Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 BC, was the first great philosopher in the Chinese tradition. His vast and enduring influence comes not from grand ideas but from deceptively simple ones—ideas that flip on its head everything we understand about getting to know ourselves and getting along with other people.
Consider this passage from Book 10 of the Analects, a collection of conversations and stories compiled by Confucius’s disciples after his death:
“He would not sit until he had straightened his mat.”
Here’s another one:
“He would not teach while eating.”
Not quite what you were expecting? Seems a little too prosaic for one of humanity’s most important texts?
These passages are not exceptional. The Analects is full of concrete, minute details about what Confucius did and what he said. We find out how high Confucius holds his elbows. We see how he talks to different people when he walks into a room. We learn, in specific detail, how Confucius behaves at dinnertime.
You might wonder how any of this could be of philosophical significance. You might be tempted to flip through the book for yourself and search for passages where Confucius says something really profound. But to understand what makes the Analects a great philosophical work, we need to learn how Confucius comported himself at his meals. We need to know what he did on a daily basis. The reason these daily moments are important is because, as we will see, they are the means through which we can become different and better human beings.
Such a stance is rare in the field of philosophy. If you take most any philosophy class or read a philosophical work, chances are the philosopher will jump right in with big questions such as: Do we have free will? What is the meaning of life? Is experience objective? What is morality?
But Confucius took the opposite approach in his teachings. Rather than start with the great big philosophical questions, he asked this fundamental and deceptively profound question:
How are you living your life on a daily basis?
For Confucius, everything began with this question—a question about the tiniest things. And unlike the big, unwieldy questions, this is one we all can answer.
The Fragmented World
We often think of people from traditional cultures as having believed in some sort of harmonious cosmos that dictated how they ought to live and the social roles they would be confined to playing. This is certainly how many in the West have thought about China. But the truth is that many Chinese philosophers actually saw the world very differently: as consisting of an endless series of fragmented, messy encounters.
This worldview emerged from the notion that all aspects of human life are governed by emotions, including the endless human interactions that take place. The Nature That Emerges from the Decree, a recently discovered fourth-century BCE text, taught that
The energies of joy, anger, sorrow, and sadness are given by nature. When it comes to their being manifested on the outside, it is because they have been elicited by others.
All living things have dispositions, or tendencies to respond to things in certain ways. Just as a flower has an inherent disposition to lean toward the sun, and birds and butterflies are disposed to seek out flowers, human beings have dispositions too. Our disposition is to respond emotionally to other people.
We often don’t even notice how constantly our emotions are being drawn out from us. But our feelings sway back and forth, depending on what we encounter. We experience something pleasurable and then feel pleasure; we encounter something frightening and subsequently feel fear. A toxic relationship makes us feel despair, an argument with a coworker makes us livid, a rivalry with a friend arouses jealousy. We find ourselves experiencing certain emotions more often than we do others, and our responses then become patterned habits.
This is what life is about: moment after moment in which people encounter one another, react in an infinite number of ways, and are pulled to and fro emotionally. Not one of us can escape this, be it a child on a playground or the leader of a great nation. Every single human event is shaped by the world of our emotional experiences. If human life consists of people constantly bumping up against one another and reacting passively, we live in a fragmented world, one in which we are buffeted about endlessly by disparate events.
But all is not hopeless: we can refine the way we react during these endless encounters and create pockets of order. The Nature That Emerges from the Decree argues that we should strive to move from a state where we just randomly respond to things emotionally (qing) to a state where we are able to respond with propriety, or “better ways of responding” (yi):
Only through training do we become able to respond well . . . At the beginning [of our lives] one responds through emotions; at the end, one responds through propriety.
Developing propriety does not mean overcoming or controlling the emotions. Feeling emotion is what makes us human. It simply means cultivating our emotions so that we internalize better ways of responding to others. These better ways become a part of us. When we have learned to refine our responses, we can start to respond to people in ways that we have cultivated, instead of through immediate emotional reaction. We do this refining through ritual.
Customs and Rituals
Most of us have certain “rituals.” Whether it’s a morning cup of coffee, family dinners, a couple’s regular Friday date night, or a piggyback ride for the kids at bedtime, we consider these moments important because they give our lives continuity and meaning and bond us to our loved ones.
Confucius would agree that all of these moments are potential rituals. But in his teachings, he elaborated upon what we should consider rituals and why they are significant.
Consider a simple act that we all engage in multiple times a day:
You run into a friend.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Great! How about you?”
This brief act connects you for a moment before you continue on.
Or your colleague introduces you to someone new: “Great to meet you.” You shake his hand, and then you both make breezy chitchat about the weather, the surroundings, or some recent news event.
Or you run into a close friend at the grocery store. You stop your carts and give each other a warm hug. “How have you been? How are the kids?” You talk a little bit about your lives, have a short, animated conversation, and promise to make a date for coffee before you go your separate ways.
We use different greetings, ask different sorts of questions, and use different tones of voice when talking to different people. We usually do all of this unconsciously. We subtly adjust our behavior, our phrases, the very words we use, depending on whether we are talking to a close friend, an acquaintance, someone we just met, our mother, our father-in-law, our boss, our coach, or our child’s piano teacher. We modify the way we speak according to who we’re with because we have learned this is the socially appropriate thing to do. And because we are with different people and in different situations all day long, everything we do shifts constantly.
Of course, any philosopher would have noticed that we employ different types of greetings and use different tones of voice in different circumstances. But few would have thought this to be philosophically significant.
That is where Confucius is different. He begins by observing that if we are spending the vast majority of our waking hours doing these things, then philosophically, that is exactly where we need to begin. We need to ask ourselves why we engage in these actions. These small acts are customs—conventions that we are socialized into performing. But at least some of these could be made into rituals—a term that Confucius defines in a new and provocative way.
* * *
Human beings are creatures of habit. We become accustomed to doing these small things—standing to the side to let a stranger pass by, putting on a tie for a job interview—and we do them unconsciously.
Even when we’re not conscious of what we’re doing, there is some good effect.
If we are feeling a bit down, taking a moment to say hi to another person can interrupt a cycle of negative emotion. If we are greeting someone we’ve had a conflict with, we can share another, more civil side of ourselves and momentarily break the pattern of disagreement. For those brief moments, we experience different relationships with those around us.
But when we go through life performing most social conventions by rote, they lose their power to become rituals that can profoundly change us. They don’t do much to help us become better people.
In order to help ourselves change, we must become aware that breaking from our normal ways of being is what makes it possible to develop different sides of ourselves. Rituals—in the Confucian sense—are transformative because they allow us to become a different person for a moment. They create a short-lived alternate reality that returns us to our regular life slightly altered. For a brief moment, we are living in an “as-if” world.
The As-If World
In early China, people saw human beings as a mass of contradictory elements—conflicting emotions, turbulent energies, chaotic spirits—all of which they worked to refine during their lives. But at the moment of death, a person’s most dangerous energies—all of his anger and resentment at passing away while his loved ones go on living—would be released and haunt the living. Thus, people believed that the world was filled with the spirits of the deceased, who looked jealously upon their survivors. Death would bring out the worst in the living as well: horrible sadness, confusion, inexplicable anger.
To combat all of these negative, uncontrolled energies, people developed ritual acts, the most important of which was ancestral worship. The purpose was to transform dangerous ghosts into benevolent ancestors. The meat of a beast, most often a pig, would be placed in bronze ritual vessels and cooked over an open fire in front of the family at a temple. The family would call down the ghosts to feed on the rich smoke that rose up from the meat. By feeding the ghosts these offerings, the living hoped to humanize them, bring them back into the family, and persuade them to inhabit the role of a benevolent ancestor hovering above.
After the ritual had ended, the ancestor eventually reverted to an angry, haunting ghost, and the rite would have to be repeated.
In the Analects, Confucius is asked about ancestor worship. He says that the ritual is absolutely necessary but that it makes no difference whether the spirits are participating or not: “We sacrifice to them,” he said, “as if they are there.” What matters is participating in the ritual fully: “If I do not participate in the sacrifice, it is as if I did not sacrifice.”
But if the ghosts aren’t even necessarily there, why do the ritual as if they are?
In life, the relationship between the deceased and the living had been imperfect and fraught, as real-life human relationships are. A father might have been stern, unloving, and temperamental; his offspring might have been hostile and rebellious. These unresolved tensions haunt the living all the more painfully when the father dies, and any possibility of a reconciliation has ended. If performed well, the ritual moves us from this troubled world of human relationships and creates a space—a ritual space—in which ideal relationships can be forged. Within this space, it is as if the haunting ghosts are proper, beneficent ancestors to the living. The living now behave as if they were proper descendants of the ancestors. The angers, jealousies, and resentments that had existed between the living and the dead are being transformed into a vastly better relationship.
For Confucius, the ritual was essential because of what it did for the people performing it. To ask whether these ritual acts actually affected the deceased or not missed the point entirely. Family members needed to make the sacrifices because acting as if the ancestors were there brought about change within themselves.
The ritual also changed the feelings of the living toward one another. A death always engenders changes in relationships among those left behind. A long-dormant childhood rivalry between two siblings flares up again; a wayward son suddenly becomes the nominal head of the household, stirring unrest among the others. Within the ritual, however, all play their new familial roles as if there were no discord.
The power of the ritual lay in how patently distinct it was from the real world. Consider one variation of the rite in which three generations exchanged roles. A grandson would personify his deceased grandfather, while his own father would personify him. Each living descendant was made to take on the perspective of the person with whom he often experienced the most tension in the world outside.
This was clearly an as-if world: there was no way the participants could possibly mistake the roles they were playing for roles they could ever assume in real life; a father is not being trained to be the son of his son. But through this rite, the living would not only develop a different relationship toward the deceased. Those left behind would also be brought together into new relationships.
Of course, the ritual always ends. Family members walk out of the ritual space, and the moment they do, they are in the messy world again. Over time the fragile peace falls apart once more. Siblings squabble, cousins rebel, the father and son are still at odds with each other.
This is why families returned to the ritual repeatedly. The fragile peace might crumble once they left the temple, but gradually, by doing the rituals again and again and re-creating these healthier connections, the improved relationships among the family members would begin to manifest more in daily life.
The ritual does not tell anyone how to behave in the real world. The perfectly ordered world inside the ritual could never replace the flawed world of real-life relationships. It works because each participant plays a role other than the one he inhabits normally. That “break” with reality is the key for allowing the participants to begin to work on their relationships. A father’s pretending to be his son helps him to understand his child and become a better father and a better person.
Sacrificing beasts and placating spirits may seem distant from our twenty-first-century lives, but the value of the rituals remains. We too are haunted by ghosts: the irritating relative we never get along with; the grudge we can’t seem to shake off; the past we can’t forget.
We tend to fall into patterned, habitual responses. They may be social conventions and customs we follow unthinkingly, like our greetings or the way we hold a door open for someone. They may be routines that we don’t even notice, such as the whine we slip into when we’re talking to a sibling on the phone, or a tendency to become quiet when distressed instead of expressing our needs clearly. But we do these things all the time. Some patterns are good, and some are less so. If we were always “true” to ourselves and behaved accordingly, we would be stuck in old behaviors, never forgiving, and limiting our potential to transform.
But we already know how to break these patterns.
When we visit a friend’s family, for example, as outsiders we notice their routines and small actions: their Sunday morning pancake breakfast, the way they hug one another to say good morning. These rituals stand out to us because they are new to us. When we observe or even participate in them, we do so with a consciousness that we don’t bring to our own lives.
When we travel, breaking from our everyday routine can allow us to develop new sides of ourselves. And when we return, we feel the lingering effects of those changes.
Why, then, don’t we do this all the time? Perhaps it is because deliberately constructing ritual moments in our “real” lives feels contrived.
But as-if moments can lead to tremendous movement.
Let’s return to the hide-and-seek game with the four-year-old that opened this chapter. How does this nurture a relationship? The game is an as-if ritual. It allows a shift in roles: the child, normally so vulnerable, gets to play at being a powerful person who bested an adult by finding him. The adult gets to play at being a bumbling person so inept that he can’t even find a good hiding place. Of course, the child knows that the adult knows that she can see him, but part of the ritual
is that they are playing as if she were able to outsmart him.
This role reversal breaks their usual pattern. The child gets to experience a feeling of competence that she will remember even after the game is over. The adult, usually an infallible being (at least in the eyes of a child), has now played at being fallible and vulnerable. He isn’t really becoming a befuddled adult, but the role reversal helps him to develop more complex, nuanced sides of himself that he, too, can take with him into other situations: vulnerability, connection, levity, and the ability not to cling to power too tightly.
The key for the players is to be conscious that they are pretending; that together they have entered an alternate reality in which they imagine different sides of themselves. If they can do this, then not only will experiences like playing hide-and-seek help cultivate a mutually more joyful and respectful relationship, but also these accumulated moments will influence the sort of person each becomes over time. These repeated rituals will develop aspects of each of them that eventually enhance other relationships in both of their lives.
As-If Rituals
Why do we say “please” and “thank you”?
Three centuries ago, European society and social relations were still defined entirely by hereditary hierarchy. If a peasant were speaking to a lord, he would use certain deferential terms, and if an aristocrat were speaking down to a peasant, he would employ completely different terms in turn.
As markets began to develop in the cities, people from different classes began to interact in new ways. Rituals developed in which buyers and sellers could act as if they were equal, though they were anything but. The “please” and “thank-you” exchange was a brief moment in which participants could experience a semblance of equality.
We perform this as-if ritual as well. Imagine that you are at the dinner table, and your child (or nephew or grandchild) demands, “Give me the salt.” If that child is very young, you understand that he hasn’t learned social niceties yet, so you might say, “Okay, but what do you say . . . ?” or “What’s the magic word?” He might not answer right away, and then you press him again. “What do you say . . . ?” And then you go back and forth until the child says, “Please give me the salt.” Then you hand him the salt and walk him through the thank-you.
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