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The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism
Jennifer Oldstone-Moore (Editor)
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To Chris
List of Contributors xi Preface xvii
Jennifer Oldstone-Moore
Acknowledgments xxi
PART I INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
1. Confucianism and “Confucianism”: Describing and Problematizing the Tradition 3
Jeffrey L. Richey
2. The Construction of Confucianism in East Asia 20
Nicolas Zufferey
3. The Construction of Confucianism in Europe and the Americas: Confucius and Confucian Sayings Across the Centuries 33
Lionel M. Jensen
PART II THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONFUCIANISM IN CHINA
4. The Confucian Legendary Past 57 Yuri Pines
5. Confucius and the Zhou Dynasty 70 Scott Cook
6. The Analects 84
Peimin Ni
7. Mencius 96
Jim Behuniak
8. Xunzi: The Quintessential Confucian 109
Lee Dian Rainey
9. The Confucian Classics 126
Newell Ann Van Auken
10. Early Imperial Confucianism 140 Keith N. Knapp
11. The Formation of Neo-Confucianism in the Song 153 Tze-ki Hon
12. Re-forming Confucianism: Zhu Xi’s Synthesis 164 Joseph A. Adler
13. Late Imperial Neo-Confucianism 177 Pauline C. Lee
14. Imperialism, Reform, and the End of Institutional Confucianism in the Late Qing 191 Kai-wing Chow
15. Confucianism in Republican China, 1911–1949 204 Jennifer Oldstone-Moore
16. Confucianism in Taiwan: The 20th and 21st Centuries 217 Chun-chieh Huang
17. Confucianism in Mainland China 230 Tongdong Bai
18. Images of Confucius Through the Ages 242 Deborah Sommer
PART III CONFUCIANISM BEYOND CHINA
19. Confucianism in Japan 255
Kiri Paramore
20. Confucianism in Japan: The Tokugawa Era 271 John A. Tucker
PART IV TOPICAL STUDIES OF CONFUCIANISM
34. Confucianism and Modern Culture
Christian Jochim
35. Confucianism and Ritual
Hagop Sarkissian
36. Confucius and Contemporary Ethics
Tim Connolly
37. Confucianism and Chinese Religion
Ronnie Littlejohn
38. Confucianism as a Religion
Yong Chen
List of Contributors
Joseph A. Adler is Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at Kenyon College. He is the author of Reconstructing the Confucian Dao: Zhu Xi’s Appropriation of Zhou Dunyi (SUNY, 2014) and The Yijing: A Guide (Oxford, forthcoming), and the translator of The Original Meaning of the Yijing: Commentary on the Scripture of Change, by Zhu Xi (Columbia, 2020).
Tongdong Bai is Professor of Philosophy and the director of an English-based MA program in Chinese philosophy at Fudan University in China. His publications in English include Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case (Princeton, 2019) and China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (Zed Books, 2012).
Jim Behuniak is Professor of Philosophy at Colby College in Waterville, ME. He is author of John Dewey and Daoist Thought: Experiments in Intra-Cultural Philosophy, Vol. 1, and John Dewey and Confucian Thought: Experiments in Intra-Cultural Philosophy, Vol. 2 (SUNY, 2019).
Sin Yee Chan is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. Her research interests include Chinese philosophy, feminism, and philosophy of emotion. Her most recent publication is a book chapter “Why Does Confucianism Prefer Compassion to Empathy?” in New Life for Old Ideas.
Yong Chen is Research Professor at El Colegio de México. Publications include Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences (Brill, 2012), ¿Es el confucianismo una religion? (El Colegio de Mexico, 2012), Yinni kongjiao 28 tian xingji (My 28-day Visit to the Confucian Religion in Indonesia)(Chinese Heritage Center, Singapore, 2013), and Historia Minima del Confucianismo (co-authored, El Colegio de México, 2021).
Kai-wing Chow is Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in Chinese intellectual and cultural history of the Ming-Qing periods. He is the author of The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford, 1994) and Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, 2004). His edited books include Beyond the May-fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity, co-edited with Tze-ki Hon, Hung-yuk Ip, and Don C. Price (Lexington Books, 2008).
Tim Connolly is Professor of the Modern Languages, Philosophy, and Religion Department at East Stroudsburg University (East Stroudsburg, PA, USA). His books include Doing Philosophy Comparatively (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Foundations of Confucian Ethics: Virtues, Roles, and Exemplars (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming).
Scott Cook is Tan Chin Tuan Professor of Chinese Studies at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His publications include The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation, Volumes I and II (Cornell East Asia Series, 2012), and three books on excavated manuscripts in Chinese, including A Study of Recorded Conversations of Confucius Texts among the Shanghai Museum Manuscripts 上博竹書孔子語錄文獻研究 (Shanghai: Zhongxi shuju, December 2021).
Michael A. Fuller is Professor Emeritus of Classical Chinese Literature and Thought at the University of California, Irvine. His two most recent books are An Introduction to Chinese Poetry (Harvard University Asian Center Press, 2017) and Drifting among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History (Harvard University Asian Center Press, 2013).
Tze-ki Hon is a Professor at the Research Centre for History and Culture, Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai campus). He is the Acting Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at BNU-HKBU United International College. He is the author of The Yijing and Chinese Politics (2005), Revolution as Restoration (2013), Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes) (2014, co-authored with Geoffrey Redmond), and The Allure of the Nation (2015). He edited and co-edited 6 volumes including Confucianism for the Contemporary World (2017), Cold War Cities (2022) and The Other Yijing (2022).
Chun-chieh Huang is a Distinguished Chair Professor of National Taiwan University (NTU) and a Member of Academia Europaea. His publications include East Asian Confucianisms: Texts in Contexts (NTU Press, 2015), Taiwan in Transformation: Retrospect and Prospect (Routledge, 2014), Humanism in East Asian Confucian Contexts (Columbia, 2010). His most recent books in Chinese include Discourses of Humanity in East Asian Confucianisms: A History (NTU Press, 2017), Confucianism and Chinese Historical Thinking (NTU Press, 2014).
Martin W. Huang is Professor of East Asian Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His specialty is literature and gender in late imperial China. His most recent book is Intimate Memory: Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China (SUNY, 2018).
Lionel M. Jensen is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Concurrent Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Duke, 1997). He has written on new Confucianisms, Chinese religion and thought, contemporary economy and politics, early culture contact, human rights, ancient and medievals popular cults, nationalism, mythology, and mythistory of Kongzi and Confucianism.
Christian Jochim is Professor Emeritus of Humanities, San Jose State University. His publications include Chinese Religions: A Cultural Perspective (Prentice-Hall, 1986) and “Carrying Confucianism into the Modern World: The Taiwan Case,” in Religion in Modern Taiwan: Tradition and Innovation in a Changing Society (Hawai‘i, 2003).
Sungmoon Kim is Professor of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and Director of the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy. His most recent publications include Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics (Cambridge, 2020) and Democracy After Virtue (Oxford, 2018).
Youngmin Kim is Professor of Political Science at Seoul National University. His primary field of research is East Asian political thought. His publications include A History of Chinese Political Thought (Polity, 2017).
Youngyeon Kim is a PhD candidate at the Department of Korean Language and Literature, Seoul National University. Her primary research interests include the literary and intellectual history of Chosŏn Korea.
Keith N. Knapp is a Professor of History at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. He is the author of Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China (Hawai’i, 2005), and co-editor of the Cambridge History of China: Volume 2, The Six Dynasties, 220–589 (Cambridge, 2019) and Early Medieval Chinese Texts: A Bibliographic Guide (coauthored; Institute of East Asian Studies University of California Berkeley, 2018).
Eddie C. Y. Kuo is Emeritus Professor of Nanyang Technological University and Academic Advisor of Singapore University of Social Sciences in Singapore. His most recent book is Language (with Brenda Chan, Singapore, 2016).
Pauline C. Lee is Associate Professor of Chinese Religions and Philosophy at Saint Louis University. Her publications include Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire (SUNY, 2012), and A Book to Burn and A Book to Keep (Hidden) (Columbia, 2016).
Ronnie Littlejohn is Chaney Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Belmont University. He is the author of a number of works including Chinese Philosophy and Philosophers (Bloomsbury, 2022), Historical Dictionary of Daoism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), and 《儒学 儒学导论》(Introduction to Confucianism). Trans. Qian Jiancheng and Xiao Ya, Foreign Language and Teaching and Research Press of China (FLTR), 2019.
Robert L. Moore is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Rollins College where he served as Coordinator of Asian Studies. He is the coauthor, with William R. Jankowiak, of Family Life in China (Polity Press, 2017).
Julia K. Murray is Professor Emerita of Art History, East Asian Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include The Aura of
Confucius: Relics and Representations of the Sage at the Kongzhai Shrine in Shanghai (Cambridge, 2021), Confucius: His Life and Legacy in Art (co-authored, Chinese Institute in America, 2010), Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (Hawai‘i, 2007; Chinese edition Sanlian shudian youxian gongsi, 2014), and Ma Hezhi and the Illustration of the Book of Odes (Cambridge, 1993).
Robert Cummings Neville is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology and Dean Emeritus of the School of Theology and of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. He is the author of over 300 articles and 30 books, including The Tao and the Daimon (SUNY, 1982), Behind the Masks of God (SUNY, 1991), Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (SUNY, 2000), Ritual and Deference (SUNY, 2008), and The Good Is One, Its Manifestations Many (SUNY, 2016).
Peimin Ni is Professor of Philosophy and East Asian Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His publications include Understanding the Analects of Confucius—A New Translation of Lunyu with Annotations (SUNY, 2017) and Confucius, the Man and the Way of Gongfu (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
Jennifer Oldstone-Moore is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Her books include Confucianism (Oxford, 2002) and Understanding Taoism (Watkins, 2011).
Kiri Paramore is Professor of Asian Studies at University College Cork in the National University of Ireland. Publications include Japanese Confucianism (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ideology and Christianity in Japan (Routledge, 2009), and Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Michael J. Pettid is Professor of Korean Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). His publications include the co-edited volume Women and Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea (SUNY, 2011) and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Daily Life: A Woman’s Guide to Living in Late-Chosŏn Korea (Hawai‘i, 2021).
Yuri Pines is Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Zhou History Unearthed, translation cum study of The Book of Lord Shang (Columbia, 2020 and 2017), The Everlasting Empire (Princeton, 2012), Envisioning Eternal Empire, and Foundations of Confucian Thought (Hawai‘i 2009 and 2002), in addition to four co-edited volumes.
Lee Dian Rainey was an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her publications include “Confucianism and Its Texts” in Reading the Sacred Scriptures: From Oral Tradition to Written Documents and their Reception, Siobhan Dowling and Fiachra Long Eds., (Routledge, 2017), Confucius and Confucianism: The Essentials (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Decoding Dao: Reading the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) as well as a number of scholarly articles.
Jeffrey L. Richey is Professor of Asian Studies at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. His publications include Teaching Confucianism (Oxford, 2008), Confucius in East Asia (Association for Asian Studies, 2013), The Sage Returns (SUNY, 2015), and Daoism in Japan (Routledge, 2015).
Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i—West O’ahu. Her publications include Confucianism and Women (SUNY, 2006/2012), “A Revisionist History of Philosophy,” Journal of World Philosophies 5.1 (2020): 121–137, and A Feminist Re-imagination of Confucianism (forthcoming).
Hagop Sarkissian is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, and Baruch College, and Co-Director of the Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy. His research spans various topics in the history of Chinese thought, as well as contemporary issues in moral psychology, metaethics, and the cognitive science of religion.
Qingjuan Sun is Associate Professor of Yuelu Academy at Hunan University in China. She received her doctorate in philosophy from Nanyang Technological University in 2017. Among her research interests are Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, and feminist philosophy.
Deborah Sommer is Professor of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College. Her recent research explores conceptualizations of the body in Chinese texts and their significance for visual representations of the body. She examines how the body and face of Confucius have been conceptualized and visualized in unusual ways over the centuries.
John A. Tucker is a Professor of History at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. His publications include Kumazawa Banzan: Governing the Realm and Bringing Peace to All Below Heaven (Cambridge, 2021), The Forty-Seven Ronin: The Vendetta in History (Cambridge, 2018), Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy, co-edited with Chun-chieh Huang (Springer, 2014), Critical Readings on Japanese Confucianism (Brill, 2012), Ogyū Sorai’s Philosophical Masterworks (Hawai‘i, 2006), and Itō Jinsai’s Gomō jigi and the Philosophical Definition of Early Modern Japan (Brill, 1998).
Newell Ann Van Auken is a Lecturer in the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include early Chinese historiography and commentary, and her publications include The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn (SUNY, 2016) and Spring and Autumn Historiography: Form and Hierarchy in Ancient Chinese Annals (Columbia, forthcoming 2023).
Linda Walton is Professor Emerita of History at Portland State University. Among her publications are Academies and Society in Southern Song China (Hawai‘i, 1999) and a conference volume, The Heritage Turn in China: The Reinvention, Dissemination, and Consumption of Heritage (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), co-edited with Carol Ludwig and Yi-wen Wang.
John K. Whitmore was Emeritus Researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. A specialist in precolonial Vietnam with mastery of Vietnamese and classical Chinese, he published two books and perhaps 100 articles on early Vietnamese political, cultural, diplomatic, and social history. Widely recognized around the world for his pathbreaking research, the late Professor Whitmore taught at the University of Michigan and Yale University.
Alan T. Wood is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington Bothell, where he was a founding faculty of the new campus in 1990. His books include Limits to Autocracy: From Sung Neo-Confucianism to a Doctrine of Political Rights (Hawai‘i, 1995), World Civilizations, a co-authored textbook (Norton, 1997), What Does It Mean to be Human? (Peter Lang, 2001), and Asian Democracy in World History (Routledge, 2004).
Nicolas Zufferey is Professor of Sinology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His publications include various books and articles about ancient Chinese Confucianism, notably To the Origins of Confucianism: The Ru in Pre-Qin Times and during the Early Han Dynasty (Peter Lang, 2003).
Preface
Jennifer Oldstone- Moore
Confucianism is a multifaceted tradition that extends over thousands of years, permeating cultures that encompass more than one quarter of the world’s population. No one-volume work can provide an exhaustive study of so vast a subject. However, a selection of works by scholars from a variety of fields reveals the richness and variety of the Confucian tradition and of the range of approaches to its study. The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism draws upon the expertise of a wide range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences to provide a textured overview that engages emerging topics and innovative perspectives in contemporary Confucian studies.
Sophisticated and elitist, mundane and elemental, in many ways Confucianism is a paradox. On the one hand it has enjoyed an exalted official status in East Asian and some Southeast Asian societies. Governments have patronized it, fostering the development of an urbane and dedicated Confucian elite who built and curated a scholarly, erudite tradition of philosophy, literature, art, and government. On the other hand, Confucianism has had a broader, pervasive, and often more subtle influence in shaping the practices and values of common people and everyday life. Confucian ideas are so pervasive and interwoven in the habits, mores, and customs of the region that they can be difficult to differentiate or categorize apart from broader cultural and historical influences often denoted as simply “culture.” In this and many other ways Confucianism often defies Western intellectual and academic categorizations of religion, philosophy, and history.
Moreover, the term “Confucianism” itself is problematic, a historical oddity that in contrast to other such misnomers—for instance, Islam’s past designation as “Mohammedanism”—has stubbornly persisted into the twenty-first century. The musings, scolding, critiques, and hand-wringing by academics about both the name and the conceptual structures that have grown up around its study are as much a part of the landscape of Confucian studies as are exegesis of ancient texts and sociological study of families and filial piety. Whether this knot of nomenclature can be untangled remains to be seen; in the meantime, the term “Confucianism” is employed by scholars to designate a coherent if marvelously variable tradition. These concerns are represented and reconsidered throughout the essays in this volume.
The legacy of Confucianism has been shaped by its engagement in populations throughout East Asia and parts of Southeast Asia, and by a rich self-reflexive native tradition of commentary and study sustained through the centuries. Thus a primary
vantage point of Confucian studies draws on native categories and commentaries. Historical encounters between Asians and explorers, missionaries and imperialists over the last four-hundred-plus years was largely framed by Confucian expectations and structures of government, shaping the engagement of East Asian states in matters of diplomacy and foreign policy. The tradition has shaped the nature of interpersonal engagement between Asians and Westerners, greatly influencing the history of Asian modernization.
The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism is itself a testament to the history, breadth, reach and subtlety of Confucianism, and the vexing complexity of the term “Confucianism.” The essays here draw upon many material and theoretical resources: the reconstruction of texts and variants; philosophical strategies stemming from Western and Asian categories and approaches; historical narratives; sociological and anthropological investigations; analysis based on art historical and visual cultures; textual exegesis. Each of the thirty-eight original essays of this volume examines a key component of Confucianism using one or more of these approaches; as a volume they provide a panoramic view of the breadth and subtlety of Confucianism manifested in subject matter and hermeneutical approaches; the essays also offer new strategies for defining, understanding, and categorizing the tradition. Presenting Confucianism conceptually, chronologically, geographically, and topically, these essays are organized under four broad sections: Introductory Essays; The Development of Confucianism in China; Confucianism Beyond China; and Topical Studies of Confucianism.
Part I’s Introductory Essays consider the fundamental and perplexing methodological considerations specific to Confucianism that have become emblematic of the contours and boundaries of its academic study. Given the singularly important questions of creating and receiving this particular tradition, the first section introduces modes of study and conceptualizations in three essays, laying out the layered terrain of sources and impact, the porous and blurred boundaries, and shifting evidence and resulting conceptualizations that have shaped and sometimes transmogrified the study and understanding of Confucianism.
In the first essay, Jeffrey Richey delineates the primary points and categories of expressions of Confucianism, including education, ritual, text, and political tradition. Examining the challenges of historical and conceptual approaches from both within and outside the tradition, Richey suggests that we move away from asking the perennial yet consistently unanswerable question of “What is Confucianism?” to ask instead, “Who is a Confucian?” Rather than defining a tradition, the description of those who practice reveals the diversity and singularity of the tradition in repertoire, performer, place, and time.
Two other chapters in the Introductory Essays lay out the stakes and challenges of nomenclature. Names that denote the tradition tell their own story of tradition and received scholarship. Nicolas Zufferey explores the history, application, and significance of the native Chinese term for Confucianism—ru 儒 or literatus—noting that the indigenous associations made with this emic term are varied. Even as ru has come to indicate “Confucian” to most modern scholars outside of Asia, Zufferey notes that use of
the term is problematic in China virtually from the beginning of its usage. Moreover, the term had variant denotations in the other Confucian cultures of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, posing a challenge even when using insider categories and nomenclature. The final essay in this section, Lionel Jensen’s, delineates the etic construction of the term, that is, the construction of Confucianism by Europeans and the emergence of European “Confucianism.” As is known from Jensen’s previous work, the manufacturing of both “Confucius” and “Confucianism” stems from Jesuit encounters with the Ming elite and subsequent encounters and conceptualizations with Western persons and powers. The term “Confucianism” itself has had a profound impact on the understanding of the tradition in the West. Jensen presents new vantage points on the Western constructions and their impact on the study of Confucianism.
The essays in the main body of the volume are organized from three vantage points. Part II, Confucianism in China, considers the development of the tradition from its earliest historical context in Chinese antiquity to the twenty-first century. Arranged in a roughly chronological format, methodologies and approaches in this this section are varied rather than monolithic. The variety of methods reflect both the indigenous and foreign modes, as well as varied “traditions” of Confucianism. Essays on the ancient heritage draw from ancient histories, philology, and archeology; essays on the foundational texts of classical Confucianism, such as the Analects and Mencius are regarded from the vantage point of philosophy; while the Confucian Classics are regarded both historically and as literary works. Other essays show important transitional periods, such as signature qualities and concerns of Neo-Confucianism in the early modern and late empire, and the reformulations of the tradition by luminaries such as Zhu Xi at the period of pivotal transformation in the Song dynasty. Using fresh approaches, this section establishes not only the historical panorama of Confucianism in China, but also the range of strategies for approaching the tradition in its diverse manifestations, and the impact of that diversity in the received tradition.
Part III, Confucianism Beyond China, reveals Confucianism both as a shared source of identity in the East Asian and Southeast Asian cultural and political world, and as a flexible and tenacious agent in varied cultural settings into which it has been absorbed and adopted. In premodern Asia, Confucianism enjoyed overt support and the systematic and institutional implementation in various states throughout the region and continues to wield influence in the present day. Confucianism is also evinced as an inchoate entity that is pervasive and identifiable in education, the etiquette of officials, family mores, and literary culture. Not only embedded in East Asian cultures and some Southeast Asian states, more recently Confucianism has taken root among Western academics in the singular manifestation of “Boston Confucianism.” Altogether, these essays reveal the expansive and diverse manifestations of Confucianism in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Western academy.
The final section, Part IV, Topical Studies of Confucianism, contains thirteen essays that show the malleability of Confucianism and the multitude of ways and arenas in which Confucianism has shaped Asian cultures. Confucianism has permeated every level of East Asian societies, shaping and nourishing many cherished cultural forms.
Essays in this section reflect Confucianism’s impact on shaping the quotidian and pedestrian structures and elements of society and culture, its integration in elite intellectual and artistic pursuits, and its imprint on standards of human relationships.
The paradoxes of the Confucian tradition are unmistakable. Confucius is a figure who claimed that he was not an innovator but a transmitter of a revered ancient tradition. Yet the aspirational outcome of the tradition is denoted by a term whose meaning Confucius dramatically changed so that junzi 君子 moved from a term of hereditary royalty to self-cultivated person, thus establishing an ideal that became fodder for social ethics and revolution. He is a man venerated as a sage and the First Teacher—and he has been reviled as Public Enemy #1 and the despised source of imperial weakness and decay. Confucianism was the basis for political culture, for strengthening government by holding officials and even the emperor accountable for immorality; governments identified as Confucian have also been regarded as irremediably conservative and dangerously tradition-bound and self-protective to the detriment of the state. Denigrated by Asians and non-Asians alike as the cause of moribund polity and social mores that endangered the very survival of East Asian states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Confucianism has now revived and flourished in the twenty-first century in communist China and capitalist South Korea alike, and has been linked with the rapid growth and economic success of the region in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A highly textual tradition and a cornerstone to cultures that revere education, erudition, and the written word, the symbolic center of Confucianism has long been a figure who himself wrote nothing, his words coming to us as remembered fragments of conversations with students. Ultimately, the significance of this tradition of paradoxes is difficult to overstate. Perhaps it is in the very paradox that the vibrancy and longevity of the tradition has been nurtured. It is hoped that these essays will be a source for a concise presentation of the state of the field, fresh scholarship presenting a multitude of approaches, and a rich resource for comparative work both in terms of method and content.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful for the skill, professionalism, and collegiality of the myriad persons at Oxford and affiliates who guided the production of this text, particularly Theo Calderara, Brent Matheny, Kayal Ganesan, and those whose contributions are invisible to me but vital to the project. One of the joys of this volume has been my interaction with forty contributors who offered their expertise in absorbing and thoughtprovoking essays, and who also provided wit, compassion, and humanity in numerous conversations and correspondences. Perhaps it is not a surprise that a major project focused on Confucianism brings to mind the debt I owe to teachers, family, and curators of knowledge. Warren Rossney, history teacher at La Jolla High School, supported and strengthened a nascent interest in the humanities; Donald K. Swearer advised and inspired me through college; and Anthony C. Yu was a revered mentor who was simultaneously encouraging and exacting in graduate school and beyond. I owe much to my parents Michael and Elizabeth, and my parents-in-law Stan and Liz for their unfailing support and enthusiasm for my work in the academy over these many years. In addition to those who research and publish, I have been keenly aware of how much I rely on my heroes, the librarians, particularly Suzanne Smailes. The library staff at Thomas Library at Wittenberg University provides unflagging support for the scholarly enterprise and access to information, and does so with great capacity amidst ever-diminishing resources.
From first considerations about taking on this volume through the planning, execution, and proofing of the final copy, my constant companion, sounding board, critic, and editor has been my scholar-husband Chris. It is to him that I dedicate this volume.
PART I INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
CHAPTER 1
Confucianism and “Confucianism”
Describing and Problematizing the Tradition
Jeffrey L. Richey
Introduction: The Politics of “- isms”
Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true 1
The English words “Confucius” (c. 1687), “Confucian” (c. 1759), and “Confucianism” (c. 1836) all are of relatively recent origin, especially in comparison with the East Asian tradition to which each refers.2 “Confucius,” a Latinization of the late medieval term Kǒngfūzǐ 孔夫子 (“Revered Master Kǒng”), dates from the final years of the Jesuit mission to spread Roman Catholic Christianity in China, not long after the celebrated visit of the Chinese convert and Jesuit priest Shěn Fúzōng 沈福宗 (d. 1691) to Europe, while “Confucian” and “Confucianism” date from the period between the British victory over Bengali and French forces in Palashi (Plassey), India (1757) and the outbreak of the first Opium War between Britain and China (1839–1842), during which Britain acquired the largest empire in history.3 The missionizing and colonizing genealogy of these terms tells one much about the context in which, and the purposes for which, they were coined. It also prompts questions about the potential gap between early modern Western languages and worldviews and the premodern Chinese tradition that these terms were intended to describe. Notably, neither “Confucian” nor “Confucianism” are derived in any way from the Chinese terms Rújiā 儒家 (“family of scholars”), Rújiào 儒教 (“teaching of
scholars”), or Rúxué 儒 學 (“learning of scholars”), by which much of what would later be known as the “Confucian” tradition was self-identified from ancient times.4
A key issue that shaped both the Christian missionary enterprise in Asia and the European colonization of Asia was the contested personhood of non-Christians and non-Europeans. While the dignity and worth of sub-Saharan African and aboriginal Australian cultures were dismissed out of hand by most colonizers and missionaries, many Westerners felt conflicted about whether and how Chinese culture, especially its religious aspects, related to European Christian culture. On the one hand, European intellectuals had spent much of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries concocting a romantic, idealized view of China as a scholar’s paradise, supposedly free of the ethnic and religious conflict that plagued the West. On the other hand, the missionaries, merchants, soldiers, and diplomats who actually visited China often castigated it as a backward country desperately in need of the West’s paired gifts of civilization and salvation, especially once the nineteenth century began.5
Thus, the terms “Confucius,” “Confucian,” and “Confucianism” were introduced at a cultural moment in which the West was increasingly ambivalent about China, seeing it as both a land of ancient wisdom and a backwater of modernity. This ambivalence seems to have left its mark on these terms and their usage in English. By framing the description of China’s oldest spiritual and intellectual tradition in terms of a singular founder (Confucius), reverence for whom was thought to entail both a personal identity (Confucian) and an institutional entity (Confucianism), these words suggested that China possessed a tradition somewhat akin to Christianity—to which it could not possibly be superior or even equal, of course. At best, Christian missionaries presented Confucianism as something like the religion of ancient Israel and rabbinical Judaism, which they regarded as having been superseded by Christianity. The Protestant Christian missionary and pioneering sinologist James Legge (1815–1897), who was much more sympathetic to Chinese culture than many other Westerners of his time, identified Confucianism as
first of all the ancient religion of China, and then the views of the great philosopher himself. . . . much as when we comprehend under Christianity the records and teachings of the Old Testament as well as those of the New.6
Legge’s Christian-influenced hermeneutic led him to subsume diverse traditions into one monolithic entity, thus establishing “Confucius” as the founder of a self-contained, uniform religion, “Confucianism,” whose adherents could be clearly distinguished not only from Christians, but also from Buddhists, Daoists, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims, as “Confucians.”7
A century later, the Christian pastor and historian of religions Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) famously declared that “the question ‘Is Confucianism a religion?’ is one that the West has never been able to answer and China never able to ask.”8 In fact, the West has produced many answers to this question, and China itself has asked it in numerous ways ever since the first encounters between Chinese culture and imported
faiths such as Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. But both the articulations of this question and the answers that it has produced are inherently problematic, at least if one seeks an objective, unbiased definition. That is a quest that may have been doomed from the start.
Like any other categorical term, the term “Confucianism” is value-laden, but the values with which it is invested depend on who deploys it, and why they do so. In other words, politics—in both loosely cultural and tightly institutional senses—has played a crucial role in the definition or non-definition of Confucianism. In this sense, Confucianism is much like other, broader categories of cultural analysis, such as gender, race, or religion. From definitions of Confucianism, one can learn more about the backgrounds and the agendas of those seeking to define Confucianism than anything about Confucianism as a cultural and historical phenomenon. This is especially true in the case of attempts to define Confucianism as a religious or non-religious tradition. But what can one learn from the ideas, images, institutions, and practices that are claimed as “Confucian” by “Confucians” themselves?
Confucianism: A Descriptive Overview
The Master said: “I transmit and do not innovate; I trust and love antiquity.” (Analects 7:1)
If one peers into the mystery, the great ultimate [tàijí 太極] seems a chaotic and disorderly wilderness lacking all signs of an arranger . . . yet its fundamental pattern [lĭ 理] of motion and rest, and of Yin and Yang, is fully contained within it. 9
Like the labels given to other non-Western, premodern cultural traditions, it probably is best to think of convenient labels such as “Confucianism” as a kind of umbrella term, under which may be grouped many different, complementary but not necessarily mutually-entailing sets of ideas, images, institutions, and practices. Throughout East Asian cultural history, there have been several different ways in which to look at Confucian ideas, images, institutions, and practices as forming a coherent pattern or tradition.
Confucianism as Teaching Tradition
One way to link “Confucianism” to a set of cultural patterns is to see it as a lineage of teaching and learning, in which master-disciple relationships (sometimes contemporaneous, sometimes posthumous) link generations of moral, political, and spiritual practitioners. The view of Confucianism as a teaching tradition of masters facilitating the self-cultivation of disciples probably is closest to the modern characterization of
Confucianism as a religious tradition. The historian and philosopher Qián Mù 錢穆 (1895–1990) put his finger on the issue of trying to see Confucianism as a religious tradition when he argued that
Confucius [Kǒngfūzǐ 孔夫子 or Kǒngzǐ 孔子, c. 551–479 BCE] was not a religious founder in China. What he had his faith and took delight in, as well as what he transmitted, was antiquity itself. His focus was on mankind, not on God, who is supernatural. Hence he never thought of himself as superior to the ancients. This is the spirit of Chinese learning and civilization. In fact, the position of Confucius in China surpasses that of Jesus in the West.10
The contemporary Confucian thinker Tu Wei-ming asserts that
Being religious, in the Confucian perspective, informed by sacred texts such as the Chung-yung [Zhōngyōng 中庸 or Doctrine of the Mean], means being engaged in the process of learning to be fully human. We can define the Confucian way of being religious as ultimate self-transformation as a communal act and as a faithful dialogical response to the transcendent.11
Thus, neither Confucian tradition nor Kǒngzǐ himself seems to regard Kǒngzǐ as Confucianism’s first teacher. On the contrary, Kǒngzǐ seems to have viewed himself as an heir to a much earlier lineage of masters and disciples, which connected him to both the legendary founders of the Western Zhōu 周 dynasty (c. 1046–771 BCE) and the mythological sage-rulers of Chinese antiquity as imagined by Zhōu texts, beginning with the primal emperor Yáo 堯. Everything that is believed to be true about Kǒngzǐ dates from sources that did not exist until after his death. Even in these sources, there is much that contemporary readers view with skepticism, such as numerologically significant ages and dates and genealogical links to famous heroes of ancient China. All that probably can be accepted with a reasonable degree of certainty as being true is that Kǒngzǐ was a teacher of traditional literature and ritual who occasionally served as a low-level official in local government.12
As for what Kǒngzǐ taught, according to three sets of writings that postdate his lifetime, it fell into three distinct categories: (1) morality, (2) the arts and humanities, and (3) politics. In the Lúnyǔ 論語 (usually translated as “Analects” meaning “Collected Sayings,” which was produced by Kǒngzǐ’s disciples and their followers over a period of several hundred years between the early fifth century BCE and the Hàn 漢 dynasty [202 BCE–220 CE]), Kǒngzǐ is depicted as a humble teacher who advocates moral integrity as a response to cultural decline and social corruption. The Zuǒzhuàn 左傳 (“The Zuǒ Tradition”), a chronicle of early China from 722 to 468 BCE, which probably was written during the fourth century BCE but based on earlier materials13, elevates Kǒngzǐ to the status of a refined cultural hero who defends his home state of Lǔ 魯 by keeping alive the spirit and traditions of Western Zhōu ritual and literature. Another text, the Mèngzǐ 孟子 (a collection of philosophical dialogues attributed to the fourth-century-BCE Confucian teacher “Master Mèng,” Latinized as “Mencius” by the Jesuits in the sixteenth
century CE), emphasizes the political dimension of Kǒngzǐ’s career as a teacher of young men from his own social class, the shī 士 (“retainers” or “knights,” originally low-level military officers), who traditionally served the Western Zhōu kings.14 Regardless, each of these three curricular categories shared in common a deep reliance upon, and reverence for, Western Zhōu antiquity—an idealized cultural past in which both personal fulfillment and social renewal might be found.
Those who embraced Kǒngzǐ’s threefold antiquarian curriculum of moral instruction, ritual and literary studies, and political praxis became known as Rú 儒. Originally a term that denoted something like “weakling” or “soft person,” Rú came to define a scholar or learned expert, particularly in the realm of ritual.15 Contemporary efforts to replace the terms “Confucian” and “Confucianism” with “Ruist” and “Ruism” seek to revive this ancient nomenclature.16 However, at least during the period between Kǒngzǐ’s lifetime and the state endorsement of Confucianism in 136 BCE, there was no single orthodoxy or systematic doctrine that defined Rú thought and practice. The third century BCE writer Han Fei 韓非 described “eight Rú factions” (Rújiā bāpài 儒家八派) in his own day, and such internal diversity within “Confucianism” has persisted into the present.17 What unites Confucianism as a teaching tradition is a shared devotion to what might be called Rú values and quintessentially Rú activities: both ideas and institutions intended to harmonize human hierarchies. Like other thinkers of the socalled global “Axial Age” (c. 700s–200s BCE), Kǒngzǐ seems to have emphasized the ideal spirit or internal feeling behind texts and practices received from traditional culture, rather than the mere performance or memorization of the external forms of these texts and practices.18 To the extent that such devotion goes beyond mere mastery of a curriculum to become the basis for an entire way of life and worldview, one might well call Confucianism “religious.” And yet, due to the ways in which Confucianism’s ritual, textual, and political dimensions interact in contemporary China, “institutionally and politically, the religious status of Confucianism in China has never been fuzzier.”19
Confucianism as Ritual Tradition
While ritual (lĭ 禮) may have been one of the most important aspects of Confucianism as a teaching tradition, over time it was transformed into perhaps the primary expression of Confucian identity and practice. This was accomplished many centuries after Kǒngzǐ’s death, first through the establishment of Confucianism as the basis for imperial court protocol during the Hàn 漢 dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), and ultimately through the promotion of Confucian decorum and ceremonies at the level of household life during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. The historian Sīmǎ Guāng 司馬光 (1019–1086) compiled a collection of ritual texts, the Shūyí 書儀 (Writings on Ceremonies), that eventually was published in 1192. In it, he sought to rectify what he saw as the errors of earlier generations, who had abandoned or oversimplified the rituals found in Zhōu literature. Building on Sīmǎ Guāng’s work, but much more influential, was the work of the
