SOURCE: Van der Sprenkel, O. B. “Confucius: Six Variations.” In Self and Biography: Essays on the Individual and Society in Asia, edited by Wang Gungwu, pp. 79-98. Sydney, Australia: Sydney University Press, 1975.

[In the following excerpt, Sprenkel describes six distinct interpretations of Confucianism and discusses how each has been used to bolster particular notions of social behavior.]

Very little is known about Confucius the man. There has never been, in China, a ‘quest for the historical Confucius’. It is generally agreed that he lived from 551 to 479 bc. He is believed to have travelled about China in middle life, and then to have returned to his native place in Lu to spend his last years in teaching and writing. On his life, our most important texts are a collection of sayings ascribed to him, the Lun-yü or Analects, and a biography by the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, written about the turn of the second and first centuries bc, in which much legendary material is already present.

What complicates the attempt to present a straightforward ‘life of Confucius’ is that so many different versions exist of the subject of the biography. In what follows I discuss several of these, following the principle of ‘one Confucius at a time’. I shall comment on: 1. the Confucius of the Analects; 2. Ssu-ma Ch'ien's depiction of Confucius in Chapter 47 of the Shih-chi or Historical Records; 3. the apotheosized Confucius of Tung Chung-shu, the New Text school, and the apocryphal literature in Former Han, together with a note on ‘Confucius as Religious Founder and Reformer’ as presented by K'ang Yu-wei; 4. the Confucius of the religion of ‘familism’; 5. discrepant Western judgements of Confucius, from the Jesuit Fathers of the China Mission in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the philistine denigrators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and 6. the Confucius who is currently the target of Communist criticism in the People's Republic.

Naturally, the content and function of what, from one historical period to the next, has been called ‘Confucianism’, have undergone great changes. The ‘Confucianism’ of the New Text school as expounded by Tung Chung-shu in the second century bc is very different from the ‘Confucianism’ of the Sage as known to us from the Analects. The ‘Neo-Confucianism’ of the Sung philosophers as it developed in the eighth to twelfth centuries, forming a body of doctrine rightly described by Max Weber as the ‘status ethic of the bureaucracy’,¹ has very little in common with the religion of familism, ancestral worship, and filial piety which for more than a millennium set the norms of community life for the common people. When Confucius is being praised—or blamed—as author of a system of social values or moral standards which promoted the stability—or alternatively retarded the progress—of China, it is well to know what system, and which Confucius, are being discussed.

Let us first consider what I have called the ‘Confucius of the Analects’. This collection of sayings contains the earliest, and therefore, we must assume, the most authentic account of the man and his teaching. It embodies traditions passed down by his disciples and committed to writing perhaps not more than two generations or so after his death. Though it is an early work, the traditional account that it was put together by the immediate disciples of Confucius cannot be sustained. Bernhard Karlgren, relying on the fact that the grammatical system of the Analects is virtually the same as that of the Mencius (Meng-tzu), has concluded that the two works belong approximately to the same period, though minor differences suggest that the Analects is slightly the older.² James Legge, translator of the Chinese Classics, places it in the late fifth or early fourth century bc.³ Confucius died in 479 bc, so we can take it that about a hundred years elapsed from the philosopher's death until the Analects received something like the present form.

The history of the text can be summarized as follows. The ancestors of the work as we now have it appear to have included two distinct versions: one in twenty-two Books which circulated in the State of Ch'i; and another, current in Confucius' own State of Lu, in twenty Books. Each of these versions had its scholarly advocates, and was transmitted. In 150 bc yet another version of the Analects was discovered. Its provenance is uncertain, but the story goes that it was found when the K'ung family mansion in the capital city of Lu was being demolished to make room for the expansion of the royal palace. Several books were found bricked up in the wall of the house, where presumably they had been hidden to save from destruction during Ch'in Shih-huang's ‘burning of the books’ in 213 bc. They were written in an unfamiliar script (often referred to as ‘tadpole characters’ from their large heads and tapering tails' which scholars of the time mistakenly took for a very ancient form of writing. Because of this, the recovered books were called ku-wen, or ‘Old Text’ versions. This copy of the Analects was handed over by the ruler of Lu to the then head of the Confucian clan, the scholar K'ung An-kuo, who succeeded in deciphering the ‘tadpole’ writing. At about the beginning of our era, the different versions were collated by the Former Han scholar, Chang Yü, Marquis of An-ch'ang (died 5 or 4 bc); and finally, during the second century ad, the definitive edition of the Analects, with commentary, was produced by Cheng Hsüan (ad 127-200). Cheng Hsüan has been described by James Legge as ‘one of the greatest scholars China has ever produced’.⁴ He took the Lu version as the received text, comparing it minutely with the Ch'i and Old Text versions, and so gave us the Lun-yü as we have it today. Our present text, therefore, was finally fixed during the Later Han dynasty, six centuries or more after the death of Confucius. It is nevertheless a good text. In drawing on it for an impression of ‘the man Confucius’ I shall restrict myself to the oldest part of the work, Books 3 to 9.

I have chosen from these Books a few paragraphs which seem to me to give an insight into the personality and character of the Sage.⁵

First, three quotations that refer to his manner: ‘In his leisure hours the Master's manner was very free-and-easy, and his expression alert and cheerful’ (VII.4). ‘The Master's manner was affable but firm, commanding but not harsh, polite but easy’ (VII.37). ‘If at a meal the Master found himself seated next to someone who was in mourning, he did not eat his fill. When he had wailed at a funeral, during the rest of the day he did not sing’ (VII.9).

The next two quotations are, I think, revealing of his character and general approach to life: ‘The Master never talked of prodigies, feats of strength, disorders of nature [e.g. hens crowing, owls hooting by day], or spirits’ (VII.20). ‘Tzu-lu said, Supposing you had command of the whole army, whom would you take to help you? The Master said, The man who was ready “to beard a tiger or rush a river” without caring whether he lived or died—that sort of man I should not take. I should certainly take someone who approached difficulties with due caution and who preferred to succeed by strategy’ (VII.10).

The most striking thing about Confucius as he stands revealed in this oldest part of the Analects is his love of learning (i.e. moral self-cultivation) and teaching. Though he demanded a high standard of his students, he was always willing to help anyone who showed a genuine desire to learn. How demanding he could be is shown in this passage: ‘The Master said, Only one who bursts with eagerness do I instruct; only one who bubbles with excitement do I enlighten. If I hold up one corner and a man cannot come back to me with the other three, I do not continue the lesson’ (VII.8). And how severe with the unsatisfactory student: ‘Tsai Yü used to sleep during the day. The Master said, Rotten wood cannot be carved, nor a wall of dried dung be patterned with a trowel. Of what use for me to scold him further?’ (V.9). A charming feature of Confucius' relationship with his students was the gentle chiding to which he sometimes subjected them; as in the following: ‘Tzu-kung said, What I do not want others to do to me, I have no desire to do to others. The Master said, Oh Tzu-kung! You have not quite got to that point yet’ (V.11). And again: ‘The Master said, “Wearing a shabby hemp-quilted gown, yet capable of standing unabashed with those dressed in fox and badger”—that would apply quite well to Tzu-lu, would it not?

“Who harmed none, was foe to none,
Did nothing that was not right.”

After this, Tzu-lu kept on continually chanting these lines to himself. The Master said, Come now, the wisdom they hold does not merit treasuring them to that extent’ (IX.26).⁶

Confucius could also, on occasion, produce an engaging dry humour: ‘Chi Wen Tzu used to think three times before acting. The Master, hearing of it, said, Twice is quite enough’ (V.19). ‘A villager from Ta-hsiang said, Master K'ung is no doubt a very great man and vastly learned. But he does nothing to bear out this reputation. The Master, hearing of it, said to his disciples, What shall I take up? Shall I take up chariot-driving? Or shall it be archery? I think I'll take up driving’ (IX.2).

To end, we must return to his love of learning: ‘The Master said, In a hamlet of ten houses you may be sure of finding someone quite as loyal and true to his word as I. But I doubt if you would find anyone with such a love of learning’ (V.27). ‘The Master said, Learn as if you were following someone whom you could not catch up, as though it were someone you were frightened of losing’ (VIII.17). ‘The Master said, Give me a few more years, so that I may have spent a whole fifty in study, and I believe that, after all, I should be fairly free from error’(VII.16).

I turn now to a not altogether different, but certainly a more developed and, from an historical point of view, a much more influential version of Confucius—namely, that presented by Ssu-ma Ch'ien in Chapter 47 of his Shih-chi or Historical Records.

Ssu-ma Ch'ien's life of Confucius is from many points of view an astonishing achievement. It was the first genuine attempt at writing a biography in China, and had no successor worthy of the name in the next two thousand years. It was immensely influential. Successive generations of Chinese have taken from it their conception of the Sage who, more than any other man, moulded Chinese civilization.

It is clear that Ssu-ma Ch'ien held Confucius in the highest esteem. This is shown in the length of his biography—some 8,000 words—compared with the meagre space he gives to other philosophers—250 words to Lao-tzu, 140 to Mencius, 130 to Chuang-tzu. Even more significant is his honouring this biography with a place in the section devoted to the Hereditary Houses—the histories of the feudal states of the Chou period and of the most important domains established by the Han.

Eduard Chavannes, in his Mémoires historiques, writes:

The biography of Confucius is one of the most important chapters in the Historical Records. Ssu-ma Ch'ien himself well understood the great influence which Confucius had exercised in the world, and this is why he reserved for the Sage, who possessed the attributes of true intellectual and moral kingship, a chapter among those given to the Princely Houses. It is therefore wrong to represent Ssu-ma Ch'ien as one who preferred the teaching of Lao-tzu to that of Confucius.⁷

It will be as well to say something at this point about the charge that Ssu-ma Ch'ien was a Taoist, and that his treatment of Confucius in the Shih-chi was either insincere, or satirical, or both. To put it another way, was he ‘theologically’ concerned to select and use his sources (which we will consider in a moment) from a Taoist rather than a Confucianist point of view?

Pan Ku (ad 32-92), an able historian if an unattractive personality, was one of the first to make this charge. In Chapter 62 of the Han-shu he says of Ssu-ma Ch'ien: ‘His judgments stray rather often from those of the Sage. In discussing fundamental moral law, he venerates the teachings of the Yellow Emperor and Lao Tzu and slights the Six Classics.’⁸

Since then this slander has often been repeated. A recent example is the late Homer H. Dubs, who wrote in 1941: ‘Szu-ma T'an and his son, the historian Szu-ma Ch'ien, were both Taoists and kept their post as the successive Grand Astrologers.’⁹ I find this charge extraordinarily perverse; and equally so Herrlee Creel's opinion that the historian's decision to include his Confucian biography among the Hereditary Houses was ‘satirical’. In his Confucius, the Man and the Myth he writes:

When vindictive “Confucians” like Kung-sun Hung were in power, it would have been most unwise to criticize [Confucius] openly. It seems probable that the authors [i.e. Ssu-ma Ch'ien and his father] chose the course of seeming to praise the sage, while in fact they subtly and effectively damned him. They depicted him, in fact as a mealy-mouthed, hypocritical “Confucian” of the sort that thronged [Emperor] Wu's court.¹⁰

With respect, I have to say that my own reading of the chapter brings me to a very different conclusion. It seems to me beyond question that Ssu-ma Ch'ien must be accepted as a good Confucian, though possibly with some eclectic sympathies. As an historian he of course liked to use all the materials available to him, and it should occasion no surprise to find that in the biography he tells the story of Confucius's supposed encounter with Lao-tzu. Indeed, he tells it twice: once in his life of Confucius (Shih-chi 47), and again in his brief biography of Lao-tzu (Shih-chi 61). In the former account, though not in the latter, he prefaces the statement that Confucius ‘went to see Lao-tzu’ with the initial particle kai, indicating doubt. The use of the formula kai … yün implies that we are dealing, not with a proven fact, but with an opinion of the writer.

Most of the stories of meetings between Confucius and Lao-tzu—and they are legion—are of Taoist provenance and highly damaging to the Confucianists. In Ssu-ma Ch'ien's version Confucius comes off rather lightly. At the close of the interview, Lao-tzu, politely seeing Confucius as far as the gate, says: ‘He who is intelligent and a deep observer is close to death, for he is an accurate critic; he whose mind is scholarly, open and penetrating places his person in danger, for he reveals men's defects; he who is a son is no longer his own master; and he who is a subject [ch'en] is also no longer his own master.’¹¹ This brief statement, speeding the parting guest, neatly and economically makes nonsense of all the cardinal Confucian virtues: intelligence, scholarship, filial piety, and loyalty to one's superior. But compared with the two long lectures Confucius gets in the Chuang-tzu (a Taoist work) when he seems to stand before Lao-tzu as a schoolboy before his headmaster (we are told that after this interview Confucius ‘returned home and for three days could not speak’), Ssu-ma Ch'ien's account is anodyne indeed.¹²

Any doubt of where the historian's allegiance lay should be dispelled by the closing lines of his biography, in which he recounts his visit to the ancient feudal States of Lu and Ch'i, where the Confucianist tradition had taken firmest root, and where the Sage's teaching had been most successfully preserved through the disorders of the Warring States period, the Ch'in persecution and book-burning, and the civil wars that preceded the founding of the Han dynasty. Ssu-ma Ch'ien profited from being able to witness with his own eyes practices handed down from Confucius' own day. He describes in moving language his visit to the birthplace, at Ch'ü-fou, on the banks of the Ssu River. ‘When I saw the hall of the temple of Chung-ni (Confucius), his chariot, his vestments and his ritual vessels, and the disciples who, at the prescribed hours, performed the rites in his dwelling, I was filled with respect, and I was as if held there, and unable to depart from that place.’¹³

We may take it then that the picture of Confucius presented in Chapter 47 of the Shih-chi is not coloured by Taoist prejudice, but is straightforwardly derived from the sources available to the historian. Ssu-ma Ch'ien in fact uses every piece of material he can lay his hands on—though never uncritically. He uses the history of the period, taken from the Tso-chuan, as framework and background; and incorporates sayings of Confucius from the Analects and elsewhere. He also uses a good deal of anecdotal and legendary material, and with regard to this Chavannes writes: ‘His conscientiousness as an historian would not allow him quite to neglect traditions about the Sage that were very generally received; but he used them with discretion, doubtless because he felt that some were too partisan, while legend played too great a role in others.’¹⁴

Ssu-ma Ch'ien's life of Confucius is chronologically arranged, beginning with his birth and ending with his death. The life is followed by a table of his descendants, and the historian's ‘summing-up’. The method used throughout the biography is, first to set incidents in the life of the Sage, as recounted in the Analects, the School Sayings (K'ung-tzu chia-yü), the Conversations from the States (Kuo-yü), the Book of Rites (Li-chi), etc., into an historical framework provided almost exclusively by the Tso-chuan (an annalistic history of China rearranged as a commentary on the Ch'un-ch'iu or Spring and Autumn Annals of the State of Lu); second to match up sayings of Confucius with particular situations in which the Master found himself, and so to provide them with a context—a habitation in time and place.¹⁵

Most of the Confucian sayings in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's biography come from the Analects. In all, he quotes textually sixty verses from this collection. For almost all the sayings in the Analects no context is provided. The great majority are introduced with the words ‘The Master said’, no clue being given to when and where the words were spoken. By ‘pairing’ sayings with situations the historian enlivens his biography and makes it more readable, but the method is not free from danger. The following comment of Eduard Chavannes is to the point:

The words of Confucius which have been preserved for us in the Lun-yü are often somewhat ambiguous in meaning because we do not know the exact circumstances in which they were spoken. Now, when Ssu-ma Ch'ien quotes them, he relates them to particular events in Confucius' life, and in so doing gives them a determinate meaning. One can say therefore that he powerfully contributed to the process of establishing meanings [of sayings in the Analects] that have since become traditional, However, modern Chinese criticism has attacked a good many of Ssu-ma Ch'iens interpretations as artificial or forced, and, disengaging the sayings from the matrix of the Historical Records and looking at them as simple pericopes, has been led to give them new meanings.¹⁶

Nevertheless, the socio-ethical teaching of Confucius is well represented in the quoted sayings, and comes through with fair accuracy and force. The Teacher himself fares less well, and the legendary and anecdotal material which Ssu-ma Ch'ien works into his account inevitably creates a ‘Confucius’ very different from the one that speaks to us from the pages of the Analects.

It is true that the story of the ‘virgin birth’ of the Sage is barely alluded to: the historian writes simply that Confucius' father, Shu-liang Ho, very late in life contracted marriage with a young bride and begat K'ung-tzu; and that the mother went up Ni mountain and prayed, and later gave birth to Confucius. On the other hands, much is made of his royal ancestry. The biography traces Shu-liang Ho's ascendants back fifteen generations to Prince Ch'i, the son of the last ruler but one of the Shang dynasty. When this dynasty was overthrown by the Chou, Prince Ch'i was enfeoffed with a domain, Wei, in the State of Sung (in south-eastern Honan) to enable him to continue the sacrifices to the ancestors of the dispossessed ruling house, who were also his own. According to this account, therefore, Confucius was descended not only from the Dukes of Sung, but through them from the royal house of Shang.

Confucius' father died when his son was three years old, and the future Sage grew up in poverty. Ssu-ma Ch'ien tells us of the modest beginnings of his civil service career as a clerk charged with checking quantities of grain into the granary and looking to the well-being of sheep and oxen. After some early setbacks we read of his subsequent rise to the high offices of Minister of Crime and of State Councillor in Lu. Then—the year is 496 bc and Confucius is fifty-six years old—comes the incident of the dancing girls and female musicians presented to the ruler of Lu by the Duke of Ch'i. The latter's plan was to distract Lu's ruler with music and dancing and so cause him to neglect affairs of state. This would annoy his Minister Confucius, who would be bound to remonstrate with him, which in turn would inevitably lead to the Minister's dismissal. Under Confucius' wise administration the State of Lu was too well governed, and could become a threat to its neighbour Ch'i. The plan was entirely successful. Confucius resigned, and again set out on his travels. He visited Wei; K'uang; Ts'ao; Sung, where he was almost a victim of the curious crime of ‘murder by tree’; Cheng; Ch'en, where he stayed for three years; P'u, where he was arrested and released upon swearing an oath which, once free, he immediately broke, claiming that it had been extracted from him under duress; then again to Wei; and, passing through Ch'en, to Ts'ai, where he also stayed for three years until invited by the King of Ch'u. He wished to accept the invitation, but was prevented by his hosts. Later Confucius managed to visit Ch'u, whose ruler proposed to enfeoff him with a domain of 17,500 families; but the philosopher proved difficult and the king changed his mind. Once more in Wei, on being asked by the Chief Minister to provide him with a plan of attack against an enemy, Confucius ordered his chariot to be made ready, and left, saying, ‘The bird can choose which tree to perch on, but the tree can't choose the bird.’ He returned to his native Lu, from which he had been absent fourteen years, and devoted himself to teaching and to putting in order the Five Classics. In the fourteenth year of Duke Ai of Lu (481 bc) a strange animal was taken by hunters in the western part of the state, which the Sage identified as a unicorn. Two years later, aged 73, he died.

This, in briefest outline, is Ssu-ma Ch'ien's account of the life of Confucius. Although the story is well furnished with historical incident, and includes innumerable conversations in direct speech, and although almost every incident if precisely dated, scarcely one has evidential support. Nonetheless there emerges from Ssu-ma Ch'ien's pages a philosopher and statesman of flesh and blood; and it is in the main his Confucius who has come down to us, and is either venerated or, as now, execrated, by his fellow countrymen.

Paradoxically, some of the ‘substantiality’ of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Confucius comes precisely from his historian's passion to include everything, and from the contradictions of character into which this leads him. After all, no man who is invariably consistent can be accepted as entirely human. Let me illustrate. In several passages the historian makes Confucius speak of omens and fabulous creatures. One example is the story of the gigantic bone, so huge that it made up the full load of a cart. Confucius, on being consulted, at once identifies it as part of the remains of Fang-fung, a mythical character put to death by the Great Yü, China's culture-hero who dispersed the floods. Another is the incident of ‘the sheep in the earthenware jar’. It was found when Chi Huan-tzu, the head of the influential Chi family in Lu from 505 to 492 bc, was having a well dug. A jar is uncovered, and Confucius is again consulted. He identifies the animal in the jar as the Fen-yang or ‘Fen’ sheep, generated, not from the intercourse of male and female, but spontaneously from the earth. And yet, later in the text, the historian is happy to quote Analects VII.20: ‘The Master never talked of prodigies, feats of strength, disorders of nature, or spirits.’

Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Confucius is a man firmly set in historical time and place, living actively in the world of affairs and equally at home in cottage and court; a man whose force of character and moral quality enabled him to suffer reverses with dignity and fortitude, and whose full acceptance of the human condition allowed him to grow in wisdom and self-mastery till at the end of his life he was able to claim that he could follow the desires of his heart without transgressing.

I now proceed to the apotheosized Confucius presented by the scholars of the Chin-wen or New Text school, and in the apocryphal literature.

The New Text school, dominant during most of the Former Han period (206 bc to ad 24), took its name from its use of versions of the Classics which, recorded early in Former Han, were written in the new form of script then in use. Its adherents diluted their Confucianism with Yin-Yang and Wu-hsing or Five Element doctrines, and gave themselves over to the wildest excesses of superstition. Early in the first century ad there began the rise of the Old Text school which dominated the Later Han period (ad 25 to 220) and was, in reaction to the extravagances of the New Text, sober, sceptical, rational and naturalistic. Summarizing the ideological movement of the Former and Later Han periods as briefly as possible, one can say that Tung Chung-shu (?179-?104 bc), the foremost exponent of the New Text school, removed Confucius from the natural order of things by exalting him to heaven as a Divine Being, and that Wang Ch'ung (ad 27-?100), the sceptical naturalist, did his best to return Confucius to earth. Unfortunately, the rationalist had less success with the general public than the miracle-monger.

I referred earlier to the taking of a unicorn by huntsmen in the western part of Lu in the year 481 bc, a unicorn identified as such by Confucius himself. The appearance of this creature of good omen was believed by Tung Chung-shu to mean that Confucius, shortly before his death, had received Heaven's Mandate ‘to correct the faults of the decadent Chou dynasty and establish the institutions of a new king and dynasty.’¹⁷ To carry out this heavenly assignment, Confucius immediately composed the Ch'un-ch'iu, the Spring and Autumn Annals. The work must have been completed during the two years that elapsed between the taking of the unicorn in the spring of 481, when Confucius received his charge, and his death in the fourth month of 479. It is an extremely laconic chronicle of events during the 241 years from 722 to 481 bc, mostly relating to the State of Lu. In it Confucius is believed, by Tung Chung-shu and others, to have exercised his royal prerogative, and set forth his laws as the unsceptred king, by distributing praise and blame to his historical personages, employing an esoteric terminology to convey moral judgements. Confucius used the Spring and Autumn Annals, as Tung puts it, ‘to correct what is incorrect’. In his Sweet Dew of the Spring and Autumn Tung further writes: ‘The Ch'un-chi'iu describes the past so as to illumine the future. Its phrases embody the inscrutableness of Heaven and are difficult to understand. To one who cannot examine them properly it seems as if they contain nothing. To one who can examine them there is nothing they do not contain.’¹⁸

So, during the Former Han period, with Tung Chung-shu ascribing a royal, even divine role to Confucius, the process began whereby he ‘rose from the position of a Sage endowed by Heaven with powers to which ordinary human beings could not attain, but after all a human being, to a divine personage, son of a God, destined to be a ruler for all ages’.¹⁹

This brings us to the apocryphal literature which began to flourish in Former Han in the receptive intellectual atmosphere provided by the dominant New Text school. The Chinese word for these writings is wei, meaning literally the woof of a fabric, and used in apposition to ching, warp, the term commonly used for the Classics. The implication is that the apocrypha are to the classics as the woof is to the warp.

Most of this literature is now lost as a result of the strong critical reaction that set in against it in the Later Han, but some is preserved. This is largely thanks to the efforts of the nineteenth-century scholar Ma Kuo-han (1794-1857) who collected quotations from apocryphal writings that survived in other books, and published them in his Yü-han shan-fang chi-yi-shu or Mountain-hut Jade-casket of Lost Books Restored in Fragments.

A single example of the genre must suffice: it comes from the Ch'un-ch'iu wei yen-K'ung-t'u or Apocryphal Treatise on the Spring and Autumn, Expository Chart on Confucius.

Confucius' mother, Cheng Tsai, while taking a walk, happened upon the mound of a large tomb, where she fell asleep and dreamed that she received an invitation from the Black Emperor (Hei-ti). She went to him, and in her dream had intercourse with him. He spoke to her, saying: “Your confinement will take place within a hollow mulberry tree.” When she awoke she seemed to feel [pregnant] and later gave birth to Confucius in a hollow mulberry. … On Confucius' breast there was a writing which said: “The act of instituting [a new dynasty] has been decided and the rule of the world has been transferred.” … Sages are not born for nothing. They must surely institute something in order to reveal the mind of Heaven. Thus Confucius, as a wooden-tongued [clapper]-bell, instituted laws for the world. … After the unicorn was caught, Heaven rained blood which formed into writing on the main gate of [the chief city] of Lu, and which said: “Quickly prepare laws, for the Sage Confucius will die. The Chou ruling house Chi will be destroyed. A comet will appear from the east. The government of the Ch'in will arise and destroy the literary arts. But though written records will be dispersed [the teachings of] Confucius will not be interrupted.” [Confucius' disciple] Tzu-hsia next day went to look at this, whereupon the writing of blood changed into a red bird and flew away.²⁰

Although it means jumping ahead some two thousand years, this is perhaps the appropriate place to speak of K'ang Yu-wei's resuscitation, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the apotheosized New Text Confucius. K'ang Yu-wei (1858-1927), inspirer of the reform movement that culminated in the ‘hundred days’ of 1898, desperately needed a ‘Chinese’ sanction for his reform programme. A Chinese state religion with the Confucius of the Apocrypha as its head and fount would be ideal. After all, in this literature Confucius had not only been promoted from ‘Sage’ to ‘King’, and from ‘King’ to ‘Divine Teacher and Lord’; he had been presented as a political reformer as well.

This notional Confucius is described by K'ang Yu-wei in his book K'ung-tzu kai-chih k'ao (Confucius as Reformer, 1913) in the following terms:

Heaven having pity for the many afflictions suffered by the men who inhabit this great earth [caused] the Black Emperor to send his semen so as to create a Being who would rescue the people from their troubles, a Being of divine intelligence who would be a Sage-King, a teacher for his age, a bulwark for all men, and a religious leader for the whole world.²¹

I do not wish wholly to denigrate K'ang's reform programme. It was a reform programme ‘within the system’. The system destroyed it, and it was then replaced by Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary programme, which was ‘outside the system’. The weakest part of K'ang's reform programme was the Confucian label pasted onto it. Unhappily for the Sage's reputation, this increasingly tarnished label was to be used again, and by politicians less scrupulous and high-minded than K'ang: by Yüan Shih-k'ai in January 1914 when Confucianism was proclaimed the state religion; and again by Chiang Kai-shek in his ‘New Life’ movement launched in 1934, blending Confucianism with Methodism and YMCA enthusiasm. A set of four postage stamps bearing the emblems for propriety, righteousness, integrity, and the sense of shame, were issued on 1 January 1936. They are all that remain of the movement.

Our next halt is with the Confucius of the ‘religion of familism’. Here we have to do no longer with a man, but with an icon.²²

In his fine study Country Life in South China, the Sociology of Familism, Daniel Kulp describes a village community near Ch'ao-an in northern Kwangtung, The people's religious practices are directed, he says, towards creating and maintaining a harmonious working together of the three distinct communities that inhabit the village: the living, the spirits of the ancestors, and the spirits of Nature that dwell in every tree, house, fence and field. The norms of village behaviour are set by ‘ancestral worship’ and the ‘filial duties of everyday life’. Kulp writes: ‘The sanctions of the dead become powerful means of control of the conduct of the living. Attention centers on ancestors and not on descendants; the look of the community is backward and not forward in any mundane sense; continuity, conservatism, traditionalism, institutionalism, familism are the great societal values.’²³ The role of Confucianism in the village he explains as follows:

The scholars are the advocates of Confucianism. They keep quoting Confucius … until gradually the norms of conduct that the great Sage enunciated seep down to the last man or woman in the village. So it is that the people believe in animism. … They have strong faith in the Buddhas, for they practise Buddhist customs and contribute money to erect Buddhist temples; they follow Taoism, for they call upon the Taoist priest … to perform ceremonies for the dead, use Taoist charms for protection against demons, and on certain days observe vegetarian diets. Lastly, they proudly refer to the teachings of Confucius as moral standards for familist practice and close every debate by quotations from his Classics as to what is proper.²⁴

This is the Confucius whose influence in the villages the Chinese Communists have to combat and eradicate if the country's peasant masses are to experience ‘fan-shen’ and play their full part in China's planned progress.²⁵

It was certainly this Confucius whom Jeremy Bentham had in mind when he wrote in the Book of Fallacies under the heading ‘The Wisdom of our Ancestors, or Chinese Argument’: ‘Wisdom of Ancestors being the most impressive of all arguments that can be employed in defence of established abuses and imperfections, persons interested in this or that particular abuse are most forward to employ it.’²⁶ Bentham cannot be accused of having ‘invented’ this Confucius—conservative, and the prop of conservatives. Clearly he had in mind the presiding icon of Familism; and presumably he was unacquainted with the original teachings of the Sage.

There is no such excuse for the anonymous author of ‘The Progress of Chinese Literature in Europe’, an article that appeared in the Quarterly Review for 1814, for this was largely a review of J. Marshman's translation of the first part of the Analects.²⁷ His comments, perhaps, can in part be explained as reaction from the favourable, even adulatory, judgements of the Jesuit Fathers of the China Mission in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It must be conceded, however, that they mainly reflect the insular self-satisfaction and wholly unwarranted sense of cultural superiority characteristic of the Quarterly Reviewers and their following—a state of mind soon to be justified by the successful outcome of the First Opium War. His opinion deserves quotation:

That a plain man like Mr. Marshman, in attempting to translate symbols of this description into the English language … should altogether fail, and frequently write nonsense, is not in the least surprising; but we confess that we were not prepared for the extremely mean and meagre dress in which he has exhibited these homely truths of the great sage: they are absolutely disgusting from their nakedness; and we will venture to say, that the manual of a village schoolmistress or parish clerk never exhibited a set of maxims more trite and puerile than those to be found in every page from the first to the last of Mr. Marshman's tremendous quarto. Confucius might in his time, and in the eyes of the unenlightened people among whom he dwelt, have been considered as a holy man and a great philosopher; but, judging him by his writings, we are perfectly astonished his name should ever have survived his natural life, much less have been handed down to the present time with increased honours and veneration. His works ought never to appear in any language but that in which they were written.²⁸

This, I must admit, is an extreme example. Not everyone shared this denigratory view. In some circles the Jesuit presentation of Confucius as the benign moral philosopher, teaching natural religion free of all ‘enthusiasm’ and every kind of irrationality, still persisted.²⁹

This was the Confucius celebrated in Voltaire's quatrain:

De la seule Raison salutaire interprête
Sans éblouir le monde éclairant les esprits,
Il ne parla qu'en sage et jamais en Prophête:
Cependant on le crut, et même en son pays.

These lines, it is interesting to note, were prefixed to the ‘Vie de Koung-tsée, appellé vulgairement Confucius’ by Father Joseph-Marie Amiot S. J. which occupies almost the whole of the twelfth volume of the great Jesuit compilation Mémoires … concernant les Chinois.³⁰

The last ‘Confucius’ with whom we have to deal is the one presently under attack in the Chinese People's Republic. One would reasonably assume that he should be neither Voltaire's Philosophe, nor the Confucius of Ssu-ma Ch'ien and Father Amiot, much less the Confucius of the Analects; but rather the familist Judge, the prop and stay of conservatism among the peasant masses and apostle of Filial Piety (hsiao)—the universal principle validating hierarchy and subordination in traditional China. Astonishingly, we find he is none of these. Instead we meet a newly-invented ‘Confucius’, presented as the advocate of an effete slave-owning aristocracy whose crumbling authority he is concerned to revive and restore: in other words, a ‘restorationist’.

It is agreed by most observers that many of the major themes that sounded in the old China can still be detected in the new. As Etienne Balazs presciently wrote in 1960:

Without a doubt, that civilization which was formerly the most traditionalist of all, has now, as a matter of principle, turned its back on traditionalism. Official propaganda is untiring in its attacks on the traditional way of life and on traditional ways of thought; and its target of predilection is Confucianism, the incarnation of every kind of conservatism. Nevertheless, if you refuse to allow yourself to be taken in by appearances it is impossible not to recognize a profound underlying continuity [between the old China and the new].³¹

Confucianism is so deeply rooted in the Chinese heritage that inevitably the Chinese Communist has an ambivalent attitude to Confucius and his ‘thought’, Mao Tse-tung himself, in a poem written in 1956, quotes approvingly Analects IX, 16.³² Paul Demiéville has translated the relevant part of Mao's poem as follows:³³

Que m'importe le vent qui souffle et les vagues qui déferlent?
Cela vaut mieux que de me promener dans une cour oisive!
Enfin! Je me sens au large!
Le Maître l'a bien dit, sur les bords d'un cours d'eau:
“Allons de l'avant, comme le flot s'écoule”!

A revealing passage, with its succession of carefully balanced judgements, is the following from the English version of Hou Wai-lu's officially authorized Short History of Chinese Philosophy: Confucius

tried to preserve the interests of the declining clan aristocracy. Owing to the rising power of the freemen, however, he was forced to make certain concessions to them. There were, therefore, also some progressive ideas in his teachings. … He was a believer in Heaven [T'ien[and a defender of the traditional patriarchal system of the Western Chou. He added, however, a moral and spiritual content to the prevailing “rites” and “music”, which by then had become quite formalistic. The highest moral concept Confucius dwelled upon was “love” or “benevolence” [jen], a moral standard attainable by all which he even extended to the freemen. But he also associated “love” with “rites”, which were formerly a monopoly of the aristocracy. In his theory of knowledge Confucius believed in innate knowledge, though he also stressed experience and practice.³⁴

Examples of this ambivalence could be multiplied. Underlying it, I believe, is a difference of attitude towards the innovating Confucius of the Analects and the conservative Confucius of familism and filial piety. The first is a Confucius whose moral, intellectual and social teachings are in many respects consistent with, and even favourable to, Chinese Communism. The Confucius of the Analects is this-worldly. He is for the test of reason, for man as the measure. He believes that human nature can be changed if men will devote themselves to the task; accordingly he would accept fan-shen as at least an attainable goal. His dictum that ‘The superior man is not an implement’³⁵ shows clearly on which side he would be in the argument over ‘expert versus red’. He teaches that the supreme aim of government is the welfare of the people (compare Mao's exhortation to ‘serve the people’). Above all, he holds that education should be available to all without distinction of rank or wealth—‘yu chiao wu lei’—and this after all was largely what the Cultural Revolution of 1966-8 was about.³⁶ Kuo Mo-jo's position would seem to be a reasonable one for the Chinese Marxist to adopt; namely, that Confucius himself had been a ‘progressive’ in his own day; though the system called by his name, which in countless ways deviated from his original teachings, had in our day to be condemned as reactionary and an obstacle to progress.³⁷

In the current anti-Confucian polemic in the People's Republic, curiously enough, it is not the Confucius of Familism that is under direct attack, but rather, as suggested above, Confucius in a quite new and different role. From scrutiny of the articles published in Hung Ch'i (Red Flag, the theoretical organ of the Party's Central Committee) and elsewhere, we find two principal charges brought against the philosopher. First, Confucius is unmasked as a ‘restorationist’ who, when a new society was struggling to be born, worked to restore an old society that was due for the scrap heap. Second, Confucius is contrasted, as a reactionary, with the First Emperor of the Ch'in dynasty, Ch'in Shih-huang-ti, who is portrayed as an agent of progress.

The second charge has long been familiar to Western scholars from the work of the great sinologist and historian Otto Franke, who makes the Ch'in First Emperor one of the two heroes of the opening volume of his Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches, while depreciating Confucius as an ineffective purveyor of ‘moralistic twitterings’ (Tugendgesäusel).³⁸

It should occasion no surprise that a scholar of strong right-wing sympathies should judge in this way. It is more surprising to find Marxist historians now taking the same position. Professor Wang Gungwu, in an article examining Chinese Communist attitudes towards Ch'in Shih-huang and Confucius, draws attention to a recently published biography by Hung Shih-t'i which presents the First Emperor and his Legalist advisers as

representatives of the newly emerged landowning class who tried to destroy the last vestiges of the slaveowning aristocracy whose spokesmen [including Confucius] continually attempted to restore power to their class. Thus he burned the books of the self-seeking remnants of the aristocracy and buried alive the most reactionary among them. This radical interpretation is now part of a nationwide campaign which, while ostensibly against Confucius, seems really to be one directed against what are called the forces of restoration. It is based on the analogy between the revolutionary times of the 4th and 3rd centuries b.c., and those of the 20th century a.d., both, in Marxist terms, times of qualitative change: the former between “slave society” and “feudal society” and the present between capitalist and socialist society.³⁹

In this way the method of contrasting Ch'in Shih-huang (‘a progressive’) with Confucius (‘a reactionary’) leads on to the charge of ‘restorationism’ levelled against the philosopher. It is clearly impossible to sustain such a charge against the ‘historical Confucius’ since our knowledge of his life is quite insufficient to allow us either to bring it or refute it, nor, even if we accept every word of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's biography as true, would it lend credence to the view that Confucius fought against emergent feudalism in support of a reactionary slave society. We are dealing, then, in the context of this polemic, not with a human being, not with a semi-divine Sage, not even with an ‘icon’, but with a mere word—a name that has been emptied of all content, to be used simply as a ‘counter’ in a political campaign.

This is not to say that the campaign itself is unreal or meaningless. The ‘restorationist’ Confucius is described in a Red Flag article as follows: he aimed ‘to revive the dictatorship of the slave-owners who had been toppled, to continue the slave system … and to support the slave-owning aristocrats. … This is what he meant by “reviving States that had been extinguished, restoring families whose line of succession had been broken, and calling to office those who had retired into obscurity.”’⁴⁰ Confucius' part in this polemic is to provide an historical parallel which will help to enlighten the masses about the evil plans and deeds of contemporary villains or political opponents. The immediate target is Chairman Mao's former designated successor, the late Marshal Lin Piao, whose crime is described as conspiring ‘to “revive” semi-feudal, semi-colonial China, “restore” the landlord and bourgeois families, and “call to office” those who were landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists.’⁴¹ This makes the parallel clear and illustrates the technique of ‘using the past to serve the present’. It is only regrettable that in this instance, the past, to be useful, needs to be invented.

This brings me to the end of my survey of six variations on the ‘Confucius’ theme: some respectable (I would award this label to the Confucius of the Analects and of Ssu-ma Ch'ien); some too good to be true (in their different ways this applies to the versions of both Tung Chung-shu and the Jesuits); one at least reactionary (the minatory guardian of hsiao and Familism); and others contemptible (either from ignorance or from wilful misrepresentation). The six taken together attest the fecundity in image and interpretation of the original Sage, about whom we know so little—and, apparently, so much.

Notes

1. Weber classifies Confucianism as a ‘Beamtenmoral’. See Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Tübingen 1920, Vol. I, pp. 395-458, comprising: ‘Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, I, Konfuzianismus; v, Der Literatenstand, vi, Die konfuzianische Lebensorienticrung’.

2. Bernhard Karlgren, On the Authenticity and Nature of the Tso Chuan, Göteborg 1926, pp. 34-5.

3. James Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol. I, containing Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean, Hongkong 1861, 2nd rev. edn, Oxford 1893, p. 16.

4. Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol. I, p. 14.

5. In the quoted passages I have mainly followed Arthur Waley's translation in The Analects of Confucius, London 1938.

6. The two lines that Tzu-lu chants are from the Book of Songs, Pt I, Manners of the States; Book III, Odes of Pei, No. 8, Hsiung-chih, verse 4. See J. Legge, The Chinese Classics, Vol. IV, The She King, or Book of Poetry, Pt I, London 1872, p. 52.

7. Ed. Chavannes, Les mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts'ien, traduits et annotés, Vol. V, Paris 1905, p. 436.

8. From Pan Ku, Han-shu, Ch. 62; quoted in Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Grand Historian of China, New York 1958, p. 68.

9. Homer H. Dubs, History of the Former Han Dynasty, Vol II, Baltimore 1944, Appendix II, The Victory of Han Confucianism, p. 346.

10. H. G. Creel, Confucius, the Man and the Myth, New York 1949, p. 247.

11. Text in Shih-chi, Ch. 47: Ku Chieh-kang edn (preface dated Peking 1936), Vol. II, p. 434, ll. 18-20; Chavannes, Mémoires historiques, Vol. V, p. 301.

12. J. Legge, Sacred Books of the East XXXIX. The Sacred Books of China. The Texts of Taoism, Pt I, Oxford 1891, pp. 354-62. This is Chuangtzu, Book XIV, Pt II, Sect. VII, T'ien-yün, v-viii.

13. Text in Shih-chi, Ch. 47: Ku Chieh-kang edn, Vol. II, p. 454, l. 279; Chavannes, Mémoires historiques, Vol. V, p. 435.

14. Chavannes, Mémoires historiques, Vol. V, pp. 438-9.

15. There is a striking procedural analogy here with the so-called ‘Two Document’ hypothesis advanced to explain the ‘Synoptic problem’. The problem is that, when the gospels of Matthew and Luke are compared, they are found to possess some common material deriving from Mark, and further common material, mostly in the form of ‘sayings’, not found in Mark, and which the two later gospels are supposed to have taken from a collection of Sayings available to them both. This is usually known as ‘Q’ (from German Quelle). Comparing Ssu-ma Ch'ien's life of Confucius with the biographical material concerning Jesus in Matthew and Luke, ‘Q’ would correspond to the Analects, and Mark to the Tso-chuan.

16. Chavannes, Mémoires historiques, Vol. V, p. 440.

17. Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. II, The Period of Classical Learning, London 1953, p. 71.

18. Fung, History, Vol. II, p. 75. Quoted from Tung Chung-shu's Sweet Dew, III, 22.

19. R. P. Kramers, K'ung-tzu chia-yü, The School Sayings of Confucius, Vol. I, Leiden 1950, p. 5.

20. Ma Kuo-han, Yü-han shan-fang chi-yi-shu (first printed 1853, Chi-nan edition of 1874 reprinted Taiwan), p. 2103. See Fung, History, Vol. II, pp. 129-30.

21. Quoted in Fung, History, Vol. II, p. 675.

22. I use the word ‘icon’ advisedly. How else describe, for instance, the well-known portrait of Confucius by the T'ang painter Wu Tao-tzu (fl. 750)? See Plate 52 in Abe Capek's Chinese Stone-pictures, London 1962. This purports to show the Sage as Teacher but succeeds admirably in conveying the impression of the fearsome Judge of Morals. Compare also the seated Confucius on Plate I facing the first page of Amiot's life of Confucius in Mémoires … concernant les Chinois, Vol. XII (Paris 1786). Plate VIII in the same volume (facing p. 157) shows Confucius as presiding judge standing by while the death sentence is being read out to a criminal about to be executed (see ‘Explication des planches’, pp. 440-1).

23. Daniel H. Kulp, Country Life in South China. The Sociology of Familism, Phenix Village, Kwantung, China, New York 1925, pp. 307-8.

24. Kulp, Country Life, p. 309.

25. The expression ‘fan-shen’ means literally to ‘turn over the body’. An illuminating book about this is William Hinton's Fanshen, a Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, New York 1966. Hinton defines ‘fan-shen’ as follows: ‘To China's hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants it meant to stand up, to throw off the landlord yoke, to gain land, stock, implements, and houses. But it meant much more than this. It meant to throw off superstition and study science, to abolish “word blindness” and learn to read. … It meant to enter a new world’ (p. vii).

26. Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies, London 1824, pp. 69-81, espec. p. 80.

27. J. Marshman, The Works of Confucius; containing the Original Text, with a Translation, Serampore 1809.

28. The Quarterly Review, Vol. XI, 1814, p. 337.

29. For example Lord Byron, who writes: ‘In Morality I prefer Confucius to the ten Commandments’. See Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), Byron's Letters and Journals, Vol. I, London 1973, p. 148. This is in a letter to Robert Charles Dallas, dated 21 January 1808, written when Byron was a student at Cambridge.

30. Amiot's Life of Confucius extends to more than 400 quarto pages, and is supported by a Chronological Table (27 pages) inspired by the Chinese nien-p'u, an ‘Explanation of the Plates’ (16 pages), and Genealogical Tables (62 pages) pursuing Confucius' ascendants back 64 generations to the Yellow Emperor and his descendants forward 71 generations to K'ung Chao-huan, who succeeded to headship of the clan in 1744, and was known to Amiot personally. The biography, though substantial, is uncritical and largely based on Ssu-ma Ch'ien. It cost its author several years of labour, was completed in 1784, and published in Paris two years later.

31. Etienne Balazs, ‘Chine historique et Chine nouvelle’, in Aspects de la Chine, causeries faites â la Radiodiffusion-Télévision française, Vol. III, Époque contemporaine, Paris 1962, p. 638.

32. Analects IX.16 reads; When the Master was standing by a stream, he said, ‘Could one but go on like this [i.e. in moral striving], never ceasing day or night’ (A. Waley's translation).

33. Quoted in Étiemble, Confucius, Paris (1956) 1966, pp. 9-10. Demiéville's translation first appeared in the Mercure de France for April 1965. Compare Jerome Ch'en, Mao and the Chinese revolution, with 37 Poems translated by J. Ch'en and M. Bullock, Oxford 1965, p. 346.

34. Hou Wai-lu, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Peking 1959, p. 6.

35. Analects, II.12.

36. The words, which mean ‘In teaching there should be no class distinctions’ (Soothill's translation), are from Analects XV.38. The Cultural Revolution, whose most active phase lay between June 1966 and October 1967, received its charter in the form of the ‘Sixteen Points’ of the Central Committee resolution adopted on 8 August 1966. The tenth of these points, on ‘Educational Reform’, is relevant here.

37. See his Shih p'i-p'an shu (1945), and Julia Ching's reference to it in ‘Confucius and his Modern Critics’ in Papers on Far Eastern History, No. 10, Canberra 1974, p. 126, n. 17.

38. See Otto Franke, Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches, I. Band, Das Altertum und das Werden des konfuzianischen Staates, 3. Teil, 1. Kap., Der neue Staat der Ts'in und sein Ende, Berlin 1930, pp. 223-67. The whole chapter is an anti-Confucian tract. Especially to be noted are pp. 225, ll. 5-37; 233 ll. 14-29; 246 ll. 12-36. His summing up of the Ch'in First Emperor deserves quotation: ‘Das Charakterbild des Monarchen selbst zeigt alle jene Züge, die den ganz grossen Trägern geschichtlicher Neubildungen eigen sind: Herrscherwille, brutale Rücksichtslosigkeit, unbegrenztes Vertrauen in die eigene Kraft, dabei aber das Bewusstsein grosser Ziele und politische Klugheit bei Auswahl der Mittel. … Dass Schi huang-tis Regierung an Gewalttätigkeiten und vielleicht auch Ungerechtigkeiten nicht arm war, werden wir ohne weiteres zugeben müssen, das war schon durch den ganzen gewaltigen Umsturz der chinesischen Weltordnung bedingt’ (pp. 251, ll. 37-41, and 252, ll. 9-12).

39. See Wang Gungwu, ‘Burning Books and Burying Scholars Alive’ in Papers on Far Eastern History, No. 9, Canberra 1974, p. 138. On pp. 178-86 of his article Professor Wang translates a key passage (pp. 59-66) from Hung's book. Hung Shih-t'i's biography, Ch'in Shih-huang, Shanghai 1972, has enjoyed a wide circulation: 350,000 copies had been printed by July 1973.

40. ‘Link the Criticism of Confucius with the Criticism of Lin Piao’, an article contributed to Red Flag (1 December 1973) by a ‘Workers' Commentary Group’ of the Tientsin Municipal Battery Cable Plant. Translated in Survey of the China Mainland Magazines, No. 766 (27 December 1973), pp. 51-2.

41. loc. cit.