Confucianism as a World Religion

Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities

Anna Sun

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400846085
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Asiatische Religionen

Is Confucianism a religion? If so, why do most Chinese think it isn't? From ancient Confucian temples, to nineteenth-century archives, to the testimony of people interviewed by the author throughout China over a period of more than a decade, this book traces the birth and growth of the idea of Confucianism as a world religion.
The book begins at Oxford, in the late nineteenth century, when Friedrich Max Müller and James Legge classified Confucianism as a world religion in the new discourse of "world religions" and the emerging discipline of comparative religion. Anna Sun shows how that decisive moment continues to influence the understanding of Confucianism in the contemporary world, not only in the West but also in China, where the politics of Confucianism has become important to the present regime in a time of transition. Contested histories of Confucianism are vital signs of social and political change.
Sun also examines the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China and the social significance of the ritual practice of Confucian temples. While the Chinese government turns to Confucianism to justify its political agenda, Confucian activists have started a movement to turn Confucianism into a religion. Confucianism as a world religion might have begun as a scholarly construction, but are we witnessing its transformation into a social and political reality?
With historical analysis, extensive research, and thoughtful reflection, Confucianism as a World Religion will engage all those interested in religion and global politics at the beginning of the Chinese century.

PART I

THE PUZZLE OF CLASSIFICATION

How Did Confucianism Become a World Religion?

CHAPTER 1

Four Controversies over the Religious Nature of Confucianism

A Brief History of Confucianism

“THE MASTER SAID”: CONFUCIUS AND HIS DISCIPLES

ACCORDING TO THE ARCHAEOLOGIST Lothar von Falkenhausen, the “age of Confucius” started five hundred years before Confucius’s birth and lasted till the end of China’s great Late Bronze Age (ca. 1000–250 BCE).¹ This coincided with the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1046–256 BCE), the longest dynasty in Chinese history. Von Falkenhausen suggests that it was during this “age of Confucius” that the foundation of Confucianism was established. The so-called Five Classics were written during this period—the Odes, Documents, Rites, Changes, and Spring and Autumn Annals—which later became part of the Confucian classical canon. It was also during this period that the traditional ritual system was stabilized and instituted, which included the worship of ancestral spirits.

The Zhou dynasty is divided into two parts: the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BCE) and the Eastern Zhou dynasty (770–256 BCE). The Eastern Zhou dynasty consisted of the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period. During the Spring and Autumn period, the many small states that carved up China were in constant warfare with one another, with 1,219 wars over about 250 years, until one state, Qin, conquered the rest.² In 221 BCE, the so-called First Emperor finally consolidated all the states and established the Qin dynasty, which was the first unification of China.

Confucius (ca. 551–479 BCE) lived through this tumultuous period of constant warfare between patrimonial states, and the experience greatly shaped his ethical and political thought. Confucius was born in the state of Lu and was orphaned at a young age. The sinologist D. C. Lau notes that we know little of Confucius’s youth except that he was poor and fond of learning; Confucius once remarked that “at fifteen I set my heart on learning” (Analects, 2.4).³ Renowned for his erudite mind and virtuous character, Confucius eventually became a much-revered teacher, although he always wanted to be a trusted advisor to a powerful ruler, a desire shared by many scholars of his time, in order to help create a peaceful and well-ordered society, governed not by brutal physical force but by the virtue of benevolence (Analects, 12.19).

Finally, at the age of fifty, Confucius was appointed to be the minister of crime of Lu. However, his advice was not followed, and he decided to leave the state in 497 BCE with some of his disciples. Confucius did not return to Lu for thirteen years; during his exile he visited different states and offered advice to rulers who cared to listen. He returned to Lu when he was sixty-eight, and he devoted the remaining years of his life to teaching until his death at seventy-two. Legend has it that Confucius had three thousand disciples during his lifetime, and this number was repeated in the first century BCE historical text Records of the Grand Historian. Among the disciples, twelve are mentioned frequently in the Analects, which is a collection of sayings and anecdotes of Confucius edited by his disciples and the students of his disciples. Confucius and his followers always looked back to the founders of the Zhou dynasty, the Sage Kings, as moral and political exemplars, particularly as the dynasty was reaching its final stage, marked by disorder.

Confucius famously said that he was “a transmitter, not a creator” (Analects, 7.1). Von Falkenhausen points out that Confucius gave clear philosophical expressions to gradual changes in society that had been ongoing long before his time, such as the emphasis of living community rather than divine ancestors in ritual practice, the stress on honest reverence rather than sanctimonious display, and, most important, the valuing of virtues, which can be obtained through self-cultivation, over noble lineage. Indeed, for Confucius, to be a junzi, originally meaning being a prince, was no longer a birthright but was achieved. Because of Confucius’s teaching, junzi came to mean a virtuous person, regardless of one’s birth or social status.

Although Confucius notably stated that he preferred not to address matters related to gods and spirits (Analects, 7.21), there were many discussions about the proper performance of rituals in the Analects, and the importance of ritual practice to Confucius cannot be underestimated. Confucius spoke of tian, literally meaning the sky, or the heaven above, frequently; there are fifty-one mentions of this in the Analects. According to the philosopher P. J. Ivanhoe, Confucius believed that heaven had a concrete plan for human beings, and that he had been chosen to play a special role in the realization of this plan toward a peaceful, just, and harmonious society; the proper way to achieve this ideal world is the dao (the way).⁴ Ivanhoe also points out that Confucius demonstrated a dynamic view of worship, especially regarding sacrifice and prayer. For Confucius, reverence on the part of those participating in worship is important; he expressed little interest in prayers for supplication, and he considered that he had been praying throughout his life by following the dao (Analects, 7.35).

The so-called Cult of Confucius, which venerated Confucius’s spirit after his death, did not start until the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), after the fall of the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE). The first mention of a cult of Confucius was in the late Han dynasty, when an emperor sent a surrogate to venerate the spirit of Confucius at Confucius’s grave. Several Han emperors followed his example by offering sacrifices at Confucius’s family ancestral temple in Qufu. Subsequent emperors of different dynasties carried out this ritual practice, and Confucius temples—temples devoted to the veneration of Confucius and his disciples—also flourished in major cities and prosperous towns throughout Chinese history. According to the historian Thomas Wilson, in the imperial pantheon of gods and spirits that dominated Chinese temple life, the temples devoted to the veneration of Confucius occupied a notable place in the hierarchy, and they have been an important part of Chinese religious life.⁵

In the Tang dynasty (618–907), a liturgy for the worship in Confucius temples was constructed based on canonical texts on rituals, and these codes for sacrifices were used throughout imperial China, with modifications along the way. Wilson notes that the Tang codes required the first offering be presented by the crown prince, the second and the third by the two top officials of the Directorate of Education; in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the ritual sacrifices were supervised by senior officials from the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, the Directorate of Education, and the Ministry of Rites.⁶

Besides such public and state performances of rituals, another important component of Confucian ritual practices was the personal worship of ancestral spirits. Although ancestral worship existed in China long before the rise of Confucianism, it has been appropriated by disciples of Confucius as an essential ritual. When the Jesuit missionaries in China were forced to deal with the issue of the Chinese Rites in the seventeenth century, which became the so-called Chinese Rites and Term Controversy, the heart of the matter was Franciscan and Dominican missionaries’—and later the Vatican’s—objection over Chinese converts’ participation in Confucian ritual ceremonies, as well as their practice of keeping ancestral shrines at home, with tablets inscribed with their ancestors’ names.

THE CONFUCIAN CANON AND THE CIVIL SERVICE EXAMINATION SYSTEM

The centrality of Confucianism in the social, cultural, and political life of China is closely related to the centrality of the civil examination system in the long history of imperial China, which started with the first unified dynasty in 221 BCE and ended with the demise of the last dynasty in 1911. Although the origin of the examinations can be traced back to the Han dynasty, it was Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty (581–618) who established the first civil service examinations in 605, selecting officials for the court by testing their knowledge of literary subjects. Throughout the Tang and Song dynasties (650–1250), the examinations, which focused on the Confucian canon, were greatly expanded and methodically institutionalized. By the Song dynasty, exams were held at the local, provincial, and national levels every three years, with candidates going through tests that took from twenty-four to seventy-two hours to finish in complete isolation in specially built exam cells (the historical site of the large provincial civil examination complex, in the southern city of Nanjing, at one point housed twenty thousand exam cells). It was through this rigorous and rigid examination of knowledge of Confucian learning that officials were selected, which solidified the incorporation of the Confucian canon into the foundation of state cultural and political ideology.

According to the historian Benjamin Elman in his definitive analysis of the civil examination system, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China, the system was the institutional link that connected three important aspects of Chinese political, social, and cultural life: (1) the imperial dynasties used the rigorous civil service examinations to select officials to fill the most important positions within the dynastic government; (2) the gentry-literati elites (selected members of the gentry who maintained their elite social and cultural status through classical scholarship as well as knowledge of lineage rituals) utilized the examinations to gain political positions and economic assets; and (3) classical studies, which formed the core content of the examinations, flourished because of the examinations, yet they were also reconstructed through the complex interactions between imperial bureaucracy and elite gentry-literati groups.⁷

Classical studies in China had traditionally been the studies of the Confucian canon, yet the canon never stayed exactly the same. The classical Confucian curriculum was constantly adjusted and reinterpreted, especially in the late imperial period, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Elman argues that late imperial examinations made “Dao learning,” which is often translated as Neo-Confucian learning, the orthodoxy in official life as well as in literati culture.

THE FOUR BOOKS: THE LEGITIMATION OF THE NEO-CONFUCIAN ORTHODOXY

Beginning in the Han dynasty and throughout the early years of the Song dynasty, the Confucian canon consisted of the Thirteen Classics, which included the early texts, the Five Classics, as well as later texts such as the Analects, the Mencius, and The Classic of Filial Piety. Even as the canon was expanding, the Five Classics remained the essential texts on how to achieve an ideal society as well as how to become a virtuous person, and they were used as the foundation of the civil service examinations. However, by the fourteenth century, the emphasis of the Five Classics in examinations was replaced by a new grouping of Confucian texts, the so-called Four Books, and this shift in the classical curriculum marked an important moment in the development and transformation of Confucianism in China.

This change reflected the great impact of a new school of Confucian thought and practice that started in the Song dynasty, which is what we now call Neo-Confucianism. It was Zhu Xi (1130–1200), a leading Neo-Confucian philosopher, who was one of the first to advance the idea of the Four Books, which included the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean. As the historian Daniel Gardner points out, this moving away from the Five Classics points to an “inward shift” toward morality that is governed not by social conventions or rituals but by inner sources of personal morality.⁸ Zhu viewed the newly grouped Four Books, texts that advocated the idea of self-cultivation through both philosophical and spiritual exercises such as contemplation and reading, as the most significant parts of Confucian texts. By doing so, he de-emphasized the complex historical lessons put forth by the Five Classics, the old set of selections from the Confucian past.

The civil examinations in effect instituted the Song Neo-Confucian moral philosophy as the orthodox of Confucian thought in the four...