Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  There were undoubtedly many teachers of the aristocratic arts and had been for a long time before Confucius. What made him unique, the beginning of a new phase of Chinese culture, is that he was not interested only in teaching specific arts, even rites and music that would be so central in the Confucian tradition, but was above all consciously concerned with what we might call the “formation” of his students, their ethical development as persons and their ethical stance in the world. He was also concerned with the sad state of society in his time, and with the loss of traditions that, in his view, had once provided greater stability and greater dignity for all people. What is clear is that Confucius was a man of extraordinary integrity who made an impression on his students that later generations never forgot.

  In trying to reconstruct his teaching, we must begin with the argument as to which of the two most central terms, ren (which Waley translates as “goodness”) and li (which Waley translates as “ritual”),28 is the most important and even ask if we really have to choose between them. According to Brooks and Brooks, ren is a key term in book 4, which they believe is the earliest book, and the only one that we can be relatively sure recounts the actual views of the historical Confucius. In that book, ren appears in a number of passages, whereas li is mentioned only once and in passing. Everyone agrees that ren is extremely rare in any text earlier than the Analects, but very common there. Its pre-Confucian meaning is not easy to establish from its rare occurrences. It is always noted that the graph for ren consists of the graph for person, human being, also pronounced ren, and the number two. Its early usages may have meant “handsome,” “valiant,” or possibly, as a play on the related term for human being, “manly,” and was probably an aristocratic quality, not an ethical virtue. In the Analects, ren is clearly ethical and yet its meaning, as the many different translations of it indicate, is not entirely clear.

  If book 4 is the earliest and the one closest to Confucius, we find in it right from the beginning something mysterious, something elusive about ren:

  The master said, For my part I have never seen anyone who loved ren and hated the not-ren. One who loved ren would put nothing else above it. One who hated the not-ren would himself be ren; he would not let the not-ren come near his person. Is there anyone who for a single day has put forth all his strength on ren? For my part I have never seen anyone whose strength was not sufficient for it. There may be some, but, for my part, I have never seen one. (4:6)29

  Nor did Confucius himself claim to be ren:

  The master said, “How would I dare consider myself a Sage (sheng) or ren? What can be said about me is that I continue my studies without respite and instruct others without growing weary. (7:34)30

  And when the disciples ask for a definition of ren, the answer is usually evasive, or whether such and such a person is ren, the answer is usually in the negative. Yet Confucius tells us that ren is not remote:

  The Master said, Is ren, indeed so far away? If we really wanted ren, we should find that it was at our very side. (7:30)31

  What we can make out from these passages is that, although ren is near, and one who loved it would put nothing else above it, yet no one, not even Confucius himself, has been able to put it into practice, though no one lacks the strength to do so. Particularly in the later books of the Analects the substance of ren gets filled in considerably, leading us to believe that ren is the highest virtue because it includes all the others and then some, but it never entirely loses its mysterious quality. There is something about it that puts it above ordinary life. It is one of a number of indications that the Analects is not entirely the secular text that both Chinese and Westerners have often taken it to be.

  If we think about some of the common translations, Waley’s “goodness” gets the generality of the term, as does the common translation “benevolence,” which, as Graham points out, is appropriate as the primary translation only from the time of Mencius,32 but both goodness and benevolence are too easily identified with our own moral vocabulary and, as Ames points out, lack the richness of the term: “ren is one’s entire person: one’s cultivated cognitive, aesthetic, moral and religious sensibilities … Ren is not only mental, but physical as well, one’s posture and comportment, gestures and bodily communication.” Ren, he writes, “does not come easy … It is something we do, and become.”” Ren is surely ethical, the highest ethical term in Confucianism as Heiner Roetz, points out,34 yet it is not theoretical, at least not in the first instance: it is performative, enactive, mimetic, though it gives rise to thought.

  Taking account of its closeness to ren, human being, we can now translate ren, the virtue, as, following Roetz, “humaneness,” but not, as is sometimes done, as “humanity,” thus agreeing with Ames’s objection to the translation “humanity” as implying it to be a general human characteristic. “Humaneness” attempts to capture the element of aspiration to an ideal that, though close at hand, is not easily realized in practice. It is nonetheless a norm or standard, indeed the norm or standard with which to judge human behavior. Though rooted in embodied, social, life, it is nonetheless universal.35 Herbert Fingarette, who is generally believed to subordinate ren to li, nevertheless gives a definition of ren that epitomizes its claim to universality: “society is men treating each other as men.“36 Almost Kantian, treating other human beings as ends in themselves. Perhaps we will understand better how humaneness works in Confucian practice after we consider its complementary term, li.

  What is striking about ren in its earliest appearance, that is, if Brooks and Brooks are right, in book 4, is that it appears nearly contextless. Whatever “arts” Confucius was teaching to his students, he was deeply concerned with their personal formation and he set for them a high, almost unattainable ethical goal. We will see eventually that ren does have a context, however stark its first appearances. But the substance of what Confucius taught was surely li, and we can hardly introduce a discussion of li without some concern for its context. Fingarette argues cogently that the key context is Dao, the Way. Dao is an important term in the Analects as it is for most Warring States thinkers, but its meaning varies with the thinker and we should not identify it everywhere as having the meaning given to it by those we have come to call Daoists. In the Analects the Dao is not so much the Way of the Cosmos as it is the Way of the ancients, the Way of the former kings, the Way of the gentleman (junzi). In the Analects the Dao is paired with the term de (power, potency, virtue), as it will be quite differently in the Daodejing. In the Analects, following fairly closely the early Zhou use of the term, de is the “charisma” of the ruler, a power that draws people to him and brings them to the practice of the Way. Confucius does indeed attribute de to the early kings, creators, he believes, of an ideal form of government, but he generalizes it as a quality of the gentleman, of any sincere follower of the Way.37

  The Way has a dignity of its own, nowhere expressed so clearly as, again, in book 4, “The Master said, In the morning hear the Way; in the evening die content” (4:8, trans. Waley).38 Fingarette nonetheless argues that the acts that are necessary in following the Way are specified in the li, and in its primary meaning, “ritual.“39 By late Chunqiu times, if we can place any confidence in the Zuo, the idea of ritual, epitomized in the “Great Services” of the early Zhou, had become generalized and extended to a wide variety of situations, still including high religious ceremonies, but now also including many areas that we would think of more in terms of manners or politeness, and yet all seen as, if properly performed, the basis of social stability. The Analects, especially but not exclusively in book 10, does include many heterogeneous examples of li, some of them, to us, rather trivial-for example, “He must not sit on a mat that is not straight” (10:9, trans.

  If Confucius began as an instructor in ritual, it would have probably been in the details of sacrifice, but also of appropriate action in various social situations, that he would have specialized. But in his concern for the formation of his students, he moved, tentatively a
t least, to generalize li as a way of relating to the world and one’s fellow humans, expressive in its own way of the same ethical depth as ren. At the opposite extreme to the straight mat, Confucius describes the correct action, in its minimalism, nonaction (wuwei), of the sage ruler Shun, earlier even than the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties: “The Master said: `Shun was certainly one of those who knew how to govern by inactivity [wuwei]. How did he do it? He sat reverently on the throne, facing south-and that was all”’ (15:5, trans. Leys). Simon Leys, whose translation I am using here, makes the point in his notes that “inactivity” could also be translated as “noninterference,” and that the ethical aspect of what Shun did lies in his “setting a moral example, and his virtue (de) radiates down to the people.“41 Putting the sayings about the straight mat and facing south together, we can see that how you sit can be far from trivial.

  Ritual, then, is a way of relating and a way of governing. In the Analects it is often contrasted with rule by punishments. In the ideal society there would be no punishments, no executions or mutilations, as people would act in accord with ritual: “The Master said: `Lead them by political maneuvers, restrain them with punishments: the people will become cunning and shameless. Lead them by virtue (de), restrain them with ritual (li): they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation”’ (2:3, trans. Leys). But it is not only the ruler who can find ritual effective. The gentleman (junzi) who acts in accord with ritual will also influence those around him: “The Master wished to live among the barbarian Nine Tribes. Someone said, `They’re uncouth. What about that?’ He said, `If a gentleman lived among them, what uncouthness would there be?”’ (9:14, trans.

  If li is not just a heterogeneous collection of customary behavior that can be summed up, as Roetz sometimes does, as “conventional ethics,” it is because Confucius locates it in a new vision. Fingarette here seems to me right in not accepting the usual (in modern culture) derogatory meaning of such terms as “convention” and “tradition,” but instead seeing the extent to which the man who claimed to be a transmitter and not a creator was actually saying something new, never said before in Chinese history. According to Fingarette, Confucius was offering a

  new ideal of a universalistic community based upon shared conventions. The content of his proposal was to found the new community as a tradition. But he also found ready to hand a powerful formal mode of discourse in which to propagate the ideal; indeed he used the most deeply rooted mode of discourse in human culture-the narrative and especially the narrative myth or anecdote of an ancient past …

  Confucius perceived humanity through the imagery of ceremony and thus of tradition. It was peculiarly appropriate for him to turn to the narrative mode of formulation in its most common form-the narrative of an ancient past. Thus the content of his teaching was perfectly congenial to the oldest and probably the most evocative of all forms of thinking about life’s meaning. Although the narrative mode used in this way is an “archaic” form of thought, it is not any more an archaism in Confucius than it is in a contemporary novel or drama. Confucius used narrative of a mythic past in the service of a new ideal grounded in radically new insights into man’s essential nature and powers.43

  Fingarette rejects the common view of tradition as the dead hand of the past, intrinsically given, unquestionable, for a more accurate view of tradition as it actually operated in most “traditional” societies, that is, as in a state of constant revision and reinterpretation in the face of new circumstances. He cites a key passage from the Analects to show that this was Confucius’s view: “The master said, He who by reanimating the Old can gain knowledge of the New is fit to be a teacher” (2:11, trans. Waley). Fingarette’s point is that it is only through tradition or convention (what the anthropologists call culture) that human beings can act in ways not determined by instinct or conditioning alone, but that new conditions always require that tradition be rethought, “reanimated.” Without reanimation, tradition is indeed dead, but the Ii transmitted by Confucius was alive, at work, as Fingarette puts it, in “reuniting” human

  We might return briefly to what Fingarette called the “formal mode” of discourse in which the Analects roots the vision of the new community, the narrative of an ancient past. Much of the content of that narrative, though reworked for the needs of the time, is contained in the section on Shang and Western Zhou China in Chapter 5 and in the first section of this chapter. Fingarette calls it a “narrative myth,” and it is that, but it is told as history and it clearly has a relationship to history as we know it. When Confucius talks of the culture of the Shang, and of the early Zhou, especially King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, he is talking about things that we believe actually existed. He also talks of a Xia dynasty, which so far has no historical substantiation, and of kings earlier than the Xia such as Yao and Shun, where we are surely in the realm of myth. But the distinction between myth and history is never an easy one, and the fact that Chinese myth is presented as history, is itself significant. Later thinkers will come up with even earlier kings to appeal to as legitimating their positions. Although the content is quite different, China resembles Israel and differs from Greece and India in its attachment to history, or should we say mythistory, as a defining cultural form.45

  It is now time to return to our question as to which is more important, ren or Ii. There are two passages in the Analects that are taken to give diametrically opposite answers to that question. We must remember that the Analects is an aphoristic book, at best anecdotal, that it is not a systematic work, that it does not itself ever develop systematic connections between its key terms. Under these conditions, apparent contradictions are numerous and varying interpretations inevitable. But let us turn to the passages:

  Yan Yuan asked about ren. The Master said, “To overcome one’s self and to return to li is ren. If for one day one will overcome the self and return to li, then the whole world will turn towards ren. Ren can only come from the self-how could it come from others?”

  Yan Yuan said, “I beg to ask for the concrete steps.” The master said, “Do not look at what is contrary to Ii! Do not listen to what is contrary to Ii! Do not speak what is contrary to li! Do not put into action what is contrary to Ii!

  Yan Yuan said, “although I am not smart, I wish to serve these words.” (12:1, trans. Roetz)46

  Here li seems to take precedence over ren, because “returning to li” seems to be the very definition of ren. But here is the other passage: “The Master said, A man who is not ren, what can he have to do with li?A man who is not ren, what can he have to do with music (yue)?” (3:3, trans. Waley).47 Here ren seems to be the essential precondition of ii, without which it would be meaningless, and so takes precedence over li.48

  Perhaps Fingarette can show us that what seems to be a contradiction is really a complementarity, and he uses music, so often coupled with li in the Analects, to do so:

  Acts that are Ii are not just rote, formula-conforming performances; they are subtle and intelligent acts exhibiting more or less sensitivity of context, more or less integrity in performance. We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, “faking,” “sentimentalizing.” We detect all this in the performance; we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer …

  Analogously, an act may be seen as ren if we look to see how this person does it, and more specifically whether it reveals that he treats all persons involved as of ultimately equal dignity with himself by virtue of their participation along with him in li.49

  We can see that for Fingarette ren and Ii are part of a single package, each implying the other.

  Roetz also sees the complementarity, yet he wants to give ren a “higher” moral status than Ii. For him li points to conventional morality (Sittlichkeit in Hegelian terms) whereas ren re
presents postconventional morality, morality based on universal ethical principles (Moralitdt in Hegelian/Kantian terms), and he uses Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of the development of moral reasoning in the child to rank li as applying to stages 3 and 4, the conventional level, and ren as applying to stage 6, the highest stage of postconventional moral reasoning.50 Roetz also pairs another “postconventional” term with ren, namely yi, often translated as “right,” “rightness,” or, as Roetz prefers, “justice.” In any case, yi, like ren, is found in what Brooks considers the oldest part of the Analects, book 4: “The Master said, The gentleman’s relation to the world is thus: he has no predilections or prohibitions. When he regards something as right, he sides with it” (4:10, trans. Brooks). “The Master said, The gentleman concentrates on right; the little man concentrates on advantage” (4:16, trans. Brooks). We will have more to say about yi when we discuss the Mencius.51

  I am sympathetic with Roetz in his effort to rescue Confucius and Confucianism from those who deny them ethical universalism and categorize Confucian ethics as “group ethics,” lacking any standard by which individuals can judge group conventions. But I would argue, contra Roetz, that Fingarette, despite his insistence on the Confucian self as a social, not a psychological, self (an argument that I don’t want to get into), does not think of Confucian ethics as “group ethics” in this derogatory sense. On the contrary, I think Fingarette, with his emphasis on the revisability of tradition in the light of new circumstances, is actually raising up li to the same stage of ethical universalism as ren.

  Still, I would like to go a bit further along with Roetz in emphasizing the universal ethical element in the Analects. Starting from ren again, something new is added in Analects 12:2:

  Zhonggong inquired about ren. The Master replied, “In your public life, behave as though you are receiving important visitors; employ the common people as though you are overseeing a great sacrifice. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not want, and you will not incur personal or political ill will.“52