3
To China
A Confucian Alternative
I never knew my grandfather. He died in 1935, when my mother was sixteen. He was a presence in our house, though, both because she had adored him and because some of the things he left her were a prominent part of our decor. He had lived in China after the Boxer Rebellion, working as a medical missionary near Swatow on the coast northeast of Canton. His first wife and infant child died shortly after their arrival—my mother said “in a plague.” His sister came to join him for the six years he remained in charge of the Jieyang hospital. He brought home with him a carved Chinese chest and a bunch of artifacts. I remember a brass lock, foot-binding shoes, a mandarin’s silk cloak, and some brush paintings. There may have been more, but most are now scattered.1
There was also a carved figure that my mother called a “house god,” six inches high (its photo opens this chapter). It stood on our mantel, surveying the household, holding its palms together in blessing. I knew as a young boy that it was more important than the other bits of memory. My mother said it was connected to ‘ancestor worship’, which the Chinese did and we did not. Yet the house god signified family, both to the Chinese and to us. For my mother, it was a memory of where she came from and of a father she had loved and lost. I heard more about his time in China than I did of her own childhood. I only later realized that our house god was her unconscious altar to him. Lynn Davidman has written movingly of the ways that we construct altars as memorials, sometimes without knowing that we are doing so. I have seen this in my own and my children’s lives. It took me a long time to see it in my upbringing.2
What is this ‘ancestor worship’? My missionary grandfather probably thought of it as superstition, as a heathen belief that our forebears become gods that need propitiation. For the Chinese, he might have said, ancestors watch over us. They set moral standards. They demand attention. Offended ancestors bring bad luck, so no good Chinese wants to anger them. He would have said that the six-inch house god was not itself sacred; it was a mere stand-in for one’s lineage and for the innumerable progenitors from whom one sprang. He was not a minister, as were his father and grandfather; he thus would not have thought it his calling to convert Chinese from heathen darkness to reverence for the One True Lord. Yet he would have recognized that the Chinese attention to their ancestors had a sacred quality to it. This would have made it religion, in his eyes.
Note the conditional phrasing I have just used. I have no idea what my grandfather actually thought, as my mother did not pass his insights down to me.3 Such ideas as these, however, were common among Americans of his generation when they thought of China and the Far East. In that era, China was no rising dragon. It was at best a doddering empire, soon (they imagined) to be swept away by the forces of progress. American Christians believed that everyone has some sort of religion, however misguided. Religion for them was a matter of belief and of relations with the supernatural, most often worship. Thus the six-inch stand-in for one’s ancestors was a ‘god’—or at least a god-image. Putting it on a pedestal, my mother said, symbolized the elevated position that ancestors held in the Chinese mind.
In this chapter, we will see a somewhat different way of understanding ‘ancestor worship’. We can mark this by calling it ‘ancestor veneration’, to lose the connotations that the term ‘worship’ has in Western ears. Traditional Chinese attitudes toward the ancestors exhibit a relational approach to the sacred that is quite far from Western religious norms. Two other commonly noted sacred concepts, ‘the mandate of Heaven’ and ‘ritual propriety’, are similarly relational. So is the traditional Chinese notion of the self, which, though not sacred, is the point from which religious action emerges. Exploring the traditional Chinese understanding of these terms, as embodied in the rú jiā (‘tradition of the scholars’, i.e., Confucian philosophy4), lets us understand these concepts in a new way. Once understood, we can use them to ask what American religious life would look like to a sociologist steeped in this traditional Chinese way of thinking.
We can start our journey with the Confucian way of understanding the self.
The Self and the Ancestors
At some point in life, all people probably ask themselves “Who am I?” The modern West, however, has made this question a fetish. From teen angst and coming-of-age novels to midlife crises, self-help books, and seminars on choosing a good death, Euro-Americans seem to be absorbed by self-creation. We have made ‘finding oneself’ into a life-project. Our nursery schools teach children to choose their own activities, our elementary and secondary schools help children identify their natural learning styles, and Facebook hosts quizzes that tell us our best colors, how we like to interact, what city best fits our personality, and what is our ideal sport. “Everyone is different,” we hear. “Every one of us is an individual.” Our culture reinforces this belief in small and in large ways.5
Listen, for example, to how we introduce ourselves:6
Hi. My name is Jim Spickard. I am a professor of sociology at the University of Redlands and the current president of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Religion. I teach courses on social theory, the sociology of religion, social science research methods, homelessness, human rights, and world hunger. I’ve written or edited several books, most recently a collection of work by younger scholars on the transnational dynamics of several contemporary African religions. I was educated at Stanford, the New School for Social Research, and the Graduate Theological Union. I have done extended fieldwork with one of the seven hundred or so new religions founded in Japan in the 20th century and also with a radical Catholic activist commune. I’ve done shorter research projects with various religious and activist groups. I am an inveterate learner and traveler, having visited some fifty-two countries (a few of which no longer exist).
In other words: “I, I, I, I, I.”
This is not just me. Americans may take individuality to an extreme, but Europeans also typically think of themselves as individuals, separate from other people. They, too, emphasize their persons and their personal accomplishments. As we saw in the previous chapter, this corresponds rather well to the Protestant emphasis on the individual relationship with God, though it is part of general Western Christian culture. Both Augustine and Luther encountered God alone, in their inner stillness. Christians call each believer to personal salvation. To this way of thinking, individualism is a theological imperative as well as a social one.
We even find our penchant for individualism in the Euro-American reverence for human rights. The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights has gained worldwide acceptance, but its language reflects the political legacy of Locke, Hume, and Jefferson, not Confucius, Hsün Tzu, or Zhu Xi. It famously enumerates the rights due to individuals: “the right to life, liberty and security of person”; the rights “to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and “to freedom of opinion and expression”; the rights “to social security,” “to equal pay for equal work,” and “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” among others. As the Chinese delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Peng-Chen Chang, noted at the time of its writing, this individualistic language is a Western legacy, not a universal one. (He still voted for the Declaration on pragmatic grounds.)7
Philosopher Henry Rosemont has argued that the Confucian view of the self is very different.8 Confucianism, the most influential of China’s many philosophical traditions, does not start with the individual, at least not as a separate entity. It sees the individual as nested in, even constituted by, a set of relationships. Following Rosemont, here is how I would introduce myself in a Confucian mode:
I am Jim Spickard, son of Donald Spickard and Mary Alice Adkins, grandson of Vernon and Mildred Spickard and of Russell and Mary Adkins. I am brother to Paul Spickard, husband to Meredith McGuire, father to Janaki and Dmitri Spickard-Keeler. My principle teachers were George Spindler, Trent Schroyer, Charles McCoy, and James McClendon. My many students include Blaine Pope, Javier Espinoza, Whitney Washington, Maggie Smith, Aaron Olive, and Julia Pazzi.
I would go on to name my colleagues and my friends, my leaders and my followers, perhaps even those intellectuals whom I have never met but who clearly influence me: Marx, Kant, Arendt, Durkheim, Barrington Moore, Mary Douglas, and so on. I could note those whose lives have inspired me: Martin King, Howard Thurman, Dorothy Day, Jeff Dietrich. I would, in short, identify myself by my relationships. I would call out those people who have shaped me, who have made me who I am.9
Rosemont noted that the Confucian way of speaking does not erase my sense of self. It simply expresses it in an unaccustomed way. It points out that I am uniquely shaped by those around me. Having my particular parents made me different than I would otherwise have been. Raising children changed me. So did my first wife’s death and also my subsequent remarriage; I am simply different as the result of such relationships than I would have been without them. My teachers and colleagues also shaped me, much as I shape my students (though sometimes I wish the latter happened a lot faster than it does).
Both introductions, in fact, display true things about us—specifically what each of these two cultures finds sacred. The individual is central to the modern West; thus we abhor violations of individual integrity and honor human rights. Classic Confucianism, on the other hand, saw the self as a nest of relationships and it sees those relationships as sacred themselves. One maintains them through lǐ 禮, the practice of ritual propriety. Lǐ is seen as the origin of dé 德, which is typically glossed as ‘virtue’.10 Maintaining the sacredness of relationships is a chief duty, not just for leaders, but for everyone.
Rosemont drew out the implications of the Confucian way of describing oneself, which is so different from the Western notion of individual autonomy:
For the early Confucians there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others. . . . Taken collectively, these roles weave, for each of us, a unique pattern of personal identity, such that if some of my roles change, others will of necessity change also, literally making me a different person.
He noted that marriage made him a different person, as did becoming a father.
Again, the point is obvious, but the Confucian perspective requires us to state it in another tone of voice: my life as a teacher can only be made significant by my students, in order to be a friend, I must have a friend; my life as a husband is only made meaningful by my wife, my life as a scholar only by other scholars.11
Jianxiong Pan and William Lakos have separately argued that this attitude is not merely Confucian, but part of the general Chinese way of seeing things. That, however, does not undercut Rosemont’s point.12 Whether specifically Confucian or Chinese in general, the self is seen as a bundle of social relationships rather than as an isolated individual, standing separate from others. What are the implications of this kind of self for the religious life? How does a connected rather than an isolated self change religion’s social side?
Let us start with ‘ancestor veneration’, which many scholars see as central to historic Chinese life. Kenneth Latourette stated it bluntly:
No attempt to understand the Chinese can be anything but imperfect without at least a brief description of the ritual practices concerning the departed kin, ancestor worship and ancestor veneration.13
The practice goes back a long way. David Keightly traced it to the earliest Chinese written records, noting that Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1100 BCE) documents described rituals to propitiate deceased kings and their consorts. William Lakos argued that the practice goes back to the late Neolithic. No matter its origin, there seem to have been three separate sites for ordinary people’s ancestor veneration throughout Chinese history: graveyards, home shrines, and the clan or lineage hall.14
Graveyards are easy to understand, as ritual visits to family graves are common in many cultures. Dia de los Muertos (November 1) in the southwestern United States, for example, is a time for Mexican Americans to hold picnics in their cemeteries and to commune with the relatives that have passed on. Lakos cited anthropologist Francis Hsu in writing that Chinese grave worship “included such actions as cleaning and repairing graves and tombs, showing reverence by doing prostrations, sharing meals with the ancestors, lighting incense, and burning paper money.” Daniel Overmyer opened his survey text on Chinese religion with a vignette of the eldest son of the Liu family consulting a geomancer and an astrologer to pick the best place and time for his father’s burial. Such practices have been routine throughout Chinese history.15
Clan or lineage halls are similarly understandable. Particularly common in southern China, where lineages were stronger than in the north, these were built to house a wooden tablet commemorating the clan founder, with dates of his birth and death. Other personal tablets were placed there to remember the founder’s descendants. Most tablets celebrated the rich and the socially prominent, though they could include any ancestor more than five generations removed from the living. In Lakos’s description:
Here ceremonies and worship to the founding ancestor and all that he symbolically stood for could take place. [The hall] was the centre of rituals and often a place for political meetings, and was also used for other more worldly functions such as lineage meetings and events, schooling, and as temporary accommodation.16
The key practice, though, was daily veneration at the home shrine. Every house had one. Lakos described them as follows:
Most commonly each ancestor is represented by a wooden tablet with their name and age inscribed upon it. Other information would include the time and date of the deceased person’s birth as well as geomancy instructions for the burial site. Ancestor tablets are often decorated with coloured silk and arranged in a special order. Daily ritual sacrifices of food, incense, flowers and so on are placed in front of the tablets. The tablets and other associated ritual paraphernalia constituted an altar, and “every house has an altar in its main hall” or it was “placed in such a position that it overlooked much of the life that went on there, a permanent presence watching over the doings of its descendants.”17
Daily care of these shrines fell to women, and married women venerated their husband’s ancestors, not their own. Rituals were simple. They often amounted to offering the ancestors a bit of the daily meal and a few short prayers. The ancestors were informed of special events, particularly births, deaths, and marriages. This was not temple worship, but it was more than pro forma. Indeed, until the early 20th century, the newlyweds’ joint veneration at the man’s family shrine was what made the marriage legal.18
This is, of course, a general picture; practices varied widely from place to place and from age to age. The whole complex, however, was remarkably resilient. Even Communist repression did not eradicate these folk practices. Both Lakos and Overmyer noted that ancestor veneration and traditional funerals have been revived since the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Overmyer suggested that East Asian nations’ recent strong economic performance might have been aided by the fact that “each generation is taught to be grateful and loyal to the family tradition and to work hard to keep it going.”19
Importantly, one’s ancestors were not ‘gods’ in the Christian sense. Traditional Chinese religion had these, too, but the gods were neither progenitors nor did they serve just a single lineage. Ancestors were not even personal supernatural actors, set over against individual descendants. Instead they were a collective—‘the ancestors’—who amounted to a compressed symbol for the family or lineage to which one belonged.20 Rituals at the family altar reminded people that they belonged to a continuing group, with duties to each other that must be upheld. They reminded participants that they were anchored in the past and connected to the future. Venerating one’s ancestors meant to remember who one was: the son or daughter of X, the grandson or granddaughter of Y, and so on. It was to house one in a nexus of related kin. Indeed, it was to give one character. One’s family determined who one was, for good or for ill. Coming from a good family was supremely important, equaled only by carrying on the family honor.
The family-centered nature of character has long been a core aspect of Chinese society. Sociologist C. K. Yang told the story of a Chinese college boy accosted by a Baptist missionary and urged to repent of his sins. Yang wrote that the young man replied:
I come of reputable ancestry, I have a good conscience, and I have always been strict about my moral responsibilities and conduct. How is it that I am full of sin?21
Note that he listed “reputable ancestry” first. Venerating one’s ancestors brings to memory one’s stream of relationships, going backward and forward in time It encourages one to live up to the full set of endowments that one has inherited from them.22
My brother and I understand this, though we have each had our periods of Western rebellion against family strictures. We now joke about inheriting the ‘duty gene’ from both our parents. Though we recognize the psychological truth of Christian warnings against temptation and we both value repentance, we are also rather resistant to the Christian notion that humans are innately sinful. Responsibility is a struggle, but it is one that our family trained us for rather well. That is, in the end, the central point of Chinese ancestor veneration. As Laktos wrote,
In a world underpinned by the reverence towards ancestors the individual exists by virtue of his descendants, and his ancestors exist only through him. The importance of the reciprocity of kinship values may be seen very clearly in Chinese family relationships, and in the phenomena of these relationships writ-large in the politico-social realm. The sense of mutual responsibility between parents and son was central to the operation of the family as a continuing and strong unit, and conversely important for the operation of the state.23
The Mandate of Heaven
This brings us to our second traditional Chinese concept, the so-called ‘mandate of Heaven’ (tiān ming 兲命). This idea was similarly relational, but on a political, not a familial level.
From the Shang period, China was ruled by kings whose authority depended on a traditional but evolving set of relationships with the mín 民: their laboring but non-slave subjects. The ruler was supposed to care for the mín, both because it is a virtuous thing to do and because Heaven (tiān 兲) holds the common people in special regard. When the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE)24 replaced the Shang and instituted a more formal feudal system, they developed the idea that the ‘mandate of Heaven’ could pass from one ruler to another, depending on the ruler’s virtue (dé 德). So long as the ruler treated the mín well, Heaven would smile on him. As the philosopher Hsün Tzu (Xun Zǐ or “Master Xun”; ca. 312–230 BCE) wrote during the Warring States period toward the end of Zhou rule:
[A true king’s] benevolence is the loftiest in the world, his righteousness is the loftiest in the world, his authority is the loftiest in the world. Since his benevolence is the loftiest in the world, there is no one in the world who does not draw close to him. Since his righteousness is the loftiest in the world, there is no one who does not respect him. Since his authority is the loftiest in the world, there is no one who dares to oppose him. He gains victory without battle and acquires territory without attack. The whole world is won over to him. This is the way of one who understands how to be a king.25
Virtuous rulership is rewarded with success: the ‘mandate of Heaven’ falls on the ruler who maintains his righteousness.
According to Mencius (Mèng Zǐ or “Master Meng”; ca. 372–289 BCE) that mandate also falls from the ruler who does evil. Mencius famously developed what A. T. Nuyen has called the “liberal interpretation” of tiān ming.26 Where both Confucius and Mencius taught that a legitimate ruler is someone who has Heaven’s blessing and a deposed ruler is someone who has lost it, only Mencius explicitly argued for the people’s right to revolt against an unrighteous superior. Passage 1B:8 in the Book of Mencius reads:
King Hsüan of Ch’i asked, “Was it a fact that T’ang banished King Chieh and that King Wen punished King Chou?” Mencius replied, “Yes, according to records.” The King said, “Is it [thus] all right for a minister to murder his king?” Mencius said, “He who injures humanity is a bandit. He who injures righteousness is a destructive person. Such a person is a mere fellow. I have heard of killing a mere fellow Chou, but I have not heard of murdering [him as] the ruler.”27
In this view, a ruler who abuses his rule has forfeited his kingship and should be overthrown.
The central concept here is dé 德. This is usually translated as ‘virtue’, and I shall mostly follow that practice, but its true meaning is much deeper than how Westerners use that term. Henry Rosemont wrote: “Dé approximates ‘dharma’ in denoting what we can do and be if we realize (i.e., make real) the full potential of our concrete physical, psychological, and cognitive endowments.”28 In other words, a person exhibits dé if she or he is living up to her or his full positive potential. This potential depends not just on the person’s innate skills and not just on circumstances, but also on the relationships that the person has with others. Dé is as relational as is the Confucian notion of the self. We can call this ‘virtue’, but it is virtue of a particularly social kind.
A ruler must be virtuous and benevolent toward his people to maintain Heaven’s favor. Whether one follows the ‘liberal’ interpretation, in which the people enforce this virtue, or the what Nuyen calls “the divine command theory,” in which the people must wait for Heaven itself to right wrongs, exhibiting dé was a matter of treating one’s subjects appropriately. There is no talk here of the people’s rights set against the ruler’s power. Rulership requires reciprocity. The ruler and the ruled have obligations to one another, which they must each carry out. The ruler actualized dé by treating his subjects properly; the subjects then remained loyal to the ruler.
As Chung-ying Cheng put it: “Dé is not the will of God but the ability to hold on to rule by following the advice of one’s ancestors.” Cheng quoted the Book of Zhou, one of the ancient texts: “Heaven sees through the seeing of people, Heaven hears through the hearing of people.”29
Just as ‘ancestor worship’ is not like Western worship, the early Chinese notion of ‘Heaven’ is not like the Christian ‘God’ and the ‘mandate of Heaven’ is not like the Western notion of “following the will of God.” To Westerners, God is personal and active. Traditional Chinese Heaven is not active in the same way. Benjamin Schwartz described this difference as follows:
The different aspects of Heaven [active and impersonal] were to serve the purpose of laying out an ethical goal, i.e. the gap between what is and what ought to be, to be implemented by the humans. Often, in religion, such as the Hebrew Bible, such a gap is illustrated as the gap between the divine legislator and humans, but in the Chinese case, it is presented as an order that ought to be rooted immanently in the sacred biological ties of the family. Although Heaven is the “emanator” rather than “legislator” of the normative order it must nevertheless be deeply concerned with the actualization of the order. Heaven throws its support to the party that seems likely to actualize that order in society in the form of a mandate.30
As a further point of contrast, the Judeo-Christian God is not always ethical: think, for example, of the genocides in the Book of Judges. The Chinese Heaven, on the other hand, is supremely ethical; tiān ming enforces dé, which involves the proper care of the community and is meaningless outside of that communal context. No Christian would say that God is meaningless outside of the community of believers, but for traditional Chinese, this anti-individualism is the normal state of affairs.
Also note the continuity in Chinese thought between the human and the divine. Rulers who possess Heaven’s mandate succeed, those who do not, fail; in either case it is human success or failure that is at stake. In traditional Chinese thinking, virtue brings reward, so the ruler can, in theory, control his success by actualizing dé in his relations with his subjects. True, the Hebrew prophets also thought that following God’s will would bring worldly political success, but in their image, God was far more inscrutable and unpredictable than was the Chinese Heaven. For the traditional Chinese, the ruler and Heaven were alike. Both were far above the people but were also responsible for them. Both addressed them collectively, not individually. Heaven was more powerful than the Emperor but less active in ordinary affairs.
One finds this same continuity in the veneration of one’s ancestors. One venerates one’s ancestors in the present, expecting to be venerated in turn after death. In both cases this continuity regularizes human-divine interaction. It also socializes these interactions by placing them in the same conceptual framework as human-human relationships. To each relationship there is a proper lǐ 禮, a proper ritualized reciprocal propriety. To each there is a proper dé 德: a proper virtue. For each there is a proper set of mutual responsibilities. In traditional Chinese thought, the ancestors were a part of human society, not of another realm.
In short, both ‘ancestor veneration’ and ‘the mandate of Heaven’ emphasize the relationships that stand at the center of social life. ‘Ancestor veneration’ emphasizes the connection between family and self; rituals at the graveyard and the home shrine acknowledge this, affirming that one is shaped by one’s forebears and that one shapes one’s descendants in turn. The ‘mandate of Heaven’ emphasizes the connection on a political scale. The ruler is connected to the people, must care for them, watch out for them, and ensure their well-being; only thus will he be able to continue his rule.
Neither of these ideas is compatible with Western individualism. Traditional Chinese society was not made up of individuals, but of descendant/ancestor and subject/ruler relationships. Ancestor veneration presumed that a person is nothing without a family. The mandate of Heaven presumed that the ruler is nothing without his good treatment of the mín. The mandate does not result in Western-style democracy, which is based on the individual rights of the ruled. Yet neither is it Western-style dictatorship. The ruler must act with dé, which means living up to his responsibilities to others. Those responsibilities are simultaneously part of his core self. Heaven smiled on the ruler who could manifest the benevolence and good leadership that his role required.
In short, traditional Chinese thought highlighted the interpersonal ties without which no society can exist. Those ties were an integral part of everyone’s core selves.
Confucianism, Thick and Thin31
We need to pause to address a matter of history. I have been speaking of ‘traditional Chinese thought’, ‘traditional China’, and so on, as if these were monolithic. We know that was not the case. Chinese civilization has been complex in each of its historical epochs, and these epochs have been many. As with all civilizations, there have been both main trends and counter-movements. There still are. No Euro-American historian would dare reduce the ‘Western tradition’ to a single strand. We must similarly take care not to treat Chinese civilization simplistically.
Yet many scholars have noted a great continuity to China over the last two or three dozen centuries. Historian John K. Fairbank, for example, wrote that the “distinctive features of China today . . . come down directly from prehistoric times.” In his 1976 presidential address to the Association of Asian Studies, Ping-ti Ho argued that the continuity extends back at least four millennia, far longer than is the case with the civilizations that began around the eastern Mediterranean.32 Continuity does not mean stasis, but it does mean that we can make some generalizations. Still, we need to get a better sense of the landscape before we proceed.
The current scholarly consensus traces the first Chinese political groupings to the Yellow River valley in the 3rd millennium BCE. Their exact form of organization is still unclear, though archaeologists have found early signs of ancestor veneration. The first written records come from about fifteen hundred years later; these show the growth of a class system, of hereditary kingship, and of the treatment of ancestors as at least quasi-deities. In Lakos’s telling:
The picture of ancient China as was once understood, especially by the readings and interpretations of the Classics and ancient Chinese histories, is now considered incorrect. The three ancient dynasties of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou were not only centered in three different areas, but also appear to have co-existed. . . . During the Three Dynasties, a fluid and dynamic situation developed where prominent clans jostled with each other for influence over other clans and villages. . . . Another important socio-political feature of ancient China, from the family, clan, village to city and state, is that they became highly stratified along genealogical lines.33
Lakos argued that ancestor veneration grew out of this emphasis on genealogy. It was at first limited to the upper classes, but by the end of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 220 BCE) it had been taken up by other classes, too. The development was not linear but it grew steadily over the next thousand years.
Importantly, ancestor veneration began as religion but did not stay in a strictly religious mode. Ho wrote that Confucius (551–479 BCE)
weakened ancestor worship as a religion. His skeptical and agnostic attitude toward the afterlife and spirits is summarized in the following terse statements. “He sacrificed [to the ancestors],” he said, “as if they were present.” On another occasion, Confucius said: “To devote oneself earnestly to one’s duty to humanity, and while respecting the spirits to keep away from them, may be called wisdom.”34
On the other hand, Confucius emphasized the innate worth of maintaining a ritual respect for one’s relationships. Everyone should do this, not just the rulers. In Confucius’s view, anyone could attain virtue (dé 德) by acting correctly toward others (lǐ 禮). We will explore lǐ a few pages hence; here let us note that the concept is not just Confucian, but is part of Chinese tradition in general.35
Confucius lived toward the end of China’s feudal period, as did his chief disciples. That period ended with the rise of the Ch’in dynasty (221–206 BCE), followed by the Han Empire (202 BCE–220 CE). These dynasties perfected the famous Chinese bureaucracy, which was staffed by literati, who won their positions by mastering the writings of Confucius and his early followers. This period solidified ‘Confucian philosophy’ as the core expression of Chinese wisdom. Not that the Chinese referred to it as “Confucianism”—i.e., as a religion founded by Confucius on a parallel with “Buddhism,” “Mohammidanism,” etc. The closest Chinese term for what we call ‘Confucianism’ is rú jiā 儒家, which means ‘tradition of the scholars’.36 In any event, Confucian teachings have been a central part of Chinese philosophical culture over the centuries. We thus need to know a bit about the various kinds of Confucian teachings that we can find in Chinese history.
When Rosemont referred a few pages back to “the Confucian perspective,” he explicitly aligned himself with what he called “the early Confucians.” It was they, he said, who developed the theory of the social self. These include Confucius himself, Mencius, who emphasized the optimistic and humanist side of Confucius’s teaching, and Hsün Tzu, who emphasized humans’ inability to act correctly without good training. Early Confucians codified what are called the Shih Shu (Four Books), which were collections of the sayings of Confucius and Mencius along with commentary by their followers. These include the Lun Yü (Analects), the Ta Hsüeh (Great Learning), the Chung Yung (Doctrine of the Mean), and the Book of Mencius. They emphasize the development of dé (personal virtue/positive potential) through attention to lǐ (right relationships). A realized dé is what marks a chün-tzu or perfect gentleman.37
These teachings are primarily ethical, not religious. Though Americans often conflate the two, and Confucius himself upheld the importance of formal rituals, his chief concern, to quote Xinzhong Yao, “was with humans and the fundamental principles of humanity.” His four main principles aimed to solve human problems through right behavior. They were dào 道 (‘the way’), rén 仁 (‘humaneness’), dé 德 (virtue/potential), and lǐ 禮 (right relationships/ritual propriety). He emphasized education and self-cultivation; formal religion was present but secondary. He was quoted in The Analects: “If a person lacks humaneness (rén 仁) within, then what is the value of performing rituals?” Yao argues, however, that Confucius’s teaching was not simply ethical, in the sense of dealing with merely moral issues:
As morality is integrated with religion and politics [for Confucius], moral virtues become essential both for governing and for religious activities. As religion and metaphysics are part of morality, religious ritual and practice are a way of moral improvement.38
This moral improvement worked on four levels simultaneously: person, the family, the state, and society at large.39 This was not—and this is Rosemont’s point—just advice for individuals about how to develop good character. A close analysis of the classic texts shows an intimate connection between self and others. Right relationships (lǐ) produce virtue (dé) in individuals and in the social order simultaneously. (We will return to this matter below.)
Depending on how one counts, there are at least three, perhaps four other periods in which Confucian teachings took subtly different forms. The first was the establishment, under the Han dynasty, of an imperial bureaucracy with an examination system based on the Confucian classics. A Middle Han philosopher, Dong Zhong-shu (179–104 BCE), integrated metaphysical speculation into the classics’ ethical focus, though some of what appears under his name was probably not his work. He did, however, emphasize the role of Heaven as a counterweight to the Emperor and the importance of sages in holding the Emperor to ethical account. He spent some time in jail for this and one of his later followers was executed for asking a profligate emperor to resign. The rú jiā remained the official state philosophy, however, until the fall of the Han dynasty in the 3rd century CE.40
A period of chaos then ensued, and Confucius’s teachings went into decline. Daoism and Buddhism became much more prominent. Though the rú jiā returned to favor under the Tang dynasty (618–907), the tradition was revised considerably during the next dynasty, the Song (960–1279). Scholars generally call the teachings of this period ‘neo-Confucianism’, because the tradition absorbed elements of its Buddhist and Daoist rivals. Its most prominent figure was Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), who used Daoist metaphysics as a basis for a Confucian cultivation of self. He heavily influenced Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who rationalized much Confucian philosophy. Zhu Xi is remembered for his book Family Rituals, which laid out the proper ways to honor ones relations and the ancestors.41
Neo-Confucianism remained a state-supporting cult for the next several centuries, though it split into two schools: a ‘law’ school that followed Zhu Xi and a ‘mind’ school that followed his opponent Wang Yang-ming. Their differences are not relevant here, except that they emphasized philosophy over religion, at least in the Western way of seeing things. In the late 19th century, however, there was an attempt to revive Confucianism as a specifically Chinese religion in order to restore China’s vigor vis-à-vis Western invaders.
Peter Beyer described this last history in some detail. He showed how Chinese intellectuals ultimately rejected the idea of Confucianism as a religion, choosing to retain its standing as a philosophic tradition. Beyer noted that there is no indigenous word for ‘religion’ in Chinese, though the term zongjiao was invented to cover the European examples that the Chinese encountered. In Beyer’s words, the literal meaning of this neologism “is close to ‘group teaching’ or ‘sectarian teaching,’ implying the perspective of a delimited subgroup of society and not something universal.” He argued that refashioning Confucian teachings as a religion would not have accomplished the national strengthening that its advocates had sought. “Those who saw [Confucianism] as humanistic, this-worldly, and moral philosophy carried the day because this view asserted both Chinese uniqueness and superiority.” The tradition’s central focus on ethics held.42
This brings us to a final group of Confucians, those of the present day. I do not mean ordinary Chinese; Anna Sun reported that just 12 out of 7,021 respondents to a 2007 survey of rural and urban Chinese households claimed “Confucian” as their religion.43 I focus instead on a group of Chinese and Western philosophers, including Henry Rosemont, who look to Confucius’s teachings for intellectual inspiration.
I do not read Chinese, so I cannot comment on the Chinese parties to this philosophical conversation. I have met and conversed with Tu Wei-ming, Henry Rosemont, the late David Hall, and Roger Ames, each of whom has done much to enhance contemporary interest in a Confucian worldview. They all advocate what they call ‘comparative philosophy’: the effort to identify both the commonalities and differences across various civilizations’ philosophic traditions. They have each retranslated core ancient texts and written commentaries on the philosophical issues that these texts raise.
Tu has written extensively on Confucian humanism and has contributed to discussions of so-called ‘Asian values’. He has rather successfully brought intellectual depth to what has at times been a deeply political conversation. Until his untimely death, Hall produced detailed formal philosophical analyses of Confucian terms and often connected Confucian philosophy with the American Pragmatist tradition. Together with Ames, he wrote a series of three volumes that explored in detail the implications of Confucian philosophy for Western culture. Ames has produced several studies of his own and has edited a book series that has greatly expanded academic attention to Confucian thinking. He, too, supports the Confucian dialog with Pragmatism and advocates attention to the philosophical, as opposed to religious, aspects of Confucian writings. Rosemont has mainly concerned himself with issues of interpretation. He is well known for demonstrating the ways that cultural presuppositions prevent us from understanding other societies’ points of view.44
Each of these scholars emphasizes the inadequacy of trying to subsume traditional Chinese concepts into Western philosophical categories. Rosemont, for example, began the essay that I cited a few pages ago with a cogent critique of the Western presumption that human beings are at root “autonomous, freely choosing, rights-bearing individuals”; his contrast between Western and Confucian ways of self-description was a concrete example of how Confucian principles produce a different way of looking at the world.45 In that world, the self is connected, not autonomous. Choice is constrained by context, not because individuals are forced to go along with the group but because individuals are constituted by their context and so must take it into account as a part of themselves. ‘Rights’ are not central to social justice; instead, the key category is ‘dignity’ or ‘respect’. In a Confucian world, people must take into account the relationships in which they are enmeshed. Respect for and care for others are central to virtue (dé). Rosemont argued that Confucian philosophy arrives at social justice by another route than does the West.
Rather than discuss these writers broadly, let us examine a parallel approach to Rosemont’s presentation of the Confucian social self: Hall and Ames’s description of the self as a ‘focus-field’.46 Their discussion connects the two Chinese religious concepts that we have already examined—‘ancestor veneration’ and the ‘mandate of Heaven’—to the third: ‘ritual propriety’. Their approach shows how all three are relational, on an even deeper level than I presented before.
Hall and Ames began by noting two ways of thinking about the individual person. One can think of an individual as distinct: i.e., as “single, unitary, separate, and indivisible,” an autonomous member of a class of equivalent separate beings. Alternately, one can think of an individual as unique—as a particular constellation of attributes, relationships, and so on that can be compared with others but not separated from them. Here, the individual is not reducible to a featureless monad. She or he is not distinct because s/he is not isolated from others. Instead, each individual is unique precisely because she or he carries a different combination of personal attributes and relationships—the latter of which connect her/him to others who are similarly complexly related to their social surroundings.
Hall and Ames argued that in Confucian philosophy, the self is unique but not distinct. In their words,
the Confucian model [of] the self is contextual, it is a shared consciousness of one’s roles and relationships. . . . The uniqueness of the Chinese person is immanent and embedded within a ceaseless process of social, cultural, and natural changes.
This is not just a matter of people realizing the importance of their social connections. Hall and Ames are making a philosophical point about the conceptual universe implicit in the very language of the Confucian texts. They write that unlike Western philosophies,
Confucian distinctions such as “self/other” [jǐ 己/rén 人] are mutually entailing and interdependent correlatives. Yīn 陰 is always becoming yáng 陽 and yáng is always becoming yīn, as “day” is a “becoming night” and “night” is a “becoming day.” For the jǐ/rén distinction, “oneself” is always “becoming other” and an “other” is always “becoming oneself.”47
In short, the self and the other are intimately connected; neither can be conceived of without the other term. No Confucian would start philosophizing from a Hobbesian—or even Rousseauian—‘state of nature’, in which individuals exist separate from society. Nor is any individual just a replaceable cog. Instead each individual is the center of a web of relationships, each of which shapes that individual into a unique person.
Hall and Ames called this a field phenomenon. In their view, any set of interacting persons form a field, in which they mutually influence each other. They do not use this example, but we can think of this field as similar to the force field that surrounds several magnets. The magnets do not exist by themselves—at least not as magnets, though they can exist singly as lumps of iron. The magnetic field that they generate involves multiple lines of influence; the field structure at any point depends on each magnet’s position vis-à-vis the others, the relative strength of its magnetism, and so on. We cannot describe that field by taking each magnet separately. We have to describe the field as a whole, noting the ways in which the web of connections surrounding each magnet creates a focus-point or node that cannot be separated from the field itself. The field shapes each focus-point and is shaped by that focus-point in turn.
Hall and Ames put it this way:
The focus-field model results from understanding one’s relation to the world to be constituted by acts of contextualization. The self is focal in that it both constitutes and is constituted by the field in which it resides. The field is the order constituting its relevant environs. By definition, the focal self cannot be independent. The structure and continuity of the focal self is immanental, inhering in and continuous with its context. . . . The openness of the self is guaranteed by the indefinite reservoir of potential perspectives offered by familial, social, cultural, and natural environs.48
Hall and Ames argued that Confucian philosophy sees this focus-field self as unique rather than distinct, as connected rather than isolated, as social rather than solitary. This is the point of ‘ancestor veneration’. By venerating one’s ancestors one recalls that one is part of a long social chain, extending into the past and leading in to the future. This is also the point of the ‘mandate of Heaven’, which put the relationship between the rulers and the common people at the center of political life. The ruler is responsible for the well-being of the mín; they, in turn, honor their superiors, especially the ruler. In the Confucian way of seeing things, correct rule is a matter of relationships rather than of one individual exercising autonomous, isolated power.
* * *
In sum, the central elements of traditional Chinese religion emphasize the relationalism that Confucians see at the heart of human life. How does this solve the question with which I started this section: of whether I am overgeneralizing when I refer to ‘traditional Chinese thought’ or even to ‘Confucian ways of thinking’? Just noting that Rosemont, Hall, Ames, and Tu use their philosophical analyses of Confucian texts to elucidate the differences between the ways that traditional Chinese and modern Western civilizations see the world may not be enough.49 Are they on good ground in doing so? Or are the many Confucianisms of the past two and a half millenia, and the many competing philosophical schools, too complex to allow them to treat the social self as a characteristic outlook of Chinese civilization?
Though there are certainly differences between the ways in which various Chinese eras have understood the rú jiā (‘tradition of the scholars’), these differences are minor compared to the vast similarities. None of these Confucianisms has been individualist, in the Western mode. Neither have been the competing schools. All have recognized the intimate, mutually constituting connection between the individual and society. All of them have seen a close connection between the moral development of the individual and the moral development of the social order. Each has seen the importance of right relationships.
Bryan Van Norden has made a useful distinction between what he calls ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ accounts of various philosophies. He wrote:
We can give a ‘thin’ description . . . which can be shared by a broad range of participants in a discussion, who might disagree significantly over many other matters. . . . In contrast, a ‘thick’ description is a detailed account framed in terms of the distinctive concepts and commitments of a participant in that discussion.50
Summarizing his example, we can speak of the sun as ‘a large bright thing in the sky’ without deciding whether it is really a god (Hesiod), a hot stone (Anaxagoras), the essence of the qi 氣 of fire (the view of the Chinese classic Haui-Nan-Zi),51 or a mass of hot hydrogen and helium. All these views allow the ‘large bright thing’ as a thin description of what they think is really going on.
The scholars on whom I have built my account—Lakos, Yao, Rosemont, Hall, Ames, and others—have, I think, demonstrated that the social, relational self is at least a thin description of the dominant traditional Chinese view of how selves and others are connected. The key matter is that neither Chinese philosophy in general nor Confucian philosophy in particular begins with an isolated self. They begin with a social self that is connected in its very being to the people around it. The key question is how a person is supposed to relate to those connections, and the consequences of that relating both for the person and for the social field in which she or he lives.
We have one more step to go before we can see how to use this self/other relationalism in our own studies of religion.
Ritual Propriety
Lǐ 禮—the third of the Chinese religious terms that I promised to elucidate—is usually translated into English as ‘ritual propriety’. This translation contains two terms: ‘ritual’ and ‘propriety’, which seem foreign when combined. Westerners associate ritual with formal actions, often (but not always) religious and public: “the priest gave a ritual blessing,” “the president laid a ritual wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,” and so on. Propriety involves personal actions: decorum, good manners, courtesy, moral rectitude, etc. Both are formal and proper, but one is public, the other private, one has to do with matters of religion or state, the other with personal virtue. What ties them together?
The connection is clearer in classical Chinese. The term lǐ 禮 is an old one, used long before Confucius to describe the family rituals surrounding the veneration of ancestors. These were religious but were not transcendent, unlike most religion in the West. In Lakos’s words,
Chinese culture was one which concerned itself more with its people than with great gods; it was humanist more than idealist. The fundamental purpose of ancestor rituals was the incorporation of the family and its extension to kin and to state [and] society; it was a strategy for the continuation of Chinese culture.52
Private rather than public, lǐ rituals helped “to regulate a person’s daily life and their [sic] interaction with others.” Lakos cited Kai-wing Chow’s comment that traditional Chinese ritual “channels emotions properly, distinguishes civilized patterns of behavior, and maintains the political order.”53
Ancestor ritual is not, here, primarily a public event. Instead, it is simultaneously a way to connect with one’s ancestors and develop one’s good character. The ‘propriety’ part of the English phrase highlights this latter task; the ‘ritual’ part reminds us that good character, for traditional Chinese thinking, had a sacred quality. This makes sense of Confucius’s statement that “a man without virtue (dé) had nothing to do with ritual (lǐ).”54 Virtue and ritual are intimately connected.
Appropriately for a civilization in which particular relationships were more important than universal ones, what specifically counted as virtue varied according to one’s social position. All people could attain good character, but they did so by fulfilling their specific social roles rather than by absorbing an abstract set of attributes. Lakos again:
Every individual has a particular position or station in life (their fèn), which is arrived at according to a number of criteria such as age, kinship, and social status. An important element of lǐ is to differentiate the socio-political positions of individuals and to ensure that each has their [sic] allocated resources required for their station in life. Ritual was the means by which an appreciation of these rules and their underlying value as virtues was most readily inculcated to society.55
The early Confucian Hsün Tzu connected lǐ with fèn 分 as follows:
The ancient kings hated [social] disorder, and hence they established lǐ (禮, rules of proper conduct) and inculcated yi (義, a sense of rightness) in order to make distinctions (fèn 分) and boundaries of responsibilities for regulating men’s pursuit, to educate and to nourish men’s desires, to provide opportunity for their satisfaction. They saw to it that desires did not overextend the means of satisfaction, and material means did not fall short of what was desired. Thus, both desires and goods mutually support each other. This is the origin of lǐ.56
In any case, ritual propriety (lǐ) was intimately connected with achieving virtue and one’s personal potential (dé)—remembering, of course, that the Confucian self is not isolated but is intimately tied to others.
Here is Confucius’s own statement of the matter:
Yan Yuan asked about perfect virtue (dé). The Master said, “To subdue one’s self and return to [ritual] propriety (lǐ), is perfect virtue. If a man can for one day subdue himself and return to lǐ, all under heaven will ascribe dé to him.” . . . Yan Yuan said, “I beg to ask the steps of that process.” The Master replied, “Look not at what is contrary to lǐ; listen not to what is contrary to lǐ; speak not what is contrary to lǐ; make no movement which is contrary to lǐ.”57
Lǐ is thus not just a matter of ritual, in the Western sense of the word. We need to remember that it is also the proper treatment of others. Such proper treatment makes social life possible, which to a relational self means that it makes the virtuous self possible as well. Self and other are integrated: connected by mutual proper conduct that takes on ritual dimensions. In doing so, it partakes of the sacred.
Like all concepts, lǐ developed over time. By the Song and Ming dynasties, it had come to mean ‘principle’ as well as ‘ritual’—combining the homophones lǐ 理 and lǐ 禮 into a single concept. Wing-tsit Chan wrote:
Lǐ (principle) originally meant to “put in order” and can therefore be understood as “pattern” and order, but in the long evolution of the concept it came to denote principle, and it has been in this sense that most Chinese philosophers have used it.58
The 11th-century neo-Confucian philosopher Cheng Yi further connected lǐ as ‘ritual/principle’ with the earlier notion of Heaven to create tiān lǐ 天理: the idea that the rituals that support the social order have cosmic significance. The 20th-century neo-Confucian Qian Mu tied this cosmic ideal back to concrete social relations:
The lǐ that are the standards for the family—its internal relations, its external relations, birth, marriage, death—are equivalent to the lǐ that are standards for the workings of government and state ceremonies—internal relations, relations between state and society, recruitment, treaties, successions.59
Both are, he wrote, cosmically grounded. Lǐ thus involves a ritual care for human relationships as a sacred duty.
What can we take from this discussion? Simply that Chinese thinking connects rituals, manners, ethics, and social order to each other, rather than treating them as disparate phenomena. Lǐ as ‘ritual propriety’ emphasizes each individual’s duty toward the social connections that make the self—in the Confucian sense—possible. As Rosemont pointed out, that self is constructed by its social connections. Those connections make individuals unique, without separating them from family, community, society, and the state. Lǐ tells us that the path to achieving one’s personal virtuous potential involves fulfilling one's duties to others.
Lǐ as ‘principle’, moreover, emphasizes these relationships’ cosmic dimension. If Confucius himself deemphasized lǐ’s religious aspects (”while respecting the spirits to keep away from them”60), the 11th-century neo-Confucians restored them. Both would say that lǐ creates virtuous individuals—divine, semi-divine, and human—by helping them realize their interconnectedness. Without this connectedness, neither persons nor the world would exist. There would be only chaos.
The bottom line is that ‘ritual propriety’ is as relational a concept as are ‘ancestor veneration’ and ‘the mandate of Heaven’. Traditional Chinese thinking taught that humans are far more intimately connected with one another than Western thinking realizes. Lakos expressed this particularly well:
The rituals and ceremonies which have underpinned Chinese society, dominated . . . by ancestor worship, are not important simply because they are a link with the past, but because they celebrate and reinforce core social relationships and values in the present lives of the Chinese people and they mirror the social world and the concerns of the living.61
Lǐ 禮 is more than just personal behavior; it is interpersonal ritual. Maintaining one’s relationships with the others that constitute oneself is a sacred matter.
Herbert Fingarette famously arrived at this realization by another route—one that I recommend you read but that I do not have space to summarize here. He wrote:
Thus, in the Analects, man as an individual is not sacred. However, he is not therefore to be thought of as a mere utensil to serve “society”. For society is no more an independent entity than is ceremony independent of the participants, the holy vessels, the altar, the incantations. Society is men treating each other as men (jen), or to be more specific, according to the obligations and privileges of lǐ, out of the love (ai) and loyalty (chung) and respect (sbu) called for by their human relationships to each other. The shapes of human relationships are not imposed on man, not physically inevitable, not an instinct or reflex. They are rites learned and voluntarily participated in. . . . To “be self-disciplined and ever turning to lǐ” ([Analects] 12:1) is to be no longer at the mercy of animal needs and demoralizing passions, is to achieve that freedom in which human spirit flowers.62
As Confucius is recorded as saying: “Virtue does not exist in isolation: there must be neighbors.”63
Sociology of Religion from a Confucian Point of View
It is time to bring this conversation back to the sociology of religion. I enjoy exploring other civilization’s philosophies, but that’s not this book’s point. Its point is to expand sociology’s conceptual toolkit, by seeing what kind of sociology we can build from the insights of non-Western civilizations. What can we gain if we use those civilizations’ ideas to analyze the religions that Western sociologists think we know well? How might lǐ 禮, dé 德, tiān ming 天命, rén 仁, and the rest transform the way we think about religions everywhere?
First, it is clear that in the traditional Chinese view, religion does not just happen in churches. While there are religious specialists, temples, public rituals, and the like, most ‘religion’ is fully integrated into daily life. Family-centered ritual is private, and the assorted healers, geomancers, and so on—all of whose work involves the sacred on some level—are hired for private ends. Traditional religion certainly does not center itself on weekly public worship. Though there has been a recent rapid growth of Chinese Christianity, it has supplemented, not altered, popular religious practices. In short, to study religion in China is to study what we in the West call “popular religion.” A sociology of religion with Chinese characteristics would have to organize itself accordingly.64
Second, from the Confucian point of view, the unit of religious analysis is not the individual: neither the individual’s beliefs, nor the individual’s actions, nor the individual’s choices (rational or otherwise). A sociology of religion based on Confucian principles would begin from relationships and would ask how religions—both popular and institutional, both private and public—create and sustain the relationships that constitute human social life. It would look at the place of ritual propriety and the attention to the others who are an intimate part of our selves, in the web of social life that reaches seamlessly from human to divine. How is each being in this web constituted, and what are the consequences of this mutual constitution for daily life? How are their relationships—which means also their selves—sustained? The exact questions are less important for our purposes than the traditional Confucian premise that individuals come second, not first.
Third, the Confucian approach undercuts the distinction between the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ spheres. Early Confucianism posited an integrated world of mutual relationships, each involving ritual propriety (lǐ) and virtue (dé) vis-à-vis others; the sum of these relationships constitutes the person. As such, religiosity or secularization is not the core issue. The universe is neither enchanted nor disenchanted, but oriented toward lǐ and dé, under the aegis of tiān ming. As the recent Communist Chinese efforts to reembrace Confucianism show, not all that much has necessarily changed over the centuries.65
Confucian thought is thus neither secular nor religious, but denies the validity of these conceptual categories. Neither religious belief nor religious institutions have ever had hegemony in China. This does not mean, however, that religion is not present nor that Chinese thought cannot tell us anything about the religious sphere. The Chinese parts fit together into a different whole. Secularization theory asks the wrong questions, from the traditional Chinese point of view. The same is true of rational choice theories of religion. They both posit the individual as the metaphysical unit of analysis—exactly the reverse of where a sociology of religion built on Chinese principles would begin.
In the next chapter, we shall see what kind of sociology this might be.
