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

by Robert N. Bellah

  That said, let me see what conclusions I can draw about axial-age China. I have emphasized and perhaps overly reified “Confucianism,” a move not popular today when we are enjoined to look at the marginal and the peripheral. I have not ignored other tendencies in Chinese thought, even some fairly peripheral ones such as the Farmers’ School, but I have focused on Confucianism, not only because it would have the greatest influence on later Chinese culture, but because it illustrates most clearly the axial transition in ancient China.228 In the discussion of how we are to define the axial transition, some idea of “transcendence” has frequently been put forward. Benjamin Schwartz, more than anyone else, has argued that there was a transcendental breakthrough in China and that it occurred in Confucianism as well as in other Warring States schools of thought. It would be well to remember Schwartz’s definition of transcendence in this context: “The word ‘transcendence’ is a word heavy with accumulated meanings, some of them very technical in the philosophic sense. What I refer to here is something close to the etymological meaning of the word-a kind of standing back and looking beyond-a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies It is true that Schwartz also argued for a more substantive kind of transcendence in China, namely a religious transcendence associated particularly with the idea of Heaven (Tian), and that he was not convinced by the notion that Heaven in later Confucianism had lost all religious meaning and had become just another word for “nature.” He insisted, as we have noted earlier, that the contrast between a naturalistic and a theistic interpretation of Heaven in early Chinese thought is “an antithesis which we impose on the text.“230 I have not been impressed by those like Mark Elvin who have argued the contrary view.231 I think the treatment of the major Warring States Confucian texts in this chapter sufficiently illustrates why I think transcendence in axial-age China, in both its formal (as in Schwartz’s definition above) and substantive-that is, religious-senses, can be found in Confucianism. I also have tried to show why the major nonConfucian tendencies, although in many ways meeting the definition of axial thought, failed to develop coherent axial cultural systems capable of exerting critical pressure on all subsequent Chinese society and culture to the same degree that Confucianism did.

  Nonetheless one must still come to terms with Max Weber’s extraordinarily brilliant and influential study of the religious ethic of China, in which he emphasized this-worldly immanence and the absence of a tension between the transcendental and mundane worlds that he thought characterized Chinese culture in general and Confucianism in particular.232 Although Schwartz’s case for transcendence in ancient China has been widely, but not universally, accepted, there has been a tendency to see ancient China, and again Confucianism in particular, as “this-worldly,” in a sense bringing it closer to Greece than to the “otherworldly” cases of Israel and India.

  Although I think the case for China as illustrating “this-worldly transcendentalism” is a strong one, it is one I would want to qualify somewhat, even with respect to Confucianism. The case for this-worldliness in Confucianism rests on the idea that if there is a notion of “salvation” in Confucianism, it is a political one: salvation will be realized in the political realm just as it once was realized in the political realm of the ancient Sage Kings. Certainly my discussion of the apocalyptic element in Mencius’s thought, the idea that the realization of the Dao in the reign of a new sage king might be imminent, suggests the validity of this idea. Yet in Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi there is an ideal of human self-cultivation leading to an identification with an ultimate moral order, with the Dao and the will of Heaven, that is available to individuals, however grim the social situation and however much they may seem to have “failed” to bring good order to society. This idea, too, could be seen as “this-worldly,” and there was surely no emphasis on life after death or reward in any future rebirth, but it was a powerfully religious ideal that was quite independent of any worldly reward except a good conscience. A quasi-religious faith such as Communism depended entirely on the realization of a new, ideal, political order, and it withered away when its thisworldly utopia failed to appear. If Confucianism had depended entirely on a political form of salvation, it might have met the same fate; surely its powerful personal faith in transcendent morality at whatever cost is what allowed it to survive political failure time and time again.

  Nowhere was the failure more evident than at the time of the unification of the empire by the victorious armies of Qin in 221 BCE. Not the Sage King that Mencius had expected, but the exact opposite, the kind of tyrant most feared by Confucians, brought the unification about. The unifier of China, Qin Shihuangdi, was under the influence of Legalist teaching, and he ordered that Confucian books be burned and Confucian scholars buried alive.233 As his prime minister, Li Si, who was responsible for this policy and for much else that brought the Qin to universal power, put it, “Anyone referring to the past to criticize the present should, with all the members of his family, be put to death.“23`*

  Li Si, as noted above, had been a student of Xunzi’s, but when he chided his former teacher for relying on humaneness and righteousness when what counted was a strong army and expedient policies, Xunzi replied that such a view was shortsighted and such a regime could not last long.235 As it turned out, Li Si was executed in 208 BCE as a result of factional conflicts after the death of the First Emperor; his execution was carried out by having him literally cut in half. Xunzi’s prediction had been right: the ruthlessness of the Qin dynasty guaranteed that it would last only a few years. All succeeding Chinese dynasties, however, until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, were caught in the tension between an essential element of Confucian legitimation and Legalist domination, and we can hardly say that that tension is over. We might remember that Mao Zedong was a great admirer of Qin Shihuangdi!

  Confucianism’s lasting influence in the political realm was its ability to uphold a normative standard with which to judge existing reality, and never to compromise that standard completely. What Qin Shihuangdi (r. 221- 210) tried to do, and a powerful Han emperor, Han Wudi (r. 140-87 BCE), imitated him in the attempt, was to make himself divine and immortal, with the help of fangshi (specialists in invoking the spirits and aiding the attainment of immortality). Michael Puett has described the process: “The QinHan sacrificial system involved a radically new approach. The goal was for the ruler to contact personally as many divine powers as possible in order to obtain their power … to become a Di [god] and to exercise direct power over the world of forms. In short, ideologically the empires under the First Emperor and Emperor Wu functioned as a celestial imperium, with the rulers as the organizing thearchs.“236 Even the Shang monarchs had not claimed to be divine, though, as ancestors, they would be worshipped after their death. The emergence of divine kingship at this point in Chinese history shows it as a structural possibility at any point in time, even though it is identified primarily with archaic civilizations. In the cases at hand, the function is clear. It involved an “end run” around the Confucians: if the emperors were divine, how could Confucians hold them up to the judgment of Heaven? By the end of Western Han (late first century BCE) the Confucians had reasserted themselves and reinstated what they understood to be the traditional sacrificial system. As Puett describes it: “In this new system, it is humans who create the center by establishing a capital and then properly aligning Heaven and Earth. This involves neither the theomorphic will to align the cosmos nor an attempt to become a spirit in accord with the patterns of the universe. Rather, it supports a hierarchy of Heaven and man; humans create the center of the cosmos, and Heaven judges man’s success.“237 Never again would the systems of self-divination of Qin Shihuangdi and Han Wudi be revived. The “traditional” system would continue through all subsequent dynasties. Needless to say, it would be the Confucians who would decide the degree to which the rulers were conforming to Heaven’s mandate. The axial separation between earthly rule and divine sanction was secur
ed.

  S. N. Eisenstadt has emphasized the deeper meaning of Chinese thisworldly transcendentalism and the sense in which it is always sociopolitical and personal:

  [The Chinese] mode of overcoming the tension between the transcendental and the mundane order, especially as it developed in neoConfucianism but the roots of which exist also in the earlier, classical Confucianism, emphasized very strongly the non-traditionalistic, reflexive definition of the nature of the cosmic order and of human existence. This definition contains within itself a continuous principled awareness of the tension between the cosmic ideal and any given reality; the imperfectability of the mundane order in general and the political one in particular; its only partial legitimation in terms of the basic cosmic harmony, and the great personal tensions involved both in the attempts to maintain such harmony through proper conduct and atti rude, which necessitates a very stringent and reflexive self-discipline, as well as in the development of a critical attitude to the existing mundane world in general and political order in

  Eisenstadt is, in this passage, correcting Weber’s sense of Confucianism as only “adapting” to the world. Weber’s notion of Confucianism was not without some basis in the ideology that was established in imperial times. Mark Csikszentmihalyi quotes the Warring States text Guoyu (Discourses of the States) as saying, “Serve one’s lord with reverence, serve one’s father with piety,” a sentiment endlessly repeated down through Chinese, indeed through all East Asian, history for millennia.239 But Xunzi’s firm injunction-“Follow the Dao and not the ruler, follow justice and not the father”-was never entirely forgotten. Theodore de Bary has given examples of Confucians who followed Xunzi’s injunction-particularly about questioning the ruler; it was much harder for Confucians to imagine disobeying a parent-throughout Chinese history.240

  Simon Leys comments on Confucius’s original move to reinterpret the notion of the junzi, literally, the lord’s son, usually translated “gentleman,” from the designation of a hereditary elite to the designation of a moral elite:

  This view was to have revolutionary consequences: it was the single most devastating ideological blow that furthered the destruction of the feudal system and sapped the power of the hereditary aristocracy, and it led eventually to the establishment of the bureaucratic empire-the government of the scholars. For more than two thousand years, the empire was to be ruled by the intellectual elite; to gain access to political power, one had to compete successfully in the civil service examinations, which were open to all. Until modern times, this was certainly the most open, flexible, fair, and sophisticated system of government known in history (it is the very system which was to impress and inspire the European philosophes of the eighteenth century).24’

  Leys is already projecting well beyond the period with which this chapter is concerned, but given Weber’s enormously influential analysis of China as a stagnant, traditional society, it is perhaps well to point out that such was not the heritage of the axial age to later Chinese history.

  Heiner Roetz, whose work, in spite of my problems with some of it, has been enormously suggestive for me in writing this chapter, has insisted on ethical universalism as a measure of the successful axial transition in Warring States China, and I think he is right in so doing.242 Far from adapting to the world, these great early Confucians stood against the currents of their time, giving examples that would long survive them. At the end of the text of Xunzi, in Knoblock’s translation, there is a “Eulogy,” whose provenance Knoblock does not give. Nonetheless, some excerpts from this eulogy, with its description of what it meant to be a true junzi, can stand as a fitting conclusion to this chapter:

  Those who offer persuasions say: Xun Qing was not the equal of Confucius. This is not so. Xun Qing was oppressed by a chaotic age and lived under the intimidating threat of stern punishments. On the one hand there were no worthy rulers, and on the other hand he faced the aggression of Qin. Ritual and moral principles were not observed. The transforming effects of teaching were not brought to completion. The humane were degraded and under constraint. The whole world was lost in darkness. Conduct that strove after completeness was ridiculed and derided. The feudal lords engaged in the greatest of subversions …

  Nonetheless, Xun Qing cherished in his heart the mind of a great sage, which had to be concealed under the pretense of madness and presented to the world as stupidity… This is why his fame and reputation are not plainly evident, why his followers are not legion, and why his glory and brilliance are not widely known.

  Students of today can obtain the transmitted doctrines and remaining teachings of Xun Qing in sufficient detail to serve as a model and pattern, the paradigm and gnomon, that establish the standard of the whole world. His presence had the effect like that of a spirit, and wherever he passed by he produced transformation. If one closely inspects his good works, one could see that even Confucius did not surpass him.2443

  Moving though this tribute is, we need not decide the question of who surpassed whom. In the end it was the teaching of Confucius, developed and elaborated by Mencius and Xunzi, and by many more Confucians in later years, that proved to be the most enduring and influential strand in the Chinese tradition from early times virtually to the present.

  It is with more than a little trepidation that I begin this chapter on India in the axial age. Of the four axial chapters, this is the one for which I was least prepared and had furthest to go with my research. In the case of ancient Israel, Greece, and China I had read the major primary texts in translation for most of my adult life and was aware of the major secondary literature. In preparing for those chapters I had to review much that I thought I knew and, in particular, do a lot of reading in recent secondary literature to be, so far as possible in this kind of comprehensive book, up to date with current thinking. I started each of those chapters with what one might call graduate student competence. But with respect to India I have started at the freshman level, without a knowledge of the major texts in translation or the major secondary works either.’

  In addition to the amount of elementary work I had to do to prepare for this chapter, there were difficulties I found with respect to the Indian case relative to the three others. There are a great number of texts from first millennium BCE India, as large as or larger than those from any of the other three cases.2 Furthermore, the most important of them were transmitted orally and continued to be transmitted orally long after written Sanskrit appeared. In any case, evidence for writing does not date from before the third century BCE, and the first reliable dates begin with the inscriptions of Asoka, who reigned from 273 to 232. The earliest text, the Rgveda, is variously dated from many thousands of years BCE to the late centuries of the second millennium BCE, the latter being more reasonable. But most Sanskrit texts, oral or written only in relatively recent times, can be dated only on grounds of linguistic age (and occasional internal evidence) to tell which is older than which.3 Richard Lariviere calls this system of dating “a chronological house of cards,” because if there is a mistake in the dating of one text, the whole system is in danger of collapsing.`

  It is even problematic whether we can speak of “texts” for speech that was orally transmitted. Behind the written texts of the other three axial cases there was, to be sure, an oral tradition, and a great deal of work has been done trying to figure out exactly how it worked. Homer is the obvious example, but in Israel and China too there is evidence of oral transmission behind the texts that have come down to us. In every case, detailed arguments about the oral traditions have been contested, because, by the nature of the case, inference is all we have. Milman Parry carried out field work in Yugoslavia in the 1930s studying traditional Serbo-Croat oral poetry.’ He argued that various techniques still in use at that time by Serbo-Croat bards, involving mnemonic devices and type phrases to fill out metrical lines, were also to be found in Homer, thus helping us understand its underlying oral basis. But one of the things Parry discovered, and in this what he found is similar to
oral traditions all over the world, is that when a bard says he is “exactly repeating” a poem-even one of his that was previously recorded-he is in fact creating a new one, with structural resemblances to previous versions, but not exact verbal

  What makes the Indian case unique is the claim, generally believed by Indologists, that the oral transmission of these early texts is exact, word for word, even to the accents involved. What makes this believable is that the oral transmission continues to this day and seems to be accurate to the smallest detail, more accurate than the printed texts or the relatively late manuscripts that lie behind them. Thus the Indic development of what has been called hyperorality, a complex system of cross-checking for verbal accuracy, turns out to be a unique kind of oral technology that is the functional equivalent of writing. Given that in all the great traditions even written texts were often memorized and transmitted orally, with the written texts used only as prompts to memory, we must consider that we are everywhere dealing with speech as much as writing. The Indian case, however, is unique in its emphasis on orality.7 The most sacred texts, especially the Vedas, were actually prohibited from being written-only oral transmission was considered authentic-and were probably not written until at least the middle of the first millennium CE.8

  In addition to these “textual” problems there is a great deal of argument, one could say intense controversy, over early Indic history, particularly the role of the “Aryans” in it. We should note that the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples who entered northwest India in the second millennium BCE did indeed call themselves Arya (which originally meant “hospitable,” but came to mean “noble” or “honorable,” the source of our word “Aryan”); the term gained its more general and unsavory implications only in recent times. Our earliest texts are, to be sure, in an archaic form of Sanskrit, which is an IndoIranian language, closely related to Avestan Persian, and part of the IndoEuropean language family. Colonialist scholars tended to see in early India an Aryan invasion across the passes of the northwest, with hordes of chariotriding Aryan warriors descending on and defeating the aboriginal inhabitants, whom they subordinated as a class of serfs while imposing their language and culture on them. Indian nationalism in the twentieth century created a counternarrative in which the whole Indo-European language family arose in India and then spilled out into Iran, Central Asia, and eventually Europe. Although this theory has little to recommend it, running counter to the entire known history of India, which has for millennia seen the incursion of one people after another from Afghanistan or Central Asia over the northwest passes, it has contributed to a rethinking of the “Aryan conquest” hypothesis.