YANGTZE

INTERNATIONAL
STUDY ABROAD
扬子国际交流项目
READER ONE
ANCIENT CHINESE CULTURE
AND TOOLS FOR
UNDERSTANDING CHINESE
PHILOSOPHY

Oracle Bones (jiăgŭwén – 甲骨文)

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PART ONE

ANCIENT CHINESE DYNASTIES

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UNIT ONE
THE ANCIENT DYNASTIES

The Ancient Dynasties

(http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/ancient1.html)

The Yellow River Culture

The Yellow River Valley: As in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and along the Indus River,
Chinese civilization began within a major river valley. Modern China itself is a huge
geographical expanse. Around 4000 BC, this huge area contained an infinite amount of
ethnic groups and languages. The course of Chinese history, however, is in part
dominated by a single ethnic group and language. This history, in which a vast area of
infinite ethnic groups became, over time, a more or less single culture, began in the
Yellow River Valley (Huánghéliúyù – 黄河流域).

http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/geo/proper.htm

The Yellow River (Huáng Hé 黄河) is the northernmost of the major Chinese rivers.
Directly to the south is the Yángzĭ (Yangtze) River (Chángjiāng 长江; Yángzĭ 扬子);
south of the Yángzĭ is the West River (Xīhé 西河); south of the West River is the Red
River (Hónghé 红河) much of which passes through modern-day Vietnam. Sometime
around 4000 BC, when the area was much more temperate and forested, populations
around the southern bend of the Yellow River began agriculture. They sowed millet, but
sometime later, the Chinese began cultivating rice to the south, near the Huái River
(Huáihé 淮河). These were a Neolithic, tribal people who used stone tools. We know also
that they domesticated animals very early on, but they still continued as a hunter society
as well. Remains of game animals are almost as common as domestic animals in these
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villages. We know almost nothing about them for they left no records, and the life-blood
of a people does not flow in the archaeological garbage they leave behind. We believe
that tribal warfare was common and that they may have had some form of ancestor
worship, but these are mere guesses.

http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Myth/prehistory-map.html

Three Cultural Heroes

Chinese civilization, as described in mythology, begins with Páng Gŭ ( ), the creator

of the universe. In the Chinese version of history, however, history begins with three
semi-mystical and legendary individuals who taught the Chinese the arts of civilization
around 2800-2600 BC: Fú Xī (伏羲) 1 , the inventor of writing, hunting, trapping, and
fishing; Shén Nóng (神农) 2 , the inventor of agriculture and mercantilism, and the Yellow
Emperor (Húangdì: , around 2700 BC), who invented government and Dàoist
philosophy (compare this history with the Hebrew version of the founding of civilization
and its arts in Genesis, Chapter 3). While Western historians dismiss these Three Cultural
Heroes as legend, they were regarded as historical fact for most of Chinese history.

1
Emperor Fú Xī was the legendary inventor of the Chinese script. His prewriting device, called the Eight
Trigrams, was a combination of straight and broken lines, apparently taken from marks on a tortoise shell.
This may have replaced knotted cords that were used for record keeping.
2
Shén Nóng is venerated as the Father of Chinese medicine. He is believed to have introduced the
technique of acupuncture.
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Shén Nóng 神农 Yellow Emperor Húangdì Fú Xī 伏羲

The Sage Kings

The Chinese believed that the Three Cultural Heroes were followed by the Three Sage
Kings, Yáo (尧/堯- around 2350 BC), Shùn (舜 - around 2250 BC), and Yŭ (禹 - founder
of the Xià dynasty; rule began in 2205 BC). These Sage Kings ruled with perfect
wisdom, clarity, and virtue. In the Chinese model of history, human events follow
discernible cycles in which times of great virtue and wisdom are followed by times of
decadence and decline. Still, Chinese historians believed the Sage Kings rule as the most
virtuous time in Chinese history. We will see constant reference to the sage kings in the
writings of the Chinese philosophers covered in this course.

Emperor Yáo

http://www.answers.com/topic/yao-ruler
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Xià
(Edited: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Myth/xia-rulers.html)

The Tribute of Yŭ and the Nine Provinces of Ancient China

http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Myth/prehistory-map.html

It seems to be quite plausible that events of prehistory as old as the accounts of the
Yellow Emperor Húangdì ( ), Yáo (尧/堯- around 2350 BC), Shùn (舜 - around 2250
BC), and Yŭ (禹 - founder of the Xià dynasty; rule began in 2205 BC) are purely
mythical inventions. Scholars have suggested that the Xià Dynasty was a pure invention
of later periods. But as not much more is known of the Xià Dynasty as simple
genealogical lists of the rulers, there should be no doubt about the existence of such a
royal line, even if detailed accounts of Yŭ taming the floods and fixing the geography of
China might be of a later date.

Traditional accounts

According to traditional historical sources, the Xià Dynasty was founded by Yŭ the Great
(Dà Yǔ 大禹; surname: Si 姒), enfeoffed as Viscount of Xià (Xià Bó 夏伯) by the
mythical emperor Shùn. He - like his father Gǔn (鯀) - is credited with the taming of the
floods that inundated the Central Plain (Zhōngyuán 中原). During his work, Yŭ the Great
divided "China" into nine provinces with each region having its particular rivers and
mountains, and he categorized the soil of these regions into nine classes. The report about
this "Tribute of Yŭ” (Yǔ Gòng 禹贡/貢) was surely compiled at least at the end of the
Zhōu period (周). Yŭ, Bó Yí (伯夷) and Gāo Táo (皋陶) served as the highest councilors
of Emperor Shùn. When Shùn died, Yŭ refused to succeed to the imperial throne in favor
of Shùn's son, Shāng Jūn (商均). But the nobles all wanted to serve Yŭ as the new
emperor. Yŭ the Great is connected with the area of Kuàijī city (会/會稽) in modern
Zhèjiāng (浙江) where tourists can still find his tomb. Yŭ's son Qǐ (啟) was the first ruler
in China who directly succeeded to his father. Before, all emperors had not chosen their
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own sons as successors, but a noble and worthy man. Under king (emperor) Tài Kāng (太
康) a rebellion of the king's five brothers (wǔzi 五子) endangered the unity of the
kingdom. His brother and successor Zhōng Kāng (中康) was unable to control his
ministers who engaged in lust and selfishness. The last ruler of Xià was Jié (桀), known
as a cruel and depraved tyrant, and who appears in the Classics often. The lords of the
various domains eventually rebelled against Jié. Led by Tāng the Perfect (Chéng Tāng
成 湯 ), who was incarcerated and later freed by Jié, Tāng assembled an army and
dethroned Jié who died in exile. Tāng’s descendants were enfeoffed with the small fief
of Qǐ (杞).

Archeological evidence

While the traditional accounts about the Xià Dynasty were long disposed as pure mythical
accounts, the discovering of the Ānyáng (安阳), Hénán ( ) oracle bones and the
verification of the traditional ruler lists of the Shāng (商) Dynasty make it possible that at
least the ruler lists given in histories such as Sīmă Qiān’s (司马迁- 司馬遷 145-90BC),
Records of the Historian (Shǐjì 史记/史記) and the Bamboo Annals (Zhúshū Jìnián 竹书
纪年/竹書紀年) are partially true. Archeology in the last decades has shown that the city
of Yīn (殷) as the capital of Shāng was by no means a capital of a vast kingdom but
rather one single city state that controlled other states and areas in a distance of several
hundred miles. It might have been pure incidence that the Zhōu historiographers chose
the royal dynasty of Yīn as universal predecessor of their own dynasty. Similarly, a
further royal line called Xià was seen as a universal dynasty controlling the Central
Yellow River Plain before the takeover by the Shāng. In the 15th to 14th centuries the
situation seemed to be quite different. The mighty city state discovered in Èr Lǐ Gāng (二
里冈/岡 - modern Zhèngzhōu (鄭州 in Hénán 河南) controlled regions far south as
Húběi (湖北) and Jiāngxī (江西). Not far away, archeologists discovered a neolithic and
early Bronze Age site near Èr Lǐ Tóu (二里頭 - near Luòyáng (洛陽, Hénán) that might
well have been the domain of a royal house like that of Xià. Recently, pottery with
inscribed readable Chinese characters has been discovered there. The state of Èr Lǐ Tóu
was not only a cultural center whose inhabitants made use of a script, but archeological
remains that are linked with Èr Lǐ Tóu are dispersed in a large area of southern Shānxī
(山西) and northern Hénán. Èr Lǐ Tóu might have been the mightiest state of that period,
and probably later historians chose this state as predecessor of the later Shāng Dynasty -
that was likewise no single state but one of the most powerful of its time.
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The Dawn of History: Shāng

http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Myth/shang-map.html

Thousands of archaeological finds in the Huáng Hé ( ), Hénán Valley ( ) --the

apparent cradle of Chinese civilization--provide evidence about the Shāng ( ) dynasty,
which endured roughly from 1700 to 1027 B.C. The Shāng dynasty (also called the Yīn
[ ] dynasty in its later stages) 3 is believed to have been founded by Tāng (汤/湯), a
rebel leader who overthrew the last Xià ruler, the tyrant Jié (桀). 4 Its civilization was
based on agriculture, augmented by hunting and animal husbandry. Two important events
of the period were the development of a writing system, as revealed in archaic Chinese
inscriptions found on tortoise shells and flat cattle bones (commonly called oracle bones
or jiăgŭwén - ), and the use of bronze metallurgy. A number of ceremonial
bronze vessels with inscriptions date from the Shāng period; the workmanship on the
bronzes attests to a high level of civilization.

3
In Sīmă Qiān’s (司马迁- 司馬遷 145-90BC), Records of the Historian (Shĭjì 史记/史記), the Shāng (商)
Dynasty is generally referred to as the “Yīn (殷),” rather than as the “Shāng” The Shāng Dynasty is the
only period in Chinese history for which there exist two entirely independent names. Although different
scholars have their own theories as to why this is so, there is no consensus as to the reason. The two most
common theories are that the capital area of the Shāng was called Yīn, and that the alternative name derives
from this. The second theory is that “Yīn” was a name given to the defeated Shāng people by the Zhou,
denoting something like “the conquered.” (Edited from www.indiana.edu/~g380/Shang-Discov.pdf) You
will need to recognize both names, although the texts we will read generally use the dynastic name Shāng.
Confucius, Mencius, the Golden Mean, and the Great Learning prefer Yīn.
4
Both Tāng and Jié are key figures in Readers Two and Three.
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Dĭng (鼎, sacrificial vessel) Oracle Bones (jiăgŭwén – 甲骨文)

A line of hereditary Shāng kings ruled over much of northern China, and Shāng troops
fought frequent wars with neighboring settlements and nomadic herdsmen from the inner
Asian steppes. The capitals, one of which was at the site of the modern city of Ānyáng,
were centers of glittering court life. Court rituals to propitiate spirits and to honor sacred
ancestors were highly developed. In addition to his secular position, the king was the
head of the ancestor- and spirit-worship cult. Evidence from the royal tombs indicates
that royal personages were buried with articles of value, presumably for use in the
afterlife. Perhaps for the same reason, hundreds of commoners, who may have been
slaves, were buried alive with the royal corpse.

The Zhōu Period

http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Zhou/zhou-map.html

The last Shāng ruler, Zhòu (纣) 5 , a despot according to standard Chinese accounts, was
overthrown by a chieftain of a frontier tribe called Zhōu ( ), which had settled in the
Wèi ( ) Valley in modern Shăanxī ( ) Province. The Western Zhōu ((Xī Zhōu 西周-
1027-770/71 B.C.) dynasty had its capital at Hào (镐), near the city of Xī'ān ( ), or
Cháng'ān ( ), as it was known in its heyday in the imperial period. Sharing the
language and culture of the Shāng, the early Zhōu rulers, through conquest and

5
Not to be confused with the duke of Zhōu (Zhōu Gōng 周公). Zhòu (纣) is another key figure in Readers
Two and Three.
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colonization, gradually Sinicized, that is, extended Shāng culture through much of China
Proper north of the Chángjiāng ( or Yángzĭ /Yangtze River). The Zhōu dynasty
lasted longer than any other, from 1027 to 221 B.C. It was philosophers of this period
who first enunciated the doctrine of the "Mandate of Heaven" (Tiānmìng - ), the
notion that the ruler (the "son of heaven" or Tiānzĭ - ) governed by divine right but
that his dethronement would prove that he had lost the mandate. The doctrine explained
and justified the demise of the two earlier dynasties and at the same time supported the
legitimacy of present and future rulers.

The term feudal has often been applied to the Zhōu period because the Zhōu's early
decentralized rule invites comparison with medieval rule in Europe. At most, however,
the early Zhōu system was proto-feudal, being a more sophisticated version of earlier
tribal organization, in which effective control depended more on familial ties than on
feudal legal bonds. Whatever feudal elements there may have been decreased as time
went on. The Zhōu amalgam of city-states became progressively centralized and
established increasingly impersonal political and economic institutions. These
developments, which probably occurred in the latter Zhōu period, were manifested in
greater central control over local governments and a more routinized agricultural taxation.

The Eastern Zhōu (Dōng Zhōu 东周): Around 771 BC, northern barbarians overran the
Western Zhōu and conquered their capital city. The Zhōu king was killed, but his son, the
heir to the throne, fled to Luòyáng ( ) and established his government there. This
begins the period of the Eastern Zhōu, which was to last until its overthrow by the Qín
(秦) in 221 BC; in Chinese history, this period is called "the Spring and Autumn period"
(771-401 BC) and the "Warring States Period" (401-221 BC). This era of the Eastern
Zhōu would also see the most energetic flowering of Chinese thought and culture in
Chinese history. For it is during the reign of the Eastern Zhōu that the greatest
philosophers established the rudiments of Chinese philosophy, ethics, political theory,
and culture.

The Spring and Autumn Period (Chūnqiūshídài -771-401 BC): China

largely consisted of a group of minimally powerful kingdoms; the Zhōu themselves never
regained enough military or political power to reconquer the west or even to maintain
much control over the city-states they ruled over. Because of the instability of these
kingdoms, and because of the encroachments on their territories by barbarian tribes to the
south, the smaller territories entered into alliances with one another and agreed to have
certain territorial lords rule over them as "hegemons." So the Spring and Autumn period
was one of great uncertainty and danger, in which territory shifted back and forth,
invasions were frequent, and alliances formed and dissolved with astonishing rapidity.

In the Spring and Autumn Period, the State of Jìn (Jìn Guó 晋/晉国), is arguably the most
powerful state in China. However, near the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, the
power of the ruling family weakened, and State of Jìn gradually come under the control
of six large families (liùqīng 六卿). By the beginning of the Warring States Period, after
numerous power struggles, there were four families left: the Zhì (智) family, the Wèi (魏)
family, the Zhào (赵/趙) family, and the Hán (韩/韓) family, with the Zhì family being
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the dominant power in State of Jìn. Zhì Yáo (智瑶), the last head of the Zhì familiy,
attempted a coalition with the Wèi family and the Hán family to destroy the Zhào family.
However, because of Zhì Yáo's arrogance and disrespect towards the other families, the
Wèi family and Hán family secretly allied with the Zhào family and the three families
launched a surprise attack that annihilated the Zhì family.

http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Zhou/zhou-map.html

In 403 BC, the three major families of Jìn, with the approval of the Zhōu (周) king,
partition Jìn into three states (sānjiāfēn Jìn 三家分晋): the State of Hán, the State of Zhào,
and the State of Wèi. The three family heads were given the title of Marquess (Hóu 侯),
and because the three states were originally part of Jìn, they are also referred to as the
Three Jìns (sān Jìn 三晋). The State of Jìn continues to exist with a tiny piece of territory
until 376 BC when the rest of the territory was partitioned by the Three Jìns. 6 The
portioning of Jìn effectively ends the Spring and Autumn Period. 7

The One Hundred Schools (诸子百家- zhūzǐbǎijiā) 8 : In the latter years of the Zhōu, from
the close of the Spring and Autumn period all the way to the unification of China under

6
http://www.famouschinese.com/virtual/Warring_States_Period
7
There is no consensus among historians concerning the date at which the Spring and Autumn period ends.
The actual chronicle after which the period is named, The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chūn Qiū 春秋),
which was a court record of the state of Lǔ (鲁/魯), closes with the year 481. That date is sometimes taken
to mark the end of the period; others are Confucius’s death (479) and the end of the Chūnqiū Zuǒchuán (春
秋左传) commentary to the Annals (464). The date that makes the most historical sense, however, is 453,
the year that the state of Jìn (晋/晉, finally fell apart (edited; www.indiana.edu/~g380/S&A.pdf).
8
This era was also known as the “One Hundred Flowers Blossom, One Hundred Schools of Thought
Contend,” period (百花齐放，百家争鸣, bǎi huā qífàng, bǎi jiā zhēngmíng). In 1956, Mao used this
phrase to trick intellectuals into criticizing the Party, only to have those who criticized him, the party, and
government, arrested and persecuted.
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the Qín in 221 BC, Chinese thought entered its most creatively productive period. All the
major schools of Chinese thought were laid out in this incredible period of Chinese
culture; the Chinese historians refer to this cultural flowering as "The Period of The One
Hundred Schools" (551-233 BC).

• Confucianism (Rújiāsīxiăng 儒家思想; Rújiào, 儒教；Rúshù, 儒术 - The School

of Humanism; Confucianist: Rújiā 儒家)

• Dàoism (道教 Dàojiào; the mystical way; inaction; wúwéi (无为/無為) let things
Take their own course )

• Mòism (墨教 Mòjiào; school of ethics)

• Logicians (逻辑学家 Luójixuéjiā；a white horse is not a horse)

• Legalists (法家 Făjiā；brutal, legal basis of Imperial China, which we will look
at in some detail)

• Yīn/Yáng (阴阳/陰陽；two opposing principles in nature).

Scholars, such as Confucius, wandered around China trying to sell their ideas to one of
dozen or so “dukes” who ruled a state in what is now China. The dukes provided room
and board and subsidies to give lectures.

The Jìxià (稷下) Academy: Towards the close of the fourth century B.C. the new ruling
house of the state of Qí (齐/齊), decided to strengthen its prestige by establishing an
academy at its capital city of Línzī (临淄 - 859 BC to 221 BC). This academy, which was
located near a gate in the city wall known as the Jìxià (稷下) Gate, was intended to serve
as a magnet for intellectual talent that would both redound to the credit of the Qí rulers
and also provide it with a promising group of young men from which to recruit
government talent. This institution became known as the Jìxià Academy, and it became
the intellectual center of early third century China.

Jìxià was attractive to learned men of every variety. We do not know precisely how men
came to receive appointments there, but it seems likely that all that was needed was for a
master and his disciples to find a patron among the patricians of Qí to recommend an
appointment to the ruler. If the Qí court deemed such a master worthy of installment
among the wise men of Jìxià, then he would receive from the ruling house a stipend
sufficient for his needs--including his need to house and feed his disciples--and in return
he would simply be expected to remain at Jìxià, accepting disciples and participating in
the ceremonial events of the Academy. Once the most famous masters of China were
assembled at Jìxià, young men came there in numbers to select a master and be trained in
some tradition that would provide them with a path to employment, fame, or simply
intellectual fulfillment (http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Neiye.pdf)
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Xú Gān (徐干), says that patronage of scholarship began with Duke Huán of Qí (Qí Huán
Gōng 齐桓公 - r. 375-358), who "established a bureau at the Jìxià, inaugurated the
practice of bestowing the title of grand officer, and extended his welcome to wise men
whom he honored and esteemed." The Academy itself seems to have been founded by his
son, King Wēi of Qí (Qí Wēi Wáng 齐威王 - r. 357-320), who collected from all over
China the outstanding minds of the day. Under the influence of his prime minister, Zōu Jì
(邹忌), King Wēi patronized some 72 scholars in the Academy who "took delight in
deliberating the affairs of government," but who "treated Zōu Jì disrespectfully whenever
they had occasion to associate with him."

King Xuān of Qí (Qí Xuān Wáng 齐宣王 - r. 319-301) founded a Scholars Hall outside
the Jì Gate. During this period, the Academy reached its zenith. The King was fond of
scholars who were accomplished in learning and who were gifted virtuosos at rhetoric.
Seventy-six such men were associated with the Academy, were given ranks and honors,
and made senior grand officers, not to participate in the government, but to deliberate and
propound learned theories. For this reason, "the scholars beneath the Jì Gate enjoyed a
renaissance, coming to number in the hundreds and thousands." Mencius says of King
Xuān that the "heart behind his actions was sufficient to enable him to become a true
king" and that despite his inordinate fondness for acts of valor, money, sex, and musical
performances, he might have become great but for his refusal to act in the proper fashion.
Xúnzi (旬子 - 310-220 BC), Mencius’ later opponent, studied at the academy.

The Jìxià scholars seem to have been free to debate with one another without any of the
responsibilities of high office, though they were accorded its honors and emoluments.
Freed from having to put their theories into action, the Jìxià scholars seem to have
delighted in displays of skill in argumentation. A few abjured the holding of office as a
matter of principle, but most seem to have hungered for the power to act that office alone
provided. We know very little more about the Jìxià Academy and how its scholars
debated one another. The academy closed in 265 BC.
(http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/bio/Buddha/classphi.htm)

The Warring States Period (475-221 B.C. - Zhànguóshídài 战 国 ): By the

beginning of the fourth century, only eight or nine very large states remained. All of the
conflict of the Warring States period resulted from the search to see who would control
all of China. China was on the path to a single, unified state, a single empire. The
population of China had grown precipitously during the Spring and Autumn periods; the
working of iron and its effects on agricultural production had greatly increased the
population (in the fourth century BC, China was the most populated region in the
world—there is no point in history where that has not been true.) Warfare had become a
large-scale affair in the Spring and Autumn period; no longer were armies small and led
by an aristocracy. They were huge, conscript armies led by professional soldiers. A
professional government class was growing, a nobility that referred to itself by the name,
"chün tzu (jūnzĭ 君子)," or "superior man." All of this was driving China inexorably into
a unified state. The forgers of that state would be the Ch'in, a ruthless and daring people
on the farthest western reaches of China.
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http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Zhou/zhou-map.html

By the 3rd century BC, there were seven major states that rose to prominence. The seven
states, known as the "Seven Great Powers" (Zhànguó qīxióng 战国七雄/戰國七雄/战国
七雄), include (commit to memory): Qí (齐/齊 – east China), Chǔ (楚 – south China),
Hàn (汉/漢), Yàn (燕 – Beijing area), Hán (韩/韓), Zhào (赵/趙), Wèi (魏), and Qín (秦
– west China). In its march toward unifying China, the Qín destroyed Hàn in 230 BC,
Wèi in 225 BC, Chǔ in 223 BC, Yàn and Zhào in 222 BC, and Qí in 221 BC, completing
the unification process and introducing Legalism as the new ideology of the Qín dynasty.
We will look at this ideology in some detail.

Model Emperors of the Golden Age in Chinese Lore

Jean Gates
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 56, No. 1. (Mar., 1936), pp. 51-76

CHINESE literature is filled with the idea of an ancient golden age, when it is claimed
there was a united empire almost as large as China at the greatest expansion under the
Chou dynasty. This empire was ruled by sages and contained the norm and pattern for all
future ages. The heroes of this golden age are the three sage emperors, Yáo (尧/堯), Shùn
(舜), Yǔ (禹), who according to Chinese tradition lived from 2356 to 2177 BC.

These sage emperors are models embodying deep-seated racial ideals which contribute to
the Chinese world view and have had a stupendous influence on all subsequent life and
thought. These ideals are blended under two inclusive theories known as déhuà xuéshuō
(德化学说/德化學說) meaning “transformation by virtue,” and shēngzhǎng (生长/生長)
meaning “to cede “or “to yield.” Briefly, these ideals were exemplified by emperors who
ruled, not by force, but by the diffusion of a personal virtue, and who resigned their
 15

thrones to those they claimed were more worthy than themselves. The throne to the
worthiest was the ideal of the golden age. Under these theories are found such ideals as
self-criticism, non-assertion, and pacifism. One of the emperors, Shùn, became a model
of filial piety. By relegating the golden age to antiquity, the Chinese gave the sanction of
antiquity to their highest ideals, and this sanction has continued valid until recent times.
Furthermore, the model emperors exemplify democratic and socialistic tendencies in
government, and give a prominent place to sage ministers.

The theories and ideals mentioned above are developed and expanded in the writings of
the Great Philosophical Period, the 6th to the 3rd century BC. They belong largely to the
Confucian school 9 ; nevertheless some of the ideals are shared by rival schools of thought.
The lore had a severe struggle for existence, threatened as it was by the anti-cultural
ideals of the Dàoists 10 , those of absolute law of the Legalists11 , the Universal Love of Mò
Dí 12 , and the Hedonism of Yǎngzhū (養豬/养猪 – Kuàilèlùn 快乐论/快樂論). In spite
of the prescription of the Classics by Emperor Qínshīhuángdì (秦始皇帝), the founder of
the Qín (秦) dynasty (221-206 BC) and the burning of the books by the emperor’s prime
minister, Lĭ Sī (李斯), the world-view as contained in the lore finally triumphed with the
recovery of the Confucian classics and the fixing of the canon under Emperor Wǔdì (武
帝 140-86 BC) of the Hàn ( 汉 / 漢 ) Dynasty, and became the official guide for
government and all subsequent philosophical thought. It also had a profound effect on the
writing of history, all later works being written with the purpose of social and moral
control. It also set an example for invoking the sanction of antiquity, and pushing back
antiquity to other traditional figures as carriers of new social ideals and theories. History
written under the influence of these ideals does not necessarily give a true picture of the
period it deals with, but it preserves other valuable and worth-while elements, and
portrays the thought of the period in which it was written. The traditional view of the
Book of History (Shūjīng 书经/書經) is that it was compiled by Confucius from older
existing documents, that all its statements are true, that a golden age was realized in
antiquity in which a large united empire was ruled over by sage kings, that this was the
most enlightened period of Chinese history, and that its sanctions are of permanent value.

The Traditions and Personalities in the Model-Emperor Lore

In the first place the records dealing with the model emperors do not deal with
contemporary figures, for the first four sections of the Book of History begin with the
words: “Examining into antiquity we find that the Emperor . . . was” etc. It cannot be
proved that the emperors were not real figures, but the evidence thus far available casts
doubt on the assumption. The earliest contemporary records of China, the oracle bones
(jiăgŭwén 甲骨文) of the Yīn (殷) 13 or Shāng (商) dynasty (1766-112 BC), which
followed directly the dynasties attributed to the model emperors, do not mention them.

9
See Reader Two, Units 7-11.
10
See Reader Four, Units 17-21.
11
See Reader Four, Unit 16.
12
See Reader Four, Unit 22-23.
13
See Fn. #3 above.
 16

Yǔ, the latest chronologically of these emperors, appears in the earliest Chinese literature,
the Book of Odes/Songs (Shījīng 詩經/诗经) of the Western Zhōu period (Xī Zhōu 西周
c. 122-770 BC). There are six references to him in this work, in which he appears in the
r6le of a divinity who set in order the hills and rivers, and divided the land after the
deluge.’ Save for the first few chapters dealing with the model emperors-and these
written hundreds of years after the events recorded therein are claimed to have occurred-
the Shūjīng has only a few passages relating to these sages. Yǔ’s name seems arbitrarily
attached to a book of geography, the Yǔ Gòng (禹贡/貢), which forms the first book of
those attributed to the Xià period (夏 2205-1766). In this work his divine role of the Odes
as divider of the land is interpreted as that of surveyor of the empire, in which he defined
its natural features as well as the boundaries of its provinces and their products, as they
existed at the greatest expansion of the Zhōu dynasty. This book as it now stands is
supposed to have been a product of the same period as that which gave rise to the model-
emperor lore.

There is only one other reference to Yŭ in the books supposed to belong to this era, and
that is in the Songs of the Five Sons, a work whose genuineness is disputed. He is
mentioned once in the books ascribed to the Shāng period (1766-1122 BC). In the Great
Plan, ascribed to the Zhōu period, a legend of Yǔ seems to have been reworked so as to
make him the founder of the earliest system of Chinese philosophy. In the Analects of
Confucius…Yŭ is a very human figure. Stripped of all legendary lore, he embodies the
Confucian ideal by living frugally but observing with elegance the rites and he is said to
have “expended all his strength on the ditches and water channels.” The titanic work
attributed to him of controlling the deluge here shrinks to the more human proportions of
irrigation work carried out by the early ancestors of the Chinese. The Yŭ lore seems to
have passed through four stages, in which a divinity, God of the hills and streams, finally
becomes one of the model emperors-an exponent of the Confucian ideal of kingly
government.

As to Yáo and Shùn, very little is known of them until the Spring and Autumn Period
(Chūnqiū 春秋 722-481 BC). The Odes do not mention them. There is one reference,
supposedly to Yáo, in the Song of the Five Sons, but, as has been mentioned, the
authenticity of this work is doubtful. Here he is referred to as a prince of a small territory.
There is one brief mention of these emperors in the books attributed to the Shāng period
where they appear as models of kingship. In one of the books ascribed to the Zhōu period
the small number of their ministers is compared to that of the Chou, while in the Analects
Yáo and Shùn are mentioned three times and described in the same phraseology as in the
first few chapters of the Book of History.

It is evident how very meager these earliest references are. In the lore as found in the
Book of History, fragments of traditions are found interspersed among long discourses
embodying social and political ideals. Yŭ in one of his admonitory speeches to the
emperor Shùn tells of his superhuman work in draining off the waters of the deluge
“which embraced the mountains and overtopped the hills.” The administration of Yáo…is
based partly on an ancient sun myth. Ancient ideas of divine kingship are also present….
 17

There is one significant addition to the Yŭ traditions found in the Historical Records
(Shǐjì 史记/史記) of Sīmǎ Qiān (司马迁/司馬遷/) of the Hàn dynasty (206 BC-220
AD)….We have thus the phenomenon of a traditional figure, Yŭ, described first in the
earliest Chinese literature, the Odes, in terms of a god, becoming, in the classical
accounts of the Book of History, a human emperor along with Yáo and Shùn who are
supposed to have preceded him, but who first make their appearance in literature several
hundred years after him. These figures in the hands of philosophers are made to
exemplify the Confucian ideal, and have had a profound influence on Chinese life and
thought. As time went on, the meager accounts in the Book of History were enlarged both
in philosophical and in imaginative and mythological writings….

Many Chinese scholars believe the model emperors to have been all they are represented
to be in the early chapters of the Book of History and in later literature, and that the
Classics are infallible. Kāng Yǒuwéi (康有为/康有為), a scholar and reformer of the late
Qīng /Manchu (清) and early revolutionary period, was the first to admit that Confucius,
with a view to social reform, read his ideas back into a past that had no basis in fact.
[Other scholars] believe that Yŭ was a god of the hills and streams in the western Zhōu
period, that he was later humanized and arbitrarily attached to the traditional figures, Yáo
and Shùn, in the fourth century BC., and that the so-called Golden Age, with China a
united kingdom, was in reality a time when only a clan concept prevailed….

It can be seen from the study of the Yŭ legends that there were two lines of tradition-one
from which the mythological and marvelous had fallen away, leaving an interpretation
acceptable to the rational thinking of the early philosophers; and another which either
preserved or added these mythological elements to meet the needs of other types of mind
among the great masses of people which were assimilated into Chinese culture.

As has been mentioned before, the emperor Yáo, the earliest chronologically of the
model emperors, is connected by some scholars with a sun myth. All reference to the sun
is effaced in the account of his reign in the Book of History, but in the Historical Record,
he is referred to as appearing like the sun, which Granet says is “all that is left of an old
myth in which Yáo is presented as a subduer of suns, or as the sun itself.”

….the earliest traces of the sun myth in the Tiānwén ( 天 文 ) probably go back to
inscriptions on old stone monuments dating from about 500 B. C. The attempt at
interpretation of old stone carvings has been offered as one solution of the growth of
legendary literature through many centuries. The Classic of Mountains and Rivers
(Shānhǎijīng 山 海 经 / 山 海 經 ), which contains so much legendary and mythical
material, was supposed to accompany and explain a book of art. It is significant that
nearly all this type of material belongs to Southern China, the home of Dàoist literature.
Again, as in the myths and legends of Yŭ, there are two lines of tradition. In the Book of
History Yáo is a highly humanized figure and is stripped of all but the vestiges of myth,
while the imaginative element is greatly enlarged and supplemented in the Dàoist
literature of the southern state of Chǔ (楚).
 18

The story of Shùn, as already mentioned, seems to have been based on the plot of a
folktale which fitted well the Confucian ideal of filial piety, and carries reminiscences of
ordeal. In later accretions to Shùn’s story given by Mencius and Sīmǎ Qiān, he carries
some of the attributes of a culture hero, and appears in the role of husbandman, a potter,
fisherman and “city-forming prince.” Erkes says that the story of Shùn’s persecution as
found in Mencius fits in well with similar tales in both Indian and Siberian tribes. In the
Bamboo Annals, an historical record claimed to have been found in a tomb in 281 A. D.,
and whose marvelous tales are said to have taxed the credulity of the Confucian scholars
of that day 14 , there are found notes attributing to the model emperors all the miraculous
signs that go with great sages and prophets, such as miraculous births, great stature,
physical peculiarities and signs and wonders. The instances given above do not exhaust
the mythological and legendary material on which in part the history of Chinese
beginnings seems to be founded, but it is enough to show that China’s early texts have
the same basis as those of other old civilizations.

Not only has the history of the model emperors been rationalized from a foundation of
tradition, myth, and folklore, but it also has roots in another institution, that of divine
kingship. The high ethical ideal of kingship attributed to the model emperors—of men
who did nothing, but through the cultivation of virtue reacted on their environment,
causing moral reformation of the people and bringing prosperity to the nation-has been
built on a much more ancient model….

In the Book of Rites (Lǐjì 礼记/禮記), which contains detailed records of ancient usages,
the ritual used by the emperor at the inauguration of the seasons is given, and also a list
of calamities which would befall if the ritual corresponding to the season was not carried
out at the proper time. This ritual was still used after the beginning of the Christian era.
Thus in historical times, there is evidence of the concept of a king who simply by the
performance of consecrated ritual caused natural forces to function regularly and brought
good government and prosperity to the people. The earliest philosophical system of
China, attributed to Yŭ, describes the interaction of the different virtues on corresponding
natural forces. According to this tradition Yŭ was successful as a ruler because he
received from heaven the “Great Plan,” by which the proper relationship between the
virtues and the natural forces were established.

From the accounts in the Book of Rites, previously mentioned, it can be seen why the
calendar was of supreme importance to one who would hold the royal power, for if ritual
was not carried out at the proper season, the orderly course of nature on which the
kingship depended was disturbed. The importance of the calendar is seen in Yáo’s
instructions to his supposed astronomers…but in this rationalized account its purpose is
for the delivering of the seasons to the people. The importance of this function is seen
again in connection with another custom of ancient kingship, circumambulation. Shùn is
recorded as making a tour of inspection of his realm, beginning in the east and then going
to the other cardinal points, at each point meeting the nobles and rectifying their

14
The chronology, however, of the Bamboo Annals has been found by comparison with that of the Yin
bones and others to be more reliable than Sīmǎ Qiān, according to C. W. Bishop, "Chronology in Ancient
China," JAOS 52. 232-247.
 19

calendars and ceremonies. This circumambulation according to the course of the sun is a
practice common also in many coronation ceremonies and other ritual, such as marriage
and initiation. In historical times in China this circumambulation was simplified to a tour
of the four gates of the city.

The idea that the virtue practiced by ancient sage emperors was in reality magic,
analogous to that of the medicine man, save that it was used in the political sphere, is
borne out by a striking incident in the tales about Yŭ. The submission of the Miao tribes
is said to have been accomplished by the dissemination of virtue by the Great Yŭ -the
virtue in this instance being synonymous with dancing with feathers on the steps of his
palace….

The Background and Conditions out of which the Lore arose

This lore, as has been mentioned already, is considered by many critical scholars today to
have been the product of the fourth century B. c., not factual material of 2000 BC, and
the Golden Age sponsored by it is believed to have no basis in fact. It is obvious from the
materials presented in this study that the ideas involved were those prevalent in the
philosophical writings of the period in which the lore arose….

The historian, Gu Jiegang, maintains that there are four traditional assumptions
concerning the ancient period of Chinese history which must be discarded. First, the idea
that the Chinese came from one original stock. From the evidence of the Odes and other
sources, there were in earliest times many small kingdoms in close proximity. There was
at that time only a clan consciousness and not a race consciousness, and the reason that
the Chinese later used the name Xià (夏) to designate their race was probably that its
civilization was superior to that of its contemporary neighbors. The Book of Rites brings
some evidence to bear on this point, as he attempts to prove that twelve racial strains are
found in the Chinese race today.

Second, the idea that all China at the time of the Golden Age was under one rule, The
Odes refer to many small kingdoms existing together. The bone fragments from the
Shāng dynasty give the names of small localities only; no states are mentioned. China of
the Zhōu dynasty, which followed the Shāng, included only the present provinces of
Shaǎnxī (陝西), Hénán (河南), and Shāndōng (山东), and the southern part of Shānxī (山
西) and Húběi (湖北), while the empire of the Golden Age is represented as covering a
much larger territory, approximately that of the Warring States, 481-255 BC.

Third, the myth that certain traditional personages were men. He says that by the close of
the Spring and Autumn period, 481 BC, all the demigods of the Chinese had been
transformed into men.

Fourth, the concept of an ancient Golden Age. As has been stated before, the Odes,
China’s earliest literature, give a very different picture from that described in the Book of
History, and the ideals of the Golden Age are those arising during the period of the
Warring States, and not those of the Odes.
 20

Politically, the age in which the lore seems to have arisen was the age of the breakdown
of feudalism, the old aristocracy, and the suzerainty of the Zhōu kings. The great Zhōu
confederacy received its death blow with the invasion of the Yíchuán (夷传) barbarians
in 771 BC. At this time the emperor was killed and the capital was moved eastward to
Luòyáng (洛陽/洛阳). Henceforth the emperor held only nominal control. Disintegrating
forces had been at work for some time, as the results of the expansion of the feudal states
and the assimilation of large numbers of barbarian peoples. The Zhōu period, beginning
with many small states, by a process of conquest and assimilation, ended with seven large
ones. When the border states began to expand and take in even greater numbers of alien
peoples, the disruption of the old order, sanctions, and loyalties was even greater. The
strong tribes extended their borders at the expense of the weak. The dynasty ended with a
period called the Warring States (Zhànguó 战国/戰國), which continued until one of the
border states, Qín (秦), succeeded in gaining the ascendancy, and united China for the
first time as an empire (221 B. c.).

The period was one of the great unrest, characterized by a spirit of pessimism and
criticism. Many cultural and social changes were taking place to meet the exigencies of
the new conditions. The amalgamation of small groups into larger ones and the changes
of power due to constant wars brought about greater communication among all the
peoples who were finally united to form the empire. Better means of communication
stimulated trade, as well as an exchange of ideas. Coined money is said to have been
introduced at this time and this probably facilitated the change from agricultural to town
economy and the consequent growth of a wealthy merchant class, thus bringing about the
destruction of the feudal aristocracy and a leveling of class distinctions. Those with
ability among the lowly rose to the highest positions in the land….

This period is also characterized by the rise of a scholar class from among the lowly.
Education was no longer the exclusive right of the nobility. Rulers sought out the talented
among the people to help them. As in Greece, there was a class similar to the sophists,
and later there followed those who founded the great schools of thought.

The great minds of the day turned to the doctrines of the lore and the examples of the
ancient kings for a solution of the disturbed condition in which they lived. Descriptions
of these conditions occur in the writings of the period. Mencius, in speaking of the time
of Confucius which preceded him, says: “The world fell into decay and principles faded
away. Perverse speakings and oppressive deeds waxed rife again. There were instances of
ministers murdering their sovereigns. Confucius was afraid.” Moreover, Mencius, in
speaking of his own age, says: “Never was there a time farther removed than the present
from the rise of a true sovereign; never was there a time when the sufferings of the people
from tyrannical government were more intense than the present.”

Sīmǎ Qiān records that in Mencius’ time wars had greatly increased and thousands fell
in one battle. According to Gu Jiegang, “those who had an eye to the salvation of the
world of that day found it very hard to bear,” and advocated subjugation by virtue instead
of force. The Lore arose as a curb on the military class. The pacifistic tendencies of the
 21

Chinese of this period grew out of an intimate experience of what war meant. The ancient
Yáo, Shùn, and Yŭ, whose traditions could easily be interpreted to fit the ideals of the
philosophers of the age, were made models of the virtues needed for the salvation of the
age, and were held up as examples to contemporary kings to curb their avarice and
militant spirit. Yŭ’s name was not connected with those of Yáo and Shùn until the period
of the Warring States, when the theories for which the lore stood were being worked out.

Not only was the lore the outgrowth of the conditions outlined above, but it was also very
closely connected with the idea of unification and new geographical concepts which
found expression at this time in the Yǔ Gòng and the Classic of Mountains and Rivers. It
can readily be seen how the absorption of small states into larger ones and the
assimilation of many alien people into China’s culture would force this idea into her
consciousness. “The idea of an ancient unification was invented to facilitate the actual
unification which began at the close of the Zhànguó period.” The manipulators of history
attached Yŭ’s name to a book of geography descriptive of the times in which they lived
and made his tradition of dividing the empire into nine zhōu (州) 15 fit their own times,
thus finding sanction in antiquity for what was taking place. Gu Jiegang points out that
formerly when the people of the north noticed that the southern barbarians tattooed their
bodies and the people of Chu chattered like birds, they were ashamed to associate with
them, but after the rise of the idea of an ancient unification connected with the nine zhōu
theory, they realized that after all they were all sons and daughters of Húangdì and Yáo
and Shùn. In this way they were able to unite all the peoples which make up China in
modern times.

The Classic of Mountains and Rivers, which belongs to this period, was also a product of
new geographical ideas which had been seeping in over the trade routes from the
Mediterranean world, giving China a new world view. The ideas which first came carried
geographical information both real and mythical. China began to realize that it was only a
part of a larger world, and began to reconstruct that outer world and her own from the
information which came to it…The Classic of Mountains and Rivers contains
descriptions of reproductions (now lost) of designs Yŭ is supposed to have engraved on
the nine tripods. These designs show the square earth surrounded by four seas and the
strange peoples and monsters inhabiting the confines of the world….

Who were the authors of this interpretation of traditional material? Hirth points out that
the dependence of the model emperors on the advice of their ministers in all important
matters is very significant, and says “it is reasonable to assume that not an independent
historian but certain parties interested in raising the importance of their own class
invented or modified the old records, so as to lay the intellectual fatherhood of great
decisions on ministers or philosophical advisers.”

That the Chinese should have used the method of finding sanction for reforms and for
their ideals by reinterpreting ancient traditional material was very natural. It had been a
very widespread practice among many cultures. The sanction of antiquity was an

15
An administrative division in ancient China.
 22

especially strong one with the Chinese, however. Confucius’ attitude toward the ancients
is well known. The worship of ancestors also emphasizes this attitude. The methods used
in the creation of the lore have been used many times since….To the philosophers, the
only solution for the conditions in which they lived seemed a moral one, and
consequently they turned for sanction to the ancient mores of the race. The ancient
mythological material on which the lore is based must have been undergoing for some
time a gradual rationalization at the hands of the philosophers and rational thinkers, and
without realizing it, they were myth makers. “The function of myth briefly is to
strengthen tradition and endow it with greater value and prestige by tracing it to more
supernatural reality of ancient events [and] “Myth is a constant product of living faith,
which is in need of miracles, of sociological status which demands precedent, of moral
rule which requires sanction.”

The Chinese based their sanction for moral rule on a golden age in antiquity, and not on
the supernatural, as was the case in some other cultures. Furthermore, throughout its
history China has possessed a high civilization, and has been the carrier of very definite
culture traits. Although it has been repeatedly overthrown by less civilized groups, yet it
has been able to hold these traits almost unimpaired and to impose them upon its
conquerors. At the time the lore arose, the foundations of the old culture were being
threatened by alien elements and subversive doctrines, and the lore was a desperate effort
at self preservation.

It is the opinion of Laufer that “the theory of perfect seclusion and isolation of ancient
Chinese culture can no longer be upheld.” China’s kinship with other parts of the world is
seen in the similarity of myths, of fundamental ideas of kingship, and of world
conceptions. The methods of compilers of the lore are also not unique with China. A very
close parallel is found in the compilation of the early books of the Pentateuch. With both
the Chinese and the Hebrews, the motive seems to have been that of preservation-in one
case, that of an ethical ideal based on ancient mores and the sanction of antiquity; in the
other that of a religious ideal based on the supernatural.
 23

UNIT TWO
THE UNIFICATION OF CHINA

Qín (秦) Dynasty, 221-206 BCE

Maps: http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/china/timeline.html#early

The Qín came to power in 221 B.C. They were one of the western states that existed
during the Warring States Period. They conquered the other Warring States, unifying
China for the first time. Their leader named himself the First Emperor, or Qínshĭhuángdì
(秦始皇帝), thus beginning the tradition of having emperors for rulers. The Qin, while
not the most culturally advanced of the Warring States, was militarily the strongest. They
utilized many new technologies in warfare, especially cavalry.

Qínshĭhuángdì (秦始皇帝)

The Qín made many changes that were meant to unify China and aid in administrative
tasks. First, the Qín implemented a Legalist form of government, which was how the
former Qín territory had been governed. The area was divided up in 36 commanderies
 24

which were then subdivided into counties. These commanderies had a civil governor, a
military commander, and an imperial inspector. The leaders of the commanderies had to
report to the Emperor in writing. The Legalist form of government involved rewards and
punishments to keep order. Also, the state had absolute control over the people, and the
former nobility lost all of their power. The nobility were also transplanted from their
homes to the capital. Groups were formed of units of five to ten families, which then had
a group responsibility for the wrongdoings of any individual within the group.

The achievements of the Qín are numerous. They standardized the language and writing
of China, which had varied greatly from area to area during the Warring States Period.
This was done partially out of a need to have a consistent way to communicate across the
country; administrators had to be able to read the writing of the commandery to which
they were sent. Also, currency became standardized as a circular copper coin with a
square hole in the middle. Measurements and axle length were also made uniform. This
was done because the cartwheels made ruts in the road, and the ruts had to all be the same
width, or carts with a different axle length could not travel on them. Many public works
projects were also undertaken. A Great Wall was built in the north [214 BC], to protect
against invasions. Roads and irrigation canals were built throughout the country. Also, a
huge palace was built for the emperor. The Qín is also famous for the terra cotta army
that was found at the burial site for Qínshĭhuángdì. The army consisted of 6,000 pottery
soldiers that protected the tomb. They may be a replacement for the actual people who
had previously been buried with the rulers.

Despite all of these accomplishments, the emperor was not a popular leader. The public
works and taxes were too great a burden to the population. It seemed that the emperor
could not be satisfied. Also, the nobility disliked him because they were deprived of all
their power and transplanted. Finally, he banned all books that advocated forms of
government other than the current one. The writings of the great philosophers of the One
Hundred Schools time were burned and more than 400 opponents were executed.

A reading of the Confucian and Legalist platforms should be enough to tell us what
happened. The dynamic and ruthlessly efficient program of the Legalists, as adopted in
Qín, helped that state to triumph successively over its rivals and in 221 BC to found the
first universal Chinese empire. Under the new regime the nobles and officials of the
former states were taken away from their territories and stripped of power. Their place
was taken by a centrally-appointed, non-hereditary, salaried bureaucracy which was to be
the model for all dynastic governments from that time onward until the founding of the
Republic in 1912. The Legalist law of Qín became the law of the entire empire. Finally,
in 213 BC., the Legalist program reached its logical climax with the notorious “Burning
of the Books,” expressly ordered by the government to destroy the classical texts of
antiquity, the writings of the non-Legalist schools of thought, and the historical records of
former states other than Qín. 16

16
This paragraph is an excerpt from Derk Bodde’s article on Legalism (Reader Four, Unit Sixteen).
 25

Lĭ Sī (李斯)
Memorial on the Burning of the Books 17

Your servant suggests that all books in the imperial archives, save the memoirs of Qín, be
burned. All persons in the empire, except members of the Academy of Learned Scholars,
in possession of the Classic of Odes, the Classic of Documents, and discourses of the
hundred philosophers should take them to the local governors and have them
indiscriminately burned. Those who dare to talk to each other about the Odes and
Documents should be executed and their bodies exposed in the marketplace. Anyone
referring to the past to criticize the present should, together with all members of his
family, be put to death. Officials who fail to report cases that have come under their
attention are equally guilty. After thirty days from the time of issuing the decree, those
who have not destroyed their books are to be branded and sent to build the Great
Wall. Books not to be destroyed will be those on medicine and pharmacy, divination by
the turtle and milfoil, and agriculture and arboriculture. People wishing to pursue
learning should take the officials as their teachers. [Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp.
209-10.]

[The First Emperor said:] “I confiscated all the books from the empire and got rid of all
those that were of not use....I have also directed people to question the various scholars
residing in Xianyang (near modern-day Xī’ān), and it appears that some are spreading
dubious stories in order to mislead the black-headed people!” He then ordered the
imperial secretary to subject all the scholars to investigation. The scholars reported on
one another in an attempt to exonerate themselves. Over 460 persons were convicted of
violating the prohibitions, and were executed [note: the word translated here as
“executed” is sometimes interpreted as “buried alive”] at Xianyang, word of it being
publicized throughout the empire so as to act as a warning to later ages. [Records of the
Grand Historian (Qin), p. 58.]

The Qín rule came to an end shortly after the First Emperor's death. He had only ruled
for 37 years, when he died suddenly in 210 B.C. His son took the throne as the Second
Emperor, but was quickly overthrown and the Hàn dynasty began in 206 B.C.

17
See Reader Four, Unit Sixteen.
 26

UNIT THREE

The Hàn (汉/漢) Dynasty (206 BCE- 220AD)

and the Victory of Hàn Confucianism

The Hàn Empire began in 206 B.C. when Liú Bāng (刘邦/劉邦 ) 18 , prince of Hàn,
defeated the Qín army in the valley of Wei. The defeat was part of a larger rebellion that
began after the First Emperor’s death. The people were dissatisfied with the tyranny of
the Qín leaders and their Legalist form of government. However, while traditional
Chinese history portrays the Hàn as implementing immediate changes in government,
evidence shows the Hàn continued to rule in the tradition of the Qín, and only gradually
incorporated Confucian ideals into their Legalist form of government. Economic
expansion, changing relationships with the people of the steppes, strengthening of the
palace at the expense of the civil service, weakening of the state's hold on the peasantry,
and the rise of the families of the rich and the gentry were all factors that led to the
adoption of Confucian ideals..

Under this new form of Legalism and Confucianism, rewards and punishments were still
used for common people. However, the administrators were judged based on Confucian
principles with the justification for these different sets of standards as they were educated.
As a last resort, the ruler could use punishment for both the people and the officials. It
was believed that force alone was not a sufficient way to rule and so the emperor needed
the help of the Confucianists to guide him morally. Evidence of rulers using their power
to punish is found in the records of officials who were beheaded.

When Liú Bāng conquered the Qín, he created his capital at Cháng’ān (长安), near
modern-day Xi’an (西安). He kept most of the laws and regulations by the Qín and made
many of his friends’ nobles and gave them fiefs. However, the land was still divided up
into commanderies and prefectures. Even the fiefs given out were treated like
commanderies. Hàn power was based on direct control of people by the state.

18
See article by Dubs below for more on Liú Bāng.
 27

Like the Qín before them, the main goal of the Hàn was the unification of China. This
goal led to the eventual breakup of the fiefs and the downfall of the imperial nobility.
This process was finally complete during Hàn Wŭdì’s reign (武帝 141-87 B.C.) His reign
was a period of great military expansion. He expanded the borders into Vietnam and
Korea and pushed the Xiōngnú [Huns] south of the Gobi. Wŭdì transplanted an estimated
2 million people to the northwestern region in order to colonize these areas.

The expansion also led to trade with the people of inner Asia. Thereafter, the Silk Road
was developed. The Silk Road actually consisted of more than one possible route
through the mountains that the traders followed. Agriculture grew with the development
of better tools. Iron tools were made of better quality, and oxen drawn ploughs were
commonly used. Irrigation systems were increased to help develop the areas of North
China. Crop rotation was also practiced from 85 B.C. onwards. The state attempted to
monopolize the production of iron and salt, which were the two biggest sectors of the
economy, but succeeded for less than a century. Silk weaving and copper work were also
important activities.

Education became more important during this period, as a new class of gentry was
introduced. A result of this was the compilation of many encyclopedias. The best known
is the Book of the Mountains and Seas, which contained everything known at the time
about geography, natural philosophy, the animal and plant world, and popular myths.
Sīmă Qiān (司马迁- 司馬遷 145-90BC), considered to be China's greatest historian
wrote his famous Records of the Historian (Shĭjì 史记/史記) during this time. This
history book became the model by which all other histories would follow. It was one of
the first attempts in China to make a record of the past in a proper form.

Sīmă Qiān (司马迁- 司馬遷)

Outside the emperor's court, life in Early Imperial China can be divided into rural and
urban and upper and lower classes. The Imperial government placed heavy demands on
its people. Every member of every household was placed on a government register. Men
(20-56 years old) were required to serve one month per year in state labor projects. These
 28

included the building of palaces, roads, bridges, canals, dikes, and walls. Men also
served two years in the military and were recalled in an emergency. The heaviest burden
was taxation. Greedy officials and the material appetites of the Imperial houses weighed
heavily on the average Chinese.

The majority of China's population consisted of small households (4-6 people) actively
engaged in working the land. Their produce provided the revenue that supported the state
(and the cities). Although they considered themselves independent, individual
households had to rely on and help each other, especially during times of natural disaster.
The household's stability was often threatened by nature or the state. Famine, excessive
taxation, and conscription to serve in military campaigns and labor corps caused the
breakup of households and the members to flee. These people were then forced to
wander the land as beggars or thieves or seek refuge with the great land owners. In return
for labor, powerful landlords offered a degree of independence from the civil government.
The peasant laborers were given seed, tools, plots of land to work, and the use of draught
animals. Existing mostly at a near starvation level, the peasants spent every daylight hour
working the fields, milling grain, or carrying water from wells or irrigation channels.

In the cities, wealthy families lived a life of luxury and extravagance in multi-storied
houses, richly decorated and furnished. They dressed in silks and furs, dined on a wide
variety of foods and delicacies and traveled in gleaming horse drawn carriages. They
entertained themselves with music, animal performances, and foreign girls. Government
offices maintained large numbers of slaves, of both sexes, who lived relatively idle and
lavish lives when compared to ordinary Chinese. The large servant and labor classes
toiled for mere survival and lived in slums and hovels or on the streets.

The Victory of Hàn Confucianism

Homer H. Dubs
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 58, No. 3. (Sep., 1938), pp. 435-449

IT WAS DURING the Former Hàn (Xī Hàn 西 汉 / 漢 ) period that Confucianism
developed from being the teaching of a few pedants in semi-retirement, at the end of the
Zhōu (周) period, to become the official philosophy of the government, which had to be
adopted by anyone who hoped to enter public life. This victory set Confucianism on its
way to become the dominating feature of Chinese culture and to affect profoundly a large
portion of humanity. It is consequently interesting to determine just how and why this
victory came about….The Confucian victory can not however be fixed at any one
particular date, rather it was a slow process of increasing completeness, which began with
the Emperor Gāozǔ (高組; also known as Gāodì 高帝 206-195 BC) 19 and was not
complete until the time of the Emperor Yuándì (元帝 48-33 BC), more than a century
and a half later.

19
Personal name: Liú Bāng (刘邦/劉邦)
 29

The Emperor Gāozǔ began with a violent prejudice against Confucians but had an
intimate younger half-brother who had a thorough Confucian education. The Confucians
had opposed and criticized Qínshĭhuángdì, the first emperor of the Qín (秦) dynasty, who
had repressed them violently, burning the Book of Odes (Shījīng 诗经/詩經), the Book of
History (Shūjì 书记/書記), and driving outstanding Confucians into flight or retirement.
Because of the Qín dynasty’s attitude, Confucians naturally assisted Gāozǔ. He received
valuable advice from Confucians, who pointed out to him the great advantage of
employing the Confucian doctrine of Heaven’s Mandate (Tiānmìng 天命) against the
tyranny of the Qín ruler. Gāozǔ seems first to have asked his administrators in the
provinces to recommend persons with excellent reputations and manifest virtue to the
imperial government for positions in the bureaucracy, which procedure initiated the
examination system, so influential in promoting Confucianism.

Gāozǔ’s men were sincere Confucians. They wrote a thoroughly Confucian book at
Gāozǔ’s request, and were highly praised and rewarded for it. Thus Gāozǔ, beginning
with an antipathy to Confucians, ended by giving them high position and favoring them.
Under the next two rulers, Gāozǔ’s son, Emperor Huìdì (惠帝 194-188 BC) and the
Empress Dowager Lǚ Hòu (呂后; r. 187-180 BC), Confucianism suffered a set-back.
The Confucians opposed the Empress Dowager, who was a Dàoist, and her usurpation of
the imperial power and went into retirement.

With the Empress Dowager’s death and the accession of Emperor Wén (文帝; r. 179-157
BC), Confucians again became influential. The new Emperor encouraged learning and
continued many Confucian practices. But he felt that he must be impartial towards all the
various philosophies current at the time; hence he established knowledgeable people to be
specialists upon these various philosophies, until he is said to have had seventy Erudites,
or court academicians with doctorate degrees (bóshì 博士). Yet Emperor Wén was
probably more influenced by Confucianism than by any other single teaching. Later
Confucians have considered him a saint. Emperor Wén moreover extended the
examination system by having the commanderies send capable persons to the imperial
court, among whom the Emperor selected officials by setting examinations for them at
the capital. In his questions, the Emperor invited the candidates to give him advice upon
governmental policies. Thus Confucianism was merely one of the most influential of the
many tendencies in Emperor Wén’s government.

In 141 BC, the youthful Emperor Wǔ Dì (武帝) came to the throne. He was only in his
sixteenth year, and had been given a good classical education, which had naturally
included a study of Chinese literature, the Confucian classics. The Emperor was greatly
interested in learning, literature, and poetry; he himself later wrote some very creditable
poetry. He was somewhat imperious and very ambitious.
 30

After having been given such an education, he was naturally much impressed by
Confucianism, so much so that at first, at the suggestion of Dŏng Zhòngshū (董仲舒) 20 ,
he seems to have wanted to make Confucianism the sole philosophy of the government.
In this resolve, he was probably swayed very largely by his advisers, for in later years the
Emperor altered his attitude to Confucianism greatly. The most serious obstacle to this
plan was the fact that the Emperor’s grandmother, the Grand Empress Dowager, was a
devotee of Lăozĭ. Because of the current exaltation of filial piety, her influence at the
court was quite as strong as that of the Emperor. The Confucian party hence
compromised by attacking only the philosophy they considered most dangerous and most
opposed to the Confucian tradition, namely the Legalist school, which had been that
espoused by the Qín dynasty, from whose institutions the Hàn dynasty had taken its
governmental organization. Hence they induced the aged and faithful but incompetent
Lieutenant Chancellor Wei Wan to memorialize the throne that all those officials and
candidates should be dismissed who had specialized in the lore of the Legalists. Emperor
Wŭ naturally ratified and enacted this proposal. Clearly, the intention of this edict was to
eliminate all non-Confucians from the government service.

The emperor and his new advisors proceeded to introduce Confucian practices and
proposed the establishment of a ceremonial building said to have been used in Zhōu times
for sacrifices and court receptions. Emperor Wŭ liked ceremonies and pomp;
Confucianism emphasized such ceremonials. His advisers needed expert aid in this
project, so they persuaded the emperor to send for their teacher. A messenger was sent
with presents of silk and jade circlets, and with a comfortable chariot with seats, with its
wheels bound with rushes, and a team of four horses, to invite the eighty-odd year old
Confucian authority to court. His two outstanding disciples followed him in a one-horse
chariot. After their arrival, the emperor ordered the discussion of the ceremonial building.

Meanwhile the Confucian clique at the court had found itself hampered by the influence
of the nobles at the capital. The Confucians accordingly revived a law enacted by
Emperor Wén under Confucian influence to the effect that nobles, especially marquises,
should reside at their estates in order to guide and care for their people. Most of the
nobles had however established themselves at the center of civilization and luxury in the
imperial capital, did not wish to leave it, and concerned themselves only with receiving
the taxes from their estates. On account of the fear of rebellion, the administrators of
noble estates were all appointed by the imperial government, so that the nobles could
have had little influence upon their people. Emperor Jǐng ( 景 ; 157-141 BC) had
consequently rescinded Emperor Wén’s law. Most of the marquises had moreover
married imperial princesses; hence they took their cause to their relative, the Grand
Empress Dowager.

In order to check the influence of the Grand Empress Dowager, the Confucians now
asked for the enactment of a law to the effect that government affairs should not be

20
He was chiefly responsible in making Confucianism the state doctrine in 136BC. He himself was a
major figure in the development of Confucianism, developing Yin-Yang Confucianism, the idea that the
universe is not static but dynamic (Chan, 271). See the following article for his contributions to the
development of Confucianism as China’s state doctrine until 1905.
 31

brought to the attention of an Empress Dowager, i. e., that female influence should be
excluded from the government. Thus the issue was joined. The court Confucianists were
trying to exalt Confucianism and suppress Dàoism as well as Legalism; the Grand
Empress Dowager was an ardent Dàoist. When the Grand Empress Dowager heard of the
Confucians’ request, she was furious; Emperor Wŭ, who had probably become somewhat
tired of the Confucians, sent the Confucianists to jail, where they were compelled to
commit suicide; others were dismissed. The Confucians could not withstand the
Emperor’s grandmother?

She died in 136 BC, four years later, a few months after which Emperor Wŭ, who had
again become influential, established the court academicians who specialized in each of
the five Confucian classics. Confucianists were appointed to office; Dàoists were
degraded. Yet there continued to be Dàoists in the court, for there had been no ban put
upon them. Sīmǎ Tán (司马坛/司馬壇) and his son, the historian Sīmǎ Qiān (司马迁/
司馬遷), were both Dàoists and kept their posts as Grand Astrologers. The Mòist school
seems to have exercised little influence, if it still existed, which is doubtful, for no
adherent of this school is mentioned among the Emperor Wŭ’s officials, although it is
mentioned by Sīmǎ Tán in his survey and comparison of the six philosophical schools.

Dŏng Zhòngshū had previously suggested to Emperor Wŭ the establishment of a

government university; sometime around 184 BC. Dŏng renewed the suggestion and
drafted the memorial which was approved by the Emperor and became the charter of the
Imperial University (Tàixué 太学/太學). It was located seven li northwest of the capital.
The masters were the Erudites; they or their Disciples did the teaching. The Grand Master
of Ceremonies was ordered to select fifty persons who were in their 18th year or over, in
good health and upright in character. They were entitled the Disciples of the Erudites, and
were exempted from taxes and service. The Administrators of Commanderies and
Chancellors of Kingdoms were ordered to select suitable students who showed a love of
learning and good character and to send them to the Grand Master of Ceremonies at the
imperial capital with the persons who brought the yearly accounts to the capital; these
students were to study at the Imperial University for one year like the Disciples,
whereupon they were to be examined. Those who showed themselves expert in one
classic or more were entitled Literary Scholars (wénxué 文学) or Authorities upon
Ancient Matters. Those who did not attain such a high rank might be made Gentlemen-
of-the-Palace, who were imperial attendants and might be selected for office. The name
of a person who showed abundant talent to an extraordinary degree might be reported to
the throne for a substantial office. Those who had not applied themselves to studying or
had shown themselves of such small ability that they could not even become expert in
one Classic were immediately dismissed. Literary Scholars or Authorities upon Ancient
Matters might be given minor positions in the official bureaucracy.

There was thus established in the capital an institution for the training of officials,
capable graduates of which automatically entered the government service. The
curriculum and teachers of this institution were all Confucian, so that, as Sīmǎ Qiān says,
“From this time on, most of the minor officials in the offices of the ministers and officials
at the capital were Literary Scholars.” Confucian learning thus became the means
 32

whereby most of the lower positions in the bureaucracy were filled, and so in time
permeated the government.

Yet Emperor Wŭ was far from being a thorough-going Confucian. Indeed, in many
respects he acted contrary to Confucian ideals. His widespread military expeditions were
un-Confucian. His heavy taxes and legal oppression of the people were un-Confucian.
His establishment of the salt and iron government monopolies, the monopoly on
fermented liquors, and the Bureau of Equalization and Standards, whereby the
government speculated in goods, were specifically Legalist measures. His cultivation of
magicians, his seeking for supernatural beings, his erection of buildings for magical
purposes, and his indulgence in superstitious sacrifices were Dàoist measures. His
elaborate development of laws was a measure stressed by the school of names and
circumstances (a Legalist school). In many ways, in his conquests, in his tours of the
empire, in his ascent of Mt. Tài (Tàishān 泰山), and in his severe government, he seems
deliberately to have imitated the First Emperor of the Qín dynasty, who was a Legalist. In
110 B. G., when the fifty-odd Confucians he had summoned could not agree on what
should be the ceremonies and utensils for some imperial sacrifices, chiefly because these
Confucians restrained themselves by historical principles and were unwilling to go
beyond what ancient texts declared, Emperor Wŭ dismissed them all and himself fixed
the rites for these sacrifices. Thus Emperor Wŭ was in reality influenced by all the
current doctrines, and did not hesitate to depart from Confucian principles. While his
reign marks the beginning of strong Confucian influence in the government, that
influence was far from being victorious at this time.

The next step towards the Confucian victory occurred in the reign of Emperor Xuān (宣),
who came to the throne almost by accident in 74 BC, thirteen years after Emperor Wŭ
died. This boy had been disinherited because of his grandfather’s rebellion against
Emperor Wŭ, and had been brought up by some faithful officials. He had been given a
good education, which naturally included a study of Chinese literature, so that he had
studied the Analects (Lùnyǔ 论语/論語), the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiàojīng 孝经/孝經),
and the Book of Odes. Thus he had been indoctrinated with Confucianism, because
Confucians had taken to themselves the exposition of the best Chinese literary treasures
and had made those treasures into Confucian books. After he began to rule, he chose
Confucians for his officials and advisers. Each of his Lieutenant Chancellors had made a
special study of some Classic, although they were not primarily scholars. When
calamities, such as earthquakes, occurred, he did the typically Confucian thing of sending
for those Confucians who professed to be able to interpret such visitations as indicating
the will of Heaven. Because his grandfather had been interested in the Commentary on
the Spring and Autumn, the Emperor Xuān revived its study and summoned its teachers
to the Imperial Palace, where he ordered ten of his gentlemen to study it, which they did
consecutively for more than ten years. Comparison of it with the other authoritative
commentaries, led to a realization of the discrepancies between different interpretations
of the various classics.

Emperor Xuān accordingly summoned to the capital all the outstanding authorities upon
the Confucian classics to discuss the meaning of these classics in the imperial presence.
 33

The discussions began in the Palace Hall and were transferred to the Imperial Pavilion,
under the presidency of the Grand Tutor to the Heir Apparent, who was famous for his
scholarship in all five classics. The discussions lasted two years; twenty-two persons are
mentioned in various places as having participated as authorities in this famous
discussion. In cases of otherwise irreconcilable disputes, Emperor Xuān seems himself to
have decided upon the correct interpretation. The decisions of this Confucian council
were memorialized to the Emperor and were ratified by him in 53 B. C. They are listed
among the books in the Private Imperial Library. In this way an official interpretation for
the classics was reached. Other interpretations were not proscribed, but the official
interpretation was doubtless taught in the Imperial University and learned by all
candidates for official position, for use in the examination. Consequently it monopolized
men’s minds. At the same time, the number of Erudites and Disciples, i. e. the teachers
in the Imperial University, was doubled and Erudites were established for special
interpretations of certain classics.

Thus at the end of Emperor Xuān’s reign, the occupants of the high government posts had
all had a Confucian training, the Imperial University was continuing to fill the
bureaucracy with Confucian scholars, and a Confucian council had fixed the official
interpretation of the Classics, which became authoritative for the government. Yet
Emperor Xuān was not a thoroughgoing Confucian and did not wholeheartedly approve
of this doctrine. He was primarily a practical man who had lived among the common
people before he came to the throne, and knew the danger of idealistic impracticality
inherent in Confucian teaching. Hence he took as his own ideal of government, not
merely Confucian principles, but also the conduct of the very un-Confucian practical
statesmen during Spring and Autumn times. He was interested in the penological 21
terminology discussed by the Legalist school of names and circumstances, and most of
his high officials used these Legalist principles as well as Confucian principles in their
government.

Yet Emperor Xuān had so well prepared the way for the victory of Confucianism that this
victory could not be delayed. He had given his son and Heir Confucian tutors. Thus
Emperor Yuán (Yuándì 元帝) was brought up in the Palace and had had little contact
with the outer world, so that Confucianism did not appear impractical to him. When he
came to the throne, he proposed immediately to make Confucian reforms. The influence
of the Emperor’s material relatives, who were in control of the army, and of the
Emperor’s favorite eunuch, was able to check the Confucian influence for a time.
Emperor Yuán knew little of government, depending upon this eunuch to decide
government matters, and spent most of his time enjoying himself in the imperial harem.
This eunuch was even able to trick the Emperor into sending the outstanding Confucian,
Xiāo Wàngzhī (萧望之), to his death. The criticism that resulted, however led this
eunuch to favor other famous Confucians, and so, during most of the Emperor Yuán’s
reign, Confucian influence was allowed to make important reforms in the government. In
this period it became the practice for the Superintendent of the Imperial Household yearly
to rank the various members of the imperial retinue according to the standards of a group
21
The theory, scientific study, and practice of how crime is punished, how prisons are managed, and how
rehabilitation is handled
 34

of four Confucian virtues. Since the commonest way of entering government service was
by spending a period as a member of the large imperial retinue, in order that the emperor
might have a personal acquaintance with his officials, it was natural, when the
bureaucracy and consequently the imperial retinue became so large that an emperor could
not know individually all the prospective candidates (it included as many as a thousand
persons) that a second and moral test should have been added after the first and literary
examination.

In the next reign, that of the Emperor Chéng (Chéngdì 成帝), Confucian influence was
equally important. His cousin Wáng Mǎng (王莽), who sought to usurp the throne, found
it advisable to adopt all sorts of Confucian practices. He indeed endeavored to secure
public approval by being more Confucian than even the Hàn emperors had been, and kept
reforming the imperial administration to give it more and more Confucian features. His
outstanding reforms were merely Confucian ideals translated into governmental practices.
In thus attracting the approval of educated men, Wáng Mǎng was so successful that the
leaders of the Later Hàn dynasty (Dōng Hàn 东汉/東漢 - 25-220 AD) largely followed
his example. The rulers of that dynasty were even more Confucian than the last emperors
of the Former Hàn dynasty and Confucian influence dominated the whole Later Hàn
period.

Thus the victory of Confucianism was a gradual process. It began when Gāozǔ found
Confucians assisting him in overthrowing the anti-Confucian Qín dynasty. The early Hàn
emperors encouraged all the various philosophies of the time. Emperor Wŭ had a
Confucian education, and, in a fit of youthful enthusiasm, endeavored to make
Confucianism the philosophy of the government. This attempt was frustrated by the
Emperor’s grandmother, while the Emperor himself lost his first enthusiasm for
Confucianism and became influenced by various other doctrines. His love for literature
and literary men, however, continued to attract him to Confucians, and he was eventually
induced to establish a Confucian Imperial University, which gradually distributed
Confucian literati among the minor offices in the government. Emperor Xuān likewise
had had a Confucian education; he favored Confucianism highly, enlarged the Imperial
University, and fixed upon an official interpretation to the Confucian Classics. But he
considered Confucian principles impractical for government, and so checked their
influence by legalist principles. The final victory of Confucianism did not come until the
reign of his son, Emperor Yuán. Thereafter Confucian doctrines became the sole guide
for princes. The usurper Wáng Mǎng and the revived Later Hàn dynasty both honored
these doctrines, and they continued to dominate the government until the end of that
dynasty.

We can now see the causes that brought about the victory of Confucianism. In the first
place, Confucianism was admirably adopted to be the official philosophy of an imperial
government. Confucius was himself a government official and his pupils were young
men whose future lay mostly in official life. Consequently he stressed and taught ideals
of good government. His ethics was aristocratic, that of the ruler who should be kind (rén
仁) to his people, and of the subject who should be filial (xiào 孝), loyal (zhōng 忠), and
polite (lĭ 礼/禮) to his ruler. In the second place, Confucius, as a good teacher, was
 35

himself a learned man, and those of his disciples who did not enter political life became
the teachers of China. Confucius taught the literature of his people; the Confucians made
themselves the scholarly authorities and teachers of that literature. Thus ancient Chinese
literature, especially the best of it, became the literature of Confucianism, and was
interpreted to teach Confucian lessons. Hence anyone who became interested in literature
or scholarship naturally gravitated to the Confucians, for they possessed the scholarly
traditions of the country, and anyone who acquired a scholarly education was inevitably
given a Confucian indoctrination. In times of warfare, such as that towards the end of the
period of Contending States, scholarship was unimportant, and Confucianism declined;
but when peace was restored, so that scholarship became useful, Confucianism revived.
Because Confucians inevitably became the tutors of the Heirs to the throne, rulers
became indoctrinated in Confucian ideals. Even though a particular ruler might not be
altogether Confucian, his son, who was affected by both his father’s example and the
influence of his Confucian tutor, was likely to be more Confucian, until the dynasty
became Confucian.

In the third place, certain governmental institutions put a premium upon Confucianism. In
the time of Emperor Wén, it became the practice for the Emperor periodically to invite
the provinces to send to him able persons; he selected among them by requiring them to
write essays on various subjects connected with government. The examination system,
even in this early form, thus put a high premium upon literary ability, and hence upon a
Confucian training. It was thus natural that the government should have been led to
establish schools, in particular the Imperial University, graduates from which filled the
bureaucracy with learned Confucians. Since Confucians were learned men, they naturally
graded the examinations, and kept non-Confucians out of the bureaucracy, not by any
proscription, but by the simple device of ploughing non-Confucians.

In the fourth place, after the advantages of Confucianism had been recognized, the
advantage of unifying the country intellectually by making one system of thought current
among all educated men led to the elevation of Confucianism. Shortly after Emperor Wu
ascended the throne, in 141 B. c., Dŏng Zhòngshū, in his reply to the imperial
examination, presented his famous memorials concerning statecraft. One of the principles
he advocated was that there should be an intellectual unification of the country by
destroying all the non-Confucian philosophies. These memorials seem to have made a
deep impression upon Emperor Wŭ, for he immediately acted upon them, proscribing
Legalism and elevating Confucians to be his highest officials. An intellectual unification
had been previously attempted by Lĭ Sī (李斯), the famous minister of the First Emperor,
when in 213 BC he recommended the burning of the books and the punishment of any
one who criticized the Qín regime. The Confucians had roundly condemned this
procedure. Emperor Wŭ was ambitious to equal the First Emperor in greatness; he was
probably not loathe similarly to unify the thought of his own time. While Emperor Wŭ
later became lukewarm towards Confucianism, Emperor Xuān was undoubtedly
reminded of Dŏng Zhòngshū’s proposal and certainly recognized the advantages of this
policy.
 36

These four factors first demonstrated their effectiveness in Former Hàn times. They have
undoubtedly continued to operate throughout Chinese history. At the end of the Later
Hàn period, there seems to have been a collapse of Confucianism because sincere and
long-continued attempts to put it into practice had failed to prevent the collapse of the
dynasty; the ensuing long period of disorder naturally also brought about the decay of
Confucianism. When peace was restored in the Táng (唐 – 618-907 AD) period, these
four factors again brought Confucianism to the front, although the dynasty’s supposed
descent from Lăozĭ kept it from becoming Confucian. In the next great dynasty, the Sòng
(宋 – 960-1279 AD), there was naturally another peak of Confucian influence. That
ascendancy continued as long as peace enabled scholarship to be prized. Only in the
modern period, when literature and learning have ceased to be synonymous with
Confucian teaching and China has ceased to be an empire, has there been a marked break
in the influence of Confucianism. In China, as in Europe, not until the advent of modern
science put into man’s hands another tool for reaching truth, has the power of the ancient
authoritarian world-view been broken.

Dǒng Zhòngshū 董仲舒

Russell Kirkland, "Tung Chung-shu." Ian P. McGreal, ed., Great Thinkers of the Eastern
World (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 67-70.
(kirkland.myweb.uga.edu/rk/pdf/pubs/DONG. pdf file available)

Born: ca. 195 BCE, Guangchuan, China (modern-day Héběi 河北 province)

Died: ca. 115 BCE, Guangchuan, China
Major Work: Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chūnqiū Fánlù春秋繁
露 - 115 BCE?) 22
Major Ideas

• Human life and institutions are subject to universal laws instituted by Heaven.
• All phenomena are intricately and dynamically interrelated.
• Heaven expressly created humanity to extend and maintain order in the world.
• Heaven holds the ruler responsible for the world's status.
• Regular and irregular natural events contain symbolic politico-cosmic meaning.

Dǒng Zhòngshū (Tung Chung-shu) was responsible for establishing Confucianism as the

22
The Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals is the only work that has survived to the present
that is attributed to Dǒng Zhòngshū. It is 82 chapters long, although 3 of the chapters within the present text
have been lost and there is considerable textual confusion in other chapters. In its current form, the book
deals with issues such as the five elements (五行 wǔxíng), and their relation to politics. One of the chapters
in this book presents the concept of the "source" (yuán, 元), which became important to later Neo-
Confucianism. Chan prefers the word “Gem” rather than “Dew.” His argument is that the word “lù” is
often translated literally as “dew.” He continues: According to one interpretation, “fánlù” means luxuriant
dew, that is, the richness of meaning in Confucius’ Spring and Autumn Annals. But the more common
interpretation is that of gems hanging down from a cap, symbolizing the connecting links between the use
of terms in the Classic and the event it describes (273). Here we stay with the author’s translation,
Luxuriant Dew, rather than Luxuriant Gems.
 37

theoretical foundation of the inchoate imperial state during the Hàn(汉/漢) dynasty (206
BCE - 221 CE). Dǒng attempted to achieve a coherent system of thought that would
provide a rational explanation for the entirety of human experience. Some argue that he
was noteworthy more for his effect upon Chinese history than for the profundity of his
thought. But such criticisms seem to slight Dǒng’s humanistic trajectory: to him,
explaining life really meant explaining human history, and explaining the world really
meant explaining how human life should be organized in order to be properly grounded
in the fundamental nature of things. In another sense, Dǒng can be interpreted as a
religious theorist, whose speculative thought was informed by certain scriptural notions.

The Background of Dǒng Zhòngshū's Thought

Most classical Chinese thinkers had vaguely agreed that Heaven (Tiān 天) instituted the
world, and that it plays some role in human life as well as in the world's ongoing
processes. But none of those thinkers articulated any systematic theology: for them, a few
basic principles sufficed, primarily as justification of other principles that they considered
more pertinent. Dǒng was, in a sense, working in the other direction: e.g., rather than
adduce Heaven to support a specific view of human nature, he adduced a specific view of
human nature in order to explicate the way in which Heaven had instituted life. Dǒng’s
thought ultimately reverted to a teleological 23 philosophy of history.

Those who assess him as a speculative philosopher are sometimes nonplussed by Dǒng's
apparent obsession with history and government. In actuality, it is not difficult to
understand his thought when one appreciates the context in which he lived. In 221 BCE,
the state of Qín (秦), organized according to the totalitarian principles of Legalism, had
exterminated its competition and instituted a ruthless new centralized state. In 206 BCE,
the Qín was overthrown, but meanwhile the Chinese had seen their civilization ransacked.
Rulers of the subsequent Hàn period struggled to understand what had happened, and
why. The collapse of the Qín offered a clear moral and historical lesson: there is justice in
the world. But if so, why had the ruthless Qín come to power in the first place? The Hàn
Emperor Wǔdì (武帝) was troubled by these questions, and solicited explanations. In
three undatable memorials, Dǒng Zhòngshū offered his views. Fuller and somewhat
divergent versions of Dǒng's thought appear in his principal work, the "Luxuriant Dew of
the Spring and Autumn Annals." However, not only is that text undatable, but modern
scholarship has determined that much of it is the work of later hands.

Dǒng's ultimate goal was to discover universal causative principles that would both
explain the past and provide a sound foundation for the future, particularly in the socio-
political sphere. But unlike thinkers who seek such principles beginning from abstract a
prioris, Dǒng (like earlier and later Confucians alike) looked instead to his cultural
inheritance. He discovered fundamental principles for a complete explanation of life
within a text known as the Chūnqiū (春秋 - "The Spring and Autumn Annals"), generally
considered the work of Confucius himself. Some might think it odd that a philosopher
should claim to find an explanation of all reality in a text like the Chūnqiū, which is (at

23
Relating to the study of ultimate causes in nature or of actions in relation to their ends or utility
 38

least to the casual observer) merely a laconic chronicle of political events in the long-
defunct state of Lǔ (鲁/魯) 24 . But at least some Han Confucians saw in the Chūnqiū the
answers to their most pressing questions: it not only had the unimpeachable authority of
Confucius himself, but it also provided an idea that suited their most crucial needs, i.e.,
the idea that Heaven is at work in worldly events, mandating certain outcomes in the
course of human affairs. Dǒng concluded that by meticulous analysis of the Chūnqiū, one
could discern the precise patterns of Heaven's subtle workings, thereby learning how all
of life could be brought into alignment with the divine plan. Such concepts seem
analogous to the thought of certain Western religious theorists who see God's plan
encoded in the text of the Bible. But in fact, Dong's thinking was little different from that
of Chinese of Hàn and later times who saw the keys to Heaven's subtle workings in the
Yìjīng (易经/易經), the ancient divination text. Dǒng was actually following a more
typically Confucian path by focusing upon history, in fact upon the historiographic
activities of Confucius himself.

Dǒng Zhòngshū's System of Thought

Dǒng's vision of the world began with ideas inherited from classical thinkers, such as the
Confucian Xúnzi. The activity of "Heaven and Earth" is perfected by Humanity's
civilizing activity: Heaven gives birth to things and instills people with moral inclinations
(as the classical Confucian Mencius had argued); Earth nourishes things and provides for
their material needs; and Humanity completes or perfects all things by maintaining proper
patterning (i.e., through rites and music). Such patterning is not the product of human
invention, but Heaven's own design. Here Dǒng goes beyond Xúnzi: Dǒng explains and
justifies Heaven's patterning through ideas drawn from natural philosophers like Zōu Yǎn
(鄒衍/邹衍) who had explained the world in terms of (1) yīn /yáng (阴阳/陰陽) -- two
basic aspects of reality within the phenomenal world, seen in all pairs of complementary
opposites; and (2) the "Five Forces" (wǔxíng 五 行 ), cosmic forces metaphorically
identified with fire, water, earth, wood, and metal. Dǒng Zhòngshū is generally
remembered as the author of a detailed system of correspondences in which everything
was correlated to one of the five fundamental forces, so that everything could be shown
to be interrelated in an orderly and comprehensible manner. But in his memorials, Dǒng
never actually mentions the Five Forces. Moreover, his system of correspondences
remains quite rudimentary; in reality, the elaborate system usually associated with his
name was only fully developed in later Han thought. Dǒng's own real concern was to
demonstrate how Humanity's activities might be integrated with the designs of Heaven.
To him, the world is not a field of self-contained natural processes, but rather (1) a field
in which human life is of central importance, and (2) a field in which Heaven acts; hence
“yáng” is Heaven's beneficent power, while the “yīn” is Heaven's chastising power."

Dǒng's immediate concern was with Humanity, which (like all Confucians) he considers
nobler than other creatures, for two reasons: (1) only humans display the consciousness
and will that we see in Heaven's workings, and (2) only humans interact in terms of
"benevolence" (rén 仁 ), "correctness" (yì 义 / 義 ), and "wisdom" (zhì 智 ) -- the

24
Modern-day Shāndōng (山东/山東) province
 39

fundamental moral principles articulated by his Confucian predecessors. Though he

clearly went beyond those predecessors in his concern with universal processes, Dǒng
placed himself squarely within their tradition by insisting that Humanity "possessed
clearly marked patterns for...social interaction," and that those patterns are ethical in
nature. He also engaged in the Mencius/Xúnzi debate over human nature: he agreed with
Mencius that we have inherent moral tendencies, but explained them in terms of a theistic
teleology: "Heaven, when it constituted human nature, commanded him to practice
benevolence and righteousness...." Dǒng also departed from Mencius' rosy view of
human nature: "Mencius evaluates it in comparison with the doings of birds and beasts
below, and therefore says that the nature itself is good. I evaluate it in comparison with
the doings of the sages above, and therefore I say that the nature is not good." Hence, like
Xúnzi, Dǒng considers the legacy of the sages essential for completing ourselves. It is
within the activity of the sages (including Confucius' composition of the Chūnqiū) that
Heaven guides us in carrying out its mandate to bring order to the world.

The contention that humans are not wholly good in themselves also serves to justify the
institution of kingship: the ruler "gives instruction that gives completion to (people's)
nature." The king models himself on Heaven by aligning his actions with the natural
processes that Heaven has instituted, such as the four seasons. But history shows that
each of the three great dynasties (Xià, Shāng, Zhōu) had reconfigured certain of its
predecessor's patterns, to demonstrate that the "mandate of Heaven" had been transferred
to a new ruling house. From that fact, Dǒng concluded that Heaven had actually
established not a single invariable pattern, but rather a changing sequence of three sets of
patterns. Accordingly, each current ruler must be alert to possible deviations from
Heaven's constantly shifting pattern, as intimated by irregular natural events (a concept
attested in an edict of early Hàn times). Here Dǒng integrates political principles with the
idea of a dynamically correlative cosmos, in which actions on the level of Humanity
(whether proper or improper) stimulate responses on other levels. He sometimes suggests
that such responses occur when humanity disrupts the "ethers" (qì 气/氣) of yīn and yáng.
But such "mechanistic" interpretations seem at odds with the more theistic argument that
Heaven takes deliberate action to alter the course of human events by warning rulers
when they deviate and by transferring the mandate to a new house when appropriate.

Dǒng Zhòngshū's Place in Chinese Intellectual History

Though Dǒng thought seems at first rather far removed from that of Confucius, he was,
in the final analysis, truly Confucian: his thought was largely an extension of that of
Xúnzi and Mencius, qualified mainly by his reading of the Chūnqiū. The overriding issue
of his day was to discover universal processes underlying human history, and Xúnzi and
Mencius had never gone so far. So to make sense of the Chūnqiū he expanded his field to
make use of ideas from classical thinkers like Zōu Yǎn and Mòzi (Mo-tzu), as well as
from contemporary sources like the Yìjīng interpreters, and the just-completed Huáinánzi
(淮南子- another attempt to explain all of life, along generally Dàoist lines). It is notable
that Dǒng shows little trace of the thought of Dàoists like Lăozi, probably because earlier
Hàn rulers had adopted certain of Lăozi's political principles. It is here that we see the
motivation behind Dǒng’s promotion of "Confucianism." When Dǒng persuaded Hàn
 40

Wŭdì to establish an academy with a "Confucian" curriculum, it was not from sectarian
motives. Dǒng certainly did not reject ideas of non-Confucian provenance: many had
great explanatory value. But he was concerned that the authority of the ruler should be
solidly grounded in the authority of Heaven, which was codified in the classics that the
Confucians had always treasured and promoted. Dǒng was thus not really concerned to
formulate a philosophical "orthodoxy" to which other thinkers had to conform, nor to
establish a new "state creed." His goal was essentially the same as Mencius' had been, i.e.
to persuade the ruler of the day to put into effect the moral and institutional principles
that had been handed down from the sages of old.

Dǒng’s teachings deeply influenced generations of Hàn thinkers. His understanding of

the world as an interactive cosmos eventually permeated most of Chinese society, and
became a fundamental element of the general Chinese worldview. But also, his utopian
vision of a harmonious union of cosmos and polity inspired other Hàn officials to
produce "revealed" texts wherein Heaven warned that it might withdraw its mandate from
the Hàn. Such ideas inspired not only rebel political movements (which eventually
toppled the Hàn), but also new religious movements, some of which eventually flowed
into the Dàoist tradition.

Dǒng Zhòngshū: selected documents

Memorials to Emperor Wŭ, History of the Hàn

Your servant has carefully examined the [Confucian] Annals, and looked at the measures
carried out in former ages, so as to view the occasions when Heaven and man are
mutually associated. These are extremely to be feared! If the country is about to suffer the
calamity of losing the Way, Heaven first sends forth natural disasters, and by means of
reprimands announces [its displeasure] to him [the king]. If he does not understand to
examine himself, [Heaven] again sends forth strange prodigies, and by means of [this]
warning strikes him with fear. [If he] still does not know enough to change, the damaging
calamity will then be upon him. In this way is manifested Heaven's mind, which is
benevolent and loving to the princes of men, and wishes to stop their disorder. [If the
prince himself] is not of an age that has entirely lost the Way, Heaven will go all out in
wishing to support and protect him, [but] its service consists only of urging him on....

Coming down to later ages, (the rulers) were depraved, decadent, decayed and feeble,
incapable of bringing all living beings into a united and orderly pattern. The feudal lords
were rebellious and mercilessly cruel to the good commoners for the sake of their
struggle over territory; they rejected indoctrination by moral power, and employed
punishments and penalties. If punishments and penalties are not appropriate, then they
will produce a distorted qì. This distorted qì accumulating among inferiors, ill-will and
hatred will mount up among superiors. If inferiors and superiors are not in harmony, then
the Yīn and Yáng will tangle and clash, and weird calamities will be produced. This is the
source from which arise natural disasters and anomalies....
 41

The greatness of Heaven's Way lies in the Yīn and Yáng. Yáng is moral power, and Yīn
is punishment; punishment rules over killing and moral power rules over life. Hence, the
Yáng ordinarily occupies the height of summer, and exerts itself in birth and nurture,
nourishment and growth; the Yīn ordinarily occupies the height of winter, and collects in
empty, vacant, and unused places. By this is manifest that Heaven employs moral power
but does not employ punishment....

The xìng (性) 'nature' is the basic raw material of life, the qíng (情) 'passions' are the
desires of men. Some are short-lived and some are long-lived; some are rén 'selfless' and
some are qì 'base': in their forming and completion, it is impossible they be entirely
perfect. They have that which produces [both] chaos and order, and thus cannot be
considered as equal....

Now, the transformation of inferiors by their superiors, and the following of superiors by
their inferiors, is similar to clay on the potter's wheel, whose shaping lies wholly with the
potter; it is similar to metal being melted, whose casting lies wholly with the
founderyman....

Now, since lower officials do not instruct their inferiors, some do not accept and employ
the laws of their lords and masters, and cruelly oppress the people, colluding with the
wicked to run rackets in the markets. Poor, alone, and weak, the people grieve over their
wrongs and lose their occupations, even to the point of not according with your majesty's
will. Hence the Yīn and Yáng are confused and distorted, vapors and qì are blocked up,
all living things lessen in compliance, and the black-headed commoners are not aided....

The ancients cultivated the officials in charge of teaching and instruction, devoting
themselves to changing the common people for the better by means of virtue; after the
common people had been greatly changed, there was never a single person involved in a
criminal offence in the whole empire. The present age has gotten rid of it and not
cultivated it, and does not use it to change the common people, and the common people
for this reason have cast off the practice of good principle and die for material benefit....

Man receives a Mandate from Heaven, and without doubt is far and away different from
all other living things. In private he has family ties such as father and son, elder and
younger brother, and in public he has principles such as ruler and minister, and superior
and inferior. If he gathers together he has the arrangement of the elderly, the seniors, the
adults, and the young; he is in glorious possession of writing to contact others, and gladly
has the grace to show concern for others. This is the reason why he is valued. (Heaven)
produces the Five Grains to feed him, mulberry and hemp to clothe him, and the Six
Domestic Animals to nourish him. (He) tames oxen and rides horses, pens wildcats and
cages tigers, for he has obtained the spiritual power of Heaven, and is more valued than
(other living) things. Thus Confucius said, 'Heaven and earth by nature put the highest
value on man.'"
 42

History of the Hàn, "Treatise on the Five Forces"

Duke Xiang (Lǔ Xiāng Gōng 鲁襄公) 24th year: "Autumn, there were great floods."
Dǒng Zhòngshū took into account that in the year before this, [the state of] Qí (齐/齊)
had attacked [the state of] Jìn (晋/晉), and Xiāng [ruler of Lǔ] had sent an official to lead
an army to assist Jìn. The state [of Lǔ] was small, its armed forces weak, and its several
enemies strong and great; the commoners [of Lǔ ] were worried and resentful, and the
Yīn qì became [over-] abundant [causing the floods].

A description by Wang Chong in the Later Hàn

Dǒng Zhòngshū surveyed the writings of Sun [Xúnzi] and Mencius, and made a theory of
emotions (qing ) and nature (xìng) which said, "The grand constant pattern of Heaven is
Yīn on the one hand and Yáng on the other; the grand constant pattern of man is basic
disposition on the one hand and natural tendency on the other. The nature is produced by
the Yáng and emotions are produced by the Yīn. The Yīn qì is base, and the Yáng qì is
good." (He) said "those who believe the nature is good are looking at its Yáng, and those
who say it is evil are the ones who look at its Yīn."

Two legal judgments on Confucian principles

A had a son B, and gave him to C. B afterwards grew up, and was raised and trained by C.
A, under the influence of drink and sensual pleasure, addressed B, saying, "You are my
son!" B became angry, and struck A with a staff twenty [times]. Because B was originally
his son, [A] could not contain his rage, and denounced him to the prefectural officials.
Dǒng Zhòngshū decided it, saying, "A begot B; not able to raise and train [him, he] gave
him to C. According to principle, [their father-son relationship] had already been severed.
Although A was beaten with a staff, [B] ought not to be adjudicated." (From a collection
of legal cases by Dǒng Zhòngshū)

Wife A's husband B beat [his] mother. A saw B beating his mother, and killed B. The
Gōngyáng theory (Gōngyángchuán 公羊傳) 25 is that A punished her husband on behalf
of her mother-in-law, in much the same way that King Wŭ punished King Zhōu on behalf
of Heaven. (From a collection of legal cases in Dǒng's scholastic tradition)

The New Text School

(http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Han/han-literature.html)

25
The two commentaries Gōngyáng (公羊) and Gǔliáng (谷梁/ 穀梁) are two surviving of a whole of four.
The commentaries have a very different interpretation of the sometimes obscure entries in the annals. The
authors of the Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng commentaries represent the New Text School and follow a Mencian
scheme to praise and blame (bāobiǎn 褒贬) the rulers and actors in history. In their eyes, every single word
in the original annals has its own meaning in judging the times past and to give a moral lessen to the
present ruler. The Gōngyáng Commentary is said to have been written by a master called Gōngyáng Gāo
公羊高 but it can be traced back to late Warring States times (Zhànguó 战国/戰國). The author of the
Gǔliáng Commentary was called Gǔliáng Xǐ ( 穀梁喜) or Gǔliáng Shú ( 穀梁淑).
 43

Although Emperor Wŭdì, the founder of the Hàn dynasty, was not really interested in
scholarship and the first rulers of the Hàn adhered to the principle of a non-interfering
government (wúwéi无为/無為), the government had to rely on professional scholars just
because they were the people he needed to administer his empire (scholars like Lù Jiǎ (陸
賈), who wrote the book Xīn Yǔ (新语/新語 "New Speeches"). "An empire can be
conquered from the horseback, but not ruled from a horseback," is a recommendation by
Lù Jiǎ valid for all Chinese dynasties. During the time of Emperor Wŭdì, the Confucian
scholar Dǒng Zhòngshū admonished the ruler to establish an academy (Tàixué 太学/太學)
which should produce scholars (bóshì 博士 26 ) to educate the crown prince and to produce
an elite for governmental offices. These officers had to learn and to study the Five
Confucian Classics (Wǔjīng 五经/五經) that were mainly interpreted in a holistic view of
universe with man embedded in a cosmic dynamism that connected the natural
phenomena with the deeds of men. While the original Confucianism only centered
around man and his position in the society, Hàn time Confucianism was highly
intertwined with Zōu Yǎn's theory of the Five Elements and the philosophy of Yīn and
Yáng that assumed an everlasting change and influence of all things.

After introducing a new calendar in 104 BC (called the tàichū 太初 reform), assuming a
reign motto and performing sacrifices to Heaven and Earth by the emperor at Mount Tài
(Tàishān 泰山) in 110 BC, Confucianism was firmly established as a state doctrine.
Confucius was seen as the Highest Saint (Zhìshèng至圣/ 至聖) and a religion founder
until old writings were discovered in the walls of Confucius' house around 102 BC. These
books were said to have survived the Qín emperor's book-burning and were written in old
characters (gǔwén 古文). The interpreters of these texts saw Confucius merely as the
primary teacher, but the orthodox direction of the contemporary New Texts (jīnwén 今文)
got the upper hand over the Old Text School in the quarrel about the right interpretation
of the Confucian writings. Their position was affirmed by a conference in 79 AD in the
"White Tiger Hall" about the true meaning of the classics, written down in the book
Báihǔtōng (白虎通). The New Text Classics were cut in stone in 175 AD during the
reign era "Dawning Peace," hence called the Xīpíng Classics (Xīpíngshíjīng 熹平石经/
熹平石經). Which one of the texts belonged to the Five Classics, was fixed in the
conference at the Shíqú Palace (Shíqúgé 石渠阁) in 51 BC; other texts were condemned
as apocryphical.

The orthodox Confucianism of the Hàn Dynasty was not identical to the man-centered
philosophy of Confucius who stressed good behavior of the ruler according to the old
customs. This becomes clear if we look at the upcoming of books that were highly
influenced with yīn and yáng thought like the collection Huáinánzi (淮南子), compiled
by a prince in 139 BC. The book saw the universe as a single operative unit of which man
forms but one small element. The guiding principle, called the Way (Dào 道 ), is
operating in the three spheres of Heaven, Earth and Man (Tiān, Dì, Rén 天地人) through

26
Equivalent to today’s Ph.D.
 44

the medium of the Five Elements. The Confucian writer Yáng Xióng (楊雄) wrote
Tàixuánjīng (太玄经/太玄經 "Classic of the Supreme Mystery"), and Fǎyán (法言
"Modeling Words"), a supporter of the usurper Wáng Mǎng ( 王莽), saw the Great
Mystery, being the invisible present essence of all things, as an all embracing unity that
centered in the human being. Man as an agent was able to know and recognize all things,
but his fate was determined by Heaven. These two books are Yáng Xióng 's interpretation
of the Book of Changes (Yìjīng 易经/ 易經) and the Confucian Analects (Lùnyǔ 论语/ 論
語). Even Dǒng Zhòngshū’s book "Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals" is
full of these influences. Dàoism itself had only small influence in Hàn thought, especially
the book Zhuāngzi (莊子) that was too intellectual, too dialectical, and too literary for
cosmologic speculation of the Han thinkers.
 45

PART TWO

MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION IN

ANCIENT CHINESE CULTURE
 46

UNIT FOUR
DOMINANT IDEAS IN CHINESE CULTURE

Derk Bodde
Dominant Ideas in the Formation of Chinese Culture
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 62, No. 4. (Dec., 1942), pp. 293-299

The World of the Supernatural

The first observation to be made here is a negative one. It is that the Chinese, generally
speaking, have been less concerned with this world than with the other worlds of nature
and of man. They are not a people for whom religious ideas and activities constitute an
all important and absorbing part of life; and this despite the fact that there are, nominally,
more Buddhists in China to-day than in any other country of the world. The significant
point, in this connection, is that Buddhism came to China from the outside, and that
before its impact in the first century A. D., China itself produced no thinker, with the
doubtful exception of the philosopher, Lăozĭ (ca. 479-ca. 381 B. c.), who could be classed
as a religious leader. It is ethics (especially Confucian ethics), and not religion (at least,
not religion of a formal organized type), that has provided the spiritual basis of Chinese
civi1ization.

The prevailing attitude of sophisticated Chinese to the supernatural is perhaps best

summed up by Confucius himself (551-479 B. c.), who once when asked by a disciple
about the meaning of death, replied: “Not yet understanding life, how can you understand
death? “ Later thinkers have generally tended to adopt a skeptical attitude toward the
unknown, and most of them, when they have ventured to express themselves on the
subject, have even gone to pains to deny that there can be such a thing as a personal
immortality. All of which, of course, marks a difference of fundamental importance
between China and most other major civilizations, in which a church and a priesthood
have played a dominant role.

The preceding remarks do not mean, of course, that before the coming of Buddhism there
were no religious manifestations in ancient China. What is important, however, is the fact
that, from the very beginnings of Chinese history, the most vital and sincere form of
religious feeling has been expressed in the worship of departed ancestor. And this has
been of decisive importance, for ancestor worship, through its very nature, was a form of
religion that could appeal to and be performed by only the immediate individual family
groups concerned. Therefore it could not develop into a national or international
organized faith similar to Christianity or other world religions.

Side by side with this ancestral cult, to be sure, various objects and forces of nature were
also worshipped, such as sacred mountains, rivers, and the life-giving soil. These,
however, were generally conceived of in abstract rather than personified terms, and even
the supreme Chinese divinity, Tiān (天) or Heaven, very rapidly lost its anthropomorphic
qualities and became for most people a purely abstract ethical power. There was,
therefore, no elaborate or mythology in ancient China. Likewise, there was no priesthood,
because the worship of these divine forces was performed, not by the common people or
 47

by a priestly class, but almost entirely by the ruler himself, who, as the “Son of Heaven,”
acted as a sort of intermediary between the world of the supernatural and the world of
man. Thus a pantheon, a mythology, or a priesthood are all comparatively late
phenomena in China, connected either with Buddhism, or with the religious and
popularized form of Taoism which developed, in part, as a Chinese imitation of the
formal aspects of Buddhism.

It is true that the innumerable divinities of Buddhism and Dàoism have in later times
found a ready welcome among the Chinese masses, but this testifies more to the highly
eclectic nature of the Chinese mind than to any strongly religious feeling. Because of this
eclecticism the Chinese have, like the Hindus, for the most part been remarkably free
from religious bigotry. The few persecutions that have occurred have usually been
directed, not against religious ideas, but against religion as a social and political
institution that might threaten the security of the secular state.

Finally, another fundamental difference between China and the civilizations of the Near
East and of India is the fact that in early China there was no idea of any kind of divine
retribution after death. The whole concept of a system of rewards and punishments,
meted out in a heaven or hell during a life hereafter, is utterly alien to Chinese thought
and appears in China only with Buddhism.

The World of Nature

If the supernatural world has held a lesser place in China than in most other civilizations,
quite the reverse is true of the second of our three categories, the world of nature. For the
Chinese, this world of nature, with its mountains, its forests, its storms, its mists, has been
no mere picturesque backdrop against which to stage human events. On the contrary, the
world of man and the world of nature constitute one great indivisible unity. Man is not
the supremely important creature he seems to us in the western world; he is but a part,
though a vital part, of the universe as a whole. This feeling conceivably may have
originally sprung out of the overwhelmingly agrarian nature of Chinese civilization, and
its consequent utter dependence, for survival itself, upon the continued regular succession
of the forces of nature. Be that as it may, it is a feeling which has come to permeate a
very large part of Chinese philosophy, art and literature.

In Dàoism, the philosophy which has best expressed this mystic awareness of the oneness
of the universe, we find many striking anticipations of the ideas that were propounded in
the West by Rousseau some two thousand years later. Like Rousseau, the Chinese
Dàoists said that human moral standards are artificial and hence invalid; that the
appurtenances of civilization are corrupting; and that therefore we must cast off these
manmade trammels and return to the state of nature. Yet Dàoist naturalism
fundamentally differs from occidental romanticism, despite certain remarkable superficial
resemblances. In the first place, it avoided the latter’s sentimentality, emotional excess,
and emphasis upon love between man and woman. In the second place, romanticism has
countenanced the breaking of moral restraints in the name of spontaneity and originality.
Taoism also did away with human moral standards, but replaced them by a higher
 48

standard, that of the Dào or Way, the first cosmic principle of the universe which gives
the Dàoist school its name Man, said the Dàoists, must subordinate himself to the Dào,
that is, to nature. This is not to be done by a facile giving in to one’s emotions, but by a
process of self discipline (through meditation and other means) that will result in a
lessening of the desires and a consequent feeling of calm content amidst the simplicities
of the natural life. In the final stage the Dàoist devotee aims at entering a state of union
with the surrounding universe, in which he is so completely freed from the bonds of
human emotions that neither joy nor sorrow, life nor death, longer affect him. In this
respect, Taoism remains in accord with the general stream of oriental mysticism.

This Dàoist subordination of the self to the universe also differs importantly from another
current of modern occidental thought. In the West happiness is to be found by harnessing
the forces of nature to the will of man and thus increasing the means for man’s material
enjoyment. In China, on the contrary, the sage traditionally has been one who accords
himself to the universe as he finds it, and thus gains what he considers to be the true
happiness of contentment in simplicity. This concept, widely accepted in China, goes far
to explain why Chinese, both educated and illiterate, can remain cheerful and even happy
under poverty and primitive conditions that to a westerner would be intolerable. It has
also been an important reason why the Chinese, though they developed remarkably
scientific techniques in the compilation of their dictionaries, histories, encyclopedias, and
other scholarly works, failed to apply these techniques to the world of nature, and so
failed to create a physical science.

Yet this prevailing attitude toward the physical universe-an attitude perhaps best summed
up in Wordsworth’s phrase as a “wise passiveness “- has not prevented the Chinese from
attempting to classify and systematize the natural phenomena which they observed. In
simplest terms, the Chinese theory of cosmogony (expressed, of course, with infinite
variations by different writers) may be summarized as follows :

Lying behind the physical universe as we see it there exists an impersonal first cause or
prime mover, known as the Dào or Way, from which all being has been evolved. This
Dào manifests itself in the form of two all-inclusive principles: the yang, which is the
principle of activity, heat, light, dryness, hardness, masculinity; and the yin, which is the
principle of quiescence, cold, darkness, humidity, softness, femininity. Through the
eternal interplay and interaction of these two principles, the five primary elements come
into existence, these being fire (which is the essence of yang), water (which is the essence
of yin), and earth, wood, and metal (which are combinations in varying degrees of the
yang and the yin). These elements in their turn combine and recombine to produce all
things in the universe, including Heaven (the sky, atmosphere, stars, etc.), which is
preponderantly yáng, and the Earth (the soil, plants, animals, etc.), which is
preponderantly yīn. Everything in the universe thus pertains to one or another of the five
elements, and the Chinese have compiled long lists of categories in fives, such as the five
colors, five smells, five tastes, five tones, five internal organs, etc., with which to
correlate the five elements.
 49

This splitting up of the world into sets of fives is a typical manifestation of the
rationalistic Chinese mind, which tries to find order and plan in all things, and which has
therefore taken a particular delight in inventing numerical categories of all kinds, not only
in fives, but in many other numbers. The theory of the yin and yang, the five elements,
and their correlates, has for more than two thousand years been the basis for Chinese
medicine, alchemy, astronomy, and naturalistic speculation generally. While it represents
a very real attempt at the use of a scientific method, it unfortunately has not led to a true
physical science, because, being based upon arbitrary, man-made analogies, it
disregarded the all important necessity of using an empirical method of direct observation
of nature.

In connection with this theory of cosmogony, it is important that we should distinguish

clearly between the Chinese dualistic system based upon the interplay of the yīn and yáng
principles, and the superficially similar dualisms of light and darkness, good and evil, etc.,
with which we are familiar in the Near East and in the occidental world. The latter
dualisms are all based upon the concept of mutual antagonism between their two
conflicting members; of the goodness of the one and the evilness of the other; and of the
consequent necessity to conquer the evil so that the good may eventually triumph. They
are often closely connected with religion.

The yīn-yáng dualism, on the contrary, is based, not upon mutual opposition, but upon
mutual harmony. The feminine yīn and the masculine yáng are equally essential if there
is to exist a universe. Each is complementary to the other, and neither is necessarily
superior or inferior from a moral point of view. In this concept we see a striking
manifestation of the Chinese tendency, already alluded to, to find in all things an
underlying harmony and unity, rather than struggle and chaos. In it, the Chinese would
seem to have come closer to the ideas lying behind much of modern science, than have
we in the West with our traditional good-versus-evil type of dualism.

The World of Man

When we turn to the third of our three categories, that of the world of man, we find
ourselves at the heart of the greater part of Chinese philosophical speculation. How to get
along equably with one’s fellow men: this is the problem that Confucianism set answer,
just as Dàoism posed for itself the problem of how man can adjust himself to the outer
universe. The Chinese, with sound common sense, have from very early times realized
that unless there can be a solution to this central problem of human relationship, material
power and progress will but serve to increase the afflictions of mankind. Being a practical,
realistic, and pragmatic people, they launched their frontal attack upon this vital question,
and in so doing have produced a great mass of ethical and political philosophy. For the
same reason they rejected both the abstruse metaphysical speculations of the Hindu, and
the explorations into logic that have been one of the major contributions of occidental
philosophy. This practical concern with the immediate exigencies of human life helps
once more to explain, perhaps, why the Chinese, although they have contributed to the
world many inventions of the highest practical value, such as paper, printing, porcelain,
and the mariner’s compass, have not developed a theoretical natural science.
 50

Coupled with this intense preoccupation with human affairs is the Chinese feeling for
time; the feeling that human affairs should be fitted somehow into a temporal framework.
The result has been the accumulation of a tremendous and unbroken body of historical
literature, extending over more than three thousand years, such as is unequalled by any
other people. This history has served in China a distinctly moral purpose, for by studying
the past one might learn how to conduct oneself in the present and future. Hence the
writing of history was commonly not left merely to the whim of a few historically
minded individuals. Ever since the founding of the first long lived empire in the second
century BC, one of the first duties of a conquering dynasty has been to compile the
history of the dynasty it supplanted, often appointing for that purpose a large board of
government-supported scholars, who were set to work upon the historical archives of the
preceding dynasty. The resulting dynastic histories were not limited to a bald narration of
political events. They included also valuable essays on such subjects as economics, law,
water-control works, astronomy, bibliography, geography, and many other topics, as well
as the biographies of hundreds of illustrious individuals. This temporal mindedness of
the Chinese once more marks them sharply apart from the Hindus?’

What was the nature of the society that the Chinese thus took such pains to record? It was
not one that believed in what we would call rugged individualism. Rather, Confucianism
aimed at teaching each individual how to take his place with the least possible friction in
his own social group, and how to perform his allotted duties within that group in such a
way as would bring the greatest benefit to the group as a whole. The basic and most
important unit of Chinese society was the family or clan, to which the individual owed
his first allegiance, and which he served, first by sacrificing to the ancestors who were
dead; secondly, by caring for the elder generation who were still living; and thirdly, by
rearing descendants of his own who carry on the family line. In return, the family acted as
a protective group of mutual aid, shielding the individual from an often hostile outer
world. Through its cohesiveness, it succeeded in maintaining the fabric of Chinese life
and culture even in times of almost complete social and political collapse. Because of this
stress upon family in China, there has been a correspondingly limited development of
nationalistic feeling (save in a vague cultural sense), and little of that fiery Patriotism so
exalted in the West.

Beyond the family, nevertheless, lay the state, which was regarded simply as an
enlargement the family unit. Thus even to-day the term for “nation” in Chinese, literally
translated, means “national family (guójiā – 国家/國家),” while it was common in the
past for the emperor to refer to himself as “parent of the people.” In this society each
individual occupied a definite position and was held accordingly responsible for the
performance produced a goodly number, not only of famous stated duties. Yet
paternalistic though it was, the beauties, but also of female painters, poets, this system
certainly did not (in theory, at least) operate solely for the benefit of a ruling class. If
inferiors were expected to serve their superiors with loyalty, superiors were equally
bound by certain definite obligations toward their inferiors. Confucianism stressed the
reciprocal nature of these duties and obligations. It also emphasized that the primary duty
of the ruler is to give good government to his people, and that to do this he must himself
set a high moral standard and select with care the officials who serve under him. It thus
 51

attached great importance to the power of personal example of men in public life, and the
need for their moral self cultivation.

Owing to the development of a very intensive agricultural economy, stimulated in part, at

least, by a widespread government-fostered system of irrigation works, it was possible in
China for a large population to subsist upon a comparatively small amount of land.
Having this large population, the Chinese empire spread to huge proportions and
developed into an exceedingly complex bureaucracy, employing a vast army of officials.
Yet despite its size and all inclusive character, the Chinese state remained sufficiently
fluid and flexible to leave a place for considerable social change and individual initiative.
It aimed at moral suasion rather than legalistic compulsion, and definitely rejected the
somewhat cold and mechanical approach to government, based on law, which has been
such a cornerstone of occidental civilization. Law codes, of course, existed, but they were
subject to a considerable degree of individual judgment and interpretation, which was
based upon the handed down body of traditional experience and morality known as “lĭ –
礼).”

It was quite possible, therefore, in Chinese society, especially in times of political change,
for determined individuals to work their way up to high positions, a feat accomplished
several times in history by founders of dynasties who rose from humble origins. Women,
similarly, though before the law they held an inferior position, yet in point of fact quite
frequently exercised very considerable power within their family group. Thus China has
produced a goodly number, not only of famous beauties, but also of female painters,
poets, historians, and empresses. There was, in fact, little in Chinese society suggestive
of any hard and fixed stratification into unchanging social groups.

The moral basis for this society was the belief, shared by the majority of Chinese thinkers,
that, man is by nature fundamentally good; that there is no such thing as original sin; and
that therefore any person, even the lowliest, is potentially capable of becoming a sage.
Evil, according to the Chinese view, does not exist as a positive force in itself; it is
simply the result of a temporary deflection from the essential harmony of the universe.
With these concepts go the optimism, the good humor, and the will to live, that are
marked characteristics of so many Chinese. The Indian dictum that life is suffering (the
first truth of Buddhism) was inconceivable to the Chinese mind, and even with the
coming of Buddhism never succeeded in gaining general acceptance.

Because they believed that all men can be taught morality, the Chinese attached an
importance hardly paralleled elsewhere upon the value of learning. “Wisdom “was
included by them among the five cardinal virtues, meaning by this an understanding of
right and wrong and of moral principles generally. Hence the Chinese stress upon their
classics, which they regarded as containing deep moral truths; upon history as an
instrument whereby man may be taught to avoid the mistakes of his forefathers; and
eventually upon all humanistic scholarship.

All this led to the creation of what has been the most distinctive feature of Chinese
government, the famed examination system. Other countries have until recent times with
 52

few exceptions been ruled by a hereditary aristocracy, a priesthood, a military hierarchy,

or a rich merchant class. But in China, ever since the creation of the first long lived
empire in the second century BC, entry into the bureaucracy that governed the country
was limited to those who succeeded in passing a series of very strict governmental
examinations, based upon a thorough knowledge of the Chinese classics. Service in this
official bureaucracy was the highest goal which one could attain, and therefore success in
the examinations was the highest aim.

Such, at least, was the theory. In practice, the system naturally operated best in periods of
strong political unity, while in times of strife or dynastic change it tended to break down.
Likewise, it contained certain manifest defects, such as its undue stress upon memory,
and the fact that the wealthy naturally enjoyed superior opportunities to acquire the
education that would make success possible.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the fact remains that the examinations provided
an impartial and purely intellectual test that had to be surmounted by each and every
individual through his own efforts alone if he were to enter the coveted ranks of the
scholar-officials. Likewise, the examinations were open to all members of society alike,
with but trifling exceptions. It is little wonder, therefore, that Voltaire, comparing this
system with the political conditions of Europe of his time, acclaimed the organization of
the Chinese state as the best the world had ever seen.

As a corollary to the Chinese respect for learning has been a corresponding dislike of
violence and strife. Reason, arbitration and compromise are (in theory, if sometimes not
in practice) the instruments for settling disputes in China, and the man who resorts to
force shows by that very fact that he is in the wrong. China has had her share of strife, yet
a large anthology could be compiled of the essays and poems that have been written
lamenting the suffering and horrors of war. The poor but worthy scholar has been the
typical hero of much Chinese literature, while there has been very little of that
glorification of the military genius so characteristic of the West. Perhaps the prevailing
attitude toward the soldier is best summed up in the popular proverb says: Good iron is
not beaten into nails; a good man does not become a soldier” (hăotiĕbùdădīng,
hăorénbùdāngbīng - 好铁不打丁，好人不当兵)

Finally, a few words remain to be said about one of the most fundamental concepts
underlying the Chinese theory of government, that of the so-called Right of Revolution.
According to this theory, the ruler, being the “Son of Heaven,” enjoys a divine sanction
for his rule in the shape of a celestial Mandate or Decree which has been conferred on
him by Heaven. As long as he rules in the interests of the people he may not be legally
overthrown. Bad government, however, is displeasing to Heaven, which then indicates
its dissatisfaction through the appearance of inauspicious natural phenomena, such as
droughts, floods, or earthquakes. If these warnings go unheeded, heavenly disapproval is
further manifested in the form of popular revolts, which may even culminate in the
ruler’s dethronement and the founding of a new dynasty. Success in such a revolt
becomes the criterion of whether or not Heaven has withdrawn its Mandate from the evil
ruler and passed it on to the new line.
 53

This theory, which originated in China before the first millennium BC, was much
elaborated by later writers, and is perpetuated at the present time in the term for
revolution, “gémìng” (革命), which literally means “changing the Decree.” Together
with the influence of the non-hereditary scholar class, it has acted as a strong check upon
the abuse of power by the sovereign, and thus has given to China a sort of ideological
preparation for democratic institutions, which, there is good reason to hope, will enable
her in the future to assume her rightful place among the world’s great democracies.

Conclusion

We have now reached the end of our lightning journey through the three worlds of the
supernatural, nature and man, and have gained a fleeting glimpse of their main contours,
as they appear eyes. Before closing, however, I should like to reaffirm the importance of
one concept to which I have already more than once alluded, namely, the fundamental
oneness and harmony of the Chinese worldview. In the Chinese mind, there is no real
distinction between the world of the supernatural, the world of nature, and the man. They
are all bound up in one all-embracing unity. “All things are complete within me,”
proclaims the Confucian, Mencius (371? -279? BC), thus echoing the sentiment of the
Dàoist, Zhuāngzĭ (ca- 369-ca. 286 BC), who says: “Heaven and Earth came into being
with me together, and with me, all things are one.”
 54

UNIT FIVE
MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION IN ANCIENT CHINESE CULTURE

The Problem of Creation Mythology in the Study of Chinese Religion

N. J. Girardot
History of Religions, Vol. 15, No. 4. (May, 1976), pp. 289-318
(Edited; for full article see Prof. Onate)

The Problem of Chinese Myth

The issue over the nature and significance of mythology is one of the most confused
problems in the study of ancient Chinese tradition. This is particularly apparent in
comparison with other ancient cultures which have generally left rather extensive records
of a mythological and legendary nature. With regard to China there is the very real
problem of the extreme paucity and fragmentation of mythological accounts, an almost
total absence of any coherent mythic narratives dating to the early periods of Chinese
culture. This is even truer with respect to authentic cosmogony 27 myths, since the
preserved fragments are extremely meager and in most cases are secondary accounts
historicized and moralized by the redactors of the Confucian school that was emerging as
the predominant classical tradition during the Former Hàn period (206 BC to AD 8).

Thus, one of the greatest problems in dealing with mythology in China is that most of the
ancient mythological narratives handed down to modern scholarship had already passed
through the filters of the systematic Hàn effort to collect and edit all of the ancient texts
and make them fit into a pseudo-historical schema concerning the civilizing activity of
the sage kings, or culture heroes, of antiquity. The texts that can be considered as
predating this period…are few and may represent only the fragmented and euhemerized
products of different local cults attached to various ancestral clans. For example, the
collection of poems known as the Qūzi (屈子, written by the poet Qū Yuán/Chu Yuan -
屈 原 ) 28 one of the richest storehouses of authentic pre-Hàn mythological material
(particularly the “Tiānwèn 天问/天問” section), is already in the form of aphoristic
sayings and lacks any consecutive recounting of coherent mythic units.

27
A theory that seeks to explain the origin of the universe
28
According to the Chinese traditional calendar, Duānwǔjié (端午节), known in English as the Dragon
Boat Festival, takes place on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month of each year. Legend has it that the
festival commemorates the life and especially the death of Qū Yuán (屈原 - c. 340-278 B.C.), the first great
poet in Chinese history. He lived during the Warring States period and was a high-ranking official in the
state of Chǔ (楚). At that time his homeland was under siege by another powerful state called Qín (秦). The
King of Chǔ did not recognize Qū Yuán's correct stand or appreciate his suggestions for saving their
country. What is more, treacherous officials slandered him, and at last he was sent into exile. On the fifth
day of the fifth lunar month, when he heard news that the capital of Chǔ had fallen into enemy hands, he
threw himself into the Miluo River (in present-day Hunan province) and drowned. What is the connection
between Qū Yuán and dragon boats? The people loved Qū Yuán, a great patriot. When villagers heard he
had thrown himself into the river, they rushed in their boats to try to save him, but they were too late.
Dragon boat races commemorate their rescue attempt.
 55

Therefore, the great difficulty in attempting to study myth in China is that it is completely
decomposed, degraded, and consciously molded to conform with the standards of
classical literature and history sanctioned by the humanistically inclined tradition of
Confucianism. Even more discouraging is that the “popular” tradition of literature
(including much of the Dàoist materials which may be said to have preserved more
faithfully the myths and legends of the archaic period) was consistently maligned and
ignored by the Confucian scholarly tradition. Western scholarship, generally working out
of the classical “great tradition” of Confucianism… was inclined simply to ignore the
relevance of such popular (and Dàoist) materials for the recovery of archaic Chinese
mythological themes….

The Problem of Cosmogonic Myth

In contrast to other nations the Chinese have no mythological cosmogony (Forke).

Beyond these general methodological issues concerning myth there is the more specific
problem of the relevance of cosmogonic mythology both for Chinese thought in general
and for Dàoism in particular. Thus, it has often been said that the comparatively late
cosmic giant or Pángǔ (盘古) myth is the only true creation myth to be found in China
and that its importance must be discredited since its appearance is too late to have
affected the great creative period of Chinese thought at the end of the Chou. Moreover, it
is said that the Pángǔ myth appears to be an obvious intrusion of foreign currents of
thought related to southern “barbarian” cultures.

My concern here is not so much with the particular problem of trying to assess the role
and meaning of the Pángǔ myth, but with the more damaging tendency to see this myth
as the only creation myth or cosmogonic theme evident in Chinese tradition. Since Pángǔ
seemed to represent a late foreign importation, it only served to demonstrate the complete
absence of any true Chinese cosmogony.

It is true that the specific creation myth of Pángǔ does not appear until a relatively late
date (ca. third century A.D.), but the feeling that this fact demonstrates the total absence
of an early Chinese cosmogony can certainly be questioned. It would really seem that the
theory of the absence of an early Chinese cosmogony is, to a great extent, only a
particular instance of the common feeling in Western scholarship that somehow China is
a special case in comparison with other ancient cultures more blatantly caught up in the
throes of religion and myth. A. Forke characteristically states this axiom when he says
that “in contrast to other nations the Chinese have no mythological cosmogony.” Even
more recently this attitude has been perpetuated by Bodde when, in an otherwise
enlightened article on Chinese mythology, he concludes that "It is rather striking that,
aside from this one myth [i.e., the Pángǔ myth], China-perhaps alone among the major
civilizations of antiquity-has no real story of creation. This situation is paralleled by what
we find in Chinese philosophy, where, from the very start, there is a keen interest in the
relationship of man to man and in the adjustment of man to the physical universe, but
relatively little interest in cosmic origins."
 56

It is perhaps more striking that, while there is a certain amount of truth to these claims,
especially in regard to the relative obscurity of strict cosmogonic themes in the classical
Confucian sources, the Dàoist texts surely tend to invalidate the overly generalized
statement that early Chinese thought had "little interest in cosmic origins." The
Dàodéjīng’s evocation of the Dào as a cosmic principle of the beginnings would seem to
make little sense without seeing the possibility that it was rooted in the symbolic
remembrance of archaic mythological, especially cosmogonic, themes. Therefore, it
would seem that the relatively late occurrence of the specific Pángǔ myth has only minor
importance in determining its significance as a cosmogonic theme in China, since it can
be seen to be structurally connected with several earlier creation themes found embedded
in early Dàoist literature.

Methodologically the issue over the significance of cosmogony is complicated by the fact
that some of the defenders of the legitimacy of using mythological data for an
understanding of Chinese tradition also feel that cosmogonic myth per se is of little
importance in China. Granet, for example, feels that the absence of a cosmogonic
sensibility is one mark of China’s uniqueness in relation to other civilizations-that is,
China’s special sociopolitical emphasis prevented any sort of cosmogonic speculation
from gaining prominence. Of course, he does not go so far as to deny the existence of
cosmogonic myth but, rather, demeans its significance for Chinese thought. He says that

it is necessary to notice the privileged place given to politics by the Chinese. For
them, the history of the world does not start before the start of civilization. It does
not originate by a recitation of a creation or by cosmological speculations, but
with the biographies of the sage kings. The biographies of the ancient heroes of
China contain numerous mythic elements; but no cosmogonic theme has entered
Into the literature without having undergone a transformation. All of the legends
pretend to report the facts of a human history. . . .The predominance accorded to
political preoccupation is accompanied for the Chinese by a profound repulsion
for all theories of creation.

In line with these remarks, J. Needham states that “on the whole the Dàoist avoided the
elaboration of a cosmogony, wisely considering that the original creative operations of
the Dào must remain forever unknowable. Granet’s feeling that because of their political
preoccupations the Chinese displayed a “profound repulsion for all theories of creation”
and Needham’s similar views with regard to Dàoism generally reflect the common
scholarly fashion to uphold the singularity of China’s highly developed sense for
humanistic and sociopolitical concerns. There can be no argument that even the Taoist
texts, particularly the Dàodéjīng do display an uncommon concentration on the problems
of man and the human world in comparison with the usual religious documents of other
cultures which are concerned more exclusively and explicitly with the creative and
salvational activities of gods and supernatural beings. This fact, however, does not negate
the possible presence of an ideological structure essentially modeled on cosmogonic
themes.

It is also somewhat curious that Needham, who stresses the Dàoist obsession with cosmic
time, cyclic transformation, and metamorphosis -as well as the apparent importance of
 57

the hùndùn (混沌) theme of primordial chaos and its specific relation to a cosmic egg
mythology -still finds it impossible to see the significance a cosmogonic scenario might
have for such theories. I can agree that there is a relative submergence of any explicit
cosmogony in Chinese thought, but Granet and Needham are certainly overstating the
case when they suggest that there is a wholly unique avoidance or even a “profound
repulsion” for all theories of creation….

Conclusion

To conclude, I only want to remark that it is going to be increasingly necessary for

Chinese specialists to go back and critically examine their historical and methodological
legacy, a legacy that has particularly served to distort the history of Chinese religions. It
is my feeling that the overall problem of the “China as a special case” fallacy concerning
the unique absence of religion and myth, especially cosmogonic myth, needs to be
reexamined in the light of the comparative findings put forth by such disciplines as
anthropology, sociology, and the history of religions. Wright has remarked that, because
of the past, “Chinese studies remain a retarded and underdeveloped field of Western
scholarship,” and this is especially true with regard to the methodological rigidity or
simple “benign neglect” associated with the study of Chinese religion and myth.

The “problem” of mythology in China is not so much a problem of the real absence of
myth or cosmogony in ancient China, but one of methodological confusion. Furthermore,
it is not so much a problem of methodological distortion or misconception but, rather, the
more damaging one of neglect and narrowness in terms of perspective. Consequently,
there is a need for the specialized areas of philological and historical research to be
coupled with more expansive synthetic and theoretical perspectives-perspectives that
must take into special consideration the possible relevance of religion and myth for the
study of Chinese culture.

In fact, it is somewhat ironic that while the early scholars of the nineteenth century are
the agents for much of the later confusion over the study of Chinese religion, there was
nevertheless a recognition of the importance of creation mythology for the understanding
of early Chinese tradition. Ordinarily, as I have pointed out above, the concern for the
study of Chinese cosmogony on the part of the missionaries resulted in a frustration over
not finding anything that resembled the Christian doctrine of a rational creator God—or,
as W. H. Medhurst remarked, Chinese cosmogony was “hopelessly materialistic” and
Chinese religion suffered because “’no first cause’ characterizes all the sects; and the
Supreme, self-existent God is scarcely traceable through the entire range of their
metaphysics.”

There were others such as Legge who found this impossible to accept and tried to
discover something that came closer to the creation doctrines of Christianity, but these
efforts were always more forced than convincing. Especially when the missionary
motivations were no longer the driving force of Chinese scholarship, this kind of
agonized theorizing became clearly outdated. That the three religions of China “resemble
each other in atheism (wúshénlùn 无神论/無神論)” was not a problem for secular
 58

scholarship. In fact, it was something to be embraced. With the rise of a wholly

secularized discipline of sinology, it seemed to be much easier and more objectively
scientific to avoid all of the messy theologically oriented issues with the implicit axiom
that China was culturally unique with regard to the absence of religion and myth.

To some degree it is worthwhile today to go back and reexamine some of the discussions
of Chinese mythology so prominently displayed in the pages of such nineteenth-century
journals as the China Review and the China Expository; for amidst the theological
upheaval there are at times surprisingly suggestive discussions of the problem and
significance of Chinese mythology. One such article that deserves to be resurrected is the
short discussion on Chinese mythology by J. Chalmers appearing in the China Review of
1885.

In response to a series of articles by another prominent scholar of the time, J. Edkins,

who maintained that China “had little or nothing of what we call mythology” and that,
from the perspective of the Indo-European hypothesis, everything mythological in China,
“must have come from the west or been invented at some time later than B.C. 820,”
Chalmers states that it is surely “more reasonable to suppose that the Chinese like other
nations had their own ‘early mythology.” For Chalmers, therefore, it was necessary to
reverse the more commonly held opinion that China was conspicuously lacking an early
mythological tradition. There were a number of factors that led him to this conclusion-
including the fact that “foreign students of Confucian literature fall naturally into the
puritanical groove” and consequently “studiously ignore mythology,” and that for such
Dàoist works as the Zhuāngzĭ “one is misled into supposing the whole of what might
otherwise be taken as mythical lore to be original allegory.”

Chalmers does feel that the Dàodéjīng “contains almost nothing of a mythological
nature” but, more significantly, that other works, especially Dàoist texts like the Zhuāngzĭ
and the Lièzi, “contain mythical or legendary matter-“legends or myths have been
gathered up from different localities at different dates, and have found a place in the
general literature of the country after surviving perhaps for ages as unwritten tradition.
He specifically notes that “the name Pángǔ, for example, which cannot be traced further
back than 350 AD, may have been handed down by unwritten tradition in southern China
from a much earlier period. Thus, though having a distinct origin from the chaos of
Zhuāngzĭ with whom he has been identified, Pángǔ may be equally entitled to a place
among the ancient myths of China such as chaos (hùndùn)….

Some of the most debilitating factors in the study of early Chinese tradition, especially
the Dàoist tradition, have been those factors in the history of scholarship that have served
to mask, avoid, or deny the significance of mythology-especially the role of cosmogonic
themes. For the missionaries the idea of a chaos cosmogony in early Dàoism was too
unchristian to be taken seriously, while the more secularized sinologists found it too
“unreasonable,” and therefore irrelevant for the study of Chinese philosophy. For both, it
was preferable to maintain China’s “singular purity” with regard to all such issues.
 59

Homer H. Dubs
Theism and Naturalism in Ancient Chinese Philosophy
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 9, No. 3/4 (Oct., 1959 - Jan., 1960), pp. 163-172

IN EVERY CENTER of civilization, philosophy has arisen out of religion. In Greece,

there was Hesiod. In India, there were the Vedas and Upanishads. In China, philosophy
begins with Confucius, but the religious thought that antedated him has not received the
study it deserves. Confucius became the founder of the most important school in ancient
Chinese thought. Platonism never succeeded, as did Confucianism, in becoming the
guiding principle of a dynasty that brought its country to the highest point of civilization
and culture attained within more than half a millennium. Confucianism, furthermore,
succeeded in eliminating from the assent of almost all educated persons all other
philosophies for a period from about 100 B.C. to about A.D. 100. It also threw its shadow
heavily upon the centuries previous and subsequent to that period of exclusive control.
This was also the period when classical scholarship flourished most highly and when the
tradition about Confucius was formed and fixed. This conception of Confucius has come
down through the centuries and has been repeated by the great Sinologists of the past
century as well as by learned Chinese. The first biography of Confucius was written in
the Han period (206 BC-AD 220). The first comprehensive Confucian philosophical
system, that of Dŏng Zhòngshū (董仲舒), was then enunciated. The first two Confucian
Councils, which fixed Hàn (汉/漢) Confucian beliefs, were held in that period. The Hàn
period was, moreover, the time when Chinese civilization reached its first great peak.
Most of our information about Confucius comes from that time.

The Hàn conception of Confucius was well delineated. He was a sage, the greatest of the
sages, greater than any before or after him. To Hàn thought, a sage is a person who
possesses unlimited intuitive knowledge. He knows what has gone before and can
predict the future. He makes no mistakes in practical situations. If any ruler adopts his
advice wholeheartedly, that ruler unifies the country and becomes the master of China.

Because the Hàn Dynasty first expanded Chinese rule to cover what is approximately
present China proper, it was believed that Confucius had written a constitution for the
Hàn Dynasty, placing it in the Confucian canon, especially the Spring and Autumn
(Chūnqiū 春秋) and its commentaries. Ideally, the Hàn rulers needed merely to listen to
what the Confucian pundits said in order to achieve a perfect government. Wáng Mǎng
(王莽 45 BC-AD. 23), who in his early years was more Confucian than most Confucians
of his day, followed the guidance of the greatest Confucian in his time, Liú Xīn (劉歆 d.
23 BC). Confucian portents appeared presaging the downfall of the Hàn Dynasty and his
own enthronement. He founded a Confucian theocracy with himself at the head. When a
combination of misrule and natural calamities brought Wáng Mǎng crashing down, his
successors, the Later Hàn emperors, also became Confucian, so that this philosophy
continued to dominate China.

As a consequence, the Hàn conception of Confucius has controlled our subsequent

understanding of that sage. Not that there was no previously written literature. But
Chinese is not a self-explanatory language, and in those days there were no dictionaries.
 60

Concise, allusive, and with obscure implications in its phrases, the Chinese language
needs explanation to be understood. Before the Hàn period, the tradition concerning the
interpretation of various pre-Hàn writings had been preserved orally, having been handed
down from master to pupil for generations. Only in the Hàn and subsequent periods were
these traditions and explanations written down. Anyone who works with pre-Hàn
Chinese must first go to the Hàn interpretations in order to understand pre-Hàn writings.
By Hàn times, Confucianism, under the influence of Xúnzĭ (旬子 fl. 298-238 BC) had,
however, become thoroughly naturalistic. If Confucius had any theistic beliefs, he would
not then have been interpreted thus, for sages were assumed to accord with Hàn ideals.

Only in the last three centuries has there grown up in China a realization that all is not
well with these Hàn and post-Hàn interpretations of the ancient classics. These more
recent keen Chinese scholars confronted Hàn and subsequent interpretations with earlier
texts and developed a “higher criticism” of pre-Hàn doctrines. Until 1905, however,
when the imperial examination system for choosing government officials was abandoned,
it was not usually politic to advocate these higher critical doubts, for success in the
examinations required an acceptance of the orthodox beliefs. So, Chinese thought has
really been unfettered for only a little more than half a century. The earlier European
Sinologists, who provided us with our knowledge of Confucius and ancient China, did
not know about this Chinese higher criticism. Even the greatest of them all, James Legge,
was not made acquainted with this newer knowledge by his eminent Chinese pundit,
Wáng Tāo (王韜 - 1828-1897). Legge’s “Chinese Classics” incorporates certain forged
chapters of the Book of History (Shūjīng 书经/書經) that are now recognized to date
from the fourth century A.D. Legge’s attention had merely not been drawn to the then-
existing Chinese works which demonstrate these forgeries. Only in the present century
has this newer knowledge percolated into Occidental knowledge. The high authority of
the older Sinologists has, however, maintained the older view in modern encyclopedias
and in the knowledge of most persons, except for a few critical Sinologists. Even many of
them may not have realized how much dogma has been upset by this “higher criticism”
of the Chinese classics.

What sources are available, then, for a correct understanding of pre-Hàn China and
especially of Confucius? Two early works are outstanding. First, there is the Analects
(Lùnyǔ 论语/論語), which records Confucius’ own sayings. This book is, however, a
compilation made by the disciples of the personal disciples of Confucius and also
incorporates some still later stories. Just as with the Bible, so with ancient Chinese
documents, one must first study the conclusions of intelligent critics about a book and
only then decide what is reliable and what is later. Second, and equally important, are
seven chapters in the Book of History, which are now accepted by Chinese critics as
having been written within a decade after the Zhōu (周) conquest of China about 1029
BC. They were written as having been spoken (perhaps edited before being inscribed) by
the first ruler of the Zhōu Dynasty, King Wu, and by his brother, the famous Duke of
Zhōu. The latter was deeply admired by Confucius, who believed that the Duke of Zhōu
even appeared to him in dreams. The doctrines plainly enunciated in these chapters are in
part not the same as what Hàn Confucianism believed, so that these doctrines have been
misinterpreted or neglected by interpreters of Confucius.
 61

These chapters preach the well-known doctrine of “The Mandate of Heaven” (Tiānmìng
天命) that a dynasty requires a mandate from Heaven to come to the throne and that, if it
misgoverns, Heaven takes away its mandate from that dynasty and gives it to another
righteous man, who overthrows the evil ruler and takes his place, founding a new dynasty.
This doctrine was used by King Wǔ (Wǔ Wáng 武王) and his father, King Wén (Wén
Wáng 文王), who may have originated it) in justifying the conquest of China by the Zhōu
Dynasty. So much was accepted by orthodox Hàn Confucianism.

When this familiar doctrine is examined carefully, however, it becomes apparent that
these chapters plainly imply a belief in a single personal high-god, i.e., a God superior in
power and in character to all other gods. This God rules the world just as the Yīn (殷) or
Zhōu Dynasty ruled China. In these speeches, he is indifferently called “the High-god”
(dì 帝),” the Supreme High-god” (Shàngdì 上帝), or “Heaven” (Tiān 天).

This word “dì” in ancient Chinese denoted what modern anthropologists have called a
“high-god.” The belief in a single high-god is found among the New Zealand Maoris
(whose culture, when they were discovered, belonged to the Neolithic age), several tribes
in Borneo, and the Pawnee Indians. P. Radin accordingly suggested that this belief
originated in the Neolithic period. Since the American Indians are blood brothers of the
Chinese (shown by the possession of identical blood groups), it is not surprising to find
such a belief also in archaic China. King Wǔ and the Duke of Zhōu taught that this
Supreme High-god had placed the Yīn Dynasty upon the throne. When, however, the Yīn
king misgoverned his people, the Supreme High-god took his mandate away from him
and gave it to the Zhōu king, who was ordered to overthrow the Yīn rule and govern the
country righteously. Such a doctrine is plainly found in these seven archaic chapters. It
does not necessarily imply monotheism, however, since, in addition to the Supreme
High-god or Heaven, there were also the ordinary gods (shén 神) and the ancestral spirits
(guǐ 鬼), all of whom were worshipped in the Zhōu royal cult.

The doctrine of Heaven’s mandate is well known, but its theistic foundations do not seem
to have been used to interpret Confucius’ own thought. The Duke of Zhōu was the
founder of the Lǔ (鲁/魯) state, in which Confucius lived. The Duke’s eldest son had
been made the first Duke of Lǔ. His descendant was on the Lǔ throne in the time of
Confucius. Confucius admired the Duke of Zhōu as his greatest hero. So, Confucius must
have studied closely these seven archaic chapters in the Book of History and accepted
their theistic belief in a single Supreme God. By Hàn times, however, such theism had
been discarded by almost all Confucians. Therefore, it did not find its way into the
interpretation of the Analects made by Hàn and later Confucian scholars.

The problem of evil has always been the most powerful argument against a high theism.
In the Book of Odes (Book of Songs, Shījīng 诗经/詩經), which dates mostly before the
time of Confucius, we find poets (probably in the seventh century BC) even calling the
Supreme God unjust, because he allows the wicked to remain unpunished while the
righteous die of famine. In the fourth and third centuries BC, the Confucian Xúnzĭ even
 62

denied the existence of any personal gods or spirits. His teaching dominated Hàn
Confucianism. So, Xúnzĭ’s naturalism ruled Hàn thought and has dominated Western
interpretations of Confucius.

But when we examine the genuine sayings of Confucius recorded in the Analects, we find
something different. Confucius plainly knew of the antitheism in the Book of Odes, but
says nothing about it. The word “dì” (High-god) does not appear in the Analects (but it
does in Mencius). Instead, Confucius talks about Heaven (Tiān). In the recorded speeches
of the Duke of Zhōu, the word “Heaven” is one of the names he applied to “the Supreme
High-god (Shàngdì).” Confucius was a profound student and teacher of the ancient
Chinese writings, and so the word “Heaven” must have denoted a personal God to
Confucius. This was not, however, the only meaning of this word. In the Duke’s speeches
and elsewhere, in addition to having this theistic meaning, the word “Tiān” is also used to
denote the sky. Consequently, it is easy to read theism out of Confucius’ teaching. But
when his sayings are examined closely, their purport is unmistakable.

Confucius did not talk about his personal religion. His intimate disciple, Duānmùcì Zi
Gòng (端木赐子贡/貢) 29 , said, “We have not been able to have or hear any speech of our
honored Master concerning the nature [of mankind] or about the ways of Heaven.”
Confucius evidently knew of no way to combat the religious skepticism abroad in his
time and kept his religious views to himself. But there are enough occasional statements
in the Analects to show what Confucius really believed.

Confucius honored Heaven as the supreme source of goodness. He is quoted as having

said, “How great was Yáo as a prince! How sublime was he! Verily, Heaven’s deeds are
the greatest, and verily Yáo took them as his pattern! How magnificent he was! The
common people could find no name for it. How sublime were his achievements! How
brilliant were his culture and proclamations! “

Confucius felt himself personally dependent upon Heaven. “When our Master had an
interview with [the dissolute wife of Duke Líng of Wèi (Wèi Líng Gōng 卫灵公/衛靈公),
one of his disciples was [highly] displeased, so our honored Master swore an oath to him,
saying, ‘If I have done anything wrong, may Heaven reject me! May Heaven reject me?’

Heaven cannot be deceived. “When our Master was seriously ill [since he was then a
private person but had previously been a State minister], one of his disciples set the other
disciples to act as if they were an official’s retainers. In an interval between the attacks
of his illness, our Master said, ‘How long he has kept up] these falsehoods! I have no
retainers, but he acts as if I had retainers! Whom do I deceive? Do I deceive Heaven?
Moreover, would I not rather die in the arms of my few disciples than in the arms of
retainers? And, although I would not be given the grand funeral of an official, would you
bury me as if I had died like a beggar by the roadside?’
“”

29
Zi Gòng (子贡/貢) plays an important role in the Analects, and is one of Confucius’ top ten disciples, as
we shall see in Reader Two.
 63

Heaven guides peoples’ lives. “When Yán Huí (颜回) 30 died, our Master said, ‘Alas!
Heaven has bereft me! Heaven has bereft me! ‘ “’

Even more important, Confucius believed that Heaven had given him a task to perform-to
teach his people. “Our Master said, ‘When I was in my fifteenth year, my mind was set
on learning. By my thirtieth year, I had perfected [most of my teachings]. By my fortieth
year, I was free from doubts. By my fiftieth year, I understood Heaven’s mandate [or will]
for me. By my sixtieth year, I could listen to and obey it. By my seventieth year, I could
follow my desires without transgressing the right.’”

He believed that Heaven knew what he was doing and approved of him, even though
none of the rulers on earth might Zi Gòng replied, ‘Why do you say that no one
understands your [value]?’ Our Master replied, ‘I am not resentful against Heaven nor do
I blame men. The learning of one like me here below is, however, known on high. [Since
that is so], is not he who understands me Heaven?’”

Perhaps the most remarkable saying, recorded twice, is one in which Confucius expresses
complete trust in the overruling providence of God.

When our Master was surrounded by people who mistook him for someone else at
Kuāng (匡), and his life was in danger, he said, “Since King Wén is gone, is not
his culture located here in me? If Heaven were about to destroy this culture, a
later mortal [like me] would not have been given that culture. Since Heaven will
not now destroy this culture, what can the people of Kuāng do to me?”

This is not the utterance of a non-theistic person. It indicates that Confucius had an
intimate trust in Heaven and believed that Heaven overrules human efforts, that he was
carrying out the will of Heaven, and so Heaven will not allow its servant, Confucius, to
be killed until his work is done. This attitude is quite parallel to that of Socrates in the
Apology, when, after his condemnation, he said, “No evil can happen to a good man,
either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.”

So, Confucius accepted a single Supreme God, Heaven. What about other deities? The
usage of terms in Hàn imperial edicts concerned with sacrifice demonstrates that the
archaic Chinese language distinguished three fundamental categories of deities. In
English, we distinguish only two groups, gods and spirits (the latter includes ghosts,
devils, etc.). In archaic Chinese, there were high gods (dì’), ordinary gods (shén), and
spirits (guǐ). This last term included good spirits, ancestors, and evil spirits. Confucius
uses this same tripartite language about deities. Significantly enough, he makes only non-
committal statements about ordinary gods and spirits: “[Concerning the principle that one
should] sacrifice as if [the being sacrificed to] were present and should sacrifice to the
gods as if they were present, the Master said, ‘For me not to be present at a sacrifice is
the same as if I did not sacrifice.’ “Here Confucius avoids saying either that gods or
manes are or are not present.

30
Confucius’ favorite disciple (Reader Two).
 64

Another such saying is the following: “When Fan asked about wisdom, our Master
replied, ‘It may indeed be called wisdom to take care that the common people become
righteous, and, while being respectful to the ordinary gods (shén) and spirits (guǐ), yet
keep at a distance from them.’ “Fan had distinguished himself in the battle of 484 BC,
and was almost surely then holding public office in the State of Lŭ. Confucius’ reply
implies that a State official cannot avoid sacrifices, but should maintain his detachment
from them. “When Zi Lù (子路) 31 asked about the [proper] service of the spirits and
ordinary gods, our Master replied, ‘Since we are not yet able to serve human beings
[properly], how can we serve the manes (guǐ) [properly]?’ When [this disciple then said],
‘I presume to ask about death?’ [our Master] replied, ‘Since we do not understand life,
how can we understand death?’ Here, again, Confucius was plainly putting off his
questioner.

Somewhat more illuminating is another saying: “When our Master was very ill, Zi Lù
asked permission to have prayers said [for the Master to the spirits and ordinary gods];
our Master replied, ‘Is there such a thing [in the ancient authorities]?’

Zi Lù answered, ‘There is, in the Dirges; it says, “We pray to the ordinary gods above
and to the earthly deities beneath.” ‘Our Master replied, ‘To me, Kǒng Qiū (孔丘 –
Confucius’ name): prayer is not an occasional matter.’ “Confucius implied that, if his
ordinary life had not secured for him protection against death and danger from whatever
spiritual powers there are (here, of course, referring to Heaven), any ceremonials or
prayers performed in an emergency, especially to ordinary gods, would give no aid. So,
in a highly superstitious age, Confucius gave no offense to those who believed in
ordinary gods and spirits, yet maintained his inward faith in one Supreme God.

Perhaps more illuminating about ordinary gods is another saying: “Wáng Sūnjiǎ (王孙贾)
[who controlled the army in the State of Wèi 衛] asked [Confucius], What does it mean,
“It is better to curry favor with the [God of] the Hearth than with [the God of] the Hall?”
‘Our Master replied, ‘Not so. He who has committed sin against Heaven has no one to
whom to pray for aid.’ “There is so much implied in this dialogue that it requires
explanation. The Kǒngānguó (孔安国) (second century) tradition on this saying declares:
“Wáng Sūnjiǎ was a Grandee in the State of Wèi. The ‘Hall’ is the inner [part of the
house]. It was used as a figure for the intimate courtiers [here, more probably, in my
opinion, for the prince himself]. The ‘Hearth’ was used as a figure for those who
controlled the government [i.e., Wáng Sūnjiǎ]. He wanted to bring Confucius to become
intimate with himself [i.e., join in his party’s intrigue].”

So, the question asked of Confucius was primarily political, not religious: Would it not
be best for him to associate himself with the controlling minister, Wáng Sūnjiǎ, than with
the ruler of the State? Confucius pushed aside any such suggestion, and his reply brought
matters back to the religious significance of the statement and to his own practice of
avoiding intrigues. He declared that there is no effective spiritual power in the universe

31
Another of Confucius’ top ten disciples (Reader Two).
 65

except Heaven. He plainly says that no ordinary god or spirit can assist a man who has
offended Heaven. This saying, together with Confucius’ evasion of questions about
ordinary gods, would seem to indicate that Confucius carried the Duke of Zhōu’s
theological teaching to its logical monotheistic conclusion. Monotheism is quite in
harmony with Confucius’ high ethics and his insistence upon the highest of ideals.

But Confucius was once a government official, and when out of office always desired
such a position again. His pupils were men who sought to go into government service and
whom he trained for that career. The State of Lŭ was far from monotheistic-it worshipped
Heaven at the solstices. The ordinary gods, especially the ducal ancestors, whose spirits
were enshrined in the Grand Ancestral Temple, were more frequently worshipped than
Heaven. Toward this polytheistic worship, Confucius was respectful, for it was part of the
State ritual. As a teacher of prospective officials and ministers, he could not denigrate the
State cult, any more than Socrates could attack the Athenian religion. Confucius was thus
loyal to his own State. The authentic sayings of Confucius thus show clearly that the
personal religious belief of Confucius was a high monotheism.

From the above considerations, it follows that Mòzĭ (墨子- fl. 479-438 BC) was the
person who really developed Confucius’ own religious teachings. Mòzĭ was born about
the time that Confucius died and very likely came from the State of Lŭ, having been
driven out to the State of Sòng (宋) by the Lŭ Confucians. Mòzĭ was plainly a monotheist.
Consequently, Hàn Confucianism rejected Mòzĭ’s teaching as heterodox. For Mòzĭ,
Heaven is the divine ruler, just as the Son of Heaven (the king) is the earthly ruler. Mòzĭ
believed that spirits and minor gods exist, but their function is merely to carry out the will
of Heaven, watching for evil-doers and punishing them. Thus they function as angels of
Heaven and do not detract from its monotheistic government of the world. With such a
high monotheism, it is not surprising that Mòzĭ should have taught that Heaven loves all
people equally and that each person should similarly love all human beings without
distinguishing between his own relatives and those of others. Such teachings are the
logical consequence of a universalistic monotheism. Mòzĭ criticized the Confucians of his
own time for not following the teachings of Confucius.

Perhaps just because of the extraordinarily effective competition made by the school of
Mòzĭ in the State of Sòng to the Confucian school in the neighboring state of Lŭ, there
arose in Confucianism a tendency to continue the earlier polytheism. In the Doctrine of
the Mean (Zhōng Yōng 中庸) 32 , Confucius is made to say, “The power of the manes and
minor gods, how great it is! Look for them and they are invisible. Listen for them and
they are inaudible. But they are in all things and cannot be neglected.”

If this passage was composed, as is the tradition, by Confucius’ grandson, Zi Sī (子思),

who was a contemporary of Mòzĭ, it shows how little Confucius was understood by his
successors. Zi Sī founded the important Confucian school of thought to which Mencius
belonged. Then it is not surprising that Xúnzĭ, who was born about the time that Mencius
died, had little difficulty in extinguishing Confucian theism. In fact, Xúnzĭ attacked

32
Reader Three, Unit Thirteen.
 66

religious polytheism chiefly. By Xúnzĭ’s time, however, the political situation in China
appeared quite hopeless. There seemed to be no indication of any providential guidance
for the world. So, when Xúnzĭ argued that there are no spirits or gods, intelligent China
agreed. Then Confucius’ high theism was forgotten, except for the traces left in ancient
Chinese records.
 67

PART THREE

TOOLS FOR UNDERSTANDING

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY
 68

UNIT SIX
BASIC CHINESE PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS

Chinese Philosophical Terms

(Zhōngwén zhélún cíhuìbiăo – 中文哲论词汇表)
(http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbphiloterms-u.html)
Wing-tsit Chan, “Basic Chinese Philosophical Concepts,” Philosophy East and West,
Vol. 2, No. 2. (Jul., 1952), pp. 166-170

Terms Broadly Shared by Confucianism (Rújiāsīxiăng 儒家思想; Rújiào, 儒教；

Rúshù, 儒术) (Confucianist, Rújiā 儒家) & Dàoism (Dàojiào 道教; Dàoist - Dàojiā 道家)

Dào (Tao) (道 ) The Way, road, path, method

lĭ (理) principle, reason, logic, truth
dé (德) virtue, morals, moral character
Yīn ( 阴 / 陰 ) and Yáng ( 阳 / 陽 ) the two opposing forces/principles in nature; Yīn
represents the feminine and negative while Yáng represents the masculine and positive;
Yīn is shade/shadow, Yáng is light (sun, sunshine)

Terms Particularly Stressed by Confucianism

Wǔcháng (五常): The five constant virtues in traditional Chinese ethics, particularly
Confucianism:

• yì (义/義) righteousness, morality, right conduct, what is proper as opposed to

profit, gain, or utility
• rén (仁) benevolence, humanity, charity, fundamental virtue of Confucianism
• lĭ (礼/禮) ritual, propriety, good manners, ceremony, politeness
• zhì (智) wisdom
• xìn (信) sincerity

xīn (心) heart, mind

lián (廉) honest and clean
chĭ (耻/恥) sense of shame, disgrace, humiliation
zhōng (忠) loyalty, doing one’s best, conscientiousness, “Golden Rule”
xiào (孝) filial Piety
xué (学/學) learn, study, school
sī (思) think, deliberate
è (恶/惡-) evil (the word that will play an important role in the debate on human nature)
xié (邪) evil, wicked, heretical
shàn (善) good, goodness
jìng (敬) respect
Tiān (天) Heaven or nature
Tiānmìng (天命) Mandate of Heaven; authority by which a ruler rules
 69

xìng (性) nature, the tranquil state; and the emotions, the aroused state, to practice
qíng (情) passion, feeling, sentiment, love
chéng (诚 /誠) sincerity, honest, being absolutely true or real, truth, or absence of evil or
fault; as expressed in honesty to one’s self, truthfulness toward man, and piety towards
the gods
Jūnzĭ (君子) the Confucian superior man; Gentleman
Dàtóng (大同) the Great Harmony
Dì (帝) the Lord on High, Supreme Being, God
zhèng (正) straight, upright, honest, correct,
zhèngmíng (正名) rectification of names
shì (士) scholar, both as a cultivated person and as the guardian of culture

The Five Human Relationships (Wŭlún 五伦/五倫)

Ruler-Subject (君臣 jūn-chén)

Father-Son (父子 fù-zĭ)
Elder brother-Younger brother (兄弟 xiōng-dì)
Husband-Wife (夫妇/夫婦 fū-fù)
Friend-Friend (朋友 péngyŏu)

Other Terms in Chinese Philosophy

aì (爱/愛) love
fă (法) law; rule by law and principles
guānxì (关系/關係) relationship, connections, ties, influence,
hé (和) harmony, peace, order, such as that between human nature and human emotions
in the individual, between members of the family and the state; between man and nature,
and the moral order of the universe.
héxié (和谐) harmony, harmonious; current ideological buzz-word
hùndùn (混沌) chaos
píng'ān (平安) harmony
qì (气 /氣) energy
rèn (任) responsibility
Tàijí (太极 /太極) Supreme Ultimate
tĭ-yòng (体/體] 用) substance and function

wúwéi (无为/無為) Principal Dàoist concept, take no action, but as we shall see, it
means much more
zìrán (自然) natural
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I. Terms Broadly Shared by Confucianism & Dàoism

Dào 道 "Way"

A Dào (tao) is a path or small road (or freeway lane), and has always been used in such a
way. However from early times it had metaphorical extensions to mean the inherent
characteristics of things, especially of the natural world. It is tempting to translate this
"natural law," except that the natural world has always been conceived of as including a
moral quality. (Filial piety, for example, was considered to be a virtue to which the
universe was responsive.) Dào is therefore not merely how the world is (or the underlying
principles of how it works), but also the goodness of how it is. It is the "nature of nature"
only if we think of nature as having moral values.

Although Confucian texts frequently refer to Dào, the word gives its name (under an old
spelling "tao") particularly to Dàoism. A basic insight particularly celebrated in Dàoism
is that Dào is past complete human understanding; hence our understanding of small bits
of it is bound to be insufficient. However to the extent that we can grasp it, we can work
in accord with it. Following this line of thinking, many struggles become effortless
accomplishments when we swim downstream in cooperation with Dào rather than
struggling upstream against its current.

Lĭ 理 "Principle"

Lĭ refers to the underlying way in which something functions, and as such often comes
quite close in meaning to Dào. Lĭ becomes an important form in Confucianism
particularly under the influence of the Neo-Confucian Southern Sòng dynasty (宋 960-
1279) writer, Zhū Xī 朱熹, who is often regarded as the founding genius of Neo-
Confucianism.

Dé 德 "Virtue, Power"

The term is usually translated "virtue," and in many contexts that works. Indeed the
compound "dàodé" 道德 is a close colloquial equivalent of that English word. However it
can also suggest the sense of virtue in which one says that, "This book has the virtue of
being well written." That is, it can refer to the ability, power, or virtue of something to
follow its own nature (its Dào) and succeed in its moral purpose.

Yīn-Yáng 阴阳 (陰陽)

This pair of terms constitutes a set of generic operators to describe binary oppositions
wherever they are found: living vs. dead, active vs. passive, male vs. female, sun vs.
moon, hot vs. cold, god vs. ghost, etc. There are several intellectual effects of using these
generic labels:

All things labeled yīn can be misunderstood as united in their yīn-ness and contrasted
against a similar category of yáng things united by their yáng-ness. (Notice that this is a
 71

similar intellectual operation to that described in connection with the "five elements" on a
separate page on this web site.) There is accordingly little possibility of real "neutrality"
in the use of the labels; describing a pencil as yīn and a pen as yáng necessarily implies
something about the differences between them beyond the fact that they stand in contrast
to each other. Despite the traditional associations, yīn and yáng labeling is necessarily in
fact relative in many cases. A living woman, for example is female as against male, hence
yīn rather than yáng, but she is living as against dead, hence yáng rather than yīn.

While most philosophical tracts, including popular ones, use yīn/yáng differentiation to
speak of balance and alternation, and stress the necessity of one for another --night and
day must alternate-- there is also a line of logic by which yáng is superior to yīn --life is
preferable to death. It is a traditional Chinese perspective that in general the stress on
balance and alternation is associated with elite, educated, and reflective understanding of
things, while the desire to maximize yáng and to war against yīn is associated with vulgar
and rustic understanding of things, but this much oversimplifies the situation, for context
and object of discussion are much more important than education or social class in the
way yīnyáng rhetoric is actually employed.

Yīnyáng thinking and reasoning are found in both Taoism and Confucianism, although
appeal to it seems to be rather greater in Taoism, and the familiar yīn/yáng symbol (the
famous divided circle) is associated especially in China with Taoism.

II. Terms Particularly Stressed by Confucianism

The Confucian canon provides many lists of terms for virtues, many of them
contradictory or overlapping. In general, the stress is on conformity to tradition,
acceptance of one's social position and willingness to perform one's assigned role in life,
essentially to bloom where one is planted. These are linked to terms like Dào to provide a
sense of the cosmic inevitability of these behaviors, and such folk manifestations of
Confucianism as the "Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars" (found elsewhere on this web site)
suggest that the sense of universal rightness and essential humanity about such a value as
filial piety was strongly believed (somewhat the way Americans believe that individual
autonomy is a universal and cosmically valid value).

Since virtue is a constant topic in the Confucian canon there are several lists of virtues to
choose from. The first four virtues in the following list make up what Mencius referred to
as the "four fundamental principles" (sìduān 四端). Xìn came into this list the Qín period.
The full list of five takes on the name "five constant principles" (Wŭcháng 五常). An
overlapping list, called the "four cardinal virtues" (sì wéi 四维/四維) was developed by
the early writer Guăn Zhòng (管仲) and included ritual, righteousness, frugality, and
sense of shame).

Yì 义 (義) "Righteousness"

This term is strongly associated with moral action. It represents the optimally efficacious
and moral way to doing things. There is a flavor of public-spiritedness about it. It is
 72

associated with faithfulness to contract and strongly associated with loyalty (zhōng). The
joint sense of morality and contract leads to this syllable being used as a prefix for
adoptive kinship relations: yìfù 义父 is an adopted father, yìnǚ 义女 an adopted daughter.
The term jiéyì 结义 "to contract righteousness" means to become sworn siblings. (A
similar character, yí 仪 [儀], is used in compounds relating to ritual and etiquette and
may arguably represent a linguistic link between righteousness and ritual.)

Rén 仁 "Benevolence"

"Benevolence" is the traditional translation, but other possibilities are "good will," "love,"
and "perfected moral character." The key concept is the readiness or willingness or do
what is righteous, that is what is called for by the moral nature of the situation. In
Confucian discussions this is often linked to several other terms that are exemplifications
of benevolence, particularly filial piety (xiào 孝) and loyalty (zhōng (忠).

Lĭ 礼 (禮) "Ritual"

"Ritual" is a perfect translation of lĭ in some contexts, and a disastrously inadequate one

in others. The Chinese term (which is not to be confused with lĭ meaning principle,
despite the identical pronunciation) has very broad application, including: (1) formal
ritual, whether religious (ritual, rites) or civil (ceremonies); (2) etiquette, whether
formalized or informal; (3) behavior that is appropriate to the social context, that is which
expresses one's benevolence (rén 仁) and manifest's one's righteousness (yì 义). Most
writers argue that ritual must not be empty, but must be performed with "sincerity,"
which seems to mean that it requires that one fully understand the status relationships and
their symbols that are almost inevitably a part of any system of etiquette.

Confucianism in the hands of pettifoggers risks degenerating into punctiliousness, and

this is the essence of much of the Taoist critique against it. At the opposite end, both
critics and supporters of Confucianism agree that lĭ necessarily stresses conformity and
modernist's argue that this tends to stifle behavioral manifestations of individualism (such
as creativity).

Zhì 智 "Wisdom"

There is a different term for learning (xué 学 [學], or today xuéwèn 学问 [學問]) that
refers to the mere accumulation of knowledge (just as in English one can refer to "book-
learning"). Zhì refers rather to the culmination of (1) understanding righteousness (yì 义),
(2) experiencing good will (rén 仁), and (3) practicing etiquette (lĭ 礼), all more or less
unselfconsciously as a result of having fully internalized the system.

However wisdom also implies an ability to manipulate the world from within this set of
values. A sage adviser can be called a "bag of wisdom" (zhìnáng 智 囊 ), and the
implication is that the person is a font of useful tactics and strategies. (A famous
collection of tales of such people is a book actually called Zhìnáng by Yuán-dynasty (元
 73

1206-1368) author Féng Mènglóng 冯梦龙 [馮夢龍].) In actual practice someone might
be called a zhìnáng for a prodigious display of peasant cunning, but the proper sense of
the term requires a more elevated attention to morality as well.

Xìn 信 "Trustworthy, faithful"

The underlying concept in xìn is belief (as in believing in Buddhism), but the term has
always included a sense of fidelity and trust, being both trusting and trustworthy. Within
the Confucian frame of reference xìn refers to the state of a person who buys the system
and fully catches the values involved with righteousness, benevolence, and etiquette and
who is free of all hypocrisy about any of it. Unlike wisdom (zhì 智), xìn does not
preclude being naïve, stumbling, and unthoughtfulness.

In the school of Neo-Confucianism associated especially with Míng-dynasty (1368-1644)

philosopher Wáng Yángmíng (王阳明/王陽明), the term xìn comes to represent the
notion that the world and its principles are a mental representation that we present to
ourselves, i.e., something contained within ourselves rather than an external reality as
such, a position usually referred to as "idealism" in Western philosophy. In modern
Chinese, xìn is a verb, and it more or less routinely means simply "to believe." (It is used
as a noun only in the unrelated sense of a letter or telegram.)

Lián 廉 "Frugality"

The same term refers both to a sense of moderation, both in material goods and in, say,
emotion, and to direct frugality. While frugality comes in for only modest attention in the
Confucian canon, moderation, often associated with the term "middle" (zhōng 中) is an
important theme. Modern Confucians sometimes point to the stress on modesty and
moderation as suggesting that Confucianism is "eco-friendly" and hence pre-adaptive to a
future in which conservation and the husbandry of resources are major themes.

Chĭ 耻 "Sense of Shame"

Shame or modesty is the ability or tendency to be content not to receive the veneration of
the vulgar, nor to walk in the counsel of the ungodly, but to take delight in the
performance of one's duty.

Zhōng 忠 "Loyalty"

See below, under the relationship between ruler and subject.

Xiào 孝 "Filial Piety"

See below, under the relationship between father and son.

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III. Human Relationships

Confucian thought defines five core human relationships, referred to in Chinese as the wŭ
lún (五伦-五倫. Each is put forth as a pair of social statuses with rights and duties that
obtain between them. Presumably the set is not imagined to be exhaustive of all human
relationships. (Nothing is said about the relation between merchant and customer, for
example.) Rather, they are five models illustrating the way in which human relationships
ideally work. The earliest coherent discussion of this is to be found in the writings of
Mencius, part of the Confucian canon discussed elsewhere on this web site.

Ruler-Subject 君臣 jūn-chén

Towards a ruler a subject should observe proprieties (lĭ 礼). Towards a subject, a ruler
should be loyal (zhōng 忠). Some writers represent loyalty as a kind of filial piety writ
large. However filial piety, slightly broadened as looking after one's family, is easily cast
into opposition to loyalty, seen as concern for the state or, more broadly, society at large.
A Communist-period Hungarian proverb puts the tension quite clearly: "If you don't steal
from the state, then you're stealing from your family."

Father-Son 父子 fù-zĭ

Towards a father (parent), a son (child) should be filially pious (xiào 孝). Filial piety is,
experientially for most of the Chinese population, the most salient feature of Confucian
society. It assumes near total submission of a child to a parent, and is the basis of the
Confucian model of human relationships as inherently and properly hierarchical, and of
the anti-Confucian critique of Confucianism as inherently totalitarian and oppressive. It
should be noted that within Confucianism, although a child must obey a parent, the child
also has the right and obligation of remonstration (guījiàn 规谏 [規諫]), and if the child
believes that the parent is making a mistake, the child should point out the error (three
times if one wants to be punctilious) before reluctantly carrying out the order. The same
tradition refers to the emperor and his advisors.

Towards a son (child) a father (parent) should be compassionate (cí 慈). In actual
practice, most people defined for fathers a somewhat different role towards children;
fathers were supposed to be "severe" (yán 严 [嚴]) to avoid spoiling a child; indeed the
word yán is sometimes used as a synonym for father. It was mothers, in contrast, who are
most usually described as being cí, just as in other societies.

Elder brother-Younger brother 兄弟 xiōng-dì

Towards an elder brother (sibling), a younger brother (sibling) should be brotherly (tì 悌).
I don't know of another language with a particular word that is used only to describe the
behavior and attitudes to be assumed towards a younger brother towards an older one,
and the translation into English as "brotherly" recognizes the difficulty more than
explaining the concept. Obedience is the expectation, and tì is often paired with filial
 75

piety in the same breath, suggesting that the father-son relationship should be understood
as something of a model for the elder brother-younger brother relationship.

Towards a younger brother (sibling), an older brother (sibling) should be friendly (yŏu
友). If the younger brother’s behavior toward his older sibling is modeled, perhaps
vaguely, on his behavior towards a parent, the behavior of the elder brother towards the
younger brother, associated with friendship, is therefore ideally far more intimate than a
father's would be, a kindly authority, verging on equality.

Husband-Wife 夫妇 (夫婦) fū-fù

To a wife, a husband should be venerable (zūn 尊). The term zūn suggests honor, high
rank, and respectability by virtue of high position. The wife, in other words, is to honor
her husband. To a husband, a wife should be humble (bēi 卑). The term bēi is the
reciprocal of zūn in other contexts of exalted and humble rank. The contrast that seems to
be intended is clearly one of who is in charge (the husband), but with it at least some
sense of a reciprocated sense of responsibility and place.

Friend-Friend 朋友 péngyŏu

Towards each other, friends should be friendly (yŏu).

The relationship between friends is the only one of the list of five that is non-hierarchical.
The character 朋 represents a pair of cowry shells, and apparently always implied a pair
of equal things. The character 友 also simply means friend. (Unlike the other terms, this
is not a compound of names of two different statuses, but a synonym compound
designating a single status, one of equality.) Mencius is quite clear on the distinctiveness
of this relationship as fundamentally non-hierarchical.

Interesting, very close friends often swore (and still swear) oaths of mock-siblinghood,
converting themselves from equal friends to unequal siblings, possibly suggesting a
greater comfort level in hierarchical than in equal relationships, at least for some people.
One can make another interpretation about the Chinese urge toward sworn siblinghood,
however. Such oaths often take place in temples devoted to the god Guān dì 关帝 (關帝),
who is quintessentially associated with loyalty (zhōng 忠) and righteousness (yì 义), q.v.
There is a suggestion here (and in the remarks of informants I interviewed in connection
with a study of sworn siblinghood) that part of the goal of swearing eternal siblinghood is
to fix the fidelity of the relationship and avoid the possibility of betrayal by one's friends.
This suggests that friendship, whatever early Confucianism may have thought or said
about it, was a relatively more fragile relationship than some friends may have hoped.

IV. Other Terms in Chinese Philosophy

Various writers have identified other terms as particularly important in understanding

Chinese civilization. Here are a few of the most frequently mentioned.
 76

Aì 爱 (愛) "Love"

This means what it sounds like. As in English, it is quite broad in application, depending
on modifiers to specify a more exact meaning. Bó'ài 博爱 refers to universal love, for
example, while lián'ài 恋爱 (戀愛) includes an element of sexual desire. Love as a social
virtue is usually rén'ài 仁爱.

Chéng 诚 (誠) "Sincerity"

Sincerity and honesty are linked in this term, although in the Confucian tradition the
result had better also be orthodox, so there is an important link to the idea of internalizing
the mainstream tradition here.

Fă 法 "Law"

This syllable is used both for human and for natural law, and even for the method by
which something is done, all rolled into one. In Buddhism it is used as a translation of
Sanskrit "dharma," and refers to Buddhist law or doctrine, but also to the general
Buddhist canon as well as to Buddhist customs, morality, and even occasionally to
objects of worship.

Guānxì 关系 (關系) "Relationship"

The expectations of behavior that people in two statuses have of each other by virtue of
their two statuses are called their "roles" in sociological English, their "guānxì" in
colloquial Chinese. But the word has wider uses. Any sort of a relationship between ideas
or things can be a guānxì. The expression "there is no guānxì" means that something
doesn't matter or is unimportant. It is what I say to you if you apologize, for example. But
what has attracted the interest of commentators is the use of guānxì to refer to influence,
"pull," or "drag" that one person may have with another. Because I know you, I go to you
to try to get a job for my nephew. I am said to be using guānxì to do it. In the abstract,
guānxì in this sense is particularism rather than universalism. Guānxì is seen as
effectiveness in getting things done by some people, as corruption by others.

Hé 和 "Harmony"

The term essentially refers to filling, uniting, flowing together, or putting things into
accord with each other, and it is a verb or a noun. Another word 合 is also pronounced hé
in modern Mandarin and means almost exactly the same thing, but the pronunciations of
the two differ in early Chinese and in non-Mandarin dialects. One could say that they
have hé-ed together in Mandarin.
 77

Liú 流 "Float, Wander"

This word really refers simply to flowing. Tears, streams and rivers, meteors, epidemics--
all of these liú. However so can people, which is not considered desirable, on the whole.
The term liúmín 流民 or liúmáng 流氓 simply means "tramp" and one doesn't really
approve of them wandering around in one's neighborhood, and doesn't trust them to do
business with. Liúmáng in late dynastic times and today refers especially to local bullies
and scoff-laws who subsist on protection rackets, petty thievery, and sometimes hiring
out to carry coffins or do short-term manual labor. Although some liúmáng may be
married or may operate in small criminal gangs, there is a semantic cloud over the term
liú that suggests an individual with little connection to the world, and is probably not
married. Unmarried adults are, of course, suspect, since on the one hand they are not
conforming to expectations, and on the other they have reduced social ties, and hence
reduced constraints to ensure their good behavior.

Píng 平 "Peaceful"

Píng refers not only to peace, in all its dimensions, but also to equality. The
differentiation in colloquial language is between píng'ān 平安 (peaceful) and píngdĕng 平
等 (equal), but as a single syllable píng incorporates both ideas, and can even refer to flat
land as well. In Classical Chinese píng-ing your enemies meant "pacifying" them.

Píng'ān 平安 "Harmony"

A colloquial term referring to a state of things being generally pleasantly uneventful.

When work pays off, study goes well, health is good, and human relations are rewarding,
in short when live delivers on its promises, the situation is said to be "harmonious." The
negation of this bùpíng'ān 不平安, "disharmony," which means that things are in general
not going well: health is poor, there are financial or farming reverses, or whatever.
Disharmony may be due to ghosts or other spirits.

Rèn 任 "Responsibility"

This means what it sounds like. It is often used to refer to one's office or responsibilities
taken on for the public good. A public office is a "responsibility object" 任务 (任務)
rènwù.