God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  The New Confucians are also trying to gestate an authentically Confucian feminism. In books such as Chenyang Li’s The Sage and the Second Sex, they look back to the mothers of Confucius and Mencius as inspirations and construct their ethics around the egalitarian relationship of friend and friend rather than the hierarchical relationship of ruler and subject.35 They also observe that, while Plato and Aristotle debated whether women were fully human, the earliest Confucians always acknowledged that women could become not only junzi but also sages. Perhaps the greatest resource for Confucian feminism is the early Chinese cosmology of yin and yang, which insists that the feminine and the masculine are complementary and ever interpenetrating each other.

  One manifestation of this New Confucianism is referred to as Boston Confucianism, because its leading advocates are Tu Weiming of Harvard and Robert Neville and John Berthrong of Boston University. In an ironic proof of the Confucian sense (shared with the Hebrew Bible) that there is nothing new under the sun, Neville and Tu are in many respects reprising the debate between Mencius and Xunzi. Neville, a United Methodist minister who describes himself as a Confucian Christian, has served as the Dean of BU’s School of Theology and as its university chaplain. In keeping with his Christian heritage, he echoes Xunzi both in his understanding of the sinfulness of human beings and in the key role played by li in disciplining this wickedness. Tu, by contrast, echoes Mencius in his understanding of humanity’s essential goodness. So while Neville traces the root of the Confucian project to Xunzi’s keyword of li, the keyword for Tu, who, like Mencius, focuses more on inner cultivation than ritual, is ren. What these two men share, however, is the conviction that there is no reason for Confucianism to restrict itself to China, or even to Asia. Confucianism successfully migrated from China to Japan and Korea and Vietnam. Why can’t it take up residence in Boston too?

  The Tigers of Mount Tai

  I must admit that I have never been much of a fan of Confucianism, which has long managed to both intrigue and horrify me. Like most Americans, I revel in individual freedom and rebel against the rhetoric of duty and obligation, particularly when that rhetoric comes from voices outside my own head. I don’t traffic in bumper stickers, either on my car or in my thinking, but if I did I’d be far more likely to display a bumper sticker reminding me to question authority than one reminding me to respect it. I ask my students, even my undergraduates, to refer to me by my first name.

  And I am not alone. The United States was born of rebellion to authority, and Europeans and Americans alike are endlessly suspicious of received truths. We are encouraged to think outside the box, to praise “mavericks,” to march to Henry David Thoreau’s paeans to nonconformity. When it comes to marriage or death, we refuse the cookie-cutter ceremonies that satisfied our grandparents, writing our own vows and asking for our ashes to be scattered at our favorite golf course or baseball diamond. What could be squarer for generations brought up on the Beats and the hippies and the Daodejing than the stuffy propriety of Confucianism?

  So it should not be surprising that we find much to commend in the short stories of Lu Xun (1881–1936), a critic of Confucianism who has been celebrated as the father of modern Chinese literature. Lionized by Chairman Mao as “the chief commander of China’s cultural revolution,” Lu Xun preferred down-and-dirty vernacular Chinese to the high-flying literary Chinese of elites, and he condemned in no uncertain terms the “man-eating” superstitions of Confucian culture as a multimillennia assault on individual freedom.36 Confucianism was in his view injustice, oppression, and conformity masquerading as morality.

  Though I am not and have never been a communist (except during the week I fell under the spell of Marx’s Das Kapital in college), I share Lu Xun’s view that Confucianism’s so-called Three Bonds (ruler over subject, father over son, husband over wife) are authoritarian and sexist. Yes, subjects, sons, and wives were told that they had both a right and an obligation to correct their rulers, fathers, and husbands when they overstepped the boundaries of virtue, but how often did that actually happen? The character for wife in Chinese includes a broom, and Confucianism did little to overturn the received wisdom that girls were little more than domestic-servants-to-be. Many New Confucians emphasize the mutuality rather than the hierarchy in male/female relationships, and Confucianism does share with feminism a focus on human flourishing here and now. But it must be admitted that this is an exceedingly difficult tradition to redeem on feminist grounds.

  I also share Lu Xun’s suspicions of the mechanisms of duty, not because I am opposed to feeling and fulfilling obligations but because I know from experience how duties can drown a person to the point where he is no longer recognizable to either himself or others. I thrill to rituals of reversal—Holi in India, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and Purim in Israel—that turn the world upside down. And I have a deep and abiding romance with the New England institution of the town meeting, a ritual of reversal itself in which for at least one night a year the subjects are the rulers, and the rulers the subjects.

  Still, I must admit that of all the great religious leaders I have studied over the years, Confucius has grown on me the most. Individualism is one of the glories of modern Western civilization, but one of its evils is our cult of narcissism. Like the Buddha, Confucius saw the ego as a weapon of mass destruction that horribly distorts our ability to see things as they really are and kills by flattery along the way. So Confucius redirected our collective attention from the solitary individual to the person in community. Like the Buddhist practice of metta meditation, which instructs practitioners to breath out compassion on self and others, Confucius and his followers seek to instill in us ever widening circles of empathy—to self, yes, but then to family, community, nation, humanity, and Heaven. Perhaps because he came from modest means himself, Confucius repeatedly insisted that our measure has nothing to do with wealth or rank and everything to do with achievement and virtue. In politics, he was no egalitarian. But neither was he a tyrant. His insistence that we defer to those who know more than we do—what Berthrong characterizes as “the education of the unwise by the wise”—is not all that different from President John F. Kennedy’s administration of and by the “best and the brightest”—a Confucian Camelot.37

  I am also drawn to Confucius’s call to speak truth to power, a call amplified by Mencius’s brave insistence that subjects have the right to rebel against any ruler who by virtue of his lack of virtue has lost the Mandate of Heaven. In the modern West, we tend to associate Confucianism with a rubber stamp to governmental authority—with President Nixon’s naked assertion, in his interview with British journalist David Frost, that, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” But there is a reason why Confucius could not land a real government job. He insisted on virtue not only in subjects but also in rulers. While Confucius did say that subjects were to respect and obey their rulers, he also said that rulers should care for their subjects like loving fathers care for their sons. Good government, he said, depended on trust even more than on prosperity or military might, and trust could not be earned, or kept, except under cover of virtue.

  As bloody causes continue to produce bloody effects in the Middle East, Confucius’s rebuke to the Realists who sought social harmony through arms comes powerfully to mind. Force from on high, he argued, will only bring resentment from below. What greater proof of this theory is there than the multitude of resentful Islamists who line up each day to blow themselves up in Iraq and Afghanistan?

  One of the most famous stories of the life of Confucius has him riding by Mount Tai (in Shandong province) when he encounters a woman consumed by grief. A disciple of Confucius learns that the woman, who is bent over her son’s grave in anguish, has experienced not one loss but three. Her husband’s father, her husband, and now her son have all been killed by a tiger. The ever-practical Confucius asks her why she has not moved to some safer place. “There is here no oppressive government,” she explains, prompting Confucius to turn t
o his disciples and remark, “My children, remember this. Oppressive government is fiercer than a tiger.”38

  As a citizen in a country increasingly obsessed with rules, I also find Confucius’s virtue ethics refreshing. All too often we try to force the round pegs of a general rule into the square hole of our particular circumstances. So while it is easy to stereotype Confucians as blind followers of unbendable rules of etiquette and propriety, Confucians have, in fact, long understood ethics as more art than science—a form of life rather than a set of hard-and-fast rules. While rules-based ethics claims to be universal and abstract, Confucian ethics is by admission situational and concrete. What to do when you see an in-law—one whom you are forbidden by the rule book of propriety to touch—floating past you in a river and about to drown? Break the rule, and save the life, says Mencius. The virtuous thing to do in any situation is what the human-hearted person would do. The goal of Confucian ethics is to turn yourself into such a person.

  During a recent graduation weekend, a newly minted doctor and I were chatting at the PhD “hooding” ceremony where dissertation advisers confer PhDs on their students. As we waited in all our medieval regalia to be summoned to the dais, he and I were taking in the li of it all, trying to figure out (among other things) whose hands we should shake, and when. So I couldn’t help but laugh when a student who had written her dissertation on Confucianism botched the whole thing up, doing an oddly informal 360-degree turn to shake the hand of the associate dean—something no one else had done all day—and gumming up the proceedings in the process. Later I teased her about it. “I would think a student as steeped in Confucianism as you wouldn’t have messed up the ritual,” I said. “Ah,” she replied with a knowing smile, “but when the sage does it, it is not messing up.”

  Finally, I must confess that Confucius is my professional hero. I have spent almost all of my adult life in academia, as either a student or a teacher. How could I not revere this man whose first words in the Analects speak of learning as a pleasure, whose birthday is celebrated as Teachers’ Day in Taiwan, and whose faith in education ran so deep that he helped to construct a whole civilization around it?

  Academics in the United States have a secret romance with France, where intellectuals somehow manage to reel in big salaries and get the pretty girls (or handsome guys). But Confucius outdid even the French in living (and loving) the life of the mind (and heart). And he did more to elevate the profession of teaching than anyone else on any continent in any age. He believed what every good teacher must believe: inside every one of us are the seeds of improvement and perfectibility, but these seeds needed to be cultivated in order to bear fruit. Ren and li were to him the antidotes to chaos and disorder. But this cure could only be administered through education.

  Confucius has been rightly described as conservative, but the sort of critical thinking he embodied epitomizes the liberal mind. Yes, he looked to the past for inspiration. As he himself said, however, he looked to what was old in order to find out what was new.39 And he was determined to look at each question from many angles, including the ever-shifting angle of the new. “A noble mind can see a question from all sides without bias,” Confucius said.40

  For all his achievements in teaching and learning, however, Confucius never lost his intellectual humility. He never claimed he was divine. He never claimed he was a sage. He never even claimed he was a junzi. When asked whether he had ascended to the level of the junzi, he offered only a litany of the ways he had fallen short:

  There are four things in the Way of the profound person, none of which I have been able to do. To serve my father as I would expect my son to serve me: that I have not been able to do. To serve my ruler as I would expect my ministers to serve me: that I have not been able to do. To serve my elder brother as I would expect my younger brothers to serve me: that I have not been able to do. To be the first to treat friends as I would expect them to treat me: that I have not been able to do.41

  Confucius provides a model, therefore, not of a fully realized human being but of someone ever striving to become more human-hearted—a model we can emulate instead of simply revere.

  Becoming a Human Being

  Over the centuries, Confucianism has become increasingly religious, particularly through its interactions with Buddhism and Daoism. But it remains extraordinarily thisworldly. So while it is one of the most influential of the great religions, it is also the least religious of them. Or is it? Perhaps the final judgment to come out of our conversation with Confucius and those who have revered and reinterpreted him is that there are many different ways to be religious.

  The Western monotheisms tell us that religion is a zero-sum game. You need to pick one, and you would do well to choose on the basis of what each religion can do for you at death. But among the many things Confucius and his followers seem to be saying is that perhaps the point of religion is not so much the by-and-by as the here and now. Perhaps human flourishing and social harmony are sufficiently lofty goals for any religion. Perhaps the greatest questions the great religions have to answer concern how to become a human being.

  The contemporary American poet-farmer Wendell Berry has argued that we become human by participating in a “beloved community,” which he defines as “common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs.” American storytelling, Berry observes, is replete with examples of sensitive individuals overrun by overbearing communities (think Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter) and therefore of solitary individuals justifiably on the run from this overbearance (think Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). But only in community, he argues, is it possible to become fully human. Only in the midst of community propriety (and impropriety), community goods (and evils), can we experience “our partiality and mortality” and our many connections to place and past, the quick and the dead. Berry defines himself as a Christian rather than a Confucian, but he comes closer to the Confucian spirit than any English-language fiction writer I know. These words—“living is a communal act”—were written by Berry. But they sound like a “Confucius says.”42

  Chapter Four

  Hinduism

  The Way of Devotion

  At the beginning of any new venture, Hindus call upon Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of good fortune, lord of thresholds, and remover of obstacles. India is a land of wild diversity—religious, cultural, regional, social, linguistic—and Hindus worship hundreds (at least) of different deities, but almost all Hindus pay homage to the fat and happy Ganesha, the most popular god in this god-besotted tradition. Devotees ask for his blessings when they enter a temple, start a new job, embark on a journey, open a new business, head off to college, begin married life, plant new crops, or start writing a book. Indian nationalists turned to him to remove the obstacle of the British, and in 1947 he obliged. Today stock traders chant his 108 names each morning before the opening of the Bombay Stock Exchange in Mumbai, where the annual festival to this god of health and wealth is celebrated with particular gusto.

  If omnipresence is a characteristic of divinity, then Ganesha is the divinest of the gods. His image is inescapable in India, popping up in ancient temples and Bollywood films, and on Tshirts, mouse pads, wristwatches, comic books, greeting cards, necklaces, and tattoos. Almost every Hindu home has an image of this potbellied god of good luck, who is classically portrayed holding an axe to destroy obstacles, a rope to rescue devotees from their troubles, and a sweet cake representing the bliss of spiritual liberation. Though Ganesha has a surplus of arms (four, typically), he has only one tusk, since he broke off the other to use as a pen to write down the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.

  Devotion to Ganesha is not confined to India, or even Hindus, however. It extends to Buddhists and Jains and far beyond the borders of the Indian subcontinent. One of the first traditional Hindu temples built in the United States—the Sri Maha Vallabha Ganapati Devasthanam in Flushing, New York—is dedicated to Ganesha (who is also known as Ganapati). A large fra
med rendering in cloth of this jolly god of prosperity, girdled by a snake and riding his customary mouse, adorns the entrance to Boston University’s Department of Religion where I work, and a pen-and-ink Ganesha, his belly as plump as a Chinatown Buddha, greets visitors to my Cape Cod cottage.

  Hinduism is an over-the-top religion of big ideas, bright colors, soulful mantras, spicy foods, complex rituals, and wild stories. One of the wildest of these stories concerns how Ganesha got his head. Like most everything in India, this story comes in different shapes and sizes, but one popular version goes like this: Once upon a time the goddess Parvati was lonely because her husband, Lord Shiva, was off with his buddies on yet another interminable hunting trip. So she created a son from the dirt and dead skin on her own body. One day she asked her son to stand guard over her privacy while she took a bath. When Shiva returned, he found a strange boy barring him from his own home. When Ganesha would not let him pass, Shiva in his rage (Hindu gods are not constrained by the virtues) cut off his head. When Parvati saw her son lying lifeless in a pool of blood, she was so possessed by rage of her own that she threatened to destroy the universe. So Shiva, the destroyer god who is better at taking lives than creating or sustaining them, turned for help to Brahma (the creator) and Vishnu (the sustainer). Brahma told Parvati that her boy could be revived if the head of another creature could be procured. So Vishnu found an elephant and cut off its head, which Shiva, in the world’s first example of xenotransplantation, attached to the boy’s body. Shiva then declared his resuscitated son the leader of his celestial armies, and, honoring Parvati’s demand, declared that from that moment forward worshippers should call on his son’s name before beginning any new undertaking, including worship itself. In this way, Parvati’s dutiful son came to be the guardian of thresholds. He also came to be called Ganesha, which combines the Sanskrit words gana (meaning gang) and isha (meaning lord) and refers here to Ganesha’s status as lord of Shiva’s celestial armies.