Confucian China and its Modern Fate

Volume Three: The Problem of Historical Significance

Joseph R. Levenson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138991590
• eBook ISBN: 9781136573088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

First published in 1965.These volumes analyze modern Chinese history and its inner process, from the pre-western plateau of Confucianism to the communist triumph, in the context of many themes: science, art, philosophy, religion and economic, political, and social change. Volume Three includes:
· Liao P'ing and the Confucian Departure from History
· The place of Confucius in Communist China
· Historical, moral and intellectual significance

Part One

OUT OF HISTORY

CHAPTER I

A Little Life: Liao P’ing and the
Confucian Departure from History

‘BUREAUCRACY without Confucianism—Confucianism without bureaucracy—Confucianism’s intellectual content had profoundly altered. . . .’ For monarchy offered the proper setting for Confucian bureaucracy, and monarchy, stricken in the nineteenth century, felled in 1912, became a vestigial idea. Confucianism under the Republic was a vestige, too. Monarchy and Confucianism, tied in companionship and suspicion for so many centuries, so many dynasties, had dragged each other down. And when Confucianism lost its institutional context, intellectual continuity was gravely imperilled. The great tradition, sinking, was ready to depart.

To depart from history was to enter it. Confucianism, yielding the future, became a thing of the past. It was remembered, loved by many, but lived only in fragments. It was historically significant.

Anyone writing the history of Confucian China, before it suffered its modern fate, might tell a great part of the story in great Confucian lives. In recent history, however, the conditions of greatness were lost to Confucianists—at least greatness in the open, where achievement may be measured. Liao P’ing (1852ṇ1932), for example, was really unimportant.

Yet, a brief life of a small Confucianist can tell, or introduce, a great part of the modern story. Liao P’ing had an empty career, and his works were full of that old Confucian abomination, ‘empty words’. Why was he so unimportant? Not by denying the justice of the question, but by answering it, one can restore Liao to importance. For Liao, too, like the Confucian tradition he lived in and exhausted, gained historical significance in stepping out of history. If Liao was an unpersuasive Confucianist, largely out of action, out of touch with the real issues of the greater part of his time, a real issue comes to light in Liao’s very obscurity.

What made his intellectual system fantastic, by any orthodox Confucian standard, was its irrelevance to any conceivable action, and his thought had just the counterpart it deserved, his uneventful life. Confucian thought, before his, had long preserved vitality through a bureaucratic tie, an intimate relationship with politics, the Confucian life—that is, with the Confucian kind of history, the kind Confucianists made and wrote. A close interaction of action and thought was intrinsic to Confucianism. But by the time Liao died in 1932, the Confucian life was available to no one. There was nothing Confucian about politics now (though Confucianism could be a political issue). The sterile public career of Liao, the last thinker of the last Confucian school, attested to the banishment of Confucianism from history. And that was what he echoed in his thought, with the banishment of history from his Confucian intellectual concerns.

1. THE LIFE

Instead of history, Liao made prophecy the stuff of Confucianism: Confucius was a prophet, and Liao as well. Confucius, of course, had to be seen as a mighty force, if a quiet one, in his own day, but in Liao, at the end of the Confucian line, we have the seer without the doer. Certainly he was a prophet without excessive honour in his own county: the gazetteer for his birthplace (Ching-yen, in Szechwan), published in 1900 when Liao was in full maturity, records under the Liao surname simply: ‘P’ing of the present dynasty is a chin-shih (graduate of the third degree) and a teacher.’¹

This pale schoolmasterly image is most of the visible Liao. Born in 1852 in a relatively poor family (with a mildly prominent bureaucratic lineage on his mother’s side), he devoted himself to study, though his father was a small dealer in medicines and his brothers followed the lead into business. Later, Liao adopted the studio style, ‘San-yü t’ang’ (Three Fish Hall), to commemorate his scholarly beginnings: one day, as a little boy, he offered his modest catch to the teacher in the village school, and won admittance. And an excellent little boy he sounds.

In any case, we hear no more of lazy times by the ponds and rivers. Books possessed him, and he graduated to teachers of a considerably higher fish-power, like Wang K’ai-yün (1833ṇ1916), a Kung-yang classical scholar who taught Liao in the Tsun-ching (Revere the Classics) shu-yüan in Chengtu (Liao later taught there, too), but who never cared to claim discipleship. Indeed, Yeh Te-hui (1864ṇ1927), a conservative scholar impatient with speculative soaring, recorded a snide bit of hearsay in this connection: Wang had allegedly labelled Liao a ‘deep thinker, not fond of study’.

In the 1880s, while Liao was moving through the conventional series of civil-service examinations, Chang Chih-tung (1837ṇ1909), then the Canton Governor-General, made him one of his secretaries, treating him with great informality, and inviting him to teach in a branch of the academy Chang founded in 1887, the Kuang-ya shu-yüan. It was in this period that he met K’ang Yu-wei (1858ṇ1927) and influenced him (or was plagiarized by him) in the preparation of the Hsin-hsüeh wei-ching k’ao (On the false Classics of the Hsin learning), one of the seminal documents of the Reform Movement of 1898 (see Volume One).

After becoming a chin-shih, Liao was appointed an archivist, but he soon requested and received a transfer to teaching duties. In 1898 he was an instructor at Sui-ting-fu in his home province of Szechwan, totally out of active politics, when the Reform Movement, which had such ties with his Confucian scholarship, flourished briefly and was suppressed. The official supervisor of studies in Szechwan, knowing that K’ang Yu-wei, object of the Empress Dowager’s most ferocious hostility, had taken his lead in Confucian matters from Liao, impeached the latter for outrageous opinions on the Classics, cashiered him, and committed him to surveillance by local officials. But Liao was so obviously harmless that the new Governor of Chekiang, who admired his talents, was willing to appoint him a master in a school under his jurisdiction.

After the revolution of 1911ṇ12, Liao for several years directed the Kuo-hsüeh yüan, a school in Chengtu. His growing reputation as a recluse led the eminent Japanese historian, Naito¯, lecturing at Kyo¯t¯ University in 1915, to observe that Liao was in the mountains of Szechwan and did not want to come out. There had been an exception—Liao’s trip in 1913 to speak to Confucian societies in Peking—but the commitment to withdraw was confirmed in 1919, when he suffered a stroke. His right side was paralysed. Liao continued to write with his left hand, depending on his eldest daughter to reduce the drafts to order. On October 6, 1932, he died during an outing in the country.²

2. THE QUESTION OF ORIGINALITY

Is there anything to chew on in this thin gruel? The Liao-K’ang relationship has some substance in it.

K’ang (claiming ‘coincidence’) never faced up to the accusation, but Liao brought in the indictment; K’ang’s sometimes dissident but always respectful disciple, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (1873-1929), admitted the grounds; and Chinese and Japanese scholars have concurred in the verdict: K’ang’s Hsin-hsüeh wei-ching k’ao (On the false classics of the Hsin learning, 1891), his first great succés d’estime and de scandale, was lifted consciously and in considerable detail from the P’i Liup’ien (Treatise refuting Liu Hsin), and K’ang’s K’ung-tzu kai-chih k’ao (On Confucius as a reformer, 1897) stole thesis and thunder from the Chih-sheng p’ien (Treatise on knowing the Sage). Together these treatises made up Liao’s manuscript of 1886, Chin ku hsüeh-k’ao (On the ‘Modern Text’ and ‘Ancient Text’ learning). According to the charge, K’ang saw Liao’s work at the home of one Shen Tseng-chih (1853ṇ192 2) and sought an introduction in Canton. Seemingly unimpressed by Liao’s esoterica, K’ang warned him against publishing these conclusions which would stain him with guilt as a teacher of unlawful doctrine. The next year, K’ang published his Wei-ching k’ao—‘dashing it off (literally, “leaning on a horse”)’, said Liao, ‘writing his book, truly breaking the tie of ethics’.³

This lament, from a Confucianist, about the rape of his originality has a dying fall. Originality per se had never been a Confucian virtue, and a touchy insistence that you yourself, not your opponent, had made the startling new departure was the reverse of the rule of old Confucian controversy. Liao was consistent in his jealous claim to priority; his own intellectual history, with its carefully plotted ‘six stages’, recapitulated his credo of movement and freshness. Anyone who studies, he laid down, should make a ‘great change’ in his theories every ten years, and a ‘small change’ every three. One who fails of the small change may be termed a ‘mediocre talent’, while one who misses the large change is an ‘abdicated talent’.⁴

This call to make it new and this claim that K’ang had pilfered the prestige Liao deserved for making a new pronouncement were merely words. It was K’ang, plagiarist or not, who chose to face the music by making history. K’ang took these claims for Confucius as a reformer and made them relate to an actual modern reform, clothing them in action and reeling out for modern China the last thread of authentic Confucian commitment. But Liao, the verbalizer about originality, was just a conventional examination-passer, circumspect enough to move smoothly through the old channels and to earn in 1889 easy traditional accolades from unreconstructed, and obviously untroubled, official examiners: ‘He creates splendid phrases . . . cites many Classics . . . is penetrating and clear in ancient teachings . . . selects refined vocabulary . . . is familiar with others’ discussions and is not one of those who restrict themselves to their own confirmations or destructive critiques.’⁵ K’ang nearly died in 1898 for what he made of Liao’s hypotheses. But Liao in 1898 (earning Liang Ch’i-ch’ao’s contempt even while Liang acknowledged him as intellectually the first comer) still shrank from implication, declaring that it was no intention of his to expound a battle-position.⁶

Once Liao had proclaimed himself above the battle, there was nothing to keep him from soaring higher and higher, borne away from the ground of action and history, where Confucius belonged, on words lighter than even the hottest air. Liao in 1916 was in his self-styled fourth phase, dealing with ‘Heaven’ and ‘man’. He ascribed light and purity to Heaven, heaviness and dross to earth.⁷ Heaven was his destination. In the early days of the K’ang coincidence, the issue had still been posed in relatively mundane historical terms: the Confucius of the chin-wen (modern text) tradition, espoused by Liao and K’ang, was taken to be the original fountain of wisdom, as against the Duke of Chou in the ku-wen (ancient text) tradition. But finally, shuffling off the dross and the heaviness, Liao had come to a fantasy of levitation. At the end of days all men would fly, when the earthy needs of food and clothing would have dropped away.⁸

The millenarian quality of Liao’s thoughts could hardly be clearer. And its distance from basic Confucianism was clear, too, For Confucianism, committed above all to civilized order and history, could not be chiliastic and still be one of its many possible selves. It stood for just the reverse of the millenarian yearning for the end of days and the upsetting of institutions.

Not surprisingly, possible disciples kept falling off Liao’s ladder to the stars. As Liao moved from ‘revering Confucius’ to ‘worshipping Confucius’,⁹ his questioning followers turned increasingly to anti-religious anti-Confucianists—Wu Yü (1871ṇ1949), for example, Liao’s student in Szechwan, who turned to Ch’en Tu-hsiu (1879ṇ1942) at Peking University¹⁰ —and Liao’s little clan rapidly dwindled.

3. FROM PARADIGM TO PROPHECY

When Confucius was revered he was a political man, a figure in history, who invited men (the State’s ministers of the Confucian ideal type) to learn from him how history should be made—what principles should apply and what judgements be levelled, in the farthest tomorrow as in classical yesterday. The Classics (transmitted by the Confucius who was revered) exposed the paradigms of history, the eternal patterns of action. ‘The Spring and Autumn records the successes and failures of the World’, said the Han Confucianist, Tung Chung-shu, flatly.¹¹ Process was unimportant, no passage of time could relativize the truth. But when Confucius was worshipped he was a saint and an oracle, a transcendent, supra-historical figure, who foretold to men the end to which time was passing. The Confucius of the Liao P’ing image put all things yet to come into the I-ching (Book of Changes), and all rules for posterity into the Shih-ching (Book of Poetry), where the religion he founded was set forth in detail.¹² The Classics (created by the Confucius who was worshipped), enshrined the prophecies of history, intimations of actions yet unseen. The Classics were new with Confucius and, as Liao put it in 1894, new Classics were not old history.¹³ Paradigmatic Classics—the classics of ku-wen traditionalists, for whom knowledge and action were one—were history, accounts of visible events which made essentials manifest. But prophetic Classics of chin-wen provenance were the keys to history, not history themselves.

Liao’s early attack on the accepted ku-wen Classics had committed him unequivocally to a religious rather than an historical view of Confucius. Liao meant to expose the ‘false classics of the Hsin learning’—to borrow K’ang’s version of Liao’s indictment—to the end of establishing the ‘true’ Classics (the chin-wen Classics) as creations of Confucius. But this amounted to admitting that the chin-wen Classics were forgeries by Confucius; that is, Confucius himself might seem like Liu Hsin (d. A.D. 23), the alleged forger of the ku-wen, writing texts and pretending they were old. Of course, Liao had no intention of making this equation, and Confucius, therefore, had to be truly superhuman; if he were only human, he would be only an ideologue like Liu Hsin, who was bought and paid for, in Liao’s opinion, by the usurper, Wang Mang, the founder of the so-called ‘Hsin Dynasty’ (A.D. 9ṇ23). How could one ‘forger’, one concealer of his own authorship, be distinguished from the other unless Liu Hsin and Confucius were simply incommensurable, the first a dishonest historian, the second a pure and divinely inspired prophet? If the Six Classics were not history, it was because in the ku-wen version they were fiction, and in the chin-wen version a miraculous rending of the veil of future time.

The Classics’ passage from paradigm to prophecy can be seen in the space of one generation, from the usages of the practising official, Hsüeh Fu-ch’eng (1838ṇ94), for example, to the fancies of the non-practising Liao P’ing. Hsüeh, in a memorial of 1875, cited an ancient model as a lesson for contemporaries, in the approved traditional fashion of a Confucianist on duty, engaged in political action. In an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• China: History, Philosophy, Economics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• Dedication
• Part One: Out of History
• Part Two: Into History
• Part Three: Historical Significance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index