Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2
Page 5
After Qin and Han [however] . . . , the underlying motive in government has been purely selfish and expedient, the fear being that otherwise one might suffer the loss of what belonged to one’s family. . . . This is why Master Zhu [Xi] said that for over two thousand years the Way had not been practiced for even a single day.
Elsewhere Lü identifies rulership with Heaven in order to emphasize both the ruler’s overarching responsibility to the people and the universality of the principles that should govern the ruler’s conduct: “The Son of Heaven occupies Heaven’s Position (tianwei) in order to bring together the common human family within the Four Seas, not just to serve the self-interest of one family.” Lü explains that during the Three Dynasties the throne was passed on to others with the idea of sharing responsibility, of doing what was best for the people. “Heaven’s Imperative (tianming) and the minds-and-hearts of the people weighed heavily on them, and the world lightly. [Such being the case, as Mencius said,] the sages would not commit even one unrighteous deed or kill even one person, though to do so might gain them the whole world.”
Some scholars had justified the dynastic system as a natural extension of the parent-child relationship and had tried to promote the idea that the ruler was the loving parent of all the people. Lü dismissed this paternalism as a fraudulent claim and instead equated rulership with ministership. The original basis of rulership was no different from that of ministership; the only criteria for holding the office should be individual merit and commitment to right principles.
Lineal succession is founded on the parent-child relationship; the passing on of rulership is founded on the ruler-minister relation. The former derives from [the principle of] humaneness; the latter, from that of rightness. On this basis these two great principles coexisted and were never confused. Thus Heaven’s Position [rulership] was originally conferred on the basis of individual worth.
Elsewhere Lü emphasizes that this basic moral relation is rooted in the nature received from Heaven:
Heaven gives birth to the people and establishes rulers and ministers for them. Rulers and ministers are for sustaining the life of the people. The minister seeks out a ruler to head the government, and the ruler seeks out the minister to share in the governing. Together they represent Heaven’s presence in the world. Thus the ruler’s position is called “Heaven’s position; official emoluments are called Heaven’s emoluments.” Heaven’s order and Heaven’s justice are not something the ruler and minister can take and make their own. Though there is a definite difference in the honor done to ruler and minister, it is still only a difference of one degree in the relative distance between them.
Here Lü emphasizes the organic nature of the social order and of the moral imperatives governing human relations. Among these, he says elsewhere, the moral relation between ruler and minister is the most important of all:
The rightness (yi) of the ruler-minister relation is of the first importance in the world (yu zhong diyi shi). It is the greatest of the human moral relations. If one does not keep to this principle, then no matter what one’s accomplishments or meritorious deeds, they will count for nothing against the guilt so incurred.
While the moral responsibility that attaches to this relation is heavy and inescapable—as fixed and unalterable as the imperatives of Heaven’s mandate—this does not mean that the personal relationship between ruler and minister is similarly fixed and unalterable:
Ruler and minister come together in agreement on what is right (yi). If they can agree on what is right, they can form the relation of ruler-minister; if not, they should part, as is the case in the relation between friends. It is not like father and son, or older and younger brother [i.e., a blood relation that cannot be changed]. If they do not agree, there is no need for personal resentment or recrimination. If their commitment is not the same, their Way cannot be carried out, and it is best to part.
Parting is in accordance with the rite of ruler and minister, not a departure from that relation. It was only in later times, with the abandonment of the enfeoffment system and adoption of centralized prefectures and counties, that the world came under the control of one ruler and consequently there was “advancement and retirement” [from office] but no parting. When the Qin abandoned the Way, they established the “rite” of honoring the ruler and abasing the minister, and created an unbridgeable gap between the one on high and the other below, giving the ruler complete control over the minister’s advancement and retirement, while leaving him nowhere to go. That was when the relation of rightness between ruler and minister underwent a complete change.
In consequence of this change, the conception of ministership, as well as rulership, was corrupted when Heaven’s [moral] authority was no longer recognized:
After the Three Dynasties, rulers and ministers forgot about Heaven. Rulership came to be thought of as for one’s own self-gratification. Ministers thought that life and death, reward and punishment, were all at the ruler’s disposal and it could not be otherwise. Thereupon the ruler became honored and the minister abased, with the two completely separated. Government, insofar as it now involved a sharing of power and prestige, could not possibly be shared. Thereupon usurpations and assassinations followed; a world of selfishness and expediency was produced. Cut off from Heaven, rulers did not understand that rites come from Heaven, ministers did not realize that fidelity [loyalty] is rooted in the moral nature, that the nature is Heaven, that Heaven is the moral imperative [and political mandate], that it is principle, and the nature is principle.
Government: From the Top Down or Ground Up?
In Lü’s view the ancient well-field system had provided the material base, and schooling the cultural support, for the people’s assumption of some responsibility for maintaining the social and political order. He had this to say in commenting on Mencius’s discussion of officials’ emoluments as in lieu of their own cultivation of the land:
[In ancient times] the whole system of emoluments was based on the usufruct of the land, and likewise the whole system of official ranks was based on it. In Heaven’s creating of the people and providing for rulers and teachers, the basic principle was thus all-embracing. . . . Looked at from the top it might seem to some as if ranks and emoluments were projected downward to the common people; they do not realize that looked at in terms of Heaven’s bestowing of life on the people, the principle originates with the people and reaches up to the ruler.
In this emphasis on the fundamental importance of the common man we see not only a reflection of Mencius’s emphasis on the people but a further application of Lu’s basic doctrine that all life comes from Heaven, that all human beings are endowed with the moral nature, and that in each individual lies the imperative to act in accordance with the principles inhering in that nature. It is not a “mandate” solely for the ruler.
This is a point of great potential significance. Confucius and Mencius had stressed the responsibility of noble men (junzi) to provide for the needs of the common man (min), but not the responsibility of the min themselves. Here the heightened emphasis on the indwelling of principle, as the Heavenly endowed moral nature, suggests that all individuals share to some degree in this responsibility. Lu does not elaborate any new political mechanisms by which this responsibility might be actively discharged.
Both the common man and the Son of Heaven are rooted in the same principle. Speaking of it in terms of rank from the top down, the Great Learning says “from the Son of Heaven down to the common man,” but in terms of principle, in reality, it goes from the common man up to the Son of Heaven. The Son of Heaven’s renewing of the people should proceed on the same principle, and conform to the common man’s regulation of his own family.
This is not only a responsibility that weighs on the ruler. Everyone has his own self [to govern] and therefore there is no one on whom the responsibility does not lie. Just as there are the myriad things and one Supreme Ultimate, so each thing has its own Supreme Norm to follow.
&
nbsp; Although the matter is discussed in terms of responsibilities rather than entitlements, it is clear that each thing’s having its own norm to follow confers on it a certain irreducible autonomy, which governance must take into account and respect. Thus Lu also says:
There are many gradations from the Son of Heaven down to the common man, and each in performing his own proper function is different, but the differentiation lies in one’s lot or function and not in the principle. Therefore it is said, “Principle is one and its particularizations diverse. . . .” No matter how low the commoner is, it is the same underlying principle and not a different case. The commoner may not have the official function of ordering the state and bringing peace to the world, but inherent in the fulfilling of his self-cultivation is the principle of ordering the state and bringing peace to the world.
[From de Bary, Learning for One’s Self, pp. 291–292, 312–313, 326–330, 335–341]
LATE CONFUCIAN SCHOLARSHIP: WANG FUZHI
Wang Fuzhi (Wang Quanshan, 1619–1692) is now widely recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the Ming-Qing period, but he was virtually unknown during his own lifetime, having been born into a strictly conservative and rather isolated family of scholars in Hengyang, Hunan. Wang’s personal life and official career were shattered by the catastrophic events surrounding the collapse of the Ming dynasty. In 1642, after succeeding in the provincial (juren) examinations, he set off for Beijing and the jinshi sessions, but marauding peasant rebels forced him to turn back, and when Zhang Xianzhong’s peasant army took Hengyang the following year, Wang’s family became a target of the insurgents. After the fall of Beijing in 1644, Wang took an active part in anti-Manchu resistance but was defeated when he raised troops in Hunan, and though he subsequently held a minor post at the southern “imperial” court of the Yongli pretender, he soon became a victim of factional strife and was forced to resign in 1650. Still only thirty-one years old, from then until his death some forty years later, he withdrew into the hills of Hunan and a life of scholarship. Fiercely loyal to the Ming, he refused either to serve the Qing or to rally to such dubious opponents of the alien regime as Wu Sangui, when the latter proclaimed a “Zhou” dynasty in Hengyang, in 1678.
Wang never, however, relinquished his hopes of a Chinese recovery, even though he had to content himself with expressing his ideas through a prodigious amount of writing that covered the entire range of traditional Chinese scholarship. His passionate commitment to Chinese civilization and its destiny shines forth through all his studies and, along with his fiery patriotism and savage criticism of barbarians, was responsible for the vast majority of his work remaining unpublished until the latter half of the nineteenth century. (Some was banned, but most was concealed from Qing officialdom by his family.) Yet once such writings as The Yellow Book (Huang shu), A Strange Dream (E meng), On Reading [Sima Guang’s] Comprehensive Mirror (Du Tongjian lun), and On the History of the Song Dynasty (Song Lun) had been published, they attracted the attention of both reformers and revolutionaries, who saw in Wang an early exponent of Chinese nationalism. Zeng Guofan, Tan Sitong, Liang Qichao, Zhang Binglin, and Mao Zedong were among those who declared their admiration for him.
Three imperatives animate Wang’s writings: the crucial need to return to the sound philosophical basis provided by the “true doctrines” of the early Song Confucian Zhang Zai; an urgent necessity to learn the lessons that the study of Chinese history could reveal; and a primordial duty to preserve Chinese culture and civilization from alien encroachment and indigenous debasement.
Indeed, the philosophical basis of all Wang’s thought was his own rational development of the monistic cosmology first worked out by Zhang Zai, whom he acknowledged as his master. Zhang had been one of the Song thinkers drawn upon for the great Song Neo-Confucian synthesis completed by Zhu Xi in the twelfth century, but, according to Wang, Zhang’s contribution to the genuine Confucian tradition had been accorded too little importance in the Cheng-Zhu system. Moreover, Wang Yangming and his followers had subsequently perverted Confucianism, and it was their influence that had resulted in the moral anarchy and social chaos that led to the ruin of the Ming dynasty. For Wang Fuzhi the realms of philosophy (both cosmology and ethics), history, and politics were dimensions of the same universal phenomenon, evolving as integrally related parts of the one great process of change. It was doubtless his desire to understand this process of universal change and, in particular, the cataclysmic changes of his own times that led him to devote himself to an extensive study of the Classic of Changes and Zhang Zai, whose entire system of thought was, as Wang himself remarked, inspired by this classic.
Following Zhang Zai, Wang built his philosophy on the identification of material-force (qi) with the Supreme Ultimate, the term that had become part of the Neo-Confucian vocabulary and was generally synonymous with the Way, either as the origin of the universe, as universal laws, or as the Absolute. Zhang had preferred to use the terms Supreme Void (Taixu) to describe its aspect as original, unformed substance and Supreme Harmony (Taihe) to refer to the complex but coherent process of activity and tranquillity, agglomeration and dispersal, in the harmony of yin and yang that constitutes the Way. In this universe of continuous change, Wang emphasizes the significance of the trend of material conditions (shi), which are the product of the evolving material-force (qi) and principles (li), in which the importance of the time factor is crucial. His concept of shi (translated here as “trend” or “condition,” depending on context) dominates both his historical criticism and his assessment of political institutions. It explains the rational empiricism of his proposals for reform and his firm rejection of any notion of reviving the well-field system or the enfeoffment system as anachronistic (despite his Song master’s advocacy of them!).
In responding to the critical problems of Ming China, Wang’s proposals were generally moderate, tempered by an awareness of what was feasible in the prevailing conditions and his conviction that change should always be gradual if the proper equilibrium (zhen from the Classic of Changes) were to be achieved and maintained. Having identified the systems of land taxation and distribution as the root of social and political disorder, he outlined original ways of improving the country’s agricultural basis and restoring peasant prosperity. Perceiving the growth of commerce as a threat to the class structure of traditional Chinese society, he advocated repressive taxation on merchants. Arguing that imperial despotism had been a dominant factor in the decline of the Ming, he, like Huang Zongxi, proposed ways of restoring the balance of power shared between the emperor and his ministers—in particular, the restoration of the office of prime minister as the first step in a general decentralization throughout the administration that would put more power in the hands of scholar-officials. The latter were, according to Wang, the ultimate guarantors of the country’s political health, and the Donglin activists of the late Ming had incarnated this role in their struggle with the inner court. As did such contemporaries as Huang and Tang Zhen, Wang severely criticized selfish and decadent emperors without ever calling the institution of monarchy itself into question. At the core of his proposals lay the aim to revive ministerial power and prestige, which had been dramatically eroded during the Ming.
Wang’s proposals were never adopted or implemented, but he anticipated, in reply to a hypothetical critic, the objection that “at present, with the country overwhelmed and the dynasty cut off, to recount too much the errors of the past will simply arouse resentment. This is ‘bolting the stable door after the horse has gone.”’ Wang’s answer was this: “Confucius, in writing the Spring and Autumn Annals, made many subtle criticisms of the reigns of Duke Ding and Duke Ai [who ruled Confucius’s state of Lu during his lifetime]. At the time when one speaks, no one understands one. In setting forth what I have understood, I am also trying to advise future generations.” (Huang shu, postface)
COSMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
In his commentary on Zhang Zai’s Zhengmeng (Discipline for Beginn
ers), Wang elaborates the foundations of his own system. In a cosmos of being, consisting entirely of material-force (and in which there is no room for nonbeing), the natural harmony of the complex interplay of elements in the ceaseless process of evolution depends on their orderly organization into different categories and on the normal functioning of each within its respective category. The concept of universal order based on strict observance of natural categories had, of course, significant social and political implications.
In the Supreme Void all is being; but it has not yet taken form. The qi (material-force) is self-sufficient through agglomeration and dispersion, change and evolution; its original substance is neither diminished nor increased. The sun and moon in their risings and settings, the four seasons in their comings and goings, the various creatures in their life and death, together with the wind and the rain, dew and thunder, flourish when the time is ripe and decline when the time is ripe. In this they are one: they are all temporary forms. . . .
. . . When the qi agglomerates, its existence is visible, but when it is dispersed one may suspect that it is nonexistent. Once it has agglomerated and assumed forms and images, then as regards talents (cai), matter (zhi), nature (xing), and feelings (qing), all accord with their own categories. They accept what is similar and oppose what is different; thus all things flourish in profusion and form their several categories. Moreover, the formation of each of these categories has its own organization. So it is that dew, thunder, frost, and snow all occur at their proper times, and animals, plants, birds, and fish all keep to their own species. There can be no frost or snow during the long summer days, nor can there be dew or thunder in the depths of winter. Nor can there be between man and beast, plant and tree, any indiscriminate confusion of their respective principles.