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

by Robert N. Bellah

  “Even if I do fall ill,” said Master Mozi, “why conclude that the gods and ghosts are not clear-seeing? There are many directions from which illness can come to a man. It can happen from heat and cold, it can happen from overwork. It is as though of a hundred doors one has shut a single one; why be surprised if thieves find a way in?“93

  Graham sums up the essential difference from Confucianism:

  The Confucian thinks of right as done for its own sake, and frees himself from the temptation to do wrong for the sake of gain by saying that wealth and poverty, long life and early death, are decreed for him by Heaven and outside his control. He can therefore act rightly with an untroubled mind, leaving the consequences to Heaven. For the Mohist on the other hand, judging all conduct in terms of benefit and harm, there can be no meaning in a morality detached from

  Many differences follow from this fundamental one, and some of them must rouse our admiration for the Mohists. They bitterly opposed the Confucian doctrine of “fate,” of what Heaven has decreed, as an avoidance of human responsibility.95 Similarly Mozi was indignant with Confucius’s refusal to serve a lord he did not feel was worthy. For Mozi that was an expression of personal pride: any opportunity for service can be turned toward the benefit of the people. The Mohists criticized elaborate ritual, especially extensive funeral ritual, and music, meaning the elaborate musical entertainments of the elite, because of the great expense involved, money that could be used to better the lives of the people. The attack on ritual (li) and music, goes to the heart of the Confucian project and surely annoyed the elite of the time, as well as adding to the notion of Mohists as dour.96

  The Mohists were against aggressive war but were not pacifists. As an organized movement, Mohists even engaged in defensive warfare, helping defend small states from the attack of large ones. Like utilitarians in later times and places, the Mohists were activists, advocates of simple living and devotion to the cause of helping others.97 Their demise as a movement had probably more to do with their activism, and their capacity to organize for military action, than with their doctrines. Such organized activism was not at all what Qin Shihuangdi was inclined to tolerate in a newly united Chinese empire. But we have already commented on the lack of lasting appeal of Mohism as a doctrine even after the collapse of the movement. This is not at all to say Mohism had no impact. It influenced in one way or another every tendency in Warring States thought, sometimes in active opposition, sometimes in surreptitious borrowing.

  The Tianxia chapter (33) of the Zhuangzi, written by Zhuangzi or someone later, gives an interesting assessment of Mozi that can serve as a fitting coda to this section:

  Now Mozi alone refused to sing a song for the living or wear mourning for the dead … Teaching this to others I am afraid he was not loving to others, and practicing this in his own case most certainly he was not loving to himself. I would not slander Mozi’s Way; however, if you sang he condemned you for singing, if you wept he condemned you for weeping, if you made music he condemned you for making music, was he really the same sort as the rest of us? With the living he took such pains, with the dead he was so niggardly, his way was too impoverished, he made men worry, made them pine, his code was hard to live up to, I am afraid it cannot be the Way of a sage. It went counter to the hearts of the empire, the empire would not bear

  [Mozi took as a model the early king Yu, who “wore out his body for the empire.”] The result was that many of the Mohists of later generations dressed in furs or coarse wool, wore clogs or hemp sandals, never rested day or night and thought of self-torment as the noblest thing of

  As far as the idea of Mozi and Qin Guli [his chief disciple] is concerned, they were right; but in putting it into effect they were wrong. The result was simply that Mohists of later generations had to urge each other on to torment themselves until there was no flesh on their thighs or down on their shins. It was a superior sort of disorder, an inferior sort of order. However Mozi was truly the best man in the empire, you will not find another like him. However shriveled and worn, he would not give up. He was a man of talent, shall we say?98

  But although Mohists pushed the idea of “benefit” to a logical extreme that placed them near the outer limit of Chinese thought, it is still well to remember that, in a more common sense way, the idea of benefit was part of the mainstream of Chinese thought. Confucians would judge rulers by whether they benefited the people-indeed, Mencius makes that the criterion of political legitimacy. Except for its fascination with logical consistency, Mohism is perhaps less eccentric relative to the Chinese tradition than at first might appear.

  “Daoism” and the Turn to Private Life

  We have seen Confucius and his disciples creating, on the basis of traditions of aristocratic education, a new kind of education aiming at the formation of a certain kind of character, one that could go on developing through the whole of life by means of the practice of self-cultivation. This education was intended to prepare the students for service in the newly centralizing states emerging in the Warring States period, where merit was being recognized as more important then lineage. But it was also preparing students to be a certain kind of person who could influence others by example, and lead a satisfying life whether he held office or not, supporting himself when out of office by teaching or by serving as a ritual specialist. Robert Eno believes that Confucianism was primarily a sect, oriented more to private life than to office, though the continuous concern with politics and the responsibilities of office that we find in Confucius and his successors makes this view appear

  Mozi and his followers, on the other hand, seem to have been oriented primarily to public life, in service to a sympathetic lord where possible, but organizing for action when that was not possible. The quasi-military organization of the Mohists and their interest in defensive warfare, including inventing mechanical devices to foil attacking armies, suggest a degree of activism that is quite un-Confucian. Self-cultivation as such does not appear to have been a Mohist concern, though activism is itself a kind of personal formation. Though the Mohists significantly advanced logic and rational argument beyond anything we find in the Analects, Mohist rational discourse was always in the service of practical ends, as its relentless utilitarianism indicates.

  If Confucianism appears to have attempted a balance between public and private life and Mohism veered rather strongly in the public direction, there were other tendencies, less well organized than these two, that moved in the direction of exclusive concern for private life. “Daoism,” which I put in quotes because it was not in the Warring States period a coherent movement even to the extent that Confucianism and Mohism were, is a term that can be applied to several figures and/or texts that use the term Dao as central to their teaching, but, equally importantly, emphasize some kind of meditation technique in the process of self-development. There were, however, other tendencies emphasizing private life that cannot be called Daoist even by these loose criteria, that were also prevalent in the Warring States period. This is hardly surprising in a period of such turmoil and constant warfare.

  In the face of an increasingly coherent ideology of centralized militarization and total control of the population, usually discussed under the rubric of “Legalism,” it might seem that there was no “private” space to retreat to. But as I have noted before, the very disorder of the Warring States period, the fact that small states lacking strong central controls continued to exist at least for a while, suggests that there were places to which those appalled at current social conditions could retreat. Some of the centralizing states were tolerant of diverse ideological trends, even ones opposed to centralization, in their search for cultural capital and possible ideological support.

  Yang Zhu and his supporters, whose ideas we will discuss shortly, were extreme in their emphasis on the individual as against society. It is significant that Mencius, representing the Confucian balance between public and private concerns, was appalled that “the words of Yang Zhu and Mozi fill the worl
d. Yang is for selfishness, which is to have no lord; Mo is concerned for everyone, which is to have no father. To have no father nor lord is to be a bird or a beast” (Mencius 3B.9).ioo Elsewhere Mencius puts the contrast even more vividly:

  Yangzi chose selfishness; if by plucking out one hair he could benefit the world he would not do it. Mozi was concerned for everyone; if by shaving from his crown right down to his heels he could benefit the world he would do reason for disliking those who hold to one extreme is that they cripple the Way. (Mencius 7A:26)10’

  Nonetheless, as Nivison points out, “Mencius was actually deeply influenced by both Mozi and Yang Zhu,” and therefore we should not let the existence of sharp controversy lead us to overlook the fact that in the world of a “hundred schools” ideas were shared as well as contested.102

  Yang Zhu

  We have no text explicitly attributed to Yang Zhu, and even what scholars attribute to him in such texts as the Zhuangzi and the Laishi chunqiu may be the words of his followers, as is so often the case with Warring States thinkers.103 We have no idea of Yang’s dates. If we believed that he really had dialogues with Confucius or Mozi (he could hardly have had dialogues with both) as are recounted in various texts, we would have to place him in the fifth century BCE, but it is more probable to date him some time in the fourth century. In any case he seems to represent a tendency toward radical withdrawal from society, exhibited at its extreme by those who chose to live as hermits. The Zhuangzi distinguishes between two types of hermits: those who withdraw to “mountain and valley,” “discourse loftily and criticize vindictively,” who as “condemners of the age, wither away and drown themselves”; and those who “head for the woods and moors, settle in an untroubled wilderness, angle for fish and live untroubled, interested only in Doing Nothing [wuwei]-such are the tastes of the recluses of the riverside and the seaside, the shunners of the age, the untroubled

  Yang Zhu (and, as we will see, Zhuangzi) clearly belongs to the second group. We hear of hermits in the Analects, but perhaps they come from a later period than that of Confucius himself, and the image of the hermit is only an extreme example of a withdrawal that could be less absolute. Graham offers some reflections that help us understand this significant tendency in Warring States thought:

  A philosophy entitling members of the ruling class to resist the overwhelming pressures to take office remained a permanent necessity in Imperial China.105 Yangism is the earliest, to be superseded in due time by Daoism and, from the early centuries AD, by Buddhism. But Yangism differs from its successors in having nothing mystical about it. It starts from the same calculations of benefit and harm as does Mohism, but its question is not “How shall we benefit the world?” but “What is truly beneficial to man?”, more specifically, “What is beneficial to myself?” Is it wealth and power, as the vulgar suppose? Or the life and health of the body and the satisfaction of the senses?106

  Yang Zhu’s teaching is easy to parody, but it is not as simple as it might seem. According to A. C. Graham, it should not be seen as a form of radical egoism, pitting the self alone against every other good, but rather as a form of selfishness, in which concern for nurturing one’s own life is primary, but concern for others remains secondary, and indeed the doctrine of nurturing one’s own life is seen as contributing to the general good if universally adopted.107 As in the Mencius quote above, the idea of not giving one hair to benefit the world is a kind of trademark of Yangism. Let us look at a fuller account of this idea, as contained in a late work that Graham argues has early material embedded within it.

  When a Mohist interlocutor asked Yang, “If you could help the whole world by the loss of a hair off your body, would you do it?” Yang replied that a hair wouldn’t help the world. The interlocutor said, but suppose that it would? Yang was silent but a follower of his asked the interlocutor if he would give up some of his skin for a thousand in gold. The interlocutor said he would. Then the follower asked if the interlocutor would cut off a limb to obtain a state. At this point the interlocutor was silent. The follower then drove home his point: that many hairs could add up to skin; much skin could add up to a limb; starting down that road will come to a bad end; therefore how can one treat even a single hair lightly?ios

  In this interchange Yang Zhu does seem to verge on egoism. Yet consider the following, which starts out much as the above:

  Yao resigned the Empire to Zizhou Qifu, who replied:

  “It might not be a bad idea to make me Emperor. However, just now I have an ailment that is worrying me. I am going to have it treated, and have no time now to bother about the Empire.”

  The Empire is the weightiest thing of all, but he would not harm his life for the sake of it, and how much less for any other thing! Only the man who cares nothing for the empire deserves to be entrusted with the Empire.109

  Here Zizhou’s selfishness would seem to be absolute, but suddenly we are told that he above all deserves to be entrusted with the empire. Consider another Yangist passage, the opening passage of the “Making Life the Foundation” chapter of the Liishi chunqiu:

  Heaven is what first engenders life in things. Man is what fulfills that life by nurturing it. The person who is capable of nurturing the life that Heaven has created without doing violence to it is called the Son of Heaven. The purpose of all the son of Heaven’s activity is to keep intact the life Heaven originally engendered. This is the origin of the offices of government. The purpose of establishing them was to keep life intact. The deluded lords of the present age have multiplied the offices of government and are using them to harm life-this is missing the purpose for establishing them. Consider the example of training soldiers: soldiers are trained to prepare against bandits; but if the soldiers who have been trained attack each other, then the original reason for their training has been lost.10

  It would seem that at least some Yangists had a political teaching-one could almost say that every tendency in Warring States thought had a political teaching. Maybe one could say the same for ancient Greek thought, or axial age thought in general-that would be something to keep in mind. In the concern for the self as well as in the political conclusions drawn from it, the thought of Yang Zhou is clearly similar to that of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. What is missing is any concern for inner cultivation, to borrow a term from Harold Roth-that is, the practices of controlled breathing and mental concentration that were believed to lead to tranquility and insightthat is the hallmark of all strands of Daoism.iii Even in the political teaching just quoted, the Son of Heaven is charged with “nurturing life,” which could be seen as slightly more interventionist than the nonaction (wuwei) that is all that is required of the ideal Daoist ruler.‘12 We really don’t know when Yang Zhu or Zhuangzi lived or when the Daodejing was composed or written down, but it is reasonable to suppose that Yang was a predecessor of the Daoist thinkers, reacting strongly against the Mohists by claiming that benefit should be first of all for the sake of the individual, and only when that idea was established would all under heaven benefit. The Daoists, like the Confucians, shied away from the idea that benefit, even the benefit of a long life, was the central concern, although there remained a Yangist element in Daoism that would never be entirely lost in subsequent history.

  The Farmers’ School

  Among the hermits of the Warring States period there was a group that developed an interesting ideology-namely, that everyone, even the rulers, should plough the fields and raise their own food. The believers in such an agrarian utopia, and we have some reason to believe that some of them practiced what they preached, revered and perhaps invented an “early king,” even earlier than the Confucians’ Yao and Shun, namely Shen Nong, the “Divine Farmer,” who in earliest antiquity put this teaching into practice. The discovery of earlier and earlier “early kings” became more frequent as time went on, so that the principle of the earlier the king the later his appearance in historical texts was already exemplified here.

  The teachings of the Farmers�
� School have been reconstructed from fragments embedded in the Han text, Huainanzi:

  Therefore the “Law of Shen Nong” says: “If in the prime of life a man does not plough, someone in the world will go hungry because of it; if in the prime of life a woman does not weave, someone in the world will be cold because of it.” Therefore he himself ploughed with his own hands, and his wife wove, to give a lead to the world.

  In guiding the people, he did not value commodities difficult to obtain, did not treasure things without use. Consequently, any who did not work hard at ploughing had no means to support life; any who did not work hard at weaving had nothing with which to clothe the body. Whether one had ample or less than enough was each person’s own responsibility. Food and clothing were abundant, crimes and vices did not breed; they lived untroubled in security and happiness, and the world ran on an even level.”’

  The agrarian utopia of Shen Nong, needless to say, was a kind of rural anarchy, without punishments or authorities able to inflict them. Rather, all governed themselves in simple self-sufficiency. Graham notes that this ideal remained attractive long after the Warring States period, as is indicated by the many efforts to demonstrate that its principles were unworkable.114 Although the Chinese were often enough governed by authoritarian states, there were always those who wished to withdraw from them as much as possible, and ideas that held that life could go on happily without them never completely died away. Only the Confucians developed an alternative, as we will see, and it was not a democratic one. It was, however, unlike withdrawal into private life or indulging in utopian dreams, concerned with ways to curb the worst excesses of tyranny, and, though it often failed, the degree of its success is perhaps measured by the long-term stability of the imperial Chinese political system.