EARNING THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN
The greatest Greek philosophers lived
at about the same time as the greatest philosophers in China, and what
may be particularly interesting is that both the Greeks, especially
Plato and Aristotle, and the Chinese were asking the same set of
questions: what can we mean when we talk about what makes a human being
"good" (both come to use terms that we translate the same way in
English as "virtue") and how are we to understand why some individuals
are to be seen as having authority over others as their rulers and
lawmakers.
A key difference in their answers
might be explained by the simple fact of geography. Greek cities
were separated by mountains and water, and perhaps for that reason they
took for granted that their status an independent city states was what
mattered most. Chinese cities developed as new settlements
appeared along the great rivers, and from the beginning tended to
see themselves as a single people who ought to have a single
ruler. Mythology often suggests that a ruler is somehow a
descendant of the gods (a vision that would hold force in Japan until
the end of the Second World War), but this would be less acceptable in
China since the story of a clear dynastic break in the twelfth century
BCE (the overthrow of the Shang by the Chou) was a major part of the
literary tradition from that time on.
In the document today know as the Book of History, the story is told of how the last Shang
ruler was an abusive tyrant who, because of how he treated his people,
had forfeited what was called the mandate of heaven--a god-given
authority to make laws and be obeyed. He is overthrown by the
first ruler of the new Chou dynasty, who because of his "virtue" now
has secured the mandate of heaven. You might ask why not just be
realistic and say that might makes right: the new man was stronger and
so managed to defeat a ruler who no longer had the ability to defend
his ancestral throne. In the Chinese vision, however, what made
such a picture unacceptable was that the ruler was seen as almost
literally the father of his country, and in China one of the worst sins
was to attack your own father. The escape clause, explained in
Confucian thought, was that there were reciprocal responsibilties in a
relationship. A father who abandoned his children no longer had
the rights of a father; the ruler who abused his people (specifically
by raising taxes to support aggressive warfare) no longer had the
rights of a ruler. Mencius would express it this way: we need to
act according to the real meaning of a name, and someone who would
steal from the people should be seen not as a ruler but as a bandit who
was to be captured and killed.
What made all this particularly
relevant was that in the centuries during which Confucius, his
contemporaries, and his immediate successors developed the varied
approaches to philosophy that entitled this period to be known as the
Era of the Thousand Schools there was intense conflict among the rival
small states whose rulers each claimed, because of the tangled marital
alliances by which their predecessors had gained power, to be the only
man who could claim to be the true emperor of all China. This was
then a period also known as the Era of the Warring States, and it would
last until the third century BCE.
In brief, the best way to approach
each of the earlier philosophers is to see how they attempted to offer
practical guidelines either for the individual who would advise the
ruler or for the ruler himself. Later, when the Era of the
Warring States had ended and there was unity of sorts, the emphasis
shifted from seeing the texts as exercises in political philosophy to
reading them as metaphysical treatises with references to government as
purely metaphorical. The same thing happened in the Greek world
in a time of empire when works such as Plato's Republic were no longer viewed as serious
political commentary.
In this course we are looking at
religious traditions, and there is still another parallel with what
happened in the Greek world. In the early Christian era, after
paganism was officially prohibited, Plato came to be viewed primarily
as a religious teacher among those intellectuals who refused to convert
and had withdrawn to enclaves where they could be left alone. The
role of a philosopher was now literally to be that of a priest.
This lasted only a few centuries, and the story came to be forgotten,
especially in the West where only a few of the oldest Greek works were
available in Latin translations. In China, though, the
transformation of both Confucianism and Daoism into religions has meant
that the political message of the early texts is what comes to be
ignored. Now that there was an emperor, it was potentially risky
to look too closely at the way in which Confucius and others discussed
the need of "virtue" in a ruler and the way in which the mandate of
heaven could still be forfeited. In both Greece and China,
philosophy, this search for wisdom, no longer looked at how individuals
were to become "virtuous" not for their own sake but in order to
achieve the right kind of social order. Instead, the goal of
philosophy became more personal and what we see more typically is
advice on how to survive in a society in which the interests of most
individuals are surrendered for the advantage of a few.
The key Confucian works--the Analects and the teachings of Mencius--and the Book
of Dao represent somewhat opposite visions of
what made for an ideal society. The Confucian stressed the role
of education, specifically a training in history and literature, in
developing the individual who was "the superior man." The Book
of Dao advised
the successful ruler to be someone who would keep his people's bellies
filled but their minds empty. One picture sees a complex social
organization as natural and right, the other sees it as artificial and
therefore undesirable. In the West we would think of these as
either/or choices, but in China they are seen more as complementary
outlooks in which one might be more appropriate in one setting but less
so in another. If you were to imagine Confucius and Lao Zi (the
legendary author of the Book
of Dao) debating the current educational scene
in the United States, what might be their advice?
The American Declaration of Independence, which reflects the political theory of
the English philosopher John Locke, expresses an outlook on how a
government comes to lose its authority. Compare the points made
there with the Confucian concept based on the Chinese Book
of History. Do you see the parallels?
Confucian ideals were a major factor in forming the Japanese outlook of
bushido, the code of the samurai warrior. Confucius had insisted on
both archery and a development of literary skills as part of the
training of his "superior man," and for the samurai, especially after the end of warfare
among rival shoguns, the ability to express oneself in a poem written
in a beautiful calligraphy was to go along with an ability to handle a
sword or a bow. How does this compare with our Western conception
of what we should expect from the military?