificial. We will see in each of the chapters below that ambiguity is the most prominent characteristic of both Confucianism and ru, and it is responsible, moreover, for invention.

The equivocal significance of manufacture as both “made” and “made up” recalls the ambiguity of “fiction,” from the Latin fingere, to fashion, to fabricate, or to form.⁴⁰ Yet such emphasis on “fiction's” madeness does not prevent it from having the connotation of “false,” for fingere is also the root of “feign.” In the popular consciousness, fiction is work that is feigned in the same way that “manufactured” refers to something made up. In the specific context of Kongzi's celebrated remark (Lunyu 7.1) “Shu er buzuo” ([I] receive but do not invent), the ambiguity of our modern term is also evident, as Kongzi implies that it is better to accept what is handed down than to make up something new. Perhaps madeness always bears the disaparaging significance of “false.” Certainly, it is easy to see how the sense of “manufacture” as fraudulently or fictitiously invented derives from the fact that the products of such fabrication are manmade and thus in a sense unnatural. As the term increasingly has been glossed with reference to modern industry, the use of mechanical power, the assembly line, the division of labor, and even robotics, the unnaturalness of its resonance is very pronounced for us.

“Manufacture” appears in this book usually in the sense of fabricating from raw material, that is, from culture: what we receive as categories for interpreting the world and what confronts us in everyday life that must be shaped in accord with what is received. The product of this conjuncture is manufacture. By “manufactured” I mean created, invented, fabricated, each of which is consistent with the Chinese word zuo,⁴¹ which they are meant to represent. The gloss of zuo as “invent” fits the general theme of this book; yet it does not stray from traditional definitions such as Xu Shen's reading, zuo: qi ye, “to start.” Furthermore, the meaning of zuo in passages from Zhou bronze inscriptions and from the Shi jing (Book of Odes), “to make,” “to open up,” “to erect,” “sprouting,” is unmistakably inaugural or foundational. Thus “invent” works as a gloss for zuo. Given that Kongzi himself has been transmitted through invention, it is necessary for us to preserve in our own translation something of the difference and similarity of these meanings. “Manufacture,” I think, accomplishes this with an impressive linguistic economy, and my use of the term is motivated by the sense of “fiction” as an enterprise of forming significance.

I should point out that I do not consider such fictiveness problematic in the way that, for example, Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) did seventy years ago when he followed a path pioneered by Cui Shu (1740-1816) and discovered that Chinese antiquity was intricately and reiteratively layered by the inventions of later scholars.⁴² Of course, it is difficult to escape the associations, common in our day and emerging in Gu's, linking fiction with the untrue, but I insist on making the ambiguity more pronounced by emphasizing the productive fictiveness of “manufacture.” Both “Confucianism” and ru are ambiguous terms, and when I speak of them as manufactured entities I exploit the ambiguity of “manufacture”—an ambiguity contained in the Lunyu's use of zuo—because the meaning of the term can be determined only in the context of what is being made and how it is being made. Yet I do not claim that there is no meaning, no real world, no real past. Concepts are not endlessly fungible. There are lines within which sense may be constructed and beyond which sense is lost. It is a dialectic of works and lives, or as we will soon learn, a dialogue between texts and interpretive communities that is responsible for the charting of these lines.

My use of the gerund “manufacturing” in the title of this book is intended to accentuate the essential and continuing conceptual processes by which ru and Confucianism have been made and remade. “Manufacturing” is used to stress the action of manufacture so as to distance this project from any attempt to characterize it as simply another meditation on a dead tradition. “Manufacturing,” thus, suggests that this corporate enterprise of making sense of China by way of Confucianism continues. Though as this three-hundred-year-old tradition called Confucianism continues by reinvention today in some of the ways discussed above, it does so, some argue, with an implicit sense of an earlier “failure,” the failure of Confucianism to endure as the socioethic of the Chinese people authorized by a living dynasty.

To speak of the failure of Confucianism is, however, to betray a lack of understanding of tradition. Moreover, such talk announces our distance from the ground we aim to represent. In fact this sense of Confucianism's failure is quite prevalent among Western and Chinese scholars whether they are defending or attacking it. Such fatalism also reflects the doctrinal persistence of the denigrative interpretation of ru and the dynastic state as decaying obstructions of modernity, which was first put forward by student nationalist advocates of “new culture” in 1915 and which was a salient concern of those demonstrating against the inequitable terms of the Treaty of Versailles in Tian'anmen Square on May 4, 1919. In this May Fourth Movement, as it came to be called, ru and Kongzi were singled out as cultural symbols of death, prominent figures of the past that had long outlived their usefulness and which an iconoclastic generation in pursuit of enlightenment was challenged to destroy, as summed up in the slogan “pohuai Kongjia dian” (Smash the shop of the Kong family). The virtual synonymy of ru, Kongzi, and China's imperial past in this critique provided an effective framing device for generational revolt, but there is little reason for us to continue to subscribe to such an indiscriminate interpretation today.

There should be no defensiveness of tone in our account of earlier manifestations of the practices we have elected to call Confucian. Reiterative invention of the concept ru and the communities represented by it throughout Chinese history, or the more recent multiple mutations of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism show plainly that tradition is a process of constant reinvention. Thus, to take one moment in this process, say the ru scholarly practice of the last years of the nineteenth century, as emblematic of the whole ensures misunderstanding. While I have considerable doubts as to the representative value of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism as interpretive fictions, doubts very similar to those expressed by Roger Ames and David Hall, I cannot subscribe to the notion, popular with some, including them, that Confucianism “failed” in the early twentieth century.

Lastly, through the use of the terms “manufacture” and “manufacturing,” I seek a vocabulary that, while essentially a contemporary Western one, still might be used to describe the cultural processes, not of our era but of an earlier one, and yet functionally homologous with our own. “Manufacture” is intended to serve as a metaphor of interpretation and of the construal of sense. It is meant to describe the reiterative reproduction of meaning within the native tradition, ru, before the widespread use of industrial machinery, and, if effective, to join past and present, native and foreign on common metaphorical and similar cultural ground.

The appropriateness of the metaphor will be determined in the course of the book's argument, which proceeds in two parts. Part 1, “The Manufacture of Confucius and Confucianism,” analyzes the foreign manufacture of Chinese identity, and part 2, “Making Sense of Ru and Making Up Kongzi,” examines the native manufacture of national Chinese identity. For both, the lines of manufacture draw from ru. I explore two moments at which Confucius/Kongzi and the tradition identified with him were reinterpreted, made important, yet made to conform to the specific needs and desires that prevailed among a community of interpreters at the moment these entities were fashioned. The moments are (1) the sixteenth-century Jesuit encounter with the Chinese and with the tradition that they deemed Confucianism, and which has been known ever since in the West by that name; and (2) the early-twentieth-century encounter of Chinese with themselves through the intermediary of the West, in which efforts to define and “organize a national Chinese heritage” (zhengli guogu) produced critical reflection on the meaning of ru, in the form of a Chinese equivalent (more or less) of Confucianism.

Chapters 1 and 2, “The Jesuits, Confucius, and the Chinese,” and “There and Back Again: The Jesuits and Their Texts in China and Europe,” examine the fictive roots of Confucianism. The inquiry is conducted through historical criticism and analysis of the Western inventions “Confucius,” “Confucian,” and “Confucianism,” as these emerged in the texts—letters, catechisms written in Chinese, memoirs, a history of the China Mission, translations of and commentary on the Sishu (Four Books), and a monumental summary of Chinese culture called the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus—of a century and a half of Jesuit life in China. These two chapters pose the question of reality and representation in the specific context of the Jesuit encounter with China. They treat the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conjunction of European and Chinese cultures as an instance in which the adequacy of indigenous categories of thought (Chinese and Western) to a novel situation were tested.

The result of this experimentation was the successful representation of Christian monotheism, using the native language of ru restorationism, and the invention of Confucianism. The Jesuit invention also reveals the same mechanisms of canon construction and textual manipulation that were so critical to the ru tradition while displaying an essential tension between universal message and sectarian defense. The opening chapters of this book demonstrate our contemporary conceptual indebtedness to the early Jesuits while permitting us to distinguish the processes critical to the invention of any tradition.

In part 2, I evaluate the extent of indigenous reflection on ru to determine (1) how Chinese represented themselves in it; and (2) how in so representing themselves they reasserted the Jesuit metonymic equivalence of ru and Chineseness. In chapter 3, “Ancient Texts, Modern Narratives: Nationalism, Archaism, and the Reinvention of Ru,” I show that it was only with Western economic expansion and the decline of Manchu political and cultural authority early in this century that the normative scholar-official definition of ru, through which the Jesuits manufactured their own native identity, was replaced by a conjectural history of socioreligious evolution in which ru were defined as priests.

Unlike the normative conception that was fashioned by Sima Qian (145-89 b.c.e.) and Liu Xin (43 b.c.e.-23 c.e.?) and that presumed ru were the congzhe, “the followers” who took Kongzi as their zongshi, “ancestral teacher/commander,” this conjecture, the product of an impressionistic philology by Zhang Binglin (Taiyan, 1868-1936), established a pre-Kongzi meaning of ru that was linked to the patrimonial theocracies of China's Bronze Age. The bulk of chapter 3 and all of chapter 4 are dedicated to a critical presentation of the two twentieth-century interpretations of ru—that of Zhang and another by Hu Shi (1891-1962)—where the emphasis will be on the specific conditions between 1900 and 1934 that inspired the differing developmental histories each scholar constructed of ru. In these two chapters I am concerned as well with how their combined accounts of an ancient history of ru achieved the status of a master fiction for the Chinese and for us. So persuasive was this “take” on ru that most subsequent interpretations took this account as their fundamental premise.

Chapter 4, “Particular Is Universal: Hu Shi, Ru, and the Chinese Transcendence of Nationalism,” shows that scholarly acceptance of Hu's and Zhang's explanatory fiction had much to do with the former's systematic representation of the history of Chinese and Western civilization as distinct moments in a unitary process of spiritual/material evolution. In this context, I will demonstrate how Zhang Binglin's effort to identity and then emplot the plural meanings of ru as moments in a narrative of evolutionary change from antiquity to the present provided the raw material that Hu Shi worked up into a cosmopolitan vision of the world's cultural evolution from a messianic past to a secular present. Such a vision was uniquely akin to the ecumenical understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuits, who saw in China compelling evidence for the world's spiritual unity in God.

Most striking in Hu Shi's interpretation was, as we will see, the way he read the evolution of ru by means of the history of Christianity's emergence from the Judaic cult of the Perushim, or Pharisees, and in turn glossed this Christian history with respect to the generation of Kongzi's teachings from a vestigial cult of Shang religious observance. The Jesuits had insisted that Christianity and ru were highly compatible but offered little more than faith as proof. After the questions raised in part 1 about reality and representation with respect to the Jesuit construction of ru, it is ironic that Hu Shi would return us to these same questions from the native point of view, in his insistence that only Christianity provided the most appropriate symbolic fund for the meaningful interpretation of the episodic manufacture of ru.

Acknowledging that Western and Chinese imaginings of ru are indeed indissociable, the book concludes with a reprise of the specific impulses that conditioned these separate instances of manufacture—seventeenth-century Jesuit and twentieth-century Chinese—and a reflection on contemporary prospects for the realization of Hu Shi's effort to establish a fundamental identity of East and West on the basis of a shared pattern of civilizational growth.

The chronology of this study may seem rather odd in the sense that if my interest is in determining what ru was made of, then I should begin with the earliest texts in which there is a record of this term. Yet it should be obvious from the above discussion that my interest is not in what ru in fact may have been, largely because it is impossible to “authenticate” such a notion. My real interest is in what ru and Confucianism mean for us, and thus I am concerned with setting forth a reasonable historical conjecture of these two conceptual inventions. Given that neither ru nor Confucianism was ever one thing, I have tried to show how the plural interpretive constructions of the Jesuits and certain twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals in the names of these two surprisingly interchangeable entities have provided a uniform representation of ru as a secularized religion that continues to influence our comprehension of this term.

The interpretation advanced in this book is merely an interpretation, and so no argument is made for the exclusiveness of my claims. The readings consequent upon my engagement with texts of an earlier time are, like Hans-Georg Gadamer's understanding of hermeneutics, “horizonal.”⁴³ I have obviously benefited from previous readings of the same literature, and this may be evident from my interpretations of them. If I differ from received interpretations or violate conventional readings, I do not denigrate them. Instead I have assimilated them, gathering such accounts into what I hope is a wider spectrum of understanding. Therefore, while my work is intended to stand alone, my findings are significant only in the context of a horizon of interpretations manufactured out of previous encounters with these texts. In this respect, my work is just the most recent inscription on a palimpsest that preceded my arrival by a number of centuries.

Thus, this book is not a defense of, nor an attack on, Confucianism. Rather, it is a defense of the creative impulses that have sustained centuries of invention in its name and that of its native equivalent, ru. Some may find this reading unconventional, even provocative, although the methods that enable my reading are conventional, even traditional. My aim is, rather, to draw historians of China, particularly intellectual historians and philosophers like myself, into a conversation that evaluates an implicit faith in our own interpretive conventions and in a continuity of Chinese culture made immemorial by us in the two-thousand-year marriage of Confucianism and the Chinese imperium. Simply, I ask for a conceptual reckoning that proceeds along two distinct but interwoven lines—the imagination of the interpreter in search of coherence, and the indigenous culture out of which the interpreter, foreign or native, hones a narrative. Proceeding in this way we will lose little but learn much, above all, about ourselves.

Notes

1. Homer and Jethro, Homer and Jethro's “Cornfucius Say” Joke Book: A Collection of Corn-temporary Wit'n Wisdom (Battle Creek, Mich.: [Kellogg's Company, 1964]). In addition, Historical Products, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., a maker of T-shirts printed with the likenesses of famous figures, includes a Confucius T-shirt in their inventory. I would like to thank David Keightley for the reference to Homer and Jethro.

2. Carol Osborn, How Would Confucius Ask for a Raise? 100 Enlightened Solutions for Tough Business Problems (New York: Morrow, 1994). I am grateful to Richard Burden for this reference.

3. “Accommodationism” is the term used to refer to a systematic apologist strategy conceived by the Jesuits under the aegis of Francis Xavier (1506-1552) for conversion of the Chinese. As a program of proselytism, directed by Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), it called for rigorous grounding in the language and customs of the target population. See Johannes Bettray, S.V.D., Die Akkommodations-methode des P. Matteo Ricci S.I. in China (Analecta Gregoriane, vol. LXXVI [Rome: Aedes Universitatis Gregorianae, 1955]), pp. 235-327; D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989), pp. 13-19, 44-73, 247-299.

4. For examples of this religious nomenclature, see Henri Doré, Recherches sur les superstitions en Chine, vol. 13 (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1918); and Herbert A. Giles, Chinese Biographical Dictionary (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1898).

5. The masculine pronoun is needed here because all Jesuit missionaries and ru were men.

6. Les Vies des plus illustres philosophes de l'antiquité, avec leurs dogmes, leurs systèmes, leur morale, a leurs sentences les plus remarquables; traduites du grec de Diogene Laerce (Amsterdam: J. H. Schneider, 1758).

7. What these figures actually knew about China was less a reasoned conjecture grounded in “fact” than an invention inspired by the rapidly growing fund of information about the country. Nevertheless, Voltaire seems to have had a French transcription of a Chinese disputation from the Warring States era (439-221 b.c.e.) from which he imaginatively constructed the “Chinese Catechism” that appears in his Dictionnaire philosophique. Montesquieu, it is known, had regular contact with a Chinese emigré, Arcadio Huang, a cataloger and translator of Chinese books in France who compiled the first Chinese/French dictionary. (While Montesquieu was drafting De l'esprit des lois he interviewed Huang.) Jonathan Spence, personal communication, April 13, 1990; and Jonathan Spence, “Claims and Counter-Claims: The Kangxi Emperor and the Europeans (1661-1722),” in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994), pp. 15-28.

8. The estimate of nearly 50 percent is taken from Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 5-6. On the circulation of specie and precious metals in a global economy that favored China see William Atwell, “Notes on Silver, Foreign Trade, and the Late Ming Economy,” Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i (December 1977): 1-33. On the movement of specie eastward in the sixteenth century and China's role within the developing world economy see Pierre Chaunu, “Manille et Macao, face à la conjoncture des XVI et XVII siècles,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations 17: 555-580; and Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, vol. 1, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 462-510.

9. See Paul A. Rule, K'ung-tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin Australia, 1986), p. 73; and Louis le Comte, S.J., Nouveaux mémoires sur l'état présent de la Chine, vol. 1 (Paris: Jean Anisson, 1697), p. 337.

10. Xu Yuanhe, Ruxue yu dongfang wenhua (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1994), pp. 47-58.

11. It was not very long ago that the campaign ended, for as Kam Louie points out in his history of contemporary criticism of Kongzi, polemics were still being written and protests organized in 1979, three years after the arrest of the Gang of Four, the four high-ranking and ultra-left-leaning Communist Party Politburo members—Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong's wife), Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao—who were officially credited with the excesses of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). According to Susan Blum (personal communication, 1989), one could still hear echoes of the campaign in the streets of Nanjing in 1982. See Kam Louie, Critiques of Confucius in Contemporary China (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), pp. 97-136; and Jilin daxue lishixi, comp., Yiqie fandongpai doushi zun Kongpai (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1974).

12. In March 1986 an academic journal by the same name, Kongzi yanjiu, was begun at Qufu.

13. “Publisher's Note,” in Kong Dema and Ke Lan, In the Mansion of Confucius' Descendants (Beijing: New World Press, 1984), p. iii.

14. Yu Ronggen, “Studies on Confucius in Our Country in Recent Years,” in Etiemble, Confucius (Maitre K'ong) (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 285-291. Since the Han dynasty, ceremonies were held (the Spring and Autumn Sacrifices) to honor Kongzi in the second and eighth months of the Chinese lunar calendar. To these seasonal days of celebration the Yongzheng emperor added, by ad hoc proclamation in 1727, an empire-wide observance of Kongzi's birth on the twenty-seventh day of the eighth lunar month. In Taiwan, this annual observance is maintained with great reverence and raucousness as Teacher's Day. On the history of memorial observance for Kongzi, see John K. Shryock, The Origin and Development of the State Cult of Confucius (New York: Century, 1932). See also Onogawa Hidemi and Shimada Kenji, eds., Shingai kakumei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1978), pp. 3-35. One estimate of the throngs in attendance at the 2,535th anniversary in Qufu was fifty thousand.

15. I say “disputed” because there are several other regions that have claimed to be the ancestral home of the Kong clan. There was an impromptu argument over the legitimacy of the Qufu claim at a recent gathering of scholars in the People's Republic of China (Frederic Wakeman, personal communication, fall 1990). The philosopher Li Zehou, for example, is of the belief that the authentic ancestral locus is near Suzhou; however, since the Tang (618-907 c.e.) there have been claimants of Kong descent in Gansu, not far from Dunhuang. Wolfram Eberhard has identified a Kong clan among twenty-nine clan names on a register of noble families of 634 c.e. and, according to this register, while they were originally from Lu, they had been registered as a gentry family of Dunhuang before the Tang. It is very likely that this family was not of Chinese origin and that they had lived in western China since before the Han. See Wolfram Eberhard, “The Leading Families of Ancient Tunhuang,” in Settlement and Social Change in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967), pp. 102-129.

16. My thanks to Michael Lindblom for these observations about beer and popular culture in central Shandong. The “three Kongs” refer to the Kong Mansion (Kongfu), the Kong Forest (Konglin), and the Kong Temple (Kongmiao).

17. Haun Saussy introduced me to the Kong Family brew.

18. For the term “hypergrowth” and an analysis of its functional value in defining the rapid expansion of certain Asian economies, see Edward K. Y. Chen, Hypergrowth in Asian Economies: A Comparative Study of Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (New York: Macmillan, 1979). See also Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), who argues that the political economies of the “Four Little Dragons”—Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea—represent a new form of industrial nation that he calls the “capitalist development state.” The core value thesis of economic development in Asia is now a commonplace in academic and journalistic accounts and is well presented in Tai Hung-chao, ed., Confucianism and Economic Development: An Oriental Alternative (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute Press, 1989). Lee Kuan Yew's pronouncements concerning the comparative rationality of a “Confucian”-grounded modernization are liberally cited in the press. See Fareed Zakaria, “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 109-126.

19. There has been more and more of this kind of interpretation of Confucianism in recent years. A great deal of it has appeared in the Hong Kong political and cultural weekly, Jiushi niandai (The Nineties) with contributions from Tu Wei-ming, Liu Shu-hsien, and Li Zehou. For examples of this interpretation, see Tu Wei-ming, “A Confucian Perspective on the Rise of Industrial East Asia,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 42, no. 1 (October 1988): 32-50; Tu Wei-ming, “The Rise of Industrial East Asia: The Role of Confucian Values,” Copenhagen Papers in East and Southeast Asian Studies (April 1989): 81-97; Tu Wei-ming, “Wenhua Zhongguo chutan,” Jiushi niandai, no. 245 (June 1990): 60-61; and Ezra Vogel, The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

20. Tu Wei-ming, “Hsiung Shih-li's Quest for Authentic Existence,” in The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China, ed. Charlotte Furth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 246.

21. Advocates of this interpretation distinguish themselves from, and are quite hostile to, the guojiao (national religion) conception of ru that was put forward by Kang Youwei and which the Qing government attempted to implement on a national level in the final years of its rule (see chapter 3). See “Ting Li Zehou, Liu Shu-hsien tan ‘He Shang,’” Jiushi niandai, no. 227 (December 1988): 88-91.

22. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Learning for One's Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. xii.

23. Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 112.

24. For a scholarly treatment of tradition and invention in Europe, Africa, and India, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

25. See de Bary's recent defense of Confucianism against the particular charges of autocracy and sexism leveled by Anthony Yu on a panel at the Forty-fifth Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Los Angeles, March 1993. De Bary's remarks, along with the comments of Irene Bloom, Chang Hao, Frederic Wakeman, Yü Ying-shih, and Anthony Yu, were published as “A Roundtable Discussion of The Trouble with Confucianism by Wm. Theodore de Bary,” China Review International 1, no. 1 (spring 1994): pp. 11-47.

26. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). See pp. 1-25, where the authors place themselves within the context of previous interpretations and approaches.

27. Hall and Ames, Thinking through Confucius, pp. 7-8. Emphasis added. See also pp. 29-43.

28. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 315-356; and Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The authors appear amenable to Rorty's call for the abandonment of epistemology, where rigid laws of commensurability and paradigmatic truth hold, in favor of hermeneutics, because the latter creates a conversation and does not impose laws. Following this reasoning then there can be no philosophy with a capital P and no theistic concept of a single unvarying truth. These notions are (in this view) the legacy of a decrepit Anglo-European philosophical tradition. Yet the urge for truth is very difficult to jettison, as we can see in this case. For a similar critique that emphasizes the singular incoherence of contemporary philosophical practice, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. with postscript (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

29. Mengzi zhushu, SSJZS, vol. 13 (reprint; Shanghai: Guji Chubanshe, 1990), pp. 56.2, 57.1.

30. One reason for the frequency of his appearance in the texts of competitive traditions might be that Mozi and Zhuangzi were, as Zhang Binglin once believed, members of the ru fellowship from the beginning—fallen followers of the same master. See chapter 3.

31. Zhuangzi jijie, ZZJC, vol. 3, part 2 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1990), p. 91. See also A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), pp. 192-193; and Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 159-160.

32. Zhuangzi jijie, p. 177; and Watson, trans., Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, pp. 296-297.

33. On the historical significance of this collected lore and the fictive quality of Kongzi's existence, see Lionel M. Jensen, “Wise Man of the Wilds: Fatherlessness, Fertility, and the Mythic Exemplar, Kongzi,” Early China 20 (1995): 407-437.

34. Lunyu zhushu, SSJZS, vol. 10, pp. 136.1, 137.2; Pound, Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, and The Analects (New York: New Directions, 1969), p. 263; Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage Books, 1938), p. 193; James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 1 (reprint; Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1971), p. 294; and D. C. Lau, Confucius: The Analects (New York: Penguin Classics, 1962), p. 132.

35. See Mozi jiangu, in ZZJC, vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 187. A somewhat different recollection of this dark moment in the history of Kongzi and his following is repeated in several places in the Zhuangzi.

36. See Robert E. Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 67-103. One cannot resist wondering in this respect whether it was the narrative ubiquitousness of Kongzi that inspired Chinese intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (especially May Fourth enthusiasts) to identify him so broadly with “tradition.”

37. Arthur Waley, Ballads and Stories from Tun-Huang (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp. 89-96.

38. See David McMullen, State and Scholars in T'ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 34.

39. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 1721. In his Treatise on Images of 1567, cited here as the first usage of “manufacture,” the Catholic controversialist scholar, Reverend Nicholas Sander (1530-1581) writes, “Yet the image is rather a manufacture, to wit, a thing wrought upon a creature by the artificer's hand, then a seueral creature of it self.”

40. Oxford English Dictionary, p. 991. See also Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 134-135.

41. See Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1963); Duan Yucai, Shuowen jiezi zhu (reprint; Taibei, 1984); Zhou Fagao et al., Jinwen gulin (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1974-1975), nos. 1079, 1620. See also Bernhard Karlgren, Grammatica Serica Recensa (reprint; Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1972), pp. 212-213, no. 8061; and Axel Schuessler, A Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1987), pp. 874-875.

42. Gu Jiegang, Gushi bian, vol. 1 (reprint; Hong Kong: Taiping Shuju, 1962), esp. pp. 51-70; Arthur W. Hummell, The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1931), pp. 92-133; and Lawrence Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China's New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 18-52. See also Zhang Xincheng's notable analysis of the many different meanings of weishu (“forgery,” “apocrypha”), in Weishu tongkao, vol. 1 (Taibei: Dingwen Shuju, 1973), pp. 16-17.

43. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Barden and William G. Doerpel (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 345-447.

Abbreviations

SSJZS: Ruan Yuan, ed. Shisanjing zhushu [The Thirteen Classics, Annotated with Commentary (1815 woodblock of standard Song edition containing Han and Tang commentaries)]. 13 vols. Reprint, Shanghai: Guji Chubanshe, 1990.

ZZJC: Zhuzi jicheng [Complete Collection of the Various Masters]: 8 vols. Reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1990.