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

by Robert N. Bellah

  140. Ibid., 7.

  141. D. C. Lau, trans., Tao Te Ching (New York: Penguin, 1963), 62.

  142. Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), 149.

  143. Ibid., 56-57.

  144. Lau, Tao Te Ching, 44.

  145. Moeller, Philosophy of the Daodejing, 7.

  146. Waley, The Way, 57.

  147. Lau, Tao Te Ching, 64.

  148. Ibid., 71.

  149. Moeller, Philosophy of the Daodejing, 22.

  150. Lau, Tao Te Ching, 85. I have altered lines 3 and 4 in accordance with Moeller’s translation in Philosophy of the Daodejing, 21.

  151. Lau, Tao Te Ching, chap. 40, p. 101.

  152. Michael LaFargue, Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Daodejing (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 118-122.

  153. Lau, Tao Te Ching, 142.

  154. Pines translation, Foundations of Confucian Thought, 89.

  155. Lau, Tao Te Ching, esp. 29-30, 41-42.

  156. Roetz, Confucian Ethics, 27.

  157. Ibid., 257. I have found the work of Hans-Georg Moeller, both his Daoism Explained and his Philosophy of the Daodejing, to be extraordinarily helpful: no one that I have read has opened up the depths of the images in these texts and the rich network of meanings between them as well as he has. But when, at the end of The Philosophy of the Daodejing, he develops, with the help of Michel Foucault, a nonhumanist or post-humanist philosophy as a counterpart to his interpretation of Daoism as a prehumanist philosophy, it seems to me he merely ends up in Kohlberg’s stage 41/2.

  158. Ibid., 255.

  159. Translation from Roetz, Confucian Ethics, 253.

  160. Chap. 75, in Philip J. Ivanhoe, trans., The Daodejing of Laozi (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002), 78.

  161. Ibid., 30.

  162. Chap. 30, Lau, Tao Te Ching, 88.

  163. It is interesting that, in his magisterial overview of early Chinese philosophy, David Nivison devotes one section to “Han Feizi, Laozi, Legalism, and Daoism.” Nivison, “The Classical Philosophical Writings,” 799-808.

  164. Arthur Waley, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939), 199ff.

  165. Burton Watson, Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 14.

  166. Schwartz, World of Thought, 328.

  167. Ibid., 336.

  168. See Burton Watson’s translation of selections from the Hanfeizi, containing a brief biography of this interesting and tragic figure. Han Fei Tzu, 2-3.

  169. Waley, Three Ways, 202-203.

  170. These passages are as modified by Nivison in “The Classical Philosophical Writings,” 801, from Watson’s Han Fei Tzu, 35, 38.

  171. Lau, Tao Te Ching, 59.

  172. Watson, Han Fei Tzu, 98-99.

  173. See the translation of the Huainanzi chapter on rulership in Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983). Paul Goldin argues that the Huainanzi was not syncretist in the sense usually assumed, but borrowed from various schools to support a singularly authoritarian form of government that was certainly not Confucian. See Paul R. Goldin, “Insidious Syncretism in the Political Philosophy of Huainanzi,” in After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 90-111.

  174. Schwartz, World of Thought, 285.

  175. Lau, Mencius, 1A6, 53-54, modified with the help of Schwartz’s translation of part of this passage, World of Thought, 282.

  176. Lau, Mencius, 2B13, 94, as modified.

  177. Schwartz, World of Thought, 284.

  178. 7A21, translation from Roetz, Confucian Ethics, 86, as modified.

  179. Lau, Mencius, 6A7, 164.

  180. Ibid., IA7, 58.

  181. Lau, Mencius, 1A4, 52.

  182. Ibid., 4A14, 124.

  183. Ibid., 1B8, 68.

  184. Ibid., 7B14, 196, as modified.

  185. Ibid., 5B7, 157. Brooks and Brooks, in The Original Analects, 285, argue that Zisi could not have been Confucius’s grandson, though he was a successor in his family line.

  186. Lau, Mencius, 5A5, 144.

  187. For an excellent discussion of human nature in Mencius, see A. C. Graham, “The Background of the Mencian Theory of Human Nature,” in Studies in Chinese Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 7-66. See also Kwong-Loi Shun, Mencius and Early Chinese Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 180-231.

  188. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 123ff. For those interested in the controversy over human nature, this would be a good place to begin.

  189. Lau, Mencius, 2A6, 82.

  190. I. A. Richards, in his Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (London: Kegan Paul, 1932), 80, notes, “We have reason to suppose that Mencius’ pronouncements ought probably to be read more as injunctions than as statements,” thus pointing out their performative intent, without necessarily denying them theoretical validity.

  191. There is a short passage, Mencius 4B12, in Lau, Mencius, 130, that reads: “Mencius said, `A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe.”’ Here Mencius uses the common Daoist symbol of the baby, but perhaps with the emphasis on the moral potential of the baby rather than its premoral power.

  192. D. C. Lau argues that Mencius is “more truly a mystic” than Laozi or Zhuangzi because “not only does he believe that a man can attain oneness with the universe by perfecting his own moral nature, but he has absolute faith in the moral purpose of the universe.” Mencius, 46.

  193. Ibid., 2A2, 77-78.

  194. Benjamin Schwartz reminds us that this very contrast between a naturalistic and a theistic interpretation of Heaven is “an antithesis which we impose on the text.” World of Thought, 289. In general Schwartz’s discussion of the religious dimension of early Chinese thought is particularly judicious.

  195. Lau, Mencius, 7A1, 182, as modified.

  196. Waley, Three Ways, 116-117. This passage was read at Waley’s funeral.

  197. Nivison, “The Classical Philosophical Writings,” 791; Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 237. John Knoblock goes so far as to say, “The domain of knowledge traversed by Xunzi’s thought exceeds that of any other ancient Chinese thinker and bears comparison only with Aristotle in the West.” Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 3 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), vii.

  198. John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 168.

  199. Ibid., 168.

  200. Burton Watson, Hsiin Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 37.

  201. The best treatment of this issue in Xunzi that I have come across is Paul Rakita Goldin, Rituals of the Way (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 1-13, 72-81.

  202. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 253.

  203. Nivison, “The Classical Philosophical Writings,” 792. Italics in original.

  204. Knoblock, Xunzi, bk. 21, 3:107; Watson, Hsun Tzu, 131-132.

  205. Knoblock, Xunzi, bk. 23, 3:166-167.

  206. Knoblock’s translation, Xunzi, 3:14-22. Watson translates the title as “A Discussion of Heaven.”

  207. Xunzi, bk. 17; Watson, trans. Hsiin Tzu, 80-81. Robert Eno, in The Confucian Creation of Heaven, has a judicious discussion of the various meanings of Tian in Xunzi, and insists that they span the gamut between naturalism and theism. See chap. 6, “Ritual as a Natural Art: The Role of T’ien in the Hsun Tzu,” 131-169.

  208. Xunzi, bk. 9, translation from Nivison, “The Classical Philosophical Writings,” 796, adapted from Watson, Hsiin Tzu, 45.

  209. Xunzi, bk. 4, translation from Roetz, Confucian Ethics, 173.

  210. Ibid., bk. 21, 159-160, as modified with the help of Watson, Hsun Tzu, 129.

  211. Translation from Goldin, Rituals, 73. Compare Xunzi, bk. 19, in Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:61.

  212. Xunzi, bk. 29, translation from Roetz, Confucian Ethics,
64-65. Compare Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:251-252. Knoblock translates the title of book 29 as “On the Way of Sons.” The whole of this short book is remarkable. Some have held that this book and other late ones were appended by disciples, but Knoblock believes they were teaching texts of Confucian traditions that Xunzi used with his own students.

  213. One can imagine Yamazaki Ansai’s hair standing on end if he ever read this statement. Ansai was the founder of absolutist Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan, and, according to Herman Ooms, “erased” any notion in the Confucian tradition that a superior could be disobeyed. See Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570-1680 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 247.

  214. Xunzi, bk. 2, translation from Roetz, Confucian Ethics, 223, modified with the help of Watson, Hsun Tzu, 24. Compare Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 151. Roetz points out the parallel with Aristotle’s statement that he loves his teacher (Plato) but he loves truth more.

  215. Robert F. Campany compares Xunzi’s theory of ritual with that of Durkheim, finding it equally sophisticated, and with many parallels. See his “Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual,” in Discourse and Practice, ed. Frank Reynolds and David Tracy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 197-231.

  216. Xunzi, bk. 19, in Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:55.

  217. Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:60.

  218. Goldin, Rituals of the Way, 73.

  219. Ibid., 105.

  220. Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:61.

  221. Ibid., 3:72.

  222. Ibid., bk. 20, 3:80.

  223. Heiner Roetz argues that Xunzi’s rejection of our nature as the source of our better feelings is more a rejection of the Daoists than of Mencius. “To make nature a norm not only destroys morality. It is treason to man himself, who is thrown back into the animal kingdom where he, contrary to the assertion of the Daoist utopia, cannot survive.” Confucian Ethics, 223.

  224. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 37. Compare Knoblock, Xunzi, 1:136.

  225. A. C. Graham, “Being in Western Philosophy Compared with shin/fei and yu/wu in Chinese Philosophy,” Asia Major 8, no. 2 (1961), as reprinted in Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy, 359.

  226. Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:viii.

  227. In the early 1950s I began a Ph.D. program specially created for me in sociology and what was then called at Harvard “Far Eastern Languages.” Even though I was intending to specialize in the study of Japan, I was required to study Chinese, and I took a semester of classical Chinese in which I read selections of the original texts of the Analects and the Mencius. In my dissertation on religion in the Tokugawa period I took as a case study an eighteenth-century Japanese religious-ethical movement called Shingaku (Ch. Xinxue, “heart learning”), and translated as an appendix a short work, the Ishida Sensei Jiseki, put together by the disciples of the founder of the movement, Ishida Baigan, composed of short anecdotes and brief dialogues with his students, obviously following the pattern of the Analects. (See Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion [Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957], appendix 1, “A Memoir of Our Teacher, Ishida,” 199-216. When, in 2000, I was invited by the remaining followers of Shingaku to speak in Kyoto at a commemoration of the founding of the movement, they asked me if they could translate the appendix. But, I said, it is in Japanese. However, they replied, we cannot read it, but we can read your English translation. Premodern Japanese, even as late as the eighteenth century, cannot be read by educated Japanese unless they are specialists.) Baigan was, among other things, a Confucian, and a great admirer of Mencius along with several neo-Confucian thinkers. I had to work hard at translating his many references to Chinese thought. I might also note that Benjamin Schwartz was one of my teachers and Weiming Tu was one of my first graduate students, and later a colleague at Berkeley. None of this makes me a specialist in ancient Chinese thought. It does, however, make it easier for me to follow translations when I have the Chinese text in hand.

  228. I do want to avoid “essentialism” with respect to either Chinese culture or Confucianism. Chinese culture, like all cultures, is complex and diverse; we could well speak of Confucianisms rather than of Confucianism-I have tried to suggest the differences between even the major figures who have most powerfully shaped the tradition. Mark Csikszentmihalyi has reminded us that Confucianism refers to a number of related phenomena: for purposes of this chapter, the school, or rather schools, who transmitted the Classics, that is Ruists, with an interpretation deriving from Confucius but different depending on different teacher-student lineages, is most important, but the term also has been used to denote a variety of political ideologies, bureaucratic status ethics, and familial practices. See Mark Csikszentmihalyi, “Confucianism,” in Gods Rule: The Politics of the World Religions, ed. Jacob Neusner (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 213-214. But even in denoting the range of meanings of Confucianism, one is struck by how many of them apply to central tendencies of premodern Chinese culture generally, including the many tensions and conflicts within it.

  229. Benjamin Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” in Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C., special issue, Daedalus 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 3.

  230. Schwartz, World of Thought, 289.

  231. See his singularly obtuse essay “Was There a Transcendental Breakthrough in China?” in The Origin and Diversity ofAxialAge Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 325-359. I admire Elvin’s work on Chinese economic and ecological history, which is his primary interest.

  232. Max Weber, “Konfuzianismus undTaoismus,” in GesammelteAufsatze zur Religionssoziologie (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1921), 1:276-536. Translated into English by Hans Gerth as The Religion of China (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951).

  233. Because what we know of the Qin dynasty comes from writers in the following Han dynasty who had a strong motive to blacken its reputation, we don’t really know how many books were burned or scholars killed, if any. That Qin Shihuangdi, under the influence of Li Si, attempted to suppress critical thought seems, however, to be certain.

  234. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 372.

  235. Schwartz, World of Thought, 320.

  236. Puett, To Become a God, 245. Paul Goldin has given a similar description of the regime of Qin Shihuangdi as Li Si saw it: “Any institution whose authority did not derive directly from the emperor inherently challenged the foundations of the empire and had to be destroyed. Philosophers and teachers, who routinely appealed to traditions, scriptures, and august precedents, would have constituted a conspicuous example of what Li Si feared most. The Qin empire was not merely an empire; it was a unified cosmos with a proper cosmology. The ruler of the cosmos, similarly, was not merely an emperor or great king; he was the center of the cosmos, the prime mover of all order and logic.” See “Li Si Chancellor of the Universe,” in Goldin’s After Confucius, 71.

  237. Puett, To Become a God, 312-313.

  238. S. N. Eisenstadt, “This Worldly Transcendentalism and the Structuring of the World-Weber’s `Religion of China’ and the Format of Chinese History and Civilization” (unpublished, 1980), 51. This paper was published in German as “Innerweltliche Transzendenz and die Strukturierung der Welt: Max Webers Studie uber China and die Gestalt der Chinesischen Zivilisation,” in Max Webers Studie fiber Konfuzianismus and Taoismus: Interpretation undKritik, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). A shortened version was published in journal of Developing Societies 1, no. 2 (1985): 168-186.

  239. Csikszentmihalyi, “Confucianism,” 122.

  240. To give just one example where a number of sharply critical Confucians are discussed, see Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  241. Leys, Analects, xxvii. I am sure Leys is aware of the dark side of Chinese history when the government of “the intellectual elite” was unable to control the horrors of despotism. Here I
take him to be emphasizing only the relative benevolence of Chinese rule, given the prevalence of the horrors of despotism in all human history, not least in the modern world.

  242. Roetz puts aside the question of religion in defining what he means by the axial transition in early China (Confucian Ethics, 19-22), something I see no reason to do, and turns to what he calls “a universal heuristic of enlightenment,” which in practice is an adaptation of Kohlberg’s scheme of moral development (26-32). Although I have reservations about Kohlberg as well, Roetz uses his scheme effectively.

  243. Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:269. According to a personal communication from Jeffrey Riegel, the text that Knoblock translated as the “Eulogy” is attached to the end of book 32, “The Questions of Yao,” in the original Chinese text. That is, there is no separation between the “Eulogy” and book 32. Because the former, however, was clearly not written by Xunzi and is quite different in content from the remainder of book 32, and given its content, Knoblock separated the two. There is precedent in Qing discussion of the text for doing so. Although the Qing authorities and Knoblock believed that the text of the “Eulogy” was written quite early-perhaps by an immediate disciple-there is insufficient evidence to establish with certainty the date and authorship of the “Eulogy.” It is assumed that it was included in the original Liu Xiang edition of the text, so it can be no later than the first century BCE.

  9. The Axial Age IV

  1. As a novice, in this chapter I am even more dependent on scholars in the field than I am in the other three axial chapters. Without Michael Witzel’s work on Vedic India and Steven Collins’s work on Theravada Buddhism, this chapter would have been virtually impossible for me to write. Each of them combines philological scholarship of the highest level with sociological imagination, not something to be lightly assumed. In addition I am grateful to Witzel for detailed comments and corrections on the first two-thirds of the chapter.