Back In Action!

As readers may have noticed, there's been an enormous pause at this blog--it was even down for a week or so. Lots has happened to make this the case, including sickness (myself and my son), traveling to India (where I've been since the start of Januaray and will be for another week), and worrying about how to get some work done on the dissertation over here. So--now since many of the problems have been solved, I'm ready to jump back into the action. Manyul Im has recently begun a Chinese Philosophy blog, at http://manyulim.wordpress.com/, where there are some interesting things going on.

Meanwhile, I'm busy making a bit of a change at Unpolished Jade. I'll be collapsing my general website into this page (consolidation gives birth to organization!), and in following with this, I'll also be bringing my various blogging concerns together. So, while this blog will still be filled with Chinese philosophy, now you'll also see more broad topics here (most likely some history, contemporary politics, globalization, foreign relations, etc.). And also I'll sometimes post a bit on books that might be of interest to those with interest in things Asian (in general).

Reflections on Analects 12.1--Translations and Commentary

Analects (first part): 顏淵問仁。子曰﹕克己復禮為仁。一日克己復仁﹐天下歸仁焉。為仁由己﹐而由人乎哉?

English Commentarial Translations

(McLeod trans.) Yan Yuan asked about ren. The master said: "conforming oneself to and thus returning to ritual creates ren. If for one day one could conform oneself to and thereby return to ritual, the whole world would then return to ren. One creates ren oneself--can others possibly do it?"

(Slingerland trans.) Yan Hui asked about Goodness. The Master said, "Restraining yourself and returning to the rites constitutes Goodness. If for one day you managed to restrain yourself and return to the rites, in this way you could lead the entire world back to Goodness. The key to achieving Goodness lies within yourself--how could it come from others?"

Slingerland is doing two interesting things here. First--He reads the wei as constitutive, which disagrees with Zhu Xi's reading (below) and leaves Analects 9.1 unclear, and also seems to broaden ren, because of the many other wei ren formulations. However, then the internal/external definition problem becomes pressing, if one wants to maintain that ren lies on either of these sides, rather than containing both, as I claim.
Second, he takes ke as "restraint", likening it to yue (in 4.23). I think this is correct. However, this can also lend support to Kong Anguo's reading as "can of oneself", where 'restraint' is thought of in terms of discipline, self-control. The discipline here is surely meant as connected to ritual, which is why I translate as "conforming oneself to [ritual]". It is not just the ke ji that creates (or is) ren, it is the ke ji with ritual. Focusing on the ke ji without its ritual connection neglects the external factor clearly at work here. Slingerland claims precedent, saying his reading "follows early commentators such as Ma Rong and Huang Kan", but what about Kong Anguo, in the He Yan commentary, which is earlier than either?
Also, Xing Bing (and Daniel Gardner, following him) holds, as I do, that the two senses, Ma Rong's and Kong Anguo's are compatible in the way suggested above, that restraint is thought of in the sense of turning of one's own volition to ritual. (Gardner, p. 83): "for He Yan, Kong's remark, 'if the self is able to return to ritual' is not basically at odds with Ma's understanding of the line 'to restrain the self and return to ritual.'" It appears to me that the best way to explain the sense of the unification of the two is through the notion of conforming oneself to ritual--which suggests both restraint, and self imposition, as well as the necessary connection to ritual itself.

(Ames and Rosemont trans.) Yan Hui inquired about authoritative conduct. The Master replied, "Through self-discipline and observing ritual propriety one becomes authoritative in one's conduct. If for the space of a day one were able to accomplish this, the whole empire would defer to this authoritative model. Becoming authoritative in one's conduct is self-originating--how could it originate with others?"

This is closer to my own reading, in that ke is taken as disciplining combined with ritual, rather than focus on the restraint which allows one to return to ritual, though Slingerland does a better job at retaining some of the neutrality of the text--which neither Ames and Rosemont nor my own translation here attempts.

(Chan trans.) follows Zhu Xi explicitly. Note claiming that Zhu Xi's reading of ke ji was "to master oneself", and Chan follows this.

(Fingarette) "self-disciplined and ever turning to li."

This is much closer to my own rendering. Benjamin Schwartz says that Fingarette is concerned with tying in the bit about the self and its control to ritual, seeing these two as "sides of the same coin"--one formulation. I completely agree. (Schwartz. p. 77) "One simply notes that Fingarette's version very much stresses the absolute simultaneity and inseparability of the two halves of the statement, implying that the self-discipline and the performance of li are two sides of the same coin. the first translation ("curb your ego and submit to li"), supported by a majority of Chinese commentators, suggests that the correct performance of the li presupposes a sustained inner effort to overcome those evil impulses which prevent the performance of li in the spirit appropriate to li."
Schwartz, I think, is wrong here, both about the reading and about the commentators. By "the majority of Chinese commentators," he must mean post Cheng/Zhu commentators. Certainly Ma Rong and Kong Anguo, the commentators mentioned in the much earlier He Yan commentary, do not hold this view. And if we can offer an explanation of why the later commentators went wrong, this further undermines Schwartz' offered support for his reading, which echoes Zhu Xi in key ways, taking the internal half of the formulation as central, and the latter external half as secondary.

Chinese Commentary

He Yan: 馬曰克己約身﹐孔曰復反也身能反禮則為仁矣。Ma (Rong) said: ke ji is "to restrain the self" (yue shen). Kong (Anguo) said: fu is "to return" (fan). If one can return one self (shen) to ritual then there is ren." 行善在己不在人也。 "The practice of being good depends on oneself not on others."

Zhu Xi (Gardner trans.): "True goodness [ren] is the virtue of the original mind-and-heart [xin] in its wholeness. Ke [to subdue] is sheng, 'to overcome or subdue.' Ji [the self] refers to the selfish desires of the self [shen zhi si yu]. Fu [to return] is fan, "to return"... 'The practice of true goodness' [wei ren] is the means of preserving whole the virtue of the mind-and-heart. Now, the virtue of the mind-and-heart in its wholeness is nothing but heavenly principle and thus can only be harmed by human desire. Consequently, to practice true goodness, one must have the wherewithal to subdue selfish desires and thereby return to ritual." [note the focus on subduing of desires as the operative condition, and return to ritual as the result of this subduing.]

Ren is mysterious for Zhu Xi because it underlies all the workings of ren. It is the virtue of the original heart-and-mind (ben (?) xin). Thus all the wei ren formulations are explained as giving us a description of the practice of ren. If this is true, however, then Confucius never said anything about ren, which makes sense of one passage [9.1], but leaves us with trouble explaining all the formulations of ren practice which involve other than the mind.

Philosophical Usefulness of Historical Commentary

I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the commentarial tradition surrounding the Analects, and its relevance for our current understanding of the Analects. I agree with John Makeham, who argues that any contemporary interpretation is inevitably indebted to the commentarial tradition. Most western scholars (myself included) first approached the Analects in English translation, and learned its subtle points from others standing in the same tradition. Influential commentaries on the Analects, such as that of Zhu Xi, played a large role in the understandings of the Analects transmitted by our teachers and translations of the text, which are inevitably interpretive (one's hermeneutical stance itself will generally also have been affected by training and tradition).

Given this, a better way to understand what is going on in the Analects, and in other historical texts (especially in ancient China and India, where the commentarial tradition was extremely important), is to examine the commentaries themselves, and investigate the views offered in them. In this way, we can come to see how we developed the views we have on the Analects. We can also discover mistakes in our understandings of the Analects, based on mistakes in the commentarial literature. One such mistake, I argue (an ongoing project, and the basis of an upcoming presentation for an ISWCP panel at the eastern APA this year), is the reading of Confucius' term ren 仁 as a moral property of an individual instantiated by a psychological state. Or, a less contentious formulation--as a moral predicate which can be predicated of an individual in a certain psychological state--x has whatever property 'ren' picks out in virtue of either being in a certain psychological state or having gained the ability to enter into a certain psychological state at will. Even less contentiously--x has the property 'ren' picks out in virtue of having whatever psychological qualities cause x to exhibit certain stable, positive moral patterns of behavior. All of the above formulations, I argue, are incorrect, because they all see ren as being connected to psychological qualities, and individuals.

Confucius sees the criteria for distinguishing ren not as constitutive, but evidential. We can tell that one is ren (speaking loosely here) when one has certain qualities, but it is not the possession of these qualities which makes one ren. So the inevitable question is--what are the constitutive criteria? What is it that makes one ren? Various commentators have offered differing answers to this question--and one influential strain of thought (culminating with Zhu Xi) holds that it is certain psychological qualities that make one ren. This, however, is due, I think, to a misreading of certain key passages in the Analects, and a desire to find in the Analects constitutive criteria, where none are offered. The view of Zhu Xi on many of the key passages is not shared by some earlier commentators of the Analects (arguably Ma Rong, Kong Anguo, and Fan Ning held different views, which are discussed briefly in John Kieschnick's article "Analects 12.1 and the Commentarial Tradition"), and other alternatives are offered. Some of these alternatives are consistent with my own interpretation of ren as a moral property of groups, realized somehow (whether supervenient on, constituted by, whatever) by more tangible social and individual properties.

Part of the mistake, on my view, is that key passages were read by some commentators as offering constitutive criteria of ren. Interpretations on 12.1 are a good example. There, Confucius mentions a way to cultivate ren, by "turning away from oneself" (ke ji 克己) and toward ritual. This is taken by some (including Zhu Xi) to mean that to have eliminated one's desires is (in the constitutive sense) to be ren. There are two key moves going on here. Zhu is both reading 'ji' as the desires or emotions which are implicit in the mind, and reading the wei 為 (here meant as the copula 'is') in "turning away from oneself and toward ritual is ren" (ke ji fu li wei ren 克己復禮為仁) as expressing some kind of identity relation. Both these moves are wrong, I argue, as there is sufficient evidence from the Analects itself to show it.

Anyway, the important point here is that an examination of the commentarial literature can help us, as I think it does in my own case, to trace the historical development of our inherited interpretive views on the Analects, and to discover whether these interpretations are adequate. Lines of interpretation and argument in the commentaries are indispensable if we are to adequately understand the Analects (and other ancient texts). Many of the commentaries to the Analects don't exist in English translation, however, so some of the growing number of philosophers and others working on the Analects (already doing some very important work, by the way) have no access to this invaluable resource. If I had the time, I would work on translating the major commentaries myself--I anticipate translating at least a sizable chunk of it as I work on my dissertation, and perhaps after that's done I can put some effort into translating complete works (at least He Yan, Zhu Xi, Xing Bing, and maybe Huang Kan, all discussed by Makeham). It certainly is a necessary project--so any interested readers, take this as a call to arms. Let's get working on translating those commentaries!

The Dangers of and the Promise of "Comparative Philosophy"

It has often struck me that philosophers studying the Chinese philosophical tradition have to rethink the “comparative” project in general, which interprets Chinese thought via a theoretical apparatus largely foreign to it, especially in pre-Buddhist thought. Often the comparative project degenerates into one of trying to justify Chinese philosophy to a contemporary western audience by filtering it through interpretive schemes borrowed from “more familiar” western philosophers. Confucius is worth studying, the argument goes, as he is advocating a similar view to that of Aristotle, or Kant, etc. Or, the way to understand Confucius is through a virtue ethical apparatus mainly borrowed from Aristotle and Aquinas. Bryan Van Norden mentions the Thomist synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian thought as inspiration for this method of doing Chinese philosophy. This is, I admit, admirable--to work on such a synthesis between Chinese and western thought—but it is a poor way of doing history of philosophy. Whatever Aquinas was doing, he certainly wasn't trying to better understand Aristotle by interpreting him with a Christian apparatus. And it would have been a mistake to do so. Synthesis can only happen after one adequately understands the pieces to be synthesized. One can't construct a building without wood.

The Chinese tradition, I contend, is not adequately understood on its own terms (by western philosophers) to begin synthesis with western traditions, especially for those outside the field of Chinese philosophy. We do ourselves no favors by jumping into the synthesizing project in order to move out of the “Chinese philosophy ghetto” and into the good graces of the mainstream. The move amounts to moving from the ghetto into the grave. The attitude to this move will inevitably be: “if Confucius is doing Aristotelian virtue ethics and the daoists are worrying about essentialism in metaphysics and philosophy of language, why should we worry about what they had to say—after all, our own tradition has probed and continues to probe those questions. There is nothing new the Chinese philosophers have to offer us.” Of course, this complaint would be wrong-headed, but this is where the “comparative” project as often done today leads.

It reminds me of a similar situation in mainland Chinese philosophy thirty or forty or so years ago (well before my time), when all historical research was filtered through the dominant apparatus of Marxism. The categories of Marxism held ancient Chinese philosophy hostage—every ethical teaching of Confucius had to be thought of in its terms. Of course, Confucius and his students didn't think in terms of Marxism, and so there was something ridiculous about this project. Universal schemes of interpretation which take themselves to “sum up” the acceptable moves on the philosophical playing field inevitably fail us miserably when they confront traditions and theories which appear not to respect their boundaries, or to have different ones altogether. It is when confronted with such traditions that these universal schemes attempt to force the discovered traditions into its own categories, and thereby necessarily misunderstand the tradition. Forcing classical Chinese philosophical thought (and of course this is not monolithic either!) into contemporary western categories thus is no more fruitful for understanding the tradition than was the forcing into Marxist categories.

Thus we have to struggle within the ghetto, we have to interpret, present, and understand Chinese philosophy on its own terms. This, I contend, is the correct way out of the ghetto. Through concentrating on Chinese philosophy and its uniqueness, we can show our philosophical colleagues that indeed something different is going on in Confucius than in Aristotle and Plato and Aquinas, and thereby may come to be seen by our colleagues as deserving a place at the table. Ancient Chinese philosophy will thereby become “relevant”, as offering different alternatives, a different theoretical background through which to understand problems of philosophy. To do this is going to take some measure of “growing up” on the part of philosophers working in Chinese philosophy. Much will have to be done from the outside. For example, only in history and East Asian studies departments can one gain an adequate historical understanding of the Chinese philosophical traditions not filtered through western philosophy. Where there are specialists of Chinese philosophy in the American academy, for example, they tend to be alone, and without the backing and structure that would allow them to bring students up to speed in the Chinese philosophical tradition, language, and culture. This is not so for students of ancient Greek philosophy, modern philosophy, and even medieval European philosophy (though perhaps moreso for Islamic and Jewish Arabic medieval philosophy).

We often have to make the choice between philosophy and Chinese philosophy. My own philosophical training, for example, has made me much more qualified to write on questions of contemporary analytic metaphysics and logic than it has on ancient Chinese philosophy, even though the latter is my specialization. Most of my knowledge of the Chinese philosophical tradition, thus, was self-taught. Almost all of my knowledge of the language, and all of my knowledge of the history was thus gained. The problem, of course, with such philosophical training is that we inevitably tend to think of what we know about the Chinese tradition in terms of the philosophical training we have received, which all but ignores the Chinese tradition (at most western universities, with a few exceptions—Hawaii being a notable one).

At any rate, the philosophical situation of Chinese philosophy thus requires more concentration on the uniqueness of ancient Chinese philosophy, and we must work to point out the shortcomings of some of the “comparative” understandings of the Confucian tradition, especially those using the apparatus of (Aristotelian) virtue ethics to interpret the tradition. At the same time, we must work to build up alternative interpretations of the main strands of the Confucian ethical system, which are much different from any of the western ethical systems on offer--although there are certain places of agreement and meeting.

Is Han Dynasty Philosophy Important?

This, from Michael Nylan's book "The Five 'Confucian' Classics" (p. 5): "Early classicism has received surprisingly little intellectual attention, and Han studies--the Chinese counterpart to Roman history--continue to languish in relative obscurity." This is sadly true. Part of the reason it is so is summed up in this bit of thinking, by Chad Hansen: "the onset of the philosophical dark age [Qin and Han], brought on by Qin Dynasty repression followed by Han dynasty policies resulted in a bureaucratic, obscurant, Confucian orthodoxy."

I very much enjoy Chad Hansen's work, and think he is in general an excellent philosopher, but he could not be more wrong here. The Han was as far from a philosophical dark age as any, as Nylan argues convincingly in her work. Part of what is disturbing here is that most philosophers seem to assume there is nothing very interesting going on in the Han. Historians, as Nylan points out, are not all that interested in it either, but philosophers tend to hardly even know that the 400 year span of Chinese history that was the Han even happened. Nearly all of the scholars who are doing or have done work on Han philosophers are historians. We philosophers tend to stick to Pre-Qin, or jump much later in time to the Neo-Confucians. More study of the Han is surely necessary. Dong Zhongshu, Yang Xiong, Wang Chong, and Wang Fu alone justify the efforts of many more scholars.

Perhaps some of the work currently underway by the few of us who work on Han philosophy will help things. I'm not too optimistic, though...

Static vs. Dynamic Xing (性)

I've been looking at the chapters on Huang Kan's (488-545 CE) Lunyu yishu (論語義疏) in John Makeham's book "Transmitters and Creators", and have been thinking a bit about the views Huang presents on xing 性 ("human nature"), and their similarity to some of what Wang Chong says about xing (by the way--a brief plug--my article on Wang's reading of the Analects in the Lunheng is going to appear in this December's Journal of Chinese Philosophy--check it out). More specifically, I have been wondering whether the Huang/Wang view of xing gives us a notion of xing as malleable. Wang's view certainly seems to be that xing is malleable, but it is not so clear we should attribute this view to Huang. The main reason I am interested in this distinction is that it can help us to discover how a theory of mind subtly formed in the Confucian tradition, not all at once, but over a long period. Part of the formation of a theory of mind (one suitable to support an Aristotelian virtue ethical apparatus) in the tradition seems to have been this movement from a dynamic view of xing to a static view of a xing which supports a number of dynamic properties. We see the latter view in Huang Kan.

Because of the static view of xing Huang adopted, he held that xing could not be characterized as good or bad in itself, but was rather prior to moral value. The acts (or what Makeham calls "emotional responses") that are shaped, or "completed" (cheng 成) through environmental factors are what possess moral value, not the xing from which these actions in part arise. Huang is also thus able to hold a view which makes sense of what seem the obvious situationist leanings of certain passages of the Analects like 4.1:

里仁為美。擇不處仁﹐焉得知? "To be in (or live in) the midst of ren is wonderful. If one cannot remain in (the midst of) ren, how can one obtain knowledge? (note--I'm not completely satisfied with this translation, but it will do for my purposes here.)

Huang takes 4.1 to be a situationist statement about those whose xing is ordinary or middle grade. He says of 4.1:

"This chapter shows that it is in the nature of ordinary people to be readily susceptible to influences. When they encounter what is good, they rise; when they meet with what is wrong, they fall. Hence, it is appropriate that one should be careful about where one lives, making sure to select a neighborhood in which humane (ren) people reside." (Makeham translation, p. 103 "Transmitters and Creators")

Thus, one may have a xing of middle grade, that of an ordinary person rather than a sage, and yet by putting oneself in the right situations, produce actions similar to those that would be produced by the sage, or the person who is ren (leave aside my worries about taking ren to be a property of individuals for the moment). One result of this is that one's xing does not have to be malleable in order for there to be the possibility of moral development--cultivation of character relies on external factors as well as inherent properties of individuals.

There are subtle differences between this view and that of Wang Chong. Although Wang and Huang do agree, as Makeham points out, that xing is only one factor in moral development, and that external factors play a much larger role in the determination of one's actions, they disagree on a key point--Wang takes xing to be malleable, and holds that xing can be good or bad at different times (echoing to an extent Dong Zhongshu and Yang Xiong). Ideally, we can control the extent to which it is good or bad, and this makes moral self-cultivation possible.

The move from this popular Han dynasty view to that of Huang, where xing becomes more "substantial", may be a key move in the construction of a theory of mind in the tradition, which, along with apparatus from Buddhism (which also certainly had some influence on Huang!), led to the eventual ascendant psychologism of Zhu Xi, through which much of the contemporary understanding of Confucius is filtered.

Yu Dan's "Little Friend" (小朋友)?

Here's a good post on Yu Dan's work on Confucius by Alan Baumler at Frog In A Well. I have mixed feelings about Yu Dan's work, as I explain in one of my earlier posts here. It is certainly amazing that Confucius makes it as a bestseller anywhere, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's really Confucius that is making the bestseller lists, or rather some monstrous pop version Confucius' students would not recognize. I think what caused this turn toward skepticism about Yu Dan's project is the revelation (from Baumler) that she "apparently thinks that the term 小人 [xiao ren] means 'child'". Baumler is far too charitable when he calls this "utterly wrong." I would not have been so nice. To interpret the Confucian xiao ren as 'child' is worse than wrong. It's stupid. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding of the classical language and context. I won't attribute this failing to her yet, however--with a charge this great one at least owes the author the benefit of reading her work. I'm going to check out a copy of her 论语心得 (Lunyu xinde), and investigate this charge. I really hope it's not true.

The Resurgence of Confucianism?

Here's a recent article from the Washington Post on a resurgence of Confucianism in contemporary China.

I find the new interest in Confucius a positive sign for the most part, as Confucianism may be able to temper some of the newfound materialist individualism China is beginning to experience, and which my own culture has been steeped in for some time. However, I am a little skeptical that Confucianism will have the power to transform the society, steering it from greed to morality and human flourishing. My own culture, again, can serve as a historical example here. The mainline Christian churches in the United States and in Europe (especially the Roman Catholic Church) have, for many years, railed against what they see as the increasing individualism and materialism of western culture in general. This, however, has done nothing to stem the tide. As people have become wealthier and more in control of their own lives, they have simply chosen to either leave the churches, or ignore the message. This has led to the decline of the mainline churches and the rise of new churches preaching the "gospel of material success", often megachurches whose sermons appear as seminars on how accepting Jesus can gain one a raise, a better job, and worldly success.

This is to show that public greed and individualism is not so easily tempered through moral teaching, even teaching as radical (in some sense of the word) as Confucianism or Christianity. People with control who are convinced that what they are doing is correct will simply listen to the message and take what they want from it. This is what is happening to Christianity in the west (where one often hears certain Christians make indignant speeches denouncing homosexuality and abortion, while at the same time praising the making of money, opposing social services, and supporting wars), and it is what will inevitably happen to Confucianism in China, as can already be seen though the work of Yu Dan, who herself claims that she has left certain features of Confucius' teaching aside, as they do not fit well with Modern China.

Of course, this is not meant to be a criticism of Yu Dan--I think her work is useful for bringing large numbers of people to some understanding of Confucianism. Her interpretation is not perfect, but this is a sacrifice that must be made in any popularization. It is impossible to retain the full substance of the complicated work of a philosopher such as Confucius when one is trying to present an easy to understand overview of this work. However, there is always a great danger when one begins to stray from the historical, because there is always the temptation (even when attempting to remain historically accurate!) to interpret a tradition as lending support to those motivations one already has and as prizing those things one already wants. However, an ethical tradition interpreted thus loses all its power to transform us. Ethical theories show us the way to be better people--point out for us the path from where we are to where we ought to be. Thus to transform a tradition into a validation of whatever it is we do (unless we're already morally perfect) is to eviscerate it. Anyone who wishes to bring Confucianism into the modern world should keep this in mind.

Yongzheng's Propaganda and Confucius on the "Barbarians"

Apologies are in order--things have been a bit slow here at Unpolished Jade recently. The reason for this is that I’ve been in the excruciating drive of studying for my comprehensive exams, which I take in August--so I’ve uncharacteristically been spending a great deal of time thinking about things other than Chinese philosophical history. Hopefully this will end sometime in late August However, even with the unending study, I’ve been unable to resist plumbing the historical depths. I’ve been catching up on some modern Chinese history, and reading a few things on the Ming and Qing dynasties. I’ve just finished reading Peter Perdue’s excellent monograph China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Not a great deal of philosophically interesting material covered here, though a must read for those interested in political and military strategy in the late Ming and Qing. One part of the book particularly piqued my interest, however. It had to do (of course) with the Yongzheng emperor’s (reigned 1723-1735 C.E.) reading of Confucius’s Analects, and his interpretation of Analects 3.5. This interpretation served as fuel for his attempt to assert the political supremacy of the Manchu Qing over the Mongol peoples of the central asian frontier, as well as (not focused on by Perdue) over native Han Chinese, whose assumptions of cultural superiority constantly challenged the Qing’s attempt to construct a narrative of natural supremacy. The difficult passage Perdue suggests that Yongzheng alludes to in a passage from the Dayi Juemilu is Analects 3.5:

夷狄之有君不如諸夏之亡也 。 Di di zhi you jun bu ru zhu xia xhi wang ye. “The barbarian tribes with a ruler are unlike the Xia states without a ruler.”

The translation I have given above is close to literal, and does not beg any questions about Confucius’ intention in the passage. There are two interpretations of this mentioned by Perdue, however, which conflict in an interesting and very important way. Arthur Waley’s translation of 3.5 takes it to be a statement that the barbarian tribes are in a better state than the Chinese states, and thus serves to chide his listeners for their divergence from the correct ways. The Brooks translate this in what Perdue says is the more traditional way, holding 3.5 to be a claim of Chinese supremacy--that even without a ruler, the barbarian tribes are not equal to the Chinese state. If forced to choose a side, I would side with Waley here, though I think it is far from obvious his is the correct interpretation. In my own translation, I choose to leave the statement ambiguous. This, I think, is the best translation of the passage, although it leaves much to be desired concerning interpretation. However, in translation I prefer to represent the ambiguities inherent in the original Chinese as far as possible in English, as this serves the needs of English readers far better (I think) than over interpretation.

Anyway--the main point of all of this is that Yongzheng seems to have accepted the Waley interpretation as well. He says:

“you cannot divide human from animal on the basis of ‘civilzed’ [Hua] and ‘barbarian’ [Di]. Those who are given rulers by Heaven’s mandate, but try to defy Heaven, cannot avoid being exterminated by Heaven” (Perdue translation, China Marches West, p. 474)

This perhaps was a break with traditional interpretation of this passage of the Analects, but such an interpretation served Yongzheng’s goal of establishing the political supremacy of the Qing. It was, for Yongzheng, powerful (and good?) rulership which established Manchu supremacy and the viability of the Qing. The interpretation of the Brooks would surely have been seen as bordering on subversive by the Manchus, as it implies that they could lead as viable an empire as one led by Han Chinese, such as the Ming (and perhaps this is the reason the Qing struggled with rebellions meant to either reestablish the Ming or drive out the Manchu “invaders”). So although I think Yongzheng’s interpretation gets Confucius right, it went against the grain in his time.

Why do I think Yongzheng and Waley’s interpretation of Analects 3.5 is probably the correct one? Because for Confucius, wen (“culture”) alone was not sufficient to achieve the thriving society. This is why he constantly stressed good rulership, which we can take to be one of the main themes (if not the main theme) of the Analects. Wen was certainly, for Confucius, one of the ways a person comes to learn how to be a good ruler, and it is necessary for a knowledge of the ritual action through which one connects with the community at large and focuses one’s moral intentions into social action. However, much of being ren (“humane,”) itself has to do with motivation, and this cannot be withheld from even those without access to wen. On many occasions in the Analects, however, Confucius bemoans of the lack of concern of those around him, and even his students, with ren and right action in general. In this context, Analects 3.5 can be seen as such a complaint. Even those without wen can try, Confucius might say--their hearts can be in the right place--and when they are, they are better than those within “civilization” are in Confucius’ era. It is important to keep in mind that Confucius did not have a high opinion of the society of his time. It was the Zhou that Confucius looked to as the ideal, not the “civilization” of his own time. He would not have had reason to praise the “states of the Xia”, and this would certainly not be keeping with Confucius’ tendency elsewhere in the Analects to prod and criticize where he finds faults, rather than make excuses, saying the equivalent of “well, you’re not on the right path, but no matter what you do, you’re better than those awful barbarians.”

We Are, Most Essentially, Consumers?

This is sad. Look what we've become. I can't help but think that most of us in old age will look back on our lives in despair, seeing only ads and money and consumption, and a dark, bottomless void where something substantial and life giving should have been. Could Confucius have anticipated something like this? I suppose he would just say this is a natural result of a myopic focus on the self, and a slavish attachment to our goods. Maybe we could all use a good shot of the Confucian virtues--filiality, devotion, respect, humanity or benevolence, and reverence for social welfare.

Why Does the West Consider Confucianism a Religion?

I've thought about this question a bit recently. It has always baffled me. It seemed to me (and still does) a key example of the misunderstandings inevitable in the meeting of different cultures. I constantly see “Confucianism” referred to as a religion, yet never see anyone identify themselves as an adherent of the Confucian religion. When I first encountered the philosophical system of the Analects, Mencius, Xunzi, and the Neo-Confucians, I found nothing that led me to believe this tradition could justifiably be called a religion. Today, having studied Confucius and the Confucian tradition in general for about a decade, I still have not found any justification for taking the Confucian tradition to represent a religion, similar to religious systems such as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, etc.

Assuming that I am right, that Confucianism is not a religion (any more than Platonism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism), then we are confronted with the question: how did the west get things so wrong? How did it become standard to classify Confucianism as a religion?

Perhaps a look at the Christian presence in China from the 16^th through the 18^th century can give us the beginnings of an answer. I have been reading Jonathan Spence's wonderful book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of the encounter between China and west). The Jesuit missionaries of Ricci's time seem to have been greatly concerned with presenting an opposition between the three Semitic religions of the west: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; and what they saw as the three main “religious” systems of China: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. To a large extent, this tripartite Chinese system of thought may have been an invention of western missionaries, created in order to make the comparison with western thought and its divisions. Perhaps Buddhism and certain facets of Daoism could have been justifiably considered religious systems, but Buddhism and Daoism alone would not give missionaries the desired contrast to the western scheme. Confucianism, then, as an elite philosophical movement of the literati, which included (or rather subsumed or assumed) certain ceremonial and devotional elements, was available to serve as this missing third system.

Initially it seems strange that a society familiar with the work of Plato and the neo-Platonists, whose systems had ceremonial and devotional elements as well, would take Confucianism to be a religious system, while withholding this status from Platonism or neo-Platonism. However, when we consider the motivation of the Christian missionaries, things become a bit clearer. Confucianism, as a foundational doctrine within Chinese society, must have presented itself as a challenge to the missionaries, who saw the doctrine of the Catholic Church as what should ultimately play this role. A Christian Chinese society could not be built on the back of an ideology which assumed no creator God and grounded its ethical system in humanity rather than in the divine. Such a doctrine would, the Church believed, cause problems for the introduction of Christianity, and might well lead even Chinese converts to begin creating new heresies, which would make it easy for the Church to lose doctrinal control of the vast empire. This may have been behind the decision of Pope Clement XI in 1715 to side with the Dominicans over the Jesuits in the controversy over whether Chinese rituals were compatible with Catholicism. The rituals of paying homage to ancestors may have looked suspiciously like worship to the Catholic Church (which stuck us with another misunderstanding of Chinese culture in the term “ancestor worship”), and this would have been incompatible with the worship of the One True God.

The first two sections of Clement XIs decree seem to suggest this:

“I. The West calls Deus [God] the creator of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. Since the word Deus does not sound right in the Chinese language, the Westerners in China and Chinese converts to Catholicism have used the term "Heavenly Lord" for many years. From now on such terms as "Heaven" and "Shang-ti" should not be used: Deus should be addressed as the Lord of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. The tablet that bears the Chinese words "Reverence for Heaven" should not be allowed to hang inside a Catholic church and should be immediately taken down if already there.

II. The spring and autumn worship of Confucius, together with the worship of ancestors, is not allowed among Catholic converts. It is not allowed even though the converts appear in the ritual as bystanders, because to be a bystander in this ritual is as pagan as to participate in it actively.”

from China in Transition, 1517-1911, Dan. J. Li, trans. pp. 22-24

This opposition to Chinese rituals on the part of the Church (fostered by the Dominicans) may be due to the fact that the Chinese terminology and practices named above predate the entrance of Christianity to China, and even the Christian religion itself. Thus, a perceived historical distance from Christianity, even for its practical similarities, may have contributed to the rejection of ritual (an integral part of Confucian ethics) by the Catholic Church.

Such a view was likely fostered by a lack of understanding of Chinese culture, and a rush to impose the principles of the Church which blinded many to the culture of those to be converted. Among the Jesuits, who spent time gaining a foothold in China, a more sophisticated view of philosophical systems in the region grew. We can see this in Ricci's own case, in his change from a simplistic and misinformed view of Chinese culture at the start of his China mission, to a more nuanced view. Spence writes of this transformation:

“The major shift in Ricci's perception of relative social status in China was rather slow in coming. In his first assessment, made after he had been in China about one year, he concluded that there were three religions of major significance in China, those of the Confucian literati, the Buddhists, and the Taoists. [...] A year later, in October 1585, as he wrote General Acquaviva, he had realized that the question was more complex: in essence, the Chinese literati could be considered as holding a cluster of beliefs similar to those of the Epicureans in the ancient Greek world...”

from The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, p. 116

Perhaps due to the Church's decision in the rites controversy, the west has retained, down to the present day, the naïve early view of Matteo Ricci. Most non-specialists have thus not gained the benefit of learning from Ricci's mature view, as we specialists have largely not insisted on forcing the matter, probably because none of us are badly misinformed about the status of Confucianism in Chinese thought or take the early Ricci view seriously.

Perhaps this can help explain why the mistaken view that Confucianism is a religion persists in the west today.

What Kind of Ru Are You, Anyway?

Analects 6.13 reads:
子 謂 子 夏 曰 ：「 女 為 君 子 儒 ！無 為 小 人 儒 ！ 」

TRANSLATION: The master said to Zigong: "Act as a junzi-like scholar, not as a petty scholar."

This is a very interesting passage for the interpretation of ru (scholar). Nicholas Zufferey's monograph "To the Origins of Confucianism" on the subject of the early ru scholars is a very useful study on this topic. We see here from 6.13 that the ru, although a class of scholars Confucius and his students belonged to, was not unified in virtue. In Confucius's day, the ru were scholars of many types, generally instructing the sons of rulers and other nobles in wen, which of course included literature and knowledge of ritual. Ru was not at that time equated with "Confucian", as it later came to be (Confucianism was classified as the ru jia). Confucius is here exhorting Zigong to be a ru with a mind for cultivation of virtue. This assumes that there were ru who cared nothing about virtue (or very little about it). Such ru were probably most concerned with the money to be made in instructing the sons of rulers, and possibly the power one might gain as an advisor to a ruler. One example of such power, quite a bit after Confucius's time, is that gained by Li Si under Qin Shi Huang. The "legalist" scholars such as Li Si and Han Feizi could be classified as ru (and probably were), although their philosophical views clearly show no concern with Confucian virtue, at least as it is usually understood (I have some reason to think the legalists were much more Confucian than they seem--more on this later).

Confucius seems to say in 6.13 that what distinguishes one as a junzi is not simply high scholarship (though this may be a necessary condition, I'm not sure), but a moral quality that the scholar can cultivate. This leaves open the interesting question as to whether non-ru can cultivate the necessary moral qualities to be a junzi--a topic that requires much more attention than I can give it here. There's actually a great deal that hangs on this for our understanding of Confucian ethics. If only the ru can be junzi, or only people whose level of education comes near that of the ru (perhaps people taught as youth by ru) can be junzi, than we have an aristocratic ethics that looks much like what Aristotle proposed in his Nicomachean Ethics. Alternatively, if a non-ru or uneducated person can become a junzi, than it seems that there is something more "egalitarian" going on here. I imagine some interpreters might want to press the more egalitarian interpretation of Confucius (as did H.G. Creel in his Confucius: The Man and the Myth), but I suspect something more like Aristotelian elitism is going on here. Of course, in Aristotle's case, this ethical elite are of necessity affluent Greeks of good families. For Confucius, to be a junzi does not require accident of birth, but education, adherence to ritual, and concern for the social project. Thus Confucius's elite (who he thinks ought to govern the state) takes the form of a "meritocracy". However, Confucius does not, I think, believe that everyone has the ability to become a junzi--nor does everyone have the ability to become educated. He might even claim that not everyone who is educated, or is a ru, has the ability to become a junzi. Perhaps some ru by their very nature are barred from the ability to cultivate virtue in the way Confucius suggests. Of course, this is starting to go beyond anything one glean from the text of the Analects alone.

Confucius's challenge in 6.13 is an interesting one, anyway--especially for those of us who, much like the ancient ru, make our living by studying, thinking, and teaching the youth. We ought to go beyond just this and cultivate virtue as well. You won't get any grants for doing it, and it won't really improve the CV. But we ought to strive to be junzi-like ru, rather than petty ru, and this way we might ultimately be more successful in our pursuits, as well as playing a role in bringing about a thriving society.

Interpretation--Historical or Creative?

John Makeham, in his 2003 Transmitters and Creators, argues that the attempt by some scholars to make Confucius relevant to contemporary concerns without study of the main Chinese commentaries and commentarial traditions on the Analects is a mistake. Although I am certainly in agreement that we should worry about the historical context of the Analects in Chinese society after the 5th century BCE, I disagree with Makeham that the project of bypassing the commentarial tradition and working directly from the Analects for interpretation is not useful. It seems to me that both projects would be desirable in the ideal situation (if every academic were a sinologist or philosopher). Granted, the ideal situation does not hold, and thus we might have a healthy discussion over which project (the historical project or the creative project) should take precedence--but it still seems that the creative project is not prima facie undesirable. One could argue that the Chinese commentarial traditions have affected our own interpretations of the Analects, whether we're aware of it or not (infecting us through our teachers, who got it from their teachers, and so forth...), but this situation is not essentially different from that of Zhu Xi, He Yan, or any of the other Chinese commentators (ancient or modern), many of whom attempted to give their own interpretations of the Analects free of close analysis of the commentarial tradition as it existed at their time. We can't avoid the fact that each commentator on the Analects attempted to interpret the text so as to make it relevant to their social and political situation, and these considerations were often separate from historical concerns. This fact is part of what makes the commentarial literature so interesting, as it is far from uniform. If this is so, however, then such projects should be as important today, as we ourselves may become part of the living Confucian tradition. If we see the Analects and the Confucian tradition(s) in general as historians, we may end up looking at it as antiquarians. This is certainly important (especially in academia), but there is also a central place (also in academia) for creative and approaches to interpretation of the Analects and other important ancient texts.

He Knows Where The Ford Is

In Edward Slingerland's translation of the Analects, he mentions Ma Rong's commentary on 18.6, the passage in which, in answer to Zilu's request (from Confucius) for directions to a particular ford, a daoist-like figure says to Zilu that Confucius "should know where the ford is." (是知津矣！). About this passage, Ma Rong claims that it is because Confucius is known to travel widely around the countryside to advise rulers and ministers in various states that the daoist-like figure takes a swipe at him with this snide remark.

It occurs to me that there is probably more to it than that. Although I agree that Ma Rong's analysis is the correct surface reading of the passage, I think this is meant to illustrate something different, a deeper perceived disagreement (by Confucians) between Confucian-inclined and Daoist-inclined people. Given the Confucian claim that the right way to live is by following and instilling in society the Li ("Ritual") of the Zhou kings, coming to know the right thing to do is (in some sense) coming to know the Zhou li, and thus there is a sense in Confucius that knowledge is a grasping and following of things already revealed, that is, available "collective knowledge".

For the daoist (especially Zhuangzi--and as Slingerland notes, the use of descriptive names for the daoist-like characters in Analects 18.5-18.7 seems to suggest these passages were written after the Zhuangzi, perhaps in response), we cannot gain full knowledge of dao ("the way") by looking to the past, because the dao is not limited by what we might call the "collective knowledge of humanity." Dao is not something humans once attained and then lost. It is contingent on each person to reconcile themselves with the state of nature, or natural propensities, in order to follow dao. Since natural propensities are always changing, the daoist sage is always on his toes, so to speak.

In contrast to this, the Confucian conception of ethical knowledge seems static (or, in a more positive light, stable), and so the response "he should know where the ford is" might be taken as a statement of a Zhuangzi-type daoist's problem with Confucians; namely, that Confucians are to them "know-it-alls", presumptuous scholars who think that the Zhou li in some way exemplifies human knowledge. So the quote "he should know where the ford is" might be seen as a glove to the face. Another way the quote may have been written, to make the same point: "If all one needs to know is the ancient ways, why does Confucius need to ask me anything? What knowledge can he gain from me? He should already know all there is to know, right?"

If this interpretation of 18.6 is right, then it begins to look like these "Confucius responds to daoists" passages in Book 18 are less biased toward Confucius than they seem. Instead, perhaps they try to lay out the debate between the camps, even if in the end their representation of the daoist is still a bit straw-mannish. Of course, a Confucian couldn't be expected to present daoist concerns as fairly or forcefully as someone like Zhuangzi

Analects 1.7--Learning Is Well Established Virtue

(1.7)
子夏曰：「賢賢易色；事父母，能竭其力；事君，能致其身；與朋友交，言而有信。雖曰未學，吾必謂之學矣。」

TRANSLATION:
Zixia said: “It is like this with the worthy person who changes (what they think of) appearances-- In attending to their father and mother, they are able to exhaust their energy. In doing the business of their ruler, they are able to devote their person. In interactions with friends, they speak and are trustworthy. It is said such people are not learned, but I would definitely call them learned.

COMMENTARY:
This is a difficult passage to translate. First of all, there is the xian xian yi se at the beginning of the passage, which could mean a number of different things. I think there is much agreement, though, that it generally refers to sageliness (whether one who is a sage or one who wants to become one) that turns away from se. The particulars of the translation are not so important as long as the translation accounts for this. Another difficulty of translation is the distinction between li and shen, as the passage says that one should exhaust li for parents and give shen for the ruler. Li is translated here as "energy", and I think this is unproblematic. But the way to translate shen when li is already translated as "energy"? This is hard. Literally, it should probably be "body", but doubtlessly an English translation would sound strange which read "they are able to devote their bodies". The connections contemporary readers would make here are, I think, absent from the set of connections ancient Chinese readers would have made to this.

A couple of points on the philosophy here. Here is a very blunt statement that learning includes cultivation of virtue, rather than simply knowledge of facts. Both are necessary for Confucius--one must know what the right way to be is, but this knowledge is only useful in that one can then cultivate virtues in oneself, as the goal of Confucius's teachings is to create people who are junzi rather than simply to inform us what the junzi is, similar to the goal of a tennis coach, to create great tennis players, rather than simply impart the information about what it is to be a good tennis player. A good coach should be able to do both, and a good student should be able to become a good player. For Confucius, one is not a good ethicist without being a good person. If we fail to live in the right kind of ways ourselves, we cannot be said to have learned much about the right ways to live, and we are certainly not qualified to teach others this. Of course, this has to be qualified--Confucius may have thought that no one could (or at least no one has) become a completely good person, a sheng ren ("sage") along the lines of Yao and Shun. He even denied that he himself had been able to cultivate the virtues he prized as well as he would have liked. Still, at least some level of goodness must be necessary in order to be said to be learned and be qualified to teach. Perhaps we need to at least be junzi. Is it good enough to simply (seriously) aspire to be junzi? Of course, aspiration here must include some amount of effort--we would readily deny that one really aspires to be a junzi if that person puts forth little effort to become a junzi. Hmmm...

Analects 1.6--Culture As A Source Of Morality

(1.6) 子曰：「弟子入則孝，出則悌，謹而信，汎愛眾，而親仁。行有餘力，則以學文。」

TRANSLATION:
The master said: "The brotherly son is filial when he enters, deferential when he leaves. Respectful and trustworthy, he widely cares for the multitude, and holds ren close. If after this he has remaining energy, he devotes it to studying wen."

COMMENTARY:
Nothing surprising in the first part of this passage. Confucius tells us that the good person (in this case, the di zi ("brotherly son") acts in such a way that ren is cultivated in himself and the society. Note here that Confucius is not talking about the junzi. Is the di zi a junzi? The attributes Confucius here gives to the di zi are much like those he gives to the junzi in other passages. Maybe then we should see this as a claim that being a brotherly son is one way to be a junzi. Maybe it is a necessary condition. This passage would not have sounded odd if di zi were exchanged for junzi. This would be following what Confucius has already told us in 1.2, that filiality and brotherliness is the root of ren. One who is a di zi has established this root.

The second part of the passage is interesting--the di zi devotes any extra energy to studying wen ("culture", "literature"). If we take wen to be "culture", specifically, for Confucius, the Zhou culture which he looks to for instruction, then we can see that there is some link between the di zi and this culture. It looks like the di zi is enriched by study of culture, as this fortifies the virtues the di zi already possesses, and helps to refine these virtues further. The main goal is the cultivation of these virtues Confucius mentions, which seem to coincide with holding ren close by (does this mean ren is an emergent property arising when one has a certain collection of virtues? Or is it that the person with certain virtues will generally also hold ren close?). What contributes most to that project is a study of culture (with "culture" here thought of not in the broad sense of contemporary anthropology, but in the sense of ideal culture or high culture--that is, "culture" in the sense that we say one who has studied the Homeric epics is "cultured". Culture in Confucius's sense carries with it a moral value. Culture is a good--that which we might call "culture" but is either morally neutral or immoral, take brutal elements of our own or other cultures, for example, would not count as wen for Confucius. Wen is an ethical term for Confucius. This is one of the key social notions in Confucianism, one of the places it seems to differ from much western philosophy, in which the ethical focus is much more on the individual. Confucius says here, as in other places, that the source of morality is society, the ideal society, which grounds our ethical pursuits.

Gandhi on Violence in the Bhagavad Gita

I've recently been collecting notes and reading some commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. One interesting commentary that I started reading last month is Gandhi's interpretation. Before I opened this book, my first pressing question was what he would say about what seemed to me to be a central theme of the Gita--that it was Arjuna's sacred duty as a ksatriya to engage in violence. Given Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence, I wondered how he would reconcile the violence advocated in the Gita (where Krishna recommends that Arjuna fight his relatives in war, because it is his sacred duty) with his own non-violent position.

What Gandhi says is that the Gita is largely symbolic, and the central battle which the dialogue centers around is one of the most potent of the symbols of the Gita. He says that the war of Arjuna against his relatives is meant to symbolize the war within each of us against those elements of our characters or minds that we are very attached to, but are ultimately detrimental to the performance of our sacred duty, or somehow impede our understanding of the truth about all action (that inaction within action, or "discipline" is the key to realizing the "infinite spirit", brahman).

Is this right? Are we to read the Gita (or at least the part of it dealing with violence) as only a symbol for struggles within? The distinction of four castes is definitely not meant only as symbolic, as the society within which the Gita was written adhered to this scheme, containing these four castes. One of those castes was (and still is, though this does not mean as much today as it did in the time of the Gita) the kshatriya class, of which Arjuna was a member. It is supposed to be the duty of this class to serve as rulers and warriors. So, even if the war situation in the Gita (and I suppose in the Mahabharata as a whole) was meant to be symbolic, the adherents of the religious and philosophical system represented by the Gita would have to admit that there are times when violence is religiously justified--namely, those times when kshatriyas are called to exert force to defend society. If it were the case that such force were never justified (as Gandhi seemed to think, though I'm not sure on his exact position), then why would there exist a divinely sanctioned class of people whose task it is to exert such force, unless something morally wrong was divinely sanctioned? I guess in this way Gandhi's problem turns into the problem of evil.

This leaves me to wonder, is Gandhi's position consistent with the Gita?

Compassion and the End of Suffering

It's been a long time since I posted here last--I'm way overdue. However, I'm glad to say that I haven't been away so long because of laziness. My son Siddhartha was born on July 8, and Tara and I have been dealing with long, sleepless nights with a screaming infant. Lots of fun. Now I'm staying up late nights, though, to let Tara get some sleep, so I finally have some time to get back into things.

I've also launched into a couple of new projects, that I'm working on along with my preparations to teach non-western philosophy in the fall. I've begun a fictional work after a long absence, which is closely enough related to the subject matter of this blog to mention here. I have started a semi-fictional account of the story of the Buddha, from his late youth as prince of the Sakyans to the first of his teachings as the Buddha. This story has always been one that has interested me (as it has many others through the centuries), and I think I may finally have enough skill (though perhaps only barely) as a writer to give it a shot.

Along with this project, and to an extent informing it, is a reading of the Theravada suttas, some of which I plan to make some comments on (that I might post here). Of course, the Analects project is still going (also to be posted here), but I figure that including the suttas is a good way to mix things up. One difference between the sutta commentaries I will give and my Analects commentary is my grasp of the original languages. My classical Chinese knowledge is many times better than my knowledge of Pali, which is pretty weak, so I'll be depending mainly on English translation for the sutta commentaries (with perhaps a little sprinkling of the original Pali text, where I can understand it or it's important enough to consult Warder and/or the PTS Dictionary).

So, I have no commentary right now--but I would like to post this sutta, the Karaniya Metta Sutta (Bhikkhu Thanissaro's translation), from the Sutta Nipata. This sutta is the essence of compassion. Reflecting on it, maybe we can cultivate the compassion (metta, often translated "loving kindness") to live the good life. (Although karuna rather than metta is more often translated as compassion, I think that metta is an important element of our notion of compassion. Our word compassion probably contains what are three separate concepts in Pali Buddhism, karuna, metta, and mudita ["sympathetic joy"])

This is to be done by one skilled in aims
who wants to break through to the state of peace:
Be capable, upright, & straightforward,
easy to instruct, gentle, & not conceited,
content & easy to support,
with few duties, living lightly,
with peaceful faculties, masterful,
modest, & no greed for supporters.

Do not do the slightest thing
that the wise would later censure.

Think: Happy, at rest,
may all beings be happy at heart.
Whatever beings there may be,
weak or strong, without exception,
long, large,
middling, short,
subtle, blatant,
seen & unseen,
near & far,
born & seeking birth:
May all beings be happy at heart.

Let no one deceive another
or despise anyone anywhere,
or through anger or irritation
wish for another to suffer.

As a mother would risk her life
to protect her child, her only child,
even so should one cultivate a limitless heart
with regard to all beings.
With good will for the entire cosmos,
cultivate a limitless heart:
Above, below, & all around,
unobstructed, without enmity or hate.
Whether standing, walking,
sitting, or lying down,
as long as one is alert,
one should be resolved on this mindfulness.
This is called a sublime abiding
here & now.

Not taken with views,
but virtuous & consummate in vision,
having subdued desire for sensual pleasures,
one never again
will lie in the womb.

Confucian Legalism, Part 2

Here's a fun site where you can take a small quiz and it tells you which "Chinese philosophy" you are most in agreement with. It's kind of silly, as the questions it asks are fairly cariacturish, but it's neat to predict what your results will show. The reason I bring this up is because my results showed that I am most sympathetic with Confucianism, second most with legalism, and least with daoism (there are only three systems represented). Of course, I already knew that I favor Confucianism and Legalism, and I am continuing to search texts and interpreters to see to what extent these overlap. What interested me, and continues to interest me, is the moral side-effects of legalist thinking. Adam Smith argued that the profit motive in capitalism indirectly benefits all the members of society. Likewise, I think something similar may be said for legalist methods of running the state. A tempered legalism, one in which the main goal of the ruler is wealth and power, may defy some of the lack of concern Han Feizi seemed to have with morality. Confucius seemed to hold that the most powerful state was the most moral state--the ruler who ruled benevolently, through dao ("right action"), which must be involved with ren ("humanity", for lack of a better term), would thereby become the ruler with the most powerful state. At least in terms of motivation, there seems to clearly be some overlap between thinkers like Confucius and Han Feizi.

Analects 1.5--Morality as a Political Expedient

(1.5) 子曰： 「道千乘之國，敬事而信，節用而愛人，使民以時。」 

TRANSLATION: The master said: "The right way (dao) to run a thousand chariot state is: to conduct(the state's) business with respect and trustworthiness; be reserved in use of the people and care for them; cause the people to use their time well.

COMMENTARY: This is, I think, the first really difficult passage of the Analects. The difficulty of this passage is not philosophical, however--most of the problem here comes in the grammar and the translation. In fact, as far as philosophical content, I find this passage to be less robust than many of Confucius's (although there are certainly some interesting issues raised which I'll touch on below, especially with respect to political expediency).

GRAMMATICAL ISSUES--
The first difficulty encountered in this passage is just how to translate the two er fragments in the center of the sentence. The first is jing shi er xin, which I've translated as "to conduct business with respect and trustworthiness", and the second is jie yong er ai ren, which I've translated as "be reserved in the use of people and care for them". These can be translated another way as well, depending on what role we take the er to be playing here. One might read it as I have, or read it so the translation is "to conduct business with respect and be trustworthy" for the first, which is not so different from my translation other than that trustworthiness (xin) is an adverbial modifier of "conducting business" in my translation, and not in this version. In the second, the translation of er as a conjunction of two complete clauses makes it read "use (things or resources) reservedly and care for the people." This makes a great difference from my reading of the er as a conjunction of two verbs. There is one main reason that I translate the passage the way I do. If the conjunction of complete clauses is what the two er in this passage are doing, I think we should expect them not to be there. Instead of using er, it seems the style of the writing in the Analects to extract an er when unnecessary, so that the passage would read: jing shi, xin, jie yong, ai ren instead of jing shi er xin, jie yong er ai ren.

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES--
As I intimate in the title of this post, I think 1.5 is meant as a lesson that political expediency is served by actions which are for the most part those of a junzi, a good person. A thriving and powerful state can be brought about through following actions which are for the benefit of the people of the state, rather than directly for the benefit of the ruler. Part of the hint here is that the ruler will gain indirectly through the welfare of the people. The correct way to run and keep a large and powerful state (hence the introductory "state of a thousand chariots", which would have been a wealthy state in Confucius's time) is to rule in such a way that things follow the correct moral order, in such a way that the people of the state thrive. If one cares for the people, one will not break the backs of the people for frivolous things (such as the later Qin emperor's building of the Great Wall or the inordinate taxing and working of the people on state projects). Although this, Confucius would contend, is the right way to act, part of the reason it is the right way to act is because it is politically expedient--that is, it is conducive to building and retaining a powerful state. The legalists will take political expediency as the number one priority, and they will have some different things to say about it than what Confucius says, but I see this as leading in the direction of the legalists. One key difference here is that actions we would for the most part consider as "good" actions serve as a political expedient for Confucius. Does Confucius think that this is the reason they are good? I contend that Confucius holds that these actions are good for a number of reasons, one of which is their expediency. As I have said elsewhere, I believe that for Confucius, the thriving society is the ground of morality, and as such, anything that leads to the thriving society is a good action. Part of a thriving society is surely wealth and power (though Confucius would disagree with Han Feizi that wealth and power are enough). Thus, it is not only an action's conduciveness to the wealth and power of society that makes an action good, but it is a necessary condition for the goodness of an action. Note that the action doesn't have to be foolproof--that is, it doesn't inevitably have to bring about a wealthy and powerful state, it only needs to be conducive to bringing about such a state, in much the same way that we claim that eating fruits and vegetables are conducive to health, even though one may eat them and still be unhealthy. The component of success is unnecessary, even though it is the goal of the project. This is partly because one cannot control external forces. Despite one's best efforts, the tide is often against one, and the most junzi-like of their actions will fail to bring about positive change. Thus it is necessary to morality for Confucius that we not worry about results so much, as this will damage our moral motivation, our willingness to try to bring about the thriving society.

Analects 1.4

(1.4) 曾子曰：「吾日三省吾身─為人謀而不忠乎？與朋友交而不信乎？傳不習乎？」

TRANSLATION: Master Zeng said: "Daily I inspect myself in three regards: for others have I done my utmost? In my engagement with friends have I not been trustworthy? Have I not practiced what I've been taught?"

COMMENTARY: not much to say abouyt this one. I just ought to point out the word zhong here (I've translated it "doing one's utmost" following Ames and Rosemont), as this is an important concept in the Analects, and causes massive headaches in the context of 4.15 (the "one strand" passage). Also, notice the xi (practice) in the last part of this passage, marking the practical element of Confucian thought, which must be kept in mind. We tend (myself included) to get carried away sometimes with interpretations of Confucius that make him too theoretical, more concerned with theory than he was. In fact, the divide between theory and practice would not have been one Confucius recognized. Though I think there may be a somewhat similar division, in Confucius's distinction between learning (xue) and cogitating (si). (See Analects 2.15--「學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆。」) One of the projects I plan to pursue is a study of how close si comes to "theory" both in our contemporary sense of the word, as well as the ancient greek theoria. I suspect there are some parallels, but not a ton. Understanding the differences though might help us to understand the difference between xue and si.

Short Rant on History and Philosophy

I've been thinking a bit about history lately, so I thought I'd chime in here, since this blog is dedicated to history of asian philosophy. For years and years (and still today), history of philosophy is something one can learn in a philosophy department (For example, I'm a PhD student in a philosophy department, focusing on history of philosophy). However, as I've seen history of philosophy done at the various universities I've been involved with, the "history" part of history of philosophy often is neglected. Sure, we are concerned somewhat with the time in which a particular philosopher wrote, and the contemporaries with which that philosopher argued, but we are sadly not as concerned with this as we should be. A good historian-of-philosphy should ideally be a good philosopher and a good historian. A weakness on one side or the other will lead to odd interpretations. A philosopher with no head for history will end up reading interpretations into historical texts which make the philosopher sound like he or she is doing contemporary philosophy. A historian with no philosophy background will do a great job at seeing a philosopher as a result of their cultural and intellectual background, but will do little as far as reconstructing a coherent interpretation of the philosopher's positions.

Maybe this means all of us who focus on history of philosophy should be forced to take degrees in philosophy and history together.

Analects 1.3

Man oh man. I'm finally back from my pseudo-vacation, and I'm trying to get back to work now. I promise I'll be faster with my delivery of the Analects translation and commentary. I want to get at least through Book 6 or 7 by the end of the summer. Of course, I'm going to throw some other things on this page as well, especially as I begin to worry a bit more about Legalism, later Confucianism and the Han dynasty. But for now, here's Analects 1.3:

(1.3) 子曰：「 巧言令色，鮮矣仁！」 

TRANSLATION:
The master said: "Eloquent words and a commanding visage do not often (indicate one as) ren."

COMMENTARY:
First, some explanation of my choices in translation. Ling se might be taken as "insinuating appearance" as Ames and Hall translate it, or as "ingratiating manner" as Slingerland renders it, which is close to Lau's "ingratiating face." I chose to use the "command" sense of ling because I think it lends to my sense of ren as an ideal social order rather than as "benevolence", in the Mencian sense. Goodness and ren are surely not seperate, but it seems to me that having an "authoritative" stance is a key component of ren, which Ames and Rosemont seem to hold in their translation generally. This is why I am a bit confused that they translate ling se as "insinuating appearance". If ren is "authoritative conduct" (as Ames and Rosemont translate it), then it seems more plau