Mencius, Xun Zi and Further Confucian Texts

Mencius (Meng Zi (孟子) – Master Meng) lived from around 370 BCE to around 300 BCE and reputedly studied with or under Kong’s grandson. Meng proposed the now famous idea of a Mandate of Heaven being given to a dynasty and finally removed from it in the event of serious misrule as an historical agent. This suggests that ‘good’ rule is ultimately more important to heaven in this view than family – again merit trumps connections in early Chinese philosophy even while the importance of family is not unstressed.

Meng still supported an hereditary system for the appointment of senior public servants, for example, on the basis that it promoted ministerial independence. Meng’s words and deeds, too, were collected in one volume (named for him) for posterity. Meng is reported to have addressed rulers directly with suggestions for better rule. For example he told King Hui of Wei and later of Liang, who thought he was a benevolent ruler, that he could always rule more benevolently and should attempt to do so and, somewhat enigmatically perhaps, that if he sought gain he was more likely to achieve it via selflessness than via selfishness. To King Xüan of Qi he remarked that true kingship required serious application. So there was, for him, no easy way to rule properly. He also intimated to Duke Wen of Teng that good rulers at least could expect to be supported by the ruled hinting at the intended cooperative mutuality of the relationship envisaged in the scheme of Confucianism. Mencius spoke of benevolence, sensible rule and moral setting of examples being more important than military matters.

Meng saw rule as a kind of zero-sum game in which proper material shares were a virtuous circle – a harmony – that could be disrupted, however, by the excess greed of a ruler (which might be satisfied only at the expense of some of the ruled (and perhaps also some neighbouring ruler and his subjects, too)). This harmony/greed/disharmony zero-sum ideology extended beyond examining political forms of domination to noticing problems with economic forms of misuse of hegemony.

Master Xun (荀子) is the third of the major early Confucians with his words and deeds finally collected in a written work for posterity and named for him. He lived from around 310 BCE to around 220 BCE and focused his philosophy more on the impartial nature of heaven and less on humanism or even human concerns. The key to Confucianism for him was that the orderly propitiation of heaven by the continuation of traditional ritual forms was required of everyone. At the same time, he appears to have been the Confucian most concerned with opposing superstition as he saw it. He stressed that education in the required Confucian virtues was essential to the social health and socially responsible practices to which it would inevitably lead.

The Great Learning (Da Xue – 大學) and the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhong Yong –中庸) round out the greatest of the Confucian texts and continue Xun Zi’s theme of moral self-improvement via Confucian learning (I‘ll mention other major Confucian texts in a later post).

A little more on Confucius

Confucius (Kong Zi or Kong Fu Zi) defended the decaying Zhou order. He also talked about essentially loving, duties, the “Golden Rule” and benevolence. Kong’s words and deeds were collected by a follower or followers into one work (the Lun Yu – Arranged Sayings) usually called in English today “the Analects”. He was called Kong Zi (Master Kong - 孔子) but his actual name was Kong Qiu (孔丘). His philosophy was mostly but not exclusively moral. He thought proper conduct was dictated mainly by adherence to courtly and other Zhou traditional roles and rituals as he idealised Zhou traditions somewhat. In a sense he was therefore somewhat like the Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab of Zhou China in being a relatively uncritical traditionist (though probably not as completely uncritical as the Arabian jurist). In valuing Zhou traditions he inevitably valued shamanistic-formed legal precedents. His preaching utilised and thus valued earlier collections of ideas that he traditionally collected as texts including what came to be called the Book of Songs or the Book of Odes and the Book of Documents or the Book of History and some ritual texts (some of which he may have produced himself). Heated scholarly argument continues as to whether he actually existed or was perhaps a composite of more than one person.

Kong’s ideal social formation was a hierarchy that he valued on the basis of a form of utilitarianism. He extolled sincere filial piety (really reverence of a son towards his parents especially). What he called Ren (仁) (we usually translate it into English as benevolence or nobility) he considered to be both superior to and encompassing of all other kinds of goodness in his philosophy.

Now to some further illustrative references to the Analects:

The gentleman understands moral duty; the petty person knows about profit (Duties ought to be considered before rights).

You can be of service [to your superior] by remonstrating with them tactfully. [After that, they must decide what to do and you must] work hard [and] do not murmur against them (essentially a form of the ‘Golden Rule’ and an abjuration to work hard in a Chinese context. Much of this ‘Golden Rule’ kind of thing is contained in the Analects).

Eliminate the army (Confucianism was actually rather pacifist).

When Kong refers to the Book of Songs he often suggests that it contains examples of misrule worthy of study and stresses to rulers especially that their subjects are not their playthings. There is in fact, he asserts, a kind of noblesse oblige linked to a Mandate of Heaven.

Late Zhou Political, Legal (and Moral) History

When Jin (晉) was partitioned and the ruler of Qi (杞) was also challenged this led to the Warring States period but this was the end of an historical era that I must now examine. The Warring States period may be seen as a failure of the ideas men but many of the ideas persist into and greatly influence both the ancient China that came out of the Warring States period and modern China. The Warring States were in fact involved in a contention essentially of ideas that political contention had produced. But how?

An initial innovation occurred in Qi under the Prime Ministership of Guan Zhong (管仲) (in the mid 7^th Century BCE so well before the Spring and Autumn period began). For war purposes, PM Guan divided Qi into divisions of five households each. Serfdom was being eradicated in the name of promoting the loyalty of subjects and the later 7^th Century saw the ruler of Jin making formal grants of land. Appointment of administrators was one of the necessary corollaries of instability (a meritocratic method of appointment to a public service was first formally promoted especially by the Mohists (followers of Master Mo, a 5^th Century BCE political thinker) but it was really only natural and was actually a fait accompli by the 5^th Century).

A further innovation of the Spring and Autumn period was the idea of law in many of the realms. This effectively provided a ruler with a means of establishing authority over (generally) his realm by his provision of legal remedies in local events of conflict. One well established early example was the promulgation of laws in Zheng (鄭) in 543 BCE. Commerce and a degree of mass production in industry were also expanding with the instability in the Spring and Autumn period perhaps counter intuitively but produced by the efficiency and innovation that instability and its corollaries wrought. Much of the commerce was in implements of warfare, though.

All of the above ran rather counter to any idea of totalitarian rule as wealth and ideas tended to destabilise traditional roles and motivations. Crudely, the reasons scholars and meritocracy became so vital and pervasive were at first all of the military conquests. A king would conquer new territory and feel the need to divide his territory for administrative purposes due to the extra requirements of administration, taxation, etc. The divisions came to be called Xian (縣) and the chief administrators came to be called Shi (士) or Ru. We call the Shi (or Ru) knights in most English translations (Ru emphasises the scholarship more). The knights tended to be well-educated in order that they might do their quite sophisticated jobs well and so a scholarly tradition was born.

Each Xian had an educated Shi, then, but also many other educated men who missed out on becoming the local head Shi who were thus eager to become travelling scholars and teachers and prove their worth to the metropolitan or other rulers.

One well known example of a complex state of the 4^th Century BCE under the aegis of Zhou was the State of Qin (秦) under the Prime Ministership of Lord Shang (Shang Yang (商鞅)). It was divided into 31 Xian.

So Confucius (Master Kong) was one of many scholars with political ideas on offer (just as China was also ruled by many rulers). Basically he proposed that older brothers, parents and ancestors (and all other people, too) be accorded due respect as tradition dictated and did not exempt rulers from this requirement. So he was seen as and was a radical conservative harking back to tradition.

In Kong's era, the Zhou emperors were not powerful. Two of the five major states in the era (the ‘age of a hundred schools’ blossoming and contending) coincided roughly in their outlooks with two of the major developing human-as-political-animal schools of thought: Kong’s philosophy and Lord Shang's Legalism. The states were Song (宋), a remnant state of the earlier Shang (商) dynasty near Kong’s minor home state of Lu in the East (and a traditional state roughly compatible in outlook with Kong’s ideas) and the up-and-coming upstart Qin state in the West.

Kong’s radical modernizing opponents ideologically (the Legalists) had a less humanist view of rule that tended to appeal more to the Qin rulers (like Lord Shang). There were lively ethical debates but Shang came down definitely on the side of dividing his population into groups of five and ten, enslaving merchants and some craftsmen along with the unemployed, reputedly standardizing weights and measures and creating 31 Xian.

Shang was a 'law and order' ruler and didn't trust his people an inch, a wise move according to his Legalist brethren. Their ideas are usually represented today by the work of Han Fei Zi (韓非子). Conspicuous in Shang’s law book were the Draconian or Shari’ah-like punishments advocated that were Legalist heaven. A Confucian would have probably called such punishments unnecessary (not to mention overkill).

The book of the ideas of Han Fei Zi that survives suggests that people are quite simply motivated by only two drives: the drive for pleasure and the desire to avoid pain. Legalists viewed virtue as exceptional in humans (i.e. nowhere near the rule Confucians hoped it was). So Kong and his followers were seen by Legalists as idealists seeking vainly to promote (mainly) what they called benevolence among vile creatures that would rarely practice it voluntarily.

In an era before the idea of constitutional monarchy it made sense that weak or bad rulers needed to be governed in some way by laws and so Legalism sought that way. In anticipation of the inevitable unintelligent, unwise and even bad rulers (that would inevitably be produced eventually by any absolutist dynastic system) they wanted him (not likely her) to be guided by their laws. They still fell short of having constitutional ideas, however, and Kong’s ideas could perhaps be seen as possessing at least the inchoate constitutionalism they lacked.

Han addressed the wise ruler when he stressed the idea of clarity and certainty of law – a version certainly of the rule of law however imperfect in practice without actual constitutional limitations on actual regal power. Han abhorred discretionary power and complexity in law – it must contain simple rewards and punishments and no ifs, ands, buts or maybes – no exceptions - as dictated by the simple idea of human motivations that he asserted. The king was the machine operating authority that commanded obedience as of right in this mechanical legalist structure of the state as machine for dummies.

Besides those two ideas, Legalism and Confucianism, and besides the Qin and Song states, there were of course others. There were many other ideas men. I’ve already mentioned the Mohists who had ideas concerning a meritocratic public service system. Among the theorists were also military ideas men. One of the ideas concerned preferring the avoidance of actual battles in war with a putative enemy by means of intimidation. Master Sun talked about how to fight bloodless wars and Mo Zi argued against wars of aggression altogether. There were also three other major states.

Merit seemed self-evidently to trump family connections in this era of travelling ideas men and innovating rulers seeking their services. One Qi ruler even set up a kind of research institute for philosophers.

Manpower in both agriculture and warfare were equally highly valued and efficiencies in its application were especially sought for one reason – state security. The actual state of affairs for the subject was always uncertain, though, as long as one day one could have a benevolent Confucian ruler and the next a legalist one and this was the nature of a disunited China in the late Zhou Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.

Confucians actually idealised this undoubted contention, however, as their humanism is inherently optimistic if not progressive. They promoted the education of rulers as well as others (especially in their own ideas) as a progressive force. One legalist Qin ruler on the other hand organised a burning of books rather than suffer books to exist that lacked the fulsome and unqualified respect due to the ruler.

The idea of war itself also developed in the late Zhou era from the chariot-bound aristocratic and gentlemanly pursuit it was in the Spring and Autumn period to the pursuit of relatively large conscript peasant infantry armies in the more scientific and relatively total and unconventional wars of the Warring States period. The individualist art of war had thus been replaced to an extent by the more conformist science of war (and individualism had become correspondingly less favoured). The commander’s job became to mesmerise his own troops into a fighting frenzy with bells and drums and simultaneously intimidate his opponent’s. Divination as a means of predicting the results of wars also ceased to be used over these periods.

Zhou Instability, the Politics of Zhou and the “Ideas Men” of Zhou

The socially sanctioned tribalism of the Shang period (and probably also the Xia period) based on tribal divisions, clan subdivisions and lineage sub subdivisions in which the Shang (and probably the Xia) emperors were the tribal heads of the strongest tribes of their eras (in which population and overcrowding were much less significant issues than they were soon to become) was replaced by a more formal (and less stable) political order in the Zhou period. The new order was probably a response to the spread in population settlement and thus the chances of conflict between powerful senior lineage chiefs of the Shang and Xia periods that may have had the strength to dominate several towns of a region each via the municipal rule of ambitious younger settler sons. According to one ancient source, at the beginning of the Xia period there were 10,000 states (probably a wild approximation) but (with the conflicts that had occurred up until Confucius’s time due to younger-son settlement projections) that had been reduced to about 100 (of which around 14 were especially powerful) by the mid Zhou period.

Kings that were formally vassals of the emperor were actually his social and to some extent also virtual political equals (certainly when compared with their relatively inferior status under later dynasties). Formally the system was a kind of feudal one with the emperor parcelling out his land in return for loyalty, military and other service and taxes and tributes but this regularly broke down in the many periods of Zhou strife especially as time went on. Instability was both external (the many barbarian encroachments and settlements) and internal (tribal conflicts) to this system and this necessarily led to an easy familiarity between the emperors and senior nobles on whom they relied. Nobles could gain power by defeating barbarians militarily. One vassal famously spat at an emperor over an argument.

The instability also produced a demand for ‘ideas men’ capable of efficient administration of the many divisions and this force for meritocracy was an impetus for serious scholarship focused on politics and the potential for legislation. “Barbarian” ideas (and their often better technology) threatening the Zhou for literally centuries (beginning in about the 9^th Century BCE) provided a serious spur in Chinese society both to internal tensions and local ideologies.

Confucius traditionally lived from 551 BCE to 479 BCE so in a period of strife and weakness in the later Zhou period (dying just a few years before the official commencement of the Warring States period) and Mencius lived in the 4^th Century BCE (so mid Warring States period) and was a follower and populariser of the teachings of Confucius but they were two of the many competing ideas men. I’ll examine the ideas and their results in overview in the context of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods in the next few posts.