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Enlightened Customary Community

It seems legitimate to start with Confucius (551?–479? bc) in narrating a history of Chinese political thought.1 Confucius has been regarded as the paragon of Chinese culture or the founder of Confucianism. The first problem surrounding this way of framing is that Confucius was an unclassifiable character even in his own time. “Confucianism,” whatever it means, did not exist during his lifetime. Although we tend to think of ancient Chinese thinkers as part of the so-called Confucian, Daoist, or Legalist schools, such labels are retrospective constructions. In Confucius’ own time, there were no identifiable schools of thought and organized movements which might be labeled “Confucianism.” The fact is that Confucius enjoyed a successful career as a tutor to ambitious young men who wanted to know how to order the world. It was not until the Han dynasty that central government honored Confucius’ teaching as part of the effort to justify government at that time.

Since then, multiple commentators have increasingly commented on the teachings of Confucius. In a sense, Confucius’ historical survival has always depended upon processes of accommodation, on centuries of apologetic and exegetical effort. To have him speak in a manner acceptable to later times constitutes much of subsequent intellectual history. As a result, Confucius came to have a specific cultural meaning as a site upon which succeeding generations could inscribe their ideas about how to order the world. Little wonder, then, that there have been many different ways of reading Confucius’ ideas. This greatly complicates the task of assessing their place in Chinese tradition.

Partly because they believed that there were no reliable primary sources with which to reconstruct the world of thought of pre-Confucian times, modern scholars analyzed Confucius’ thought in somewhat ahistorical fashion (Pines, 2002, pp. 7–10). However, in recent decades, the situation has begun to change. Works of Yuri Pines (2002) and Lothar von Falkenhausen (2006), among other studies, are notable. In particular, unlike Hsiao Kung-chuan, who viewed Confucius’ thought as a rather sudden breakthrough, Pines’ contextual study showed that Confucius’ thought did not occur in a vacuum, but evolved within the cultural milieu and intellectual development of the Eastern Zhou period (770–221 bc). In particular, he analyzed the Zuo zhuan, detailed year-by-year accounts of political activities from 722 to 468 bc, in order to reconstruct the intellectual history of the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 bc). Indeed, there was an earlier tradition of thought which possibly inspired Confucius’ political thinking. Thanks to works of Lothar von Falkenhausen, Yuri Pines, and others, Confucius turned out to be part of larger cultural trends of his own time, which aimed at limiting the process of disintegration and restoring social stability by reworking inherited intellectual resources. This contextual perspective challenges some problematic assumptions and approaches that have hindered inquiry into the study of Confucius’ thought – among them, the idea that Confucius was a “traditionalist” who sought to bring back the ritual practices of the early Zhou dynasty.

Confucius lived most of his life in the first half of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, which designates the name of the period after 770 bc when the Zhou ruler's power was circumscribed and he had to move the capital east near the modern city of Luoyang on the Yellow River and lost control of his former territory. The Eastern Zhou period is conventionally divided into two halves: the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 bc) and the Warring States period (453–221 bc). The following statement regarding the thirteen-year rule of Duke Cheng, in Zuo's Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals, offers a convenient window into the milieu of the times: “The significant affairs of the state are sacrifice and warfare.” Archeological finds show that these salient features of Confucius’ society, sacrifice and warfare, were domains characterized by the widespread use of bronze for making weapons and ritual utensils, both of which represent powerful methods of organizing collective life. Bronze weapons were necessary for waging war, and war was a typical way to create political order. However, because violence is costly, and its overuse produces diminishing returns, it cannot be employed continuously. So, political elites need to find less expensive ways of re-creating political order. Religious rituals deliver the sorts of political order demanded by political elites in a cost-effective way. Through religious rituals, political power is continuously re-sanctified, thus giving the ruling elite the sacred legitimacy they need to retain power. Once the political order becomes some sort of believed-in reality, political elites, who come to see themselves as part of the order, no longer need to resort to constant war. To see how this dynamics of power unfolded in ancient China, we should examine the successions of ancient Chinese dynasties.

For most Chinese historians, the Xia, the Shang, and the Zhou kingdoms represent the earliest three succeeding dynasties that constitute the first part of Chinese history. Such historiographical practice can be traced back to as early as Sima Qian (145–c. 86 bc), a great Han dynasty historian who did not make use of the archeological evidence available to us. His influential book Records of the Grand Historian offered the first linear narrative to connect the three dynasties with the Qin and the Han dynasties. However, the people of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou did not share Sima Qian's mind-set. In the first place, none of the three kingdoms was able to create a polity large enough to govern the entire region of what one may call “China.” Archeological discoveries of recent decades have demonstrated that since the beginning of civilization, multiple cultures coexisted in the basins of the Yellow River, the Yangzi, and beyond. In addition, the name “China,” or something analogous to it, did not serve as an identity marker that integrated the three kingdoms. The boundary between the three kingdoms and other political entities, which were considered “barbarian,” was never clearly defined, and they constantly interacted with one another (Di Cosmo, 2002, pp. 6, 102). In fact, oracle bones, which came from the shoulder blades of large mammals or undershells of turtles and constitute a primary source of ancient China, indicate that many groups coexisted at the same time. The Shang and the Zhou were merely two of the eight groups whose names appeared with some frequency on the oracle bones. The Zhou, in alliance with another group called the Qiang, eventually conquered the Shang (Hansen, 2015, p. 43).

What was the ideology of the Shang? The Shang people believed that the gods and spirits had power to influence such important human affairs as harvests, battles, and illnesses. They performed divination and sacrifice, which were accompanied by elaborate rituals of music and dancing. In particular, the Shang people questioned the ancestral spirits’ feelings and opinions about affairs by burning cracks in oracle bones. These bones were believed to record communications with ancestral spirits. That is, the Shang rulers served as the essential link with the sacred order by observing shamanic communication with its patron spirits. The relationship between the Shang rulers and their ancestral spirits was reciprocal, based on self-interest without universal moral preconditions. They thought that ancestral favors were transmitted only to their descendants who performed ritual properly. The rulers, who needed some assistance from supernatural powers, made offerings to their ancestors through ritual. The ancestors, who needed such offerings, were expected to perform a certain task as a response to the ritual.

The Shang rule was a type of theocracy in that the political authority of the Shang rulers was based on their access to the spirit power of potent ancestors. The rulers overcame the sense of a low degree of mastery over their natural and social environments by tapping the resources of the spirit world. Before the Zhou conquered the Shang, the Zhou kings also worshiped their ancestors by conducting elaborate rituals in their family temples as the Shang did (Hansen, 2015, p. 50). However, after their conquest, the Zhou justified their victory not by right of divine favor of the lineage, but by employing a new notion of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming). The main thrust was that they had defeated the Shang not because of overwhelming military force but because Heaven, the transcendental authority, had willed them to do so. As the Shang had turned immoral, they had lost the Mandate of Heaven, which was the prerogative of the rightful rulers. The Mandate of Heaven enabled the Zhou people to legitimize their power in terms that went beyond mere clan genealogy. That is to say, theocratic kingship had been redefined as political authority on universal moral grounds. The Zhou's conception of the universal Mandate of Heaven would come into competition with another unpredictable and thus mystic notion of Heaven, which is seen in The Book of Odes: “Majestic Heaven is awesome, swift. It frames not Its plans nor carefully thinks. … Even those free of any guilt, Fall...