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

by Robert N. Bellah

  Moeller starts his examination of the text with the short chapter 6, in part because it contains so many central images. As one of the “darker,” more mysterious passages, this chapter has attracted the attention of other translators. Let us start with Moeller’s translation:

  D. C. Lau’s translation is not very different, yet suggests how the use of different English words can change the overall impression:

  Arthur Waley translates this similarly, but uses “Doorway” instead of “gate” or “gateway,” capitalizes “Heaven” and “Earth,” and translates the last two lines thus:

  These examples give only a very elementary sense of how this highly condensed text can be variously read by highly knowledgeable Sinologists. In addition, Waley thinks this chapter may have circulated independently as part of “the stock of early Daoist teaching,” and finds it, or passages similar to it, in other early Chinese texts.143 Lau suggests “the remote possibility that the language used here is an echo of some primitive creation myth.””’

  Let us look at some of the individual terms that appear in this short chapter, as they provide an entry into the rich world of images and metaphors that pervade the Daodejing. We can briefly note that the word all three translators translate as “spirit” is the ancient word for minor divinities, shen, as in “ghosts and gods,” gueishen, which we commented on in the discussion of the Neiye. Moeller argues that here “spirit” is impersonal and implies “a kind of virtue, strength or power, like, let’s say, the `American That may be true, but the resonance with older ideas of divinity has survived, because the graph shen, even up to the present, has never lost that reference.

  With the term “valley,” we are already in the heart of Daodejing thinking. As Waley puts it, “The valleys, then, are `nearer to Dao’ than the hills; and in the whole of creation it is the negative, passive, `female’ element alone that has access to Dao, which can only be mirrored `in a still pool.-146 It is the lowness of valleys to which the water comes, creating rivers that eventually run into the great water, the sea. And water itself is another central image; as chapter 8 puts it: “Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way.“147 It is the relative formlessness of the valley as compared to the mountains that makes it an effective image.

  Chapter 15 links it to another whole set of related images:

  Thawing ice, uncarved wood, an empty valley, and muddy water are all apparently formless, and, in the eyes of the world, worthless, yet it is through these that the way is attained.

  The metaphors of the Daodejing build up a complex of paradoxes in which what seems weak overcomes what seems strong. Nowhere is this more evident than in the exaltation of the feminine; chapter 61, for instance, asserts: “The female overcomes the male/ by constant stillness.“149 And in chapter 28:

  The baby, like the woman, seems weak but is really strong. Both are closer to the source than the man or the adult, are closer to the root, another metaphor in our first example, chapter 6. The root might seem insignificantdirty, hidden-when compared to the mature plant, but it is the source of the plant’s life, it is the essential; it seems not to be doing anything, yet it does everything.

  There is a debate over whether the Daodejing can be called “quietist,” but the essential point is that in the end what prevails is quiet, not bluster and force. It is in this way that the “negativity” of the Daodejing is to be understood, that is, its identification of the Dao with “Nothing”: it is from Nothing that Something comes:

  And it is in this context that we must understand wuwei in the Daodejing. The first line of chapter 37: “The Dao does nothing (wuwei), and nothing remains undone,” or, more literally, “Nothing doing; nothing not done.”

  Michael LaFargue is the one scholar who has tried to give a social context for the teaching of the Daodejing. He believes that the teaching arose among a group of “shi-idealists,” using the word shi, as we have seen, to designate a group that descended from the lowest rank of the nobility but had come to mean officials, or just educated people, in the Warring States period.152 The idealists among the shi were those concerned with the state of society and with their own moral integrity. Under the harsh conditions of the Warring States, many of the shi, though they were by vocation trained for official service, were unemployed or underemployed and had become disillusioned with the current political situation. They did not turn to rebellion, but they did turn to criticism.

  Whereas Confucians criticized the behavior of the ruling class and tried to convince the rulers of the day to follow the example of the ancient kings, the Daodejing engages in a frontal assault on contemporary cultural assumptions, such as that the high is better than the low, men are superior to women, and so on, assumptions held not only by the ancient Chinese but by most of the world’s cultures. It is this assault, purveyed in vivid metaphors and images of which I have only been able to give a very few, that has appealed to readers for a long time in China and in recent years to readers all over the world.

  Daoist Primitivism

  As we have already seen in the Zhuangzi, the assault on the commonsense understanding of reality was conducive to a sense that things were better in the beginning, when humans lived “the same as birds and beasts,” a horrifying idea for Confucians. This preference for simpler days, which has been called Daoist Primitivism, is nowhere better exemplified than in chapter 53 of the Daodejing:

  Reduce the size and population of the state. Ensure that even though the people have tools of will not use

  Even when they have ships and carts, they will have no use for them; and even when they have armour and weapons, they will have no occasion to make a show of them.

  Bring it about that the people will return to the use of knotted rope [instead of writing],

  Will find relish in their food

  And beauty in their clothes.

  And will be content in their abode

  And happy in the way they live.

  Though adjoining states are within sight of one another, and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.is3

  In what is almost as extreme a rejection of culture as in the Zhuangzi passage, it is clear that the Confucian virtues, “the huffing and puffing about benevolence and righteousness,” as Zhuangzi put it, would come in for the same treatment. Indeed that is the case, as we find in chapter 38:

  Therefore when the way is lost, virtue (de) appears; when virtue is lost, benevolence (ren) appears; when benevolence is lost, propriety (ii) appears; when propriety is lost, ritual (li) appears. Ritual is the husk of loyalty and trustworthiness, the way of calamity.154

  It would seem that the Daoist rejection of conventional beliefs and complex culture includes a rejection of the normative order as well, because in the ideal Daoist society everything operates “without doing” (wuwei) or, like the Dao, “by itself” (ziran). Things will “naturally” run well without the need of interference, and the ideal ruler will rule by not ruling. One might argue that there is indeed a Daoist moral order, even a feminist moral order, of gentleness and yielding in place of aggression and interference, but gentleness in the end is not recommended because it is good or right but because it “works.” D. C. Lau, in his introduction to his translation of the Daodejing, suggests that the book is best interpreted as a “survival manual” for harsh times: one should make oneself small and scarce to stay out of trouble.155 At best this is a teaching for “untroubled idlers” or isolated villagers, for those seeking to avoid the society that actually existed, not for its reform. Of course an almost antinomian ethic of the sort the Daodejing implies is perennially attractive, and only contributes to the lasting popularity of the text.

  Heiner Roetz, however, offers an interesting interpretation in terms of Kohlberg’s scheme
with which he evaluates early Chinese thought. Though I find his interpretation in many ways problematic and at best suggestive, it is still worth considering. Roetz argues that Daoism as represented by the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing firmly rejected “conventional morality” (Kohlberg’s stages 3 and 4), but did not securely reach “postconventional morality,” as represented in stages 5 and 6. Instead, it could be said to have attained a stage 41/2, which he describes, following Kohlberg, as:

  The stage of “anything goes,” the phase of youthful protest. What is right is a question of arbitrary subjective decision. This stage is characterized by a radical rejection of the alienated conventionalism of Level B [conventional morality] and the recourse to the naive pleasure principle of Level A [preconventional morality]. Instead of new normative rules, this stage proclaims a provocative “beyond good and evil.” It is postconventional but not yet principled.156

  In applying this idea, he says that the “Zhou Daoists”

  can be interpreted as exemplary representations of Kohlberg’s Stage 41/2. The gesture of exposing moralism, the nonconformist symbolism … the rejection of conventional compulsion and the emphasis on individual life-all this fits well with the stage of youthful protest … More than any other school, the Daoists personify the adolescent crisis in Chinese society … And even if today the unembarrassed frankness of the Daoists, much more than the sedate earnestness of most Confucians, appeals to us, it is probably because it evokes reminiscences of the naive spontaneity of childhood.157

  Roetz does give credit to one aspect of Daoist ethics, not the least important today: “Daoist naturalism undoubtedly contains the idea of universalism. That this universalism is not discursively mediated has one advantage: not solely the members of the linguistic community, but everything belonging to nature, also that which cannot speak, a priori falls within its range. Ethics is macroethics from the beginning.“58 But it is the very “naturalism” of Daoist thought, its emphasis on the Dao as “inactive” (wuwei) and nature as everything happening “by itself” (ziran) that disables Daoism from telling us how to act, even though it tells us a lot about how not to act. If in nature everything is perfect as it is, then returning to nature is all we have to do. Among other things there is a remarkable absence in Daoist thought of the dark side of nature, of the fact that aggression and dominance are as natural as their opposites. In these ways Daoism is postconventional, but offers us no postconventional ethic.

  The Politics of the Dao

  The Zhuangzi and the Daodejing contain some of the most biting social criticism in any early Chinese text. Book 10 of the Zhuangzi says, “He who steals a belt buckle is put to death, but he who steals a country becomes a feudal lord.“159 The Daodejing says, “The people are hungry because those above eat up too much in taxes; this is why the people are Along the same lines chapter 53 says:

  Both the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing are well aware of the cost of warfare to ordinary people:

  Sharp as these criticisms are, they do not lead to any proposals of reform. Rather, these bad conditions are merely symptoms of how far society has fallen from its original form.

  In the light of these criticisms of the rulers of the warring states, it is not only a shock but rather strange to learn that there was a relationship between Daoism and Legalism from the earliest What could be more manipulative and domineering than the technology of tyranny that the Legalists developed? Legalism consists largely of recipes for enhancing political and military power, but without any moral foundation. At best, in a bad scene, the Legalists (Arthur Waley called them could say that tyranny is better than anarchy. Yet when the Legalists did toy with the idea of an overarching cosmology, it was always Daoism to which they were attracted. Why?

  First, just a word about Legalism, to which I have referred, but which I have not defined. As usual in early Chinese thought, the term “Legalism” covers a number of thinkers and texts that differ between themselves. As Burton Watson puts it, Legalist texts belong to a genre of technical literature that is only marginally philosophical. They are instruction manuals along with “treatises on divination, medicine, agriculture, logic, military science, and so forth.“165 In terms of the axial problem, Legalism is certainly an example of a rather advanced rationalism-as Benjamin Schwartz says, “instrumental rationalism” in the Weberian sense, oriented to “the enrichment of the state and the strengthening of its military capacity,” as one Legalist put it.166 Schwartz argues that one early legalist, Shen Buhai, developed a theory of bureaucracy, and that “the emergence of a `theory’ of bureaucracy is a most significant event in the world history of sociopolitical The late Warring States figure Han Fei, whose work, the Hanfeizi, summed up the Legalist teaching, remained, in spite of protests against his immorality, of perennial interest to later generations.168

  The teaching that gives the school its name was its emphasis on law, on rewards and punishment, but especially punishments, as the key to effective government. This emphasis put the Legalists at odds with the Confucians, who believed that rule by punishments was a symptom of the failure of rule by virtuous example, and, one would have thought, at odds with Daoists as well. Legalist teaching was entirely oriented to the ruler and consisted largely of advice as to how a ruler could obtain and increase power. It is this narrow focus that makes Legalism marginal in this chapter, and it is the link to Daoism that explains why a discussion of it occurs only at the end of the discussion of Daoism.

  No one has put more succinctly the parallels between Daoism and what he calls Realism than Arthur Waley:

  With Daoism Realism has a very real and close connection. Both doctrines reject the appeal to tradition, to the `way of the Former Kings,’ upon which the whole curriculum of the Confucians was based … Both condemn book learning and would have the people kept “dull and stupid,” incurious of all that lies beyond their own village and home. Even the mystical doctrine of wu-wei, the Non-activity of the ruler by which everything is activated, finds a non-mystical counterpart in Realism. When every requirement of the ruler has been embodied in law and the penalties for disobedience have been made so heavy that no one dares to incur them, the Realist ruler can sink deep into his cushions and enjoy himself; “everything” (just as in Daoism) “will happen of its own accord.“169

  Waley goes on to point out that major Legalist/Realist texts, such as the Hanfeizi, often use Daoist imagery and, though very critical of other schools, especially the Confucians, seldom have anything negative to say about the Daoists. For an example of Legalist Daoism, we might look at a couple of passages from the “Wielding Power” chapter of the Hanfeizi:

  Do not let your power be seen; be blank and actionless. Government reaches to the four quarters, but its source is in the center. The sage holds to the source, and the four quarters come to serve him. In emptiness he awaits them, and they come to serve him as needed.

  And again:

  This is the way to listen to the words of others: Be silent as in a drunken stupor. Say to your self. Lips! Teeth! Do not be the first to move … If you show delight, your troubles will multiply; if you show hatred, resentment will be born. Therefore discard both delight and hatred, and with an empty mind become the abode of the Way.170

  The third chapter of the Daodejing would seem to be all too compatible with Legalism:

  Therefore in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones. He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire, and ensures that the clever never dare to act.

  Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.‘7’

  It seems that what links Daoism and Legalism is an opposition to moralism; the danger is that together they reject morality. Into the vacuum of Daoist Primitivism comes the centralized power of the Legalist state. And the Legalists have their own explanation of why government by virtue no longer works. In ancient times people were few and resources plentiful; today people are many an
d resources few. What required little government then requires harsh punishments today:

  Hence, when men of ancient times made light of material goods, it was not because they were benevolent, but because there was a surplus of goods; and when men quarrel and snatch today, it is not because they are vicious, but because goods have become scarce …

  When the sage rules, he takes into consideration the quantity of things and deliberates on scarcity and plenty. Though his punishments may be light, this is not due to his compassion; though his penalties may be severe, this is not because he is cruel, he simply follows the custom appropriate to the time. Circumstances change according to the age, and ways of dealing with them change with the circumstances. 172

  It is in this way that the Legalists opposed the Confucian use of the old to criticize the present, and preferred a “Daoist” responsiveness, leavened by a little economic determinism, instead.

  But the third type of Daoism, the Syncretist, mentioned early in this section, did not consist of a union of Daoism and Legalism. The rapid collapse of the Qin dynasty after its remarkable unification of the whole country, forever tainted that ideological option. Somehow a moral basis of rule was necessary after all, and though Han Syncretism included Daoism and Legalism to be sure, Confucianism now became an essential and increasingly dominant element, as is already evident in the early Han Syncretist work, Huainanzi.173