by John Keay
Perhaps mischievously, Confucianism prior to the Song has been characterised as ‘more a curriculum than a philosophy’.7 Lacking a bedrock in natural law or divine revelation, all Chinese scholarship probed the past for structural validation. Pile-driving into the depths of documented antiquity, it sought an acceptable purchase much as construction engineers building on China’s soft alluvial soils must today drill deep to secure their skyscrapers. Writing of any sort had a bibliographical flavour and involved copious citation; the compilation of anthologies, historical encyclopedias, geographical gazetteers, biographical collections and all manner of other compendia constituted a veritable industry. It was by selecting, editing, interpreting, listing and reproducing the extant works of other ages – curriculum-building in effect – that scholarship progressed. Such constant revision could be a sterile process, which was how it had seemed to Han Tuozhou when he labelled it ‘false learning’. But it also possessed its own dynamic. In the 1170s Wang Anshi’s reinterpretation of the contentious Zhouli had triggered the most revolutionary of reform programmes. Likewise the number of works enjoying canonical status as ‘the Confucian classics’ had varied over the centuries between five and thirteen, additions and subtractions providing the stimulus for new trends in thought and government as well as affording a barometer of these trends.
Under the Song, concern over the marginalisation of Heaven’s Son within the cosmic and geographical schema of ‘All-under-Heaven’ set thinkers to thinking and writers to writing as never before. It generated the candid historical scholarship of Ouyang Xiu and Sima Guang, the furore over the reformist programmes of Fan Zhongyang and Wang Anshi, endless debate about the merits of peace versus the risks of war, and urgent scrutiny of the entire Confucian legacy. Neo-Confucianism in its broadest sense embraced all these activities. Like the Renaissance in Europe, the term came to be used to sum up the spirit of an age and highlight its defining characteristic. This was not the rediscovery of a classical past but the re-evaluation of an intellectual and ethical heritage that, though always cherished, was thought to have long been imperfectly understood.
The parameters of scholarly reference remained tight. Education and tradition kept speculation on the straight-and-narrow of what could be sourced in the Confucian classics and illustrated from the historical record. On the other hand, these repositories of wisdom were sufficiently capacious and enigmatic to accommodate challenging and often contradictory new thinking about the dynamics of the universe, the composition of human nature and the social and political conduct appropriate to both. In this ferment of ideas, the formation of pressure groups and parties remained taboo. Confucian tradition urged self-cultivation; virtue was to be sought within, through arduous study and such vigilant examination of one’s motives that doing the right thing became second nature. Exceptional scholars like Zhu Xi, though encouraged to teach and publish, tended therefore to stress their association not with contemporary thinkers but with past sages and to construct a pedigree for their ideas. Sometimes dignified as a ‘Way’ or a ‘Great Tradition’, it linked them to key figures, concepts and phrases from the textual tradition.
Bearded and twinkly-eyed (if one may trust his portrait) and apparently indifferent to career advancement, Zhu Xi chose his textual pedigree rather sparingly. His curricular contribution was to pare down the Confucian classics to just ‘Four Books’ (Sishu). Two were from the same text, the perhaps fourth-century BC Liji or ‘Book of Rites’; he selected extracts, reorganised them as two works entitled the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, reinterpreted them, and then repositioned them within his own ‘Four Books’ sequence. The other two of the four, also heavily abbreviated and glossed, were the Analects of Confucius and the Mengzi of Mencius, the Master’s acknowledged successor. Forming ‘a coherent humanistic vision’ and stressing the humane and socially responsible side of Confucianism, the Four Books would soon take priority over all the other classics and as of the fourteenth century become the foundation texts for both primary and civil service examinations. Memorised by millions, they ‘exerted far greater influence on Chinese life and thought over the next six hundred years than any other works’.8
Surveying the historical record, Zhu Xi was equally sparing. The mythical Five Emperors of prehistoric times were unassailably virtuous, likewise the pre-imperial Xia and Shang dynasties and of course the grand old Duke of Zhou. Then things had gone downhill. Confucius had managed to ‘transmit’ the accumulated wisdom of this sage past, and Mencius had refined and humanised this ‘transmission’; but the principles and the rationale underlying it had been too often ignored in public life. The nadir was reached in the tenth century under fly-by-night dynasties like that of Later Liang, the most unspeakable of Ouyang Xiu’s Five Dynasties.
Only under the Northern Song in the eleventh to twelfth centuries had the great ‘Way of Learning’ (Daoxue) at last resurfaced. Prompted by the Song’s political embarrassments, and goaded by the mystical and metaphysical subtleties of Daoist and especially Buddhist doctrine, Confucian studies had revived. At the core of this new, or Neo-, Confucian thinking lay a host of different ideas about how the cosmos worked and how the individual, as part of it and in accordance with its workings, might discover his own parallel path to moral perfection. The society and government composed of such enlightened individuals would then automatically be realigned in harmony with the cosmos. Man had the potential for good, or ‘humaneness’, within him; but to realise it, he needed to understand what human nature consisted of and how the mind functioned. Ancient concepts such as the ‘Mean’ (a state of lofty impartiality) and the ‘Supreme Ultimate’ held the key. According to Zhu Xi, the ‘Supreme Ultimate’ was ‘merely the principle [or the polarity] of Heaven and Earth and the myriad things’ it resided in each and every one; and its ‘movement generates yang and . . . its tranquillity generates yin’.9 Rationally reinterpreted, reformulated and, of course, exhaustively sourced, these and other such key ideas generated several schools of philosophy and so, for the first time, gave to Confucianism a metaphysical root-structure that was every bit as philosophically respectable, not to say mentally testing, as for instance Buddhist notions of non-being. Indeed, whether in reaction to Buddhism and Daoism or in imitation of them, Neo-Confucianism owed to both a considerable debt.
Finally, in its narrowest possible sense the term Neo-Confucianism is sometimes reserved exclusively for the immensely influential synthesis of ideas distilled from this cauldron of speculation by Zhu Xi himself. His synthesis is called Lixue, the ‘doctrine of principle’, the ‘principle’ in question somewhat resembling a metaphysical gene, inherent in all things but not uniform, basically good, and decisive in determining a human being’s moral nature. Zhu supposed it dormant until activated by ‘material-force’, which in the case of man meant the ‘investigation of all things’. His achievement lay not just in synthesising and organising what one writer calls these ‘fruitfully ambiguous concepts’ but in their cogent presentation and practical application.10 As a teacher with his own academy he disseminated them, and as a provincial official he endeavoured to practise them.
A handbook on family rituals – marriages, funerals, ancestor reverence, etc. – prepared under his direction was probably as influential as the ‘Four Books’, though it did his later reputation no favours. As a stickler for the Confucian submission of young to old and female to male, Zhu Xi ordered girls to cover their faces in public; wives were to be denied either financial or intellectual independence; and in those regions ‘notorious for their frequent cases of abduction’, he advised the women to ‘attach wooden blocks to their shoes so that they made a noise in walking’. Assuming they could actually walk, as opposed to shuffling on stumps, this scarcely amounted to protection; the clatter may have been more advertisement than safeguard. The Japanese scholar responsible for unearthing such strictures has suggested that they instilled a deep conservatism. The standard-isation of Confucian family rites, in Japan (where Zhu Xi’
s writings were equally influential) as in China, reinforced a stifling degree of social conformity by adding the weight of canonical sanction to the burden of convention. ‘If Christianity. . . attaches importance to the sense of guilt, and Buddhism to the sense of pain [or suffering],’ says the same scholar, ‘Confucianism stresses the sense of shame.’11
Come reaction, let alone eventual revolution, Zhu Xi would be an easy target. His ‘Four Books’, instead of encouraging ‘the investigation of all things’, stressing the obligation to think for oneself, and so ending the set-piece tyranny of the examinations, came in time to comprise that tyranny; and in encapsulating Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi would be roundly condemned for it. For ignoring political realities and obsessing about abstract theories of human nature, he invited contempt, while ‘the no doubt unintended consequence of his social thought was to harden the status quo, close minds to unconventional views, and discourage those in government from taking any disruptive actions’.12 The more he became the central figure in the ideology of the later empire, the more exposed he would be to the criticisms of those who would overthrow it.
Ironically the official adoption of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism would come not under the Song but under the supposedly uncultured Mongols. In 1259 Mongol forces reached the Yangzi, so bringing the prospect of confrontation between the mannered lifestyle of Southern Song and the raw fury of the steppe uncomfortably close. Visions of Mongol cavalry watering their horses in Hangzhou’s West Lake before carrying rape and pillage into the heart of Polo’s ‘finest city in the world’ were too horrible to contemplate. Rote-learning students in lakeside bowers must have shivered in their chest-gaping gowns, carousing grandees aboard pedalled pleasure-craft have choked on their kumquats. ‘The people of this land [i.e. Manzi] were anything but warriors,’ says Polo, ‘all their delight was in women, and nought but women.’ Their ‘king’, too, ‘thought of nothing but women, unless it were charity to the poor’. Though his kingdom ‘had no horses’, the lakes and rivers provided a natural defence; he could have held out if the people had been a little more martial, thought Polo; ‘but that is just what they were not, and so it was lost’.13
MONGOL REUNIFICATION
Seldom can more mismatched adversaries have squared up to one another. The Song, with a massive army but a wretched military record, had been retreating, on and off, for nearly three hundred years; the Mongols, though fewer and occasionally repelled, had been advancing for fifty years, had never lost a war, and had conquered most of the known world. Their onslaught, more sudden than that of the Arabs, more widespread than that of Alexander, and more traumatic than either, was like nothing that history had ever known – or would again. According to both Christian and Muslim sources, bleached bones and charred timbers marked their trail; the slaughter of those who offered resistance was generally as comprehensive as steel and muscle could manage. Urbanisation in much of Asia was halted in its tracks, fragile agricultural systems never recovered, and population figures are thought to have nosedived. Like the plague, which they may unintentionally have spread, the Mongols came from nowhere and were suddenly everywhere.
It had all begun in north-east Mongolia in 1206 when a resourceful and audacious twenty-year-old called Temujin, scion of a junior branch of the neither numerous nor powerful Meng people of that region, having united the Meng and overrun more formidable neighbours, was acclaimed their ‘Chinggis Khan’ (‘Oceanic Qaghan’ or ‘Universal Ruler’). A great white banner was unfurled at the windswept gathering near the source of the Onon River where this ceremony took place, a basic military-cum-administrative organisation was set up, and plans laid for further triumphs. The unity of the peoples of the Mongolian steppe, no less than the authority of their new ruler, depended on maintaining the momentum of success. Only by more raids, more proof of invincibility and more redistributed plunder – livestock, gold, furs, textiles, foodstuffs, craftsmen, presentable women and enslaveable children – could loyalty be rewarded and the allegiance of others attracted.
Though ‘Meng’ or ‘Meng-wu’ was just the Chinese rendering of ‘Mongol’, ‘Mongolian’ better describes the composition of Chinggis’s following. Turkic-speaking neighbours, some of whom had adopted Nestorian Christianity, were already more numerous than native Mongols. Included, too, were the Tatars, another Mongolian people whose name both Chinese and European writers would often prefer to that of ‘Mongol’ – much as the Mongols would prefer ‘Jin’ (or ‘Chin’) for Song China. Other early adherents included numerous Uighurs from the northern city-states of Xinjiang. They would play a major part in Mongol administration. Their script was adapted for Mongol use, and their confessional odyssey – through Buddhism to Manichaeism and Islam – lent an ecumenical diversity to the profile of the Mongol court. While much of contemporary Eurasia counted professing the wrong faith a greater incitement to war than the possession of conspicuous wealth or irresistible women, the Mongols begged to differ. Their demands, though exhorbitant, rarely extended beyond the portable and the serviceable; freedom of worship, for those who lived to enjoy it, was officially guaranteed.
First among their prosperous southern neighbours to feel the impact of Mongol power was Tangut Xia, or the ‘Great State of White and High’. Mongol armies rode in from the Gobi in 1209 and laid siege to the Tangut capital beside the upper Yellow River in Ningxia. It was the first Mongol assault on a sedentary people with a fortified city and it fared indifferently. A Mongol attempt to flush out the defendants by destroying their irrigation system flooded the Xia defences but also swept through their own positions. The Mongols withdrew, wet, undefeated and yet not exactly victorious. They had secured Xia’s submission, plus a Tangut bride for Chinggis, but left the state intact. This would turn out to be a mistake.
The Xia campaign served as a trial run and strategic prelude to the more rewarding task of raiding the northern territories of the Jurchen Jin. Begun in 1211, the raids had climaxed with the capture of the Jin capital (the later Beijing) in 1215 and the attachment of much of Manchuria, whose remaining Khitans transferred their allegiance to the Mongols. Chinggis then turned west. The submission of the Kara Khitai (or Western Liao) of Turkestan in 1218 was easily won, though not so that of their more powerful neighbour, the Muslim kingdom of Khwarazm (roughly Uzbekistan). While its shah took refuge on an island in the Caspian Sea, where he died in 1221, his son went on the run and led the Mongols a none-too-merry dance through what are now northern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and then back again. This bloodiest of campaigns ended in 1223 with Khwarazm’s collapse and the dispersal of its forces. Many entered India, where they swelled the ranks of the Muslim conquistadors under the Delhi sultanate; others gravitated towards Syria and there carved for themselves ‘a small niche in history as the Muslim force that (more or less incidentally) finally evicted the Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1244’.14
Further Mongol probes in the 1220s into Azerbaijan, Georgia and Russia presaged the great advance into Europe of 1241. Meanwhile Chinggis Khan ended his foreign adventures as he had begun them, with an attack on Tangut Xia. From end to end the ‘Great State of White and High’ was blackened and brought low before its capital was again besieged. It was still holding out when in 1227 Chinggis died, apparently from complications resulting from a fall from his horse. (Mongols were forever falling off horses, according to Brother William of Rubruck, a missionising Franciscan who, with encouragement from Louis IX of France, reached the Mongol capital in 1253; for men who lived and often slept in the saddle, it was an occupational hazard.) Days later, Xia surrendered and the khan’s corpse could be taken home to be interred on a mountain in eastern Mongolia. As for the ‘Great State of White and High’, within a couple of decades it too had disappeared under the sands of history.
The Tanguts of Xia had brought all this upon themselves by failing to support ongoing Mongol operations against the Jin and then signing a unilateral peace treaty with them. From 1216 to 1223, while the main Mongol forces were subduing Khwaraz
m in the west, one of Chinggis’s generals had rampaged up and down the Yellow River from Shandong to Shaanxi at the head of an army composed principally of Khitan and other ex-Jin subjects, including many Han Chinese. Experience in siegecraft was gained and sophisticated weaponry amassed; but the Tangut absence, and then defection, had limited its territorial gains.
Once the succession to Chinggis had been resolved with the elevation of his third son, Ögödei, as Great Khan (and with the installation of other sons as subordinate khans elsewhere in Eurasia), offensive operations in China were resumed. In 1230 Ögödei himself campaigned in Sichuan, ever the strategic key to an all-China dominion. Then in 1233–34, with some gleeful assistance from the Southern Song, he completed the conquest of the last Jin redoubts in Henan. All northern China down to the Huai River was now under the Mongols’ control and at the mercy of their military commanders. A sinicised Khitan official favoured by Ögödei remonstrated against indiscriminate pillage and supposedly convinced his master that depriving China of its people in order to turn it into pasturage would be less rewarding than sparing the population in order to tax their labours and enjoy their produce. He set up a basic administration, reinstated the examination system (though practically no successful candidates were entrusted with office) and briefly curbed the excesses of military rule. But with Ögödei’s death in late 1241, this first Mongol experiment in Chinese-style government ended. The examinations lapsed and tax collection was farmed out among a coterie of central Asian merchants and moneylenders who had attached themselves to the Mongol leadership. Their extortionate demands and brutal enforcement methods laid waste the countryside. The northern Chinese, though spared annihilation to make way for grass, thus got an early taste of a most pernicious form of colonial oppression. ‘It is difficult to imagine a more ruinous or exploitative economic system,’ says a contributor to The Cambridge History of China.15