None of what we are looking at should be considered “Chinese” views as opposed to “Western” ones, any more than we are dealing with traditional ideas as opposed to modern ones. As we explore these concepts, we will see that not only have people been debating how best to organize the world since long before the modern era but also that there are true alternatives in thinking about how to live well.
Myth: We Know How to Determine the Direction Our Lives Will Take
When it comes to planning for happiness and prosperity in the West, we are taught to rely on our rational minds, confident that we can arrive at a solution by careful calculation. In the face of life’s uncertainty, we take comfort in the belief that by overcoming emotion and bias and reducing our experience to measurable data, we can master chance and defy fate. Consider our most popular approach to moral and ethical dilemmas: inventing a representative hypothetical situation and working through it rationally. In the famous trolley experiment, we’re told to imagine ourselves in a trolley yard, watching a runaway trolley coming down the tracks. We see it’s going to hit five people up on the tracks ahead. But if we pull a switch we can divert the trolley onto a different track, where one person is lying. Do we allow the trolley to plow into those five people, or do we pull the switch to save them—actively choosing to kill the single person lying there?
What’s the right thing to do?
This kind of question has occupied philosophers and ethicists for lifetimes. Countless essays—even a book or two—have been written on its implications. The scenario allows us to reduce decision making to a simple set of data and a single choice. Most of us think that’s how decisions get made.
They tried these thought experiments in classical China, too. But our Chinese thinkers weren’t as intrigued. This is a fine intellectual game, they determined, but you can play these games all day long, and they will have no impact on how you live your ordinary everyday life. None whatsoever.
The way we think we’re living our lives isn’t the way we live them. The way we think we make decisions isn’t how we make them. Even if you did find yourself in that trolley yard someday, about to see someone killed by an oncoming trolley, your response would have nothing to do with rational calculation. Our emotions and instincts take over in these situations, and they guide our less spontaneous decisions as well, even when we think we’re being very deliberate and rational: What should I have for dinner? Where should I live? Whom should I marry?
Seeing the limitations of this approach, these Chinese philosophers went in search of alternatives. The answer, for them, lay in honing our instincts, training our emotions, and engaging in a constant process of self-cultivation so that eventually—at moments both crucial and mundane—we would react in the right, ethical way to each particular situation. Through those responses, we elicit positive responses in those around us. These thinkers taught that in this way, every encounter and experience offers a chance to actively create a new and better world.
Myth: The Truth of Who We Are Lies Within Us
The breakdown of old aristocratic religious institutions left the people of the Axial Age in search of new sources of truth and meaning. Similarly, in our own age, we feel we have broken free of older, confining ways of thinking and are looking for new sources of meaning. Increasingly, we have been told to seek that higher truth within. The goal of a self-actualized person is now to find himself and to live his life “authentically,” according to an inner truth.
The danger of this lies in believing that we will all know our “truth” when we see it, and then limiting our lives according to that truth. With all this investment in our self-definition, we risk building our future on a very narrow sense of who we are—what we see as our strengths and weaknesses, our likes and dislikes. Many Chinese thinkers might say that in doing this, we are looking at such a small part of who we are potentially. We’re taking a limited number of our emotional dispositions during a certain time and place and allowing those to define us forever. By thinking of human nature as monolithic, we instantly limit our potential.
But many of the Chinese thinkers would argue that you are not and should not think of yourself as a single, unified being. Let’s say that you think of yourself as someone with a temper; someone who gets angry easily. The thinkers we are about to encounter would argue that you should not say, “Well, that’s just the way I am,” and embrace yourself for who you are. As we will see, perhaps you aren’t inherently an angry person. Perhaps you simply slipped into ruts—patterns of behavior—that you allowed to define who you thought you were. The truth is that you have just as much potential to be, say, gentle or forgiving as you do to be angry.
These philosophers would urge us to recognize that we are all complex and changing constantly. Every person has many different and often contradictory emotional dispositions, desires, and ways of responding to the world. Our emotional dispositions develop by looking outward, not inward. They are not cultivated when you retreat from the world to meditate or go on a vacation. They are formed, in practice, through the things you do in your everyday life: the ways you interact with others and the activities you pursue. In other words, we aren’t just who we are: we can actively make ourselves into better people all the time.
Of course, this is no simple task. It requires us to change our mind-set about our own agency and about how real change happens. Nor is it a quick process: change comes incrementally, through perseverence. It comes from training ourselves to broaden our perspective so that we can grasp the complicated tangle of factors (the relationships we’re in, the company we keep, the jobs we hold, and other life circumstances) that shape any given situation and slowly transform our interactions with everything around us. This broad perspective enables us to behave in ways that gradually bring about true change.
While we have been told that true freedom comes from discovering who we are at our core, that “discovery” is precisely what has trapped so many of us in the Age of Complacency. We are the ones standing in our own way.
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Does this mean that we need, then, a radical new plan for how to live and how to organize the world? On the contrary, the philosophers we will explore often illustrated their ideas through mundane aspects of daily life, arguing that this is where great change occurs. Following their lead, we have included many quotidian examples in this book to bring their ideas to life. But these thinkers did not mean for these illustrations to be taken as prescriptive advice, and nor do we. Rather, they are meant to show that we already do many of these things; we just don’t do them well. As we rethink these aspects of our lives, we will understand how practical and doable the ideas really are.
The title of this book comes from a concept the Chinese philosophers referred to often as the Dao, or the Way. The Way is not a harmonious “ideal” we must struggle to follow. Rather, the Way is the path that we forge continually through our choices, actions, and relationships. We create the Way anew every moment of our lives.
There was no one unified vision of the Way with which all these philosophers would have agreed. Not only did they argue against the conventions of their own society, but also each offered a strikingly different vision of how exactly one creates this path. But they agreed that the very process of building it has endless potential to transform us and the world in which we live.
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The Age of Philosophy
Enter any major museum of art, and you face a wealth of galleries: Mesopotamia. Ancient Egypt. Ancient Greece. Roman Empire. Medieval Europe. Modern Europe. Each gallery is filled with beautiful artifacts, and as you walk through them in succession, you can trace the rise of civilization. You can then wander to another wing if you like, and go into rooms focused on lands such as India, and China, and Japan.
This is how we tend to learn about world history: as discrete civilizations that developed on their own over time.
Now imagine a different kind of museum, one organized solely by era. You could stroll through a g
allery, for example, and see a Roman silver denarius coin, a bronze coin from China’s Han dynasty, and a punch-marked coin from India’s Mauryan Empire. You would see right away that three major civilizations were going through remarkably similar changes at roughly the same time, despite the vast distance between them: each had become an empire, and each was running an economy based upon coin currency. Or you could enter a gallery about the early medieval period, several centuries later, and see Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist sacred objects and architectural remnants. They would vividly bring to life the fact that at the same time in history, all the major world religions spread, establishing themselves along the trade networks that linked China, India, and the Mediterranean region This would present a more accurate portrayal of how this history unfolded, for Europe and Asia have always been interconnected.
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Many of us think that globalization is exclusively a modern phenomenon—that technology and air travel have ushered in a new era in which societies that were closed off from one another now finally can be connected. But if that’s the case, then why were Confucius, Socrates, and the Buddha addressing similar philosophical questions at roughly the same time 2,500 years ago, despite living in completely different places, separated by such great distances, and speaking completely different languages? The fact is that innovations, technologies, and ideas have been moving across the globe for a very long time. Dynamic tension and movement within Eurasia have defined much of its history. Confucius, Socrates, and the Buddha were responding to very similar societal catalysts.
To understand why philosophical debate emerged at all and why these thinkers focused on such similar problems, we have to understand the teeming, vibrant culture in which they lived and their ideas developed.
Nineteenth-century Europeans were not the first to think they were breaking away from the past and creating a completely new age. Similar eruptions have happened repeatedly throughout human history. One of the most significant occurred across Eurasia midway through the first millennium BC.
In a revolutionary historical shift, the Bronze Age aristocratic societies that had dominated Eurasia for two thousand years, passing power and wealth down exclusively through hereditary bloodlines, began to crumble. As these states collapsed, new forms of political experimentation arose —from radical democracy in Greece to centralized bureaucracies and legal systems in China. These new forms of statecraft helped to foster the beginnings of social mobility. And in the midst of the immense social changes that these states engendered, the religious institutions that had been embedded in the earlier aristocratic cultures fell as well.
As a result, religious and philosophical movements flourished across Eurasia. In classical Greece, this was the era of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as the Pythagoreans and the Orphics. In India, it brought the emergence of Jainism and, most important, the arrival of the Buddha. And in China, this was the age of Confucius, Mencius, and the other philosophical and religious movements we will be encountering in this book. All were roughly contemporary. And all were pondering the questions that emerge when a societal order breaks down: What is the best way to run a state? How do I build a proper world where everyone has a chance to flourish? How do I live my life? All were wrestling with problems very much like our own.
The Axial Age lasted until the formation of massive empires across Eurasia in the last centuries BC. In response to these empires, a series of salvationist religions spread through Eurasia in the first centuries of the Common Era: Christianity, Manichaeism, Mahayana Buddhism, Daoism, and, later, Islam. And within a few centuries, in many parts of Eurasia and especially in Europe, this period of philosophical and religious experimentation would come to an end after the fall of the empires and a return to aristocratic rule.
The societal changes of the Axial Age led to remarkably similar developments across a wide geographical area. There’s no evidence that Confucius and the Buddha and the Greek philosophers were even aware of one another, much less one another’s ideas. And yet by around the year 500 BC, these major philosophical movements in disparate parts of Eurasia were unified by the belief that the world had to change.
Throughout much of the Bronze Age, most humans saw no possibility of being able to change the trajectory of their lives, but increased social mobility now planted the seeds of the idea that what is available to some people could and should be available to all, not just a few.
At the same time, people saw themselves as living in a period of massive cultural crisis. The times were marked by ceaseless warfare, especially in Greece, north India, and the North China Plain—the very areas where many of the major philosophical and religious movements emerged later. In these regions, there was a pervasive sense that humans had lost their way and had forsaken the rules of conduct that enabled them to live in simple civility. The Greek poet Hesiod captured the ethos of the time, lamenting that he was living in an era when relationships had crumbled: fathers and offspring disagreed with one another, children failed to care for their aging parents, siblings fought with one another, and people freely gave their “praise to violence.”
It was in the midst of this cultural crisis that religious and philosophical movements began emerging. Many involved withdrawing from society and creating alternative communities based upon a full rejection of violence. Others emphasized transcending the fallen world here on earth altogether by imagining a higher world beyond.
The movements that developed in the North China Plain focused, too, on creating alternate worlds. But for them, the solution was not to withdraw from society or seek higher, transcendent realms, but to make changes in the very patterns of everyday life.
Specific developments led to this focus on the mundane. In the North China Plain, one response to the breakdown of the Bronze Age hereditary societies was the formation of new states run by literati from the class just below the aristocracy, who would hold their positions through merit rather than through birth. More and more people sought to become educated in the hope of gaining positions in these new bureaucracies and raising their status in life. As they became educated, they became deeply dissatisfied with the world as it was and began to ponder how to live differently. Most of the new religious and philosophical movements in China during this period were populated by figures from this growing literati class.
Take Confucius, for example. This great philosopher lived during the decline of the last great Bronze Age dynasty, the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou was a powerful aristocratic clan that claimed its status over other great clans because it possessed the mandate of Heaven. In early China, Heaven was seen as a deity that granted the most virtuous lineage of the time the mandate to rule for as long as it continued to be moral. It was an age very much like pre-nineteenth-century Europe, in which the great aristocratic lineages ruled through a claim of divine right.
During Confucius’s lifetime, these leading aristocratic families were losing their power. The Zhou itself was in decline, but so were the other clans. None could step forward to claim the new mandate.
It was during the ensuing political vacuum that figures such as Confucius came to prominence. He held a few minor official posts and, later in his life, became a teacher who focused on a new generation of people seeking these positions as well.
When we think about Confucianism today, we often associate it with rigid social hierarchy, strict gender roles, and a conservative emphasis on correct behavior—an impression based in part on later reinterpretations of these teachings. But the portrayal of Confucius in the Analects is not one of someone who was trying to control people, nor is it one of someone who was trying to create a coherent ideology at all. On the contrary, we see a figure trying to create worlds in which humans could flourish. These worlds were to be built in the here and now, through how we interact with those around us.
Confucius thought that a great era of human flourishing had existed in the early days of the Zhou, about five hundred years before his lifetime. He saw this period as
having been ruled by several individuals who cultivated themselves, became virtuous, and, briefly, succeeded in creating a better world around themselves. He sought to do the same: create a world where his students could thrive, with the hopes that some of them might be able to create a larger social order where the broader population could flourish too.
Every philosopher we encounter in this book is similar to Confucius. Each emerged from this crucible of transition. Each opposed the society in which he lived and was actively contemplating new and exciting ways to live. Each believed strongly that every person has equal potential for growth.
And these thinkers’ training led them to be extremely practical and concrete. This is why, in questioning their society, they tended not to focus on big abstract questions immediately. Rather, they asked, How did our world become like this, and what can we do to change it? Out of these practical questions emerged inspiring discoveries about each person’s potential to be great and good.
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On Relationships: Confucius and As-If Rituals
If we told you that playing a simple game of hide-and-seek with a four-year-old could dramatically transform all your relationships, we’d understand if you were skeptical. But the fact is that when you play this game—when you crouch with your foot sticking out of a closet door so that she can find you easily, when she laughs with glee upon discovering you, and when you enthusiastically repeat the game with her again and again—you are not just engaging in lighthearted play. The two of you are participating in a ritual by taking on roles that diverge from your usual ones—a ritual that allows you to construct a new reality.
This may seem counterintuitive. We tend to think of ritual as something that tells us what to do, not as something transformative. But one strand of classical thought, beginning with Confucius, led to a radically new vision of exactly what ritual can do.
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