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Ancient Ruins in Wei Valley

scholar

Mozi, as imagined by the artist

A Taoist and nature

The Zhou Dynasty Declines

After more than two hundred years of rule, the Zhou dynasty began to decline in power. According to legend, a Zhou emperor named You Wang appointed the son of his concubine as his heir, rather than the son of his wife. This angered the queen, and she and her father allied themselves with a nearby nomadic tribe called the Chuanrong. You Wang is described as having wasted his energies on pleasures and as having neglected the defense of his realm, and in 771 BCE the Chuanrong tribesmen overran the capital city in the Wei Valley (near what in the coming centuries would be the city of Xianyang. They killed the emperor, and then with friendly wishes they sent the queen, her father and the queen's son away to a new capital, Luoyang, and the queen's son become the next Zhou emperor.

Local lords across the Zhou empire responded to the Chuanrong victory over You Wang by making themselves powers in their own right, and the new Zhou emperor and his successors were unable to recover their power over these local lords. The new Zhou emperors lost the revenues that previous Zhou emperors had received from the provinces, and they survived on the taxes they received from those who worked their personal, nearby lands. The Zhou emperors continued to issue edicts and to conduct religious ceremonies that according to custom they alone were allowed to perform, and they maintained at their court numerous officials and many priests, but they now ruled the Zhou empire in name only.

With the decline in power of Zhou emperors came wars between the local lords. Each local lord had his own army. Each jealously adhered to the formalities that symbolized his status, and each created his own court of law. Some local lords pursued vendettas against a neighboring lord, or one raided another lord's land in search of loot. Lords entered into alliances with each other, sometimes through marriage. They made treaties and exchanged goods. But for some lords war was a sport - better than a good hunt. Often wars were fought as a gentleman's activity, with battlefield courtesy such as letting an opponent cross a river and form ranks before attacking. They believed that heaven disapproved of extreme measures and that a ruthless victor might suffer from the displeasure of the gods.

Confucius and Conservatism

Exercising what they believed was their religious authority, the Zhou emperors maintained a collection of scholarly specialists on morality, festivals and sacrifices. And local lords imitated the Zhou emperors and attracted scholars to their courts to conduct their sacrifices and funerals and to teach their children. A new age of scholarship had appeared, and among the scholars was a man named Kongfuzi, a name that in the seventeenth century CE in Europe was to be Latinized to Confucius.

The earliest biography on Confucius was written four hundred years after his death, and those writing about him most likely portrayed him without any details that the passing of time had made disagreeable. The earliest copy of the writings of Confucius that are available to modern scholars date back to the fourth century CE, seven centuries after Confucius lived - during which followers might have edited his work to suit changing times and attitudes. These writings purported to have been by Confucius are called The Analects, which describe requisites for being a good person, a good ruler and a good follower.

According to legend, Confucius was born in 551 BCE, in a principality called Lu - where Shang culture remained strong. Confucius is said to have lost his father when he was three and to have studied in his early youth. Some have claimed that he may have been the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a concubine, for, rather than work in the fields and remain illiterate as common boys did, he went to work for the local ruler, managing stables and keeping books for granaries. After marrying at nineteen, he completed studies that earned him the title of scholar. As a scholar he was a master of ritual, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy and arithmetic and he had some familiarity with poetry and history.

Confucius lived after people around him had begun using iron tools. The use of iron had brought a higher productivity in agriculture, a greater rise in population, more urban growth, improvements in transportation and trade, coinage and new wealth. This loosened social stratification and may have led Confucius and others to see society as having become chaotic and in moral decline. Some scholars saw the world as hopelessly askew and became recluses. But, according to legend, rather than become a recluse, Confucius decided to change society through education. He is described as having opened a school for those he thought were potential leaders and as having taught any male willing to learn. Confucius is described as a teacher who conversed rather than lectured. He is described as the first among the Chinese to support himself by teaching - by charging tuition. According to legend, Confucius also became active in politics, advocating government for the happiness of the common people rather than the pleasure of their rulers, and he advocated a reduction of taxes, the mitigation of severe punishments and the avoidance of wars.

Confucius is described by his biographers as advocating the restoration and renovation of the institutions of the first of the Zhou emperors. He is described as blaming the ills of his day on leaders neglecting old Zhou rituals or performing these rituals incorrectly. Controversy exists over whether Confucius actually revered the early rule of the Zhou emperors or merely pretended such reverence in order to make his views more palatable to contemporaries - a subterfuge that would have contradicted sayings attributed to Confucius about honesty, sincerity and straight-forwardness.

By the time of Confucius, the founder of the Zhou dynasty, Houji, was described as having been born by a virgin. Confucius may not have believed this, but he is described as believing the claim of Zhou emperors that their rule was a mandate from heaven. Confucius is described as seeing events as a morality play directed from heaven, as believing that Shang emperors had lost the mandate of heaven through a decline in their virtue and especially through the wickedness of their last ruler, Zhouxin. To the Confucianists the Zhou leaders who overthrew Zhousin were great heroes. According to the followers of Confucius, he believed that early Zhou rule was a golden age, a time of order, reason and virtue, and that Zhou emperors lost their power by having failed to exercise virtue.

Confucius is described as believing that a return to the golden age of the early Zhou emperors could be accomplished by the return of rule that was similarly ethical and wise. Apparently, Confucius believed that a king had to earn this mandate from heaven. According to his followers, Confucius saw the Lord of Heaven not as a tyrant but as the embodiment of a system of laws. He believed that kings should conduct themselves in accordance with these laws, including observing established ceremonies and offering all sacrifices in accordance with the proper rites. He believed that the king should set a moral example for commoners and that commoners should conduct themselves in accordance with the laws of heaven and remain obedient to the rule of the king. Confucius is described as believing that people should respect and obey their parents as well as the king who ruled over them. The state, he believed, was an extension of the family, a collection of families. He believed that a family should be ruled by the eldest adult male, and that families should be led by the superior family of the emperor. In this regard, Confucius was a man of his time: he placed his hope for humanity in the sincerity of the ruler rather than in checks and balances in government and the watchful eye of the public.

The right course, believed Confucius, was for a king to behave like a king and a son to behave like a son. He created what he called categories and held that a king who did not behave as a king was not a king, and a son who did not behave as a son was not a son. According to Confucius, obedience was the prime ingredient of the authentic individual. To maintain harmony, believed Confucius, people should not wander from what is authentic.

Confucius is described as believing in class distinctions - what he called social categories. He not only supported the religious values of the elite, he supported their good manners, and he dissociated himself from the religion that had become identified with the common people: shamanism, witchcraft and sorcery. Although he favored the elevation of males according to their learning and superior moral qualities, he appears to have failed to see that equal opportunity was not possible in an autocratic society dominated by aristocrats.

When Confucius was around fifty, he served as a minister of public works and as a minister of justice, but his support for Zhou kingship could not have set well with the ruler of Lu - who owed his power to independence from Zhou rule. And the moral posturing of Confucius might have alienated him from those around the local ruler - advisors and servants of various sorts who often wished to entice the ruler with sensual pleasures.

Confucius was disappointed that his views were not taken seriously and put into practice. He left politics in disgust and went on a decade of dangerous travels through various states. When he was sixty-seven, he responded to an invitation from some of his disciples to return to Lu, and there he taught five more years. Then he died viewing the world as askew, his optimism from earlier years having gone unrewarded.

Mozi's Alternative

After Confucius' death, his teachings were overshadowed by the scholar Mozi (Master Mo), who was born in 490 BCE - nine years after Confucius had died. Like Confucius, he was trained in classical literature. Mozi saw the Confucianists of his time as pretentious and selfish aristocrats - further evidence that Confucius did not support equality or democracy. He condemned Confucian preoccupation with religious ritual, and he ridiculed Confucianists for putting family and class above the welfare of common people.

Unlike Confucius and his followers, Mozi believed that all were equal before the lord of the heavens. He believed that the powers of heaven acted on the world and exercised a love for all humankind. He spoke of the value of the labor of common folks, and he advocated promoting people to positions of power solely on the strength of their abilities and virtues.

In place of Confucianism's dutiful love for the father of a family, Mozi supported a wider devotion: he urged people to follow heaven and reciprocate or duplicate heaven's love with their own love for all. He claimed that members of the aristocracy should love commoners and that commoners should love members of the aristocracy. Unlike the haughty Confucianists, who would lecture for only those who treated them with what they thought was proper respect, Mozi and his followers would lecture anyone willing to listen.

But in some ways, Mozi was also a man of his time. He supported monarchical rule - support for democracy in China during his time being considered his time to be criminal. He saw evil as having originated in individualism in pre-civilized society, an individualism in which everyone had his or her own standard of what was right or wrong. Drawing from this misconception of pre-civilized society, he believed that heaven had overridden individualism by creating civilization and by giving power to the most worthy of persons, the emperor - rather than the emperor's power being derived from common people. It was an emperor's duty, claimed Mozi, to unify the standards of morality according to heaven. He believed that rulers might deviate from the wishes of heaven but that it was the duty of people to adhere to heaven's standards by exercising reason.

Disorders, Mozi believed, came from men of power understanding only trifles and not matters of great importance, most importantly heaven's universal love. Disasters such as hurricanes and torrential rains he explained as heaven's punishment for people deviating from these standards. He believed that heaven manifested its love for humankind by providing humans with their material needs.

As Mozi pondered and taught, trade and the money economy had been expanding, and Mozi wanted the blessings of material benefits extended among common people - especially food, clothing and housing. He saw as waste those activities that did not contribute to the creation of these. He found fault with aristocrats spending enormous sums on their weddings and funerals. He condemned luxury, music, extravagant entertainment, frivolity, heavily ornamented coffins and embroidered shrouds. And in his opposition to waste, he opposed war.

Mozi lived in a time of many wars. He witnessed lords sending their armies into weaker states, devastating crops, slaughtering cattle, burning towns and temples, killing civilians and dragging people away to be made slaves. He spoke against lords who already had much but who sought what little some other lord might have. He said that killing people in great numbers should not make one a hero. He tried mediating between rulers at war with each other. It was military aggression that he opposed, and, rather than losing himself in a utopian pacifism, he created an army of well-trained, highly disciplined warriors which he offered to local rulers defending themselves against aggression.

Attempting to refute Mozi was the Confucian scholar Mengzi, who lived from 372 to 289 - whose name would be Latinized to Mencius. Confucianists would call Mencius the Second Sage. Whereas Mozi had worn the simplest and most unpretentious clothing and otherwise appeared humble, Mencius rode around in style in a carriage. Mencius claimed that like Mozi he was for adequate living conditions, and he agreed that such conditions were needed for morality to prevail, but he attacked Mozi's belief in universal love. Mencius claimed that people must give love in varying amounts to different people. He accused Mozi of having failed to give sufficient importance to loving one's parents and of wishing to abolish fatherhood. He argued that a good king was needed to assure that the people were properly fed and clothed, and he argued that an emperor was needed to spare people the horrors of war.

Mencius defended Confucianism against another critic, Yangzhu, accusing him of failing to recognize the need of a king, and he said that to fail to recognize the primacy of a father and a sovereign "is to be a bird or beast." He claimed that the substance of being human was serving one's parents and that "the basis of righteousness" was obeying one's elder brothers. In advocating heaven's harmony through the virtue of emperors and the obedience of common people, Mencius argued that people overall were essentially good but that anarchy made them evil and that people had to be encouraged to be good. And while he wished to find a ruler who would put his teachings into practice, local rulers faced with increased competition and warfare were not inclined to listen with much patience to his lectures about essential goodness.

The Taoist Protest and Withdrawal

An alternative to both Confucius and Mozi appeared that would eventually become the second most influential school of thought among the Chinese. This was Taoism, whose founder is believed to have been Laozi. During the life of Mencius, China's literate minority was reading a book now believed to have been written by Laozi.

Laozi saw nature as paradoxical and essentially indescribable. He claimed that people should forget trying to acquire truth. Knowledge, he claimed, merely contributes to discontent and unhappiness. According to legend he declared:

Banish sageliness, discard wisdom, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.

Early Taoism rejected Confucianism's striving for virtue, its belief in social reform, ritual and governmental regulation. Laozi advocated withdrawal from social strife, and he expected society to continue being driven by greed and a lust for power. His early followers scoffed at Confucianist veneration of early Zhou emperors. They saw futility in lecturing a king or prince on doing right. They saw lectures on morality as attempts to parade one's own excellence. Laozi is believed to have written that humanity should discard words such as duty, humanity, benevolence and righteousness. Only during disorders, he claimed, did people hear talk of "loyal servants." These words, he claimed, were the flip side of strife, and strife should be avoided.

The second man of Taoism has been described as Zhuangzi, a contemporary of Mencius. Zhuangzi is said to have been a minor official who dropped out to become a teacher. He advocated liberating oneself from narrow mindedness - by accepting Taoism. In accord with Laozi's opinions, he described Confucianism's professing values as an artifice. In the place of such values he proposed that people focus their attention on and submit to nature. Nature, he claimed, is primary.

While Mencius wrote of duty and decency, the wisdom of monarchical rule and of anarchy returning people to beastliness, the Taoists insisted that all social organization was ruinous. The Taoists claimed that more laws created more robbers and thieves, that more government created more greed and ambition. They claimed that the best rulers would be those who converted to Taoism and gave up luxurious living and warfare and who just left people alone.

The Taoists saw military leaders as murderers who built their reputations on the bodies of thousands of innocent people. They claimed that a military hero was to be pitied because he was unaware of his guilt and ignorance. Like the Buddhists, early Taoists sought salvation for themselves through a pursuit of serenity. Like many others, they believed in harmony. He who does not fight, they believed, would live in peace, and he who does not strain after success will suffer no failure.

One of their paradoxical expressions claimed that he who does nothing accomplishes everything. In this, like Mozi, they believed that one should refrain from devoting oneself to the pursuit of material gains or fame, that one should live modestly, that luxury breeds envy and that envy breeds strife. And they believed that to help end strife and greed, profits should be banished.

Against Confucianist and Mozi's moralizing, the Taoists believed in acting on impulse, such as eating when one is hungry and sleeping when one is tired. This, they believed, left them in "perfect harmony" with their original nature. The realization that much that was conflict originated with impulse (as with infants fighting over toys or adults fighting over territory) eluded them.

The Taoists sought harmony between themselves and heaven by joyfully surrendering to the will of heaven. In this, they believed, they could achieve a happiness unaffected by change and death. They favored moving to a quiet, sparsely populated area where one could contemplate the beauties of nature. If evil came one's way - as with the arrival of a murderous army - they believed in remaining passive, and if this brought death so be it, because death was inevitable.

Xunzi, Revisionist Confucian

A couple of generations after Mencius, a Confucian scholar appeared whose name was Xunzi. He lived from 315 to 236, and like Mencius, he was to be looked upon as a great contributor to Confucianism. As a Confucian he believed in education, activism, class hierarchies and accessing heaven's powers through religious rites, but he believed that earlier Confucianists had erred in believing that the order and virtues of the early Zhou dynasty could be re-established. He called on Confucianists to give up what he saw as their excessive idealization of the past.

Xunzi revised the Confucian view of human psychology. He argued against the view of Mencius that all men were born with a nature that was essentially good. He put himself more in accord with what would be the view of modern psychology: that goodness was a product of socialization - what Xunzi called learning. Xunzi believed that one should ask not whether humanity was basically good but what was the source of people doing evil. Befitting his Confucianism, and contrary to Taoism, he concluded that evil was the work of impulse, that impulses had to be controlled and that this was accomplished by reason. Correct behavior, he believed, came from the teachings of the sages and could therefore be learned by striving. Believing in reason over impulse, Hunzi attacked those religious practices that he thought were unreasonable, including fortune telling. He also opposed the Taoist claim that people should submit to nature, arguing that the destiny of humankind was decided to a degree at least by humans themselves. He saw recourse to the ills of his time not in the skepticism and withdrawal of the Taoists but in leaders of society understanding and discriminating between wise and foolish policies. This ability to discriminate, he believed, was what distinguished humanity from beasts.

Realism and Development

Among those who believed in an activism shunned by the Taoists were scholars who would be called Legalists. These scholars saw themselves as realists. They saw Confucian worship of the past as a waste of time and Mencius' theory about the goodness of humanity as misguided. The Legalists saw goodness as people cooperating with authority. They believed that to keep people from deviating from this cooperation, authority had to threaten punishment. Society, they believed, had to be organized by the state. They accepted as a fact of life that power was in the hands of autocratic monarchs, and they approved, seeing power in the hands of a single rational ruler and his ministers as better than someone wielding power as a product of conflict and compromise.

Seeing rivalries between various states as a fact of life, the Legalists believed in strengthening the state. They believed a society benefited from military strength, and some among them advocated expansion as a means of strengthening their state. To strengthen the state they also believed frugality, and some among them believed in a devotion to agriculture and restrictions on commerce. And, seeing Confucian teachings and other rival theories as unessential and divisive, they favored restricting these.

During the time of wars between the various petty states there was a pursuit of knowledge in general that rivaled Taoism's belief in withdrawal, impulse and banishment of sageliness, and, unrelated to what Confucianists were advocating, there were developments in mathematics, physics, technology and the economy. Someone discovered the relationship between radius and circumference. Someone else re-invented what a Greek named Pythagoras had discovered about the sides of a right-angled triangle, and someone invented quadratic equations and formulas for measuring prisms, cones, and cylinders. Astronomy was being studied in the belief that the heavens affected human affairs, and, pursuing this, someone discovered how to calculate the distance between the sun and the earth. Using the principles of hydraulic engineering, intricate irrigation works and numerous dams and dikes were constructed that were to function into modern times. New canals and roads were built. Crop production had increased. And with this came the usual increase in populations and growth in the size of towns.

But science in the North China Plain remained a matter of private learning and not widely, or publicly, taught. Many, including the Confucianists, still believed that it was the gods that made things work. And technological progress remained hampered by secrecy. New techniques most often remained a trade secret among a family's males, kept from the women so it would not spread to another family through marriage.

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