Religion or Philosophy?
There is a nagging question, however, about whether Confucianism is a religion at all. Very few people in China think of it in these terms. For them Confucianism is a philosophy, ethic, or way of life. Only five religions are officially recognized by the Chinese government (Buddhism, Daoism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam), and Confucianism is not on the list. Confucianism has no formal religious hierarchy such as the Vatican, no official priesthood, and almost no congregational life. Confucian temples are dedicated to mere mortals. Its canonical texts are not said to be divinely inspired. And much of the ink in these texts is devoted to mundane matters such as good governance and profane genres such as the folk song. Here, making sense of ultimate reality takes a back seat to just making sense.
Like Buddhism, Confucianism can’t seem to make up its mind about the religion thing. So it calls into question what we mean by religion and in the process helps us to see it in a new light. Confucianism distinguishes itself from many other religions by its lack of interest in the divine. Its adherents do speak of an impersonal force called Heaven that watches over human life and legitimates the authority of rulers, and they have been known to revere the quasidivine sage emperors of golden ages past. But they pay about as much attention to the creator God as your average atheist, and even less to formal theology. The Analects, which refer no fewer than eighteen times to an impersonal Heaven, do not once use personal terms for God popular in pre-Confucian China.
Confucians also respond to questions of death and the afterlife with a yawn. British feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen has argued that religions are and ought to be at least as much about creation as about destruction—as much about flourishing in this world as about being saved from it in the next.6 And while there is something odd about tapping this unabashedly patriarchal tradition as an example of Jantzen’s effort to overcome what she sees as a male preoccupation with death, there is no gainsaying the fact that Confucians do focus on human flourishing. Before Confucius, Chinese thinkers were more likely to speak of Heaven than Earth. After Confucius it was the other way around. To this day, Confucians are preoccupied with humans rather than gods, and with life before death rather than life after it. Their concerns are ethical rather than eschatological, practical rather than metaphysical. The purpose of rites is not to make it rain or save us from our sins but to knit us—dead and alive—into a beloved community. In Confucianism, even the cosmos asks after human life.
Rites for the dead are by no means neglected by Confucians, however. Like Jews, who see burying one’s parents and saying Kaddish prayers for them as one of the prime ways to observe the commandment to honor fathers and mothers, Confucians extend the obligations of filial piety beyond the grave. In fact, they see rites for deceased ancestors, including venerating those ancestors in tablets in home shrines, as key expressions of filial piety. But when asked to speculate about spirits, gods, and the afterlife, Confucius always directed the conversation back to human beings and this life:
Chi-lu asked how the spirits of the dead and the gods should be served. The Master said, “You are not able even to serve man. How can you serve the spirits?”
“May I ask about death?”
“You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?”7
If the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich was right to define religion in terms of “ultimate concern,” whatever “religion” there is in Confucianism takes place here and now in this world of pain and overcoming. The earth is our home, Confucians have always insisted, and now is our time. We need not wait for some coming utopia. Our focus should be on actions in this world and particularly on social relations—the rites, etiquette, and ethical actions that make social harmony possible.
This might make the Confucian project sound secular, but it makes more sense to see it as a thisworldly religion—an attempt to find the sacred hidden in plain sight in the profane or, as the contemporary Confucian thinker (and a former teacher of mine) Tu Weiming puts it, “to regard the everyday human world as profoundly spiritual.”8 If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.
There is a persistent, unexplored bias in the study of religion toward the extraordinary and away from the ordinary. In the United States this bias manifests in a strong attraction (even among scholars who are atheists) toward hardcore religious practitioners—people who are slain by the Spirit and speak in tongues—for whom religion arrives as rupture rather than continuity. This bias leads us to see evangelicals as more “religious” than liberal Protestants, Orthodox Jews as more “religious” than Reform Jews, and Confucians as hardly “religious” at all. But there is nothing irreligious about the Confucians; it is our categories of analysis that are confused. If we listen to Confucians in their own voices and on their own terms, we will see how religion can incarnate in very different forms.
Unlike Christianity, which drives a wedge between the sacred and the secular—the eternal “City of God” and the temporal “City of Man”—Confucianism glories in creatively confusing the two. There is a transcendent dimension in Confucianism. Confucians just locate it in the world rather than above or beyond it. The closest Confucians get to Western notions of a transcendent and “wholly other” God is the notion of Heaven (tian), which, while impersonal, nonetheless seems to have a will. But transcendence is always to be found here and now in human history and in human bodies themselves. What we refer to as the sacred and the secular are from the Confucian perspective forever trespassing upon and interpenetrating each other—“immanent transcendence.”9
For all these reasons, Confucianism can be regarded as religious humanism. Confucians share with secular humanists a single-minded focus on this world of rag and bone. They, too, are far more interested in how to live than in plumbing the depths of Ultimate Reality. But whereas secular humanists insist on emptying the world of the sacred, Confucians insist on infusing the world with sacred import—on seeing Heaven in humanity, on investing human beings with incalculable value, on hallowing the everyday. In Confucianism, the secular is sacred. Or, as Tu Weiming puts it, “The Way of Heaven is immanent in human affairs.”10
Of all the religious dimensions, Confucians care the least about theology. Confucians traditionally speak of God about as comfortably as do French politicians, and the notion of a transcendent Creator calling the shots from on high is as foreign to Confucianism as Confucianism is to most Western readers. Confucians do affirm, however, that our human nature comes from Heaven, that the good life is a life lived in accordance with this nature, and that a good state carries out the Mandate of Heaven.
Also overshadowed in Confucianism is the mythological dimension so highly cultivated in Hinduism and the experiential dimension so prized among Sufis. But Confucians care deeply about religion’s other dimensions: the institutional, the material, and, most centrally, the ethical and the ritualistic. In fact, one of the hallmarks of Confucians is their conviction that ethics and ritual are inextricably intertwined. So while Confucianism is doubtless a bit of an odd offspring of the family of religions, it is in the family nonetheless.
Perhaps the most important DNA Confucianism shares with other members of the religion family is its faith in individual transformation. A friend of mine once remarked that there are really only two ways to change fundamentally who you are: Christian conversion and psychoanalysis. But Confucians believe their tradition, too, can fundamentally change a person. Each of us can become fully human. But because virtue needs a neighbor, this project is by no means in our hands alone.
A recent review of a New Agey book by a self-professed medium complains that much that passes for spirituality today “encourages self-involved people to b
ecome more self-involved.” New Agers speak incessantly about how we are all related, yet all too many of them live inside a bubble of “self-regard,” writes the reviewer Gordon Haber. “I’ve never heard of anyone visiting a psychic in order to learn how to be more generous with other people.”11 You can say what you want about Confucianism, but it doesn’t have this problem. Whereas Daoists see society as a barrier to human flourishing, for Confucians, social life is essential. As Tu Weiming has written, “self-transformation … is a communal act.”12 We become human by becoming social.
Overcoming Chaos through Character
Confucianism emerged in the midst of a particularly chaotic period in Chinese history. The Zhou dynasty (1046–256 B.C.E.) was in turmoil, and China was breaking into fiefdoms waging bloody war after bloody war. So it should not be surprising that harmony became the all-consuming goal. Different Chinese schools had different strategies for wresting order out of chaos. Realists sought harmony through the forces of law, punishment, and arms. Mohists sought harmony through undifferentiated universal love. Daoists retreated into nature in the name of spontaneity. But Confucians charted a different path. To the Realists they said that force would produce only resentment. To the Mohists they said that love would end war only in utopia. And to the Daoists they said that retreating from society into yourself was selfish and irresponsible. The Confucian strategy was to engage, engage, engage—to entwine yourself in the hustle and bustle of politics and society, and especially in ethics and ritual. Unlike religious traditions that focus on the relationship between the individual and the divine, Confucianism focused on relationships among individuals—on morality, yes, but also on etiquette, ritual, and propriety. We are neither born nor raised in isolation, Confucians observed, and only through interactions with other human beings do we become fully human.
One of Confucianism’s key insights is that self-cultivation and social harmony are not at odds. Like modern-day evangelicals, Confucians say that if you want to change society, you first need to change individuals. But is this really possible? Confucians have always had a faith, bordering on fanaticism, in the ability of human beings to improve and even perfect themselves. You can change. Each of us can become the Confucian exemplar—a junzi, or “exemplary person” (also translated as “profound person,” “noble man,” “gentleman,” and “superior man”)—whose influence and example have the power to improve society.13 In short, each of us can flourish and by flourishing bring order and harmony to society and cosmos alike.
But how can this be accomplished? In a word: education, which for Confucius was more about building character than about acquiring knowledge. In keeping with Confucius’s epithet, “The First Teacher,” Confucians have always stressed self-cultivation through education. We can improve ourselves and our society by studying ancient classics, by emulating the sages, by learning proper etiquette and rituals, and by practicing the virtues. So job one in Confucian education is not learning a trade but learning to be human. Human beings are learners, and as we learn we become more ourselves. This cannot be done alone, however. Children need parents; students need teachers; spouses and friends need one another.
In a seminar I taught on wandering in the world’s religions, my students got into a heated debate about whether it was better to wander alone or together—a debate that quickly turned into a conversation about whether humans are solitary or social creatures. Are we made and sustained in isolation or in relation? The Enlightenment notion of the self as an independent free agent makes no sense from the Confucian perspective of the interdependence of all things. Just as Confucians say no to the secular/sacred divide, they creatively confuse the boundaries between self and society. The self is not an isolated atom, they insist, but the center of a vast web of relationships with family, community, nation, and world. Without this complex ecology of overlapping networks of mutual obligations, there may be an ego, but there is no self.
Although unapologetically communitarian, Confucianism is not opposed to self-cultivation. In fact, self-cultivation is essential to the Confucian project. Confucians insist, however, that we become ourselves, and transform society, through others. The path to social harmony runs through human flourishing, and human flourishing is made possible through right relations with other human beings.
These relations are, according to Confucians, hierarchical by necessity. As John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was about to disembark from his ship, the Arabella, and transform himself and his passengers into New Englanders, he spoke of the importance of knowing your place and staying in it. “God Almighty, in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection,” Winthrop said. The New World’s wilderness was wild enough without the anarchy of social climbing. Here rich would stay rich, and poor would stay poor, but all would be “knit together in this work as one man.”14 Confucians, too, see hierarchy as an essential ingredient of social harmony.
When asked what he would do first if called to administer a state, Confucius said he would start by rectifying names. The phrase rectification of names actually points to two principles: first, things should be called what they really are; second, things should conform to what they are called. “Let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son.”15 Much disharmony and disorder in a society, Confucius argues, comes when people either do not know their roles or do not act in keeping with them.
Confucians typically break down these roles into Five Relationships: ruler/subject; parent/child; husband/wife; elder brother/younger brother; and friend/friend. Each of these Five Relationships is supposed to be characterized by two-way mutuality and reciprocity rather than one-way obedience. Parents and rulers are to care for their children and subjects, while children and subjects owe loyalty and respect to parents and rulers.
Just as important as the Five Relationships are the Five Virtues: human-heartedness; justice; propriety; wisdom; and faithfulness. Careful cultivation of these Five Relationships and Five Virtues is supposed to produce social order, but according to Confucians these relationships and virtues also produce fully human beings. Here, too, it takes a village.
Confucius
Confucius (from Kung-fu-tzu, or “Master Kung”: 551–479 B.C.E.) is often described as Confucianism’s founder, but he regarded himself as a transmitter of ancient truths rather than an inventor of new ones. He lived his remarkable life during China’s Age of the Hundred Schools and, in global terms, during the Axial Age in which Socrates and the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at roughly the same time as the Buddha.
Biographical details about the life of Confucius are hard to come by, but it is widely agreed that he was born in 551 B.C.E. in Qufu in the state of Lu (in today’s Shandong province) to a family of little means. He responded to the death of his father, and the poverty it produced, by plowing himself into his studies. Renowned when young as a polymath—China’s Jefferson—he used his expertise in ritual, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, mathematics, poetry, history, and music (he played a stringed instrument called the zither) to set himself up as the first private teacher in China. His instruction, which focused on the Five Classics, aimed at character building and self-cultivation. Like Socrates, he taught through conversation, and his students reported that he was particularly good at posing the provocative question.
Confucius is typically credited with editing and writing portions of the Five Classics, but the work people most associate with him, the Analects (literally, “conversations”) was put together by his students. In the Analects, Confucius identifies chaos as the human problem and order as the solution. The techniques he employs to move from sickness to cure are ethics and ritual.
Confucius taught each of his students to try to become a junzi (“exemplary person”) by learning to cultivate ren (“human-heartedness”) and li (ritual/etiquett
e/propriety). The purpose of education in his view was not to turn out workers who could turn out widgets but to empower students to transform themselves into complete human beings—people who both understand and embody the virtues.
Confucius also tried to become a player in politics, but his efforts in this arena would not bear fruit until long after his death, when in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) Confucianism became the state orthodoxy. As his efforts in politics and education indicate, Confucius was neither an ascetic nor a contemplative. He liked to fish, hunt, and sing. He was an aficionado of the arts. And he enjoyed a good drink and a good meal. Married with children, he was a practical person who, according to one of the most celebrated passages in the Analects, had by the age of seventy attuned duty and desire into one clear voice.
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