Localities Vol. 1, (2011): 109-123
Confucianism: A Deconstruction
William F. Pore
Abstract
For more than twenty years, Confucianism has experienced a renewal of interest.
This best known of the ancient systems of thought originating in Sinic Asia,
sometimes imprecisely regarded as a religion and in large part aphoristically philosophical,
has nevertheless captured renewed scholarly and, to an extent, even popular interest.
This is due not only to the interest of historians, but also to scholars in other fields,
such as political science and international relations. All of these scholars have
approached Confucianism in different ways resulting in sometimes contrasting
valuations and interpretive debates. Yet, the viability of Confucianism per se, not its
apparent manifestations in today’s world, in this writer’s view, is very suspect. How
can it be considered extant when its ancient foundations, the institutions and people on
which it depended for its interpretation, transmission, the performance of its functions and
vitality have nearly completely vanished?
K eywords: Confucianism, Renewal, Contrasting Valuations, Interpretive Debates,
Suspicious of the Viability of Confucianism
Confucianism
109
And “we are unknown,” said K ung
Canto X III
Ezra Pound1 )
The “Kung” in the quotation above is the late Zhou dynasty thinker Kong Qiu (丘 ) or
Kong Zhongni (孔仲尼) of the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, who is
better known in the West as Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.), a name derived from Kongfuzi
(孔夫子), or Master Kong. In Chinese he is commonly known as Kongzi (孔子), in
Korean as Kongja, in Japanese as Kōshi and in Vietnamese as Khổng tử. This essay is a
reflection on the early twenty-first century state of his legacy, Confucianism, the learning
derived from his works or those attributed to him. It questions whether that learning
really exists today beyond the survival of its name.
There has been a steady growth of scholarly interest in Confucianism since
at least the early 1980s. There may be several reasons for this, but one likely
stimulus to this growth of interest is the participation of some well known
figures who have commented on Confucianism in relation to the late twentieth
century politico-economic condition of East Asia. Lively exchanges of opinion
still sometimes occur on the concept developed by Samuel Huntington in 1993
of competing “civilizations,” including a “Sinic civilization” (in which he placed
Korea and Vietnam but excluded Japan), and the organizing role he assigned to
Confucianism in this concept.2) Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of
Singapore, and Kim Dae Jung (Kim Taejung), the former president of South
Korea, followed in 1994 with an exchange on how “Asian values,” authoritarianism
and democracy were in some part owing to or not owing to Confucianism.3)
1) Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: Selected Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 20.
2) Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993), pp. 24-48; see
also The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
3) Fareed Zakaria, “Culture Is Destiny?: A Conversation with Lee Kwan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73, no.
2 (1994), pp. 109-126; “Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia’s Anti-Democratic Values,” Foreign
Affairs 73, no. 6 (1994), pp. 189-194.
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Then, when the economic crisis of 1997 struck East and Southeast Asia, attention
was again directed to Confucianism, but, instead of being praised for its
purported positive effects, it was criticized for what appeared to be its negative
effects.
Now in the twenty-first century many more scholars of Asia, and, to an
extent, possibly a wider public have a much more complex awareness of
Confucianism. Conferences, scholarly papers, dissertations, books and newspaper
articles on Confucianism continue to multiply. However, within this multiplying
discourse on Confucianism, fundamental questions about its definition were
often prominently present, such as: Is it a religion, a philosophy, an ethical
system or a political ideology? Because Confucianism does possess a historical
record, its past, in which documents were produced which can be examined
and in which there were people who took certain actions based on it, seems
more verifiable than anything which purports to be evidence of its contemporary
existence. Indeed, when in the present time forms of speech, or actions, or
thought, or social actions or business practices are referred to as Confucian, we
can be left to wonder why they are so labeled, or we, casually or critically,
assess certain signs, clues and expressions for their possible Confucian content
and as evidence of its presumed continuity.
In the later part of the twentieth century, the presumed expressions of
Confucianism, let along scholarly thinking on it, were already disparate, often
running counter to each other. In part, this was because of the diversity of
those who found an interest in or invoked Confucianism for whatever reason,
but it was also owing to how and where it had been localized. Some time
before the conflicting views of those cited above had appeared, Ezra Pound,
the erudite and talented Imagist poet who incorporated Confucian motifs into
some of his best known poetry and who was an admirer of its sense of order,
Confucianism
111
went on to speak in support of an even more ordered system, the Fascist
government of Italy during World War II. Mao Zedong is said to have resorted
to residual Chinese Confucianism to bring about a resolution to some of the
conflicts in the Cultural Revolution. Park Chung Hee (Pak Chŏnghŭi), the
former president of South Korea, appropriated the utopian idealism of the Book
of Rites (believed to have been compiled by Confucius) and especially the
concept of datong (Korean: taedong), or “great harmony” found there in, a
useful classical paradigm for securing his dictatorship. Some Vietnamese
historians describe a direct link in their country’s history running from
Confucianism to Communism. Early in 2001 a book titled Boston Confucianism
explained the portability of the Confucian scholarly mindset to an urban bastion
of American intellectuals. Since 2004, the Confucian Institutes with their
Chinese language and cultural programs, ambiguously tied to the People’s
Republic of China, have been proliferating in what some see as an effort to
extend Chinese soft power worldwide.
Despite the indications of an apparent flourishing of interest in Confucianism,
some doubting or less convinced scholars eventually perceived that a specter
had been hanging over it all along, not to mention those who were skeptical
about any hope of its revival. In 1979, at about the time of the beginning of
the resurgence of interest in Confucianism, a reviewer of W. Theodore de Bary
and Irene Bloom’s Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical
Learning opined that, despite the emerging increase in the number of works on
the subject, there was a “continuing devaluation of the Confucian tradition.”4)
A commentator in 1986 described a world in which the West can be called
post-Christian and East Asia, having largely argued itself out of Confucianism,
could be called post-Confucian.5) The commentator goes on to label Korea
4) South East Asian Research 4, no. 2 (1992), pp. 225-227.
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“sub-Confucian” for never having argued itself through and out of its perceived
strict Confucian values. But, if Korea is sub-Confucian, assessing it place in
another East Asian state where official Confucianism had once been dominant,
Vietnam, is even more problematic. The Vietnam historian Keith Taylor
elaborated a position that regards Confucianism as only ever having had a weak
influence in that country. In fact, Taylor argued in a 1998 essay that if
Confucianism had existed at all in Vietnam its influence stopped at an
imaginary line he draws bisecting the East Asian and Southeast Asian zones of
the country at its midsection near the location of the former imperial capital of
Hue.6) More recently a similar caution about Vietnamese Confucianism has
been raised by Shawn McHale, who writes in his Print and Power: Confucianism,
Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam, that many Vietnamese
and other scholars have been wrong in their assessment of the Vietnamese past
as seamlessly Confucian.
This writer on his own has attempted to get at the essence of Confucianism
as it appears in as many sources as possible by extracting the features that have
been attributed to it by scholars and observers from various fields. Not very far
into this attempt I had produced a list that ran to hundreds of items. For
example, it has been described as “the habits of traditional social life,” “true
kingship,” “familism,” “the essential goodness of man,” “a closeness to nature,”
“moderation,” “how to become fully human,” a state of being in which there
is “a prevalence of the Dao mind, “a transcendent knowledge of virtue,” “the
self as self-fulfillment,” and so on. Further, the rituals and humanitarianism
associated with some aspects of Confucianism, such as those commonly held to
5) Tony Mitchell, “Generational Change and Confucianism: Organization and Interaction in Korea,”
Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society-Korea Branch 61, (1986), pp. 15-33.
6) K. W. Taylor, “Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and region,” The
Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 4 (November 1998), pp. 949-978.
Confucianism
113
be expressed in politeness and respect for elders, are often in the popular
Western mind assumed to be its pillars. Sometimes scholars who have closely
examined it can also be reductionist. A few years ago, in a discussion with one
such Korean scholar, I was told that despite its seeming complexity and large
corpus of literature, Confucianism, as a philosophical system, is essentially
“simple”.
In Western languages, the term Confucianism appeared in the seventeenth
century. It is now accepted that the term gained currency in Western languages
when scholars from Europe singled it out in accord with their identification of
oppositional classification methods. Confucianism was translated back into
Chinese in the late nineteenth century as Kongjiao (孔學; Japanese: Kogaku;
Vietnamese Không hak). Interestingly, alone among other East Asian Confucian
societies past and present, as a term for Confucianism, Koreans do not use
Konghak, the Korean pronunciation of Kongxue (as commonly used in Chinese),
even though they, like the other societies with a Confucian heritage, do refer to
Confucius as Master Kong (Kongja). This is because Koreans have long
preferred to use yuhak or yukyo (儒學/儒教), another Chinese-derived term for
Confucianism or Chujahak (朱子學), both of which are particularly used to
identify Zhu Xi’s contribution to Neo-Confucianism. In Chinese, ruxue (儒學)
refers to the learning and doctrines of the scholars (ru), by which the followers
of Confucius’s teaching from early historical times in China, Korea and
Vietnam were known until the first decades of the twentieth century.
As Lionel Jensen writes in Manufacturing Confucianism, this learning may
originally have had roots in a late Zhou dynasty (1046-771 B.C.E.) mysticism.7)
While that may well be so, it is clearly known that before Confucianism was
7) Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997), p. 146.
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designated by Western scholars as a form of thought separate from Buddhism
and Daoism, it had up until then with them formed an integrated triad.8) It was
thought of as one part of a tradition that viewed each teaching not as separate
but as coequal parts of an integrated whole. Confucianism contributed the
values of filial piety, regard for heritage, cosmic harmony and the importance of
family to a tradition that in essence can be regarded as more identifiably
Chinese (and East Asian) than distinctively Confucian. Moreover, as has been
pointed out by some scholars, these values are not exclusively East Asian either,
as they have existed in many pre-industrial societies.
In each of the countries in which Confucianism has long been a cultural
fixture, the local Confucian educated elite shaped and interpreted it. Confucian
texts in these countries have also lent encouragement to the formation of
self-referential communities having a nexus in nationalist thought. Indeed, there
is still often a localized insistence on the differences among Chinese, Japanese,
Korean and Vietnamese Confucianism. In an interview with one scholar, when
I asked about the integrity of these separate national branches of Confucianism,
I was told to reflect by comparison on the divided nature of Christianity.
However, although doctrinally divided, Christianity is not notably separated
along national lines. There is a reason that a comparison between Confucianism
and Christianity is even more troubling. This is that while both Christianity and
Confucianism have left great moral and intellectual legacies in the countries they
have influenced and that both may now have less committed followings than
8) The combination of these three is commonly referred to as the “Three Teachings” (Chinese:
sanjiao (三教); Japanese: sankyō; Korean: sankyo; Vietnamese: tam giao). Both inside and outside of
China, instead of Daoism, either animism or shamanism or another local religious practices or
combinations of these two may just as likely have been the third part of the triad. For further
on the constitution of the third teaching, see Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Volume 1:
Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
Confucianism
115
they once did, Confucianism’s palpable legacy is comparatively much more
lethargic than Christianity’s. In large part this is due to the still sizable number
of Christian scholars and devoted followers, who have easy access to its original
texts and who interpret, teach and research it often through its original
languages in schools of theology and in university religion departments.
Confucianism is not pursued in the same way today.
Most of the clearest scholarship I found refers only to Confucianism, not
Confucianisms or a specific kind of Chinese or other national form of
Confucianism. Moreover, despite certain particulars of Korean Confucianism,
such as the practical learning movement, Sirhak (實學), between the seventeenth
and nineteenth centuries, the intricate Four-Seven Debate in the mid-sixteenth
century and the scholarly interest they received in late twentieth century, these
elite events had little effect on Confucianism overall. The historically well
known literati purges and factional fissures which were just as distinctively a
part of Korea’s past likewise had little effect on greater East Asian
Confucianism. When fissures like these appeared among Confucian literati,
whether in China, Korea or Vietnam, although the participants sometimes
justified themselves with Confucian arguments, these divisions were in actuality
more often along political rather than philosophical lines. All of the participants,
no matter their position in any of the disputes or their factional loyalty, still
regarded themselves as followers of the principles of Confucianism, or more
precisely, Neo-Confucianism.
Similarly, when I attempted to establish continuities from Korea’s Confucian
past, in particular those based upon philosophical, familial and regional lineages
that could possibly lead even into the present, a respected Korean interpreter of
Confucianism told me that these lineages have existed, but the positions of the
individual members would have depended more on the time and circumstances
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in which they lived than the mentalité of the lineage. This led me to the
conclusion that many Confucian scholars in Korea’s past, within their tradition,
underwent changes in their thinking that reflected their practical, lived
experiences. This change did not mean an abandonment of tradition, that is,
the part of Korean tradition that was Confucian, but, a reworking of that
tradition. In other words, during the late Chosŏn period for example, in the
crisis of the impending takeover of the country by a foreign power and under
the influence of a variety of thought, some literati and intellectuals seem to
have unassumingly taken a Zhu Xi-like position. They reinterpreted Confucianism
not unlike the great thirteenth century Chinese innovator had when he
reformulated it into what became known as Neo-Confucianism, but they did so
in a less formal way that similarly incorporated elements that were outside of
the tradition. In China, Korea and Vietnam today, the nearly 2,000-year-old
infrastructure of the formerly Confucian state no longer exists. In this formerly
solid Confucian region, there are no more monarchs (except in Japan), no
examinations based on the Confucian classics, no bureaucracy chosen through
those examinations, no moral remonstrance based on Confucian principles, no
memorials from concerned literati, no Confucian-based state ritual, no tribute
missions to China, no four classes of people, no academies where students
memorize and recite The Thousand Character Classic or any of the other standard
texts of study. Few people are able read the Four Books or the Analects in their
Chinese original and few seek to know the Confucian dao of anything.9) These
were all parts of Confucianism and are as much non-existent in South as North
Korea or anywhere else in formerly Confucian East Asia, despite some claims
about the effects of isolation on the latter or the devolution of tradition in
9) See the chart comparing the Confucian curricula in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan, Table 1,
pp. 12-13.
Confucianism
117
either state. The societies of these states, like some Confucian scholars in the
past, experienced changes over time which led eventually to changes in
themselves and other changes. These transformations in thinking still continue
and have led to changes which have carried Confucianism either to extinction,
as in China, its place of origin, or far away from the way it was formerly
understood.
So, what is left? Only on the linguistic level do any of the formerly
Confucian states retain a tenuous link to Confucianism. Even though China, the
wellspring of Confucianism, continues to use character writing, this writing is
no longer in the form familiarly found in the classics. Due to this and
Confucius’s works having been written in non-vernacular Classical Chinese,
these works are even more inaccessible to his followers today. The still present
but very much weakening maintenance of the linguistic medium of Chinese
characters in South Korea, the written medium which had always kept it
removed a step from easy access, is the only genuine, but increasingly subsiding,
connection with its Confucian past. In North Korea, due to the exclusive use
of han’gŭl, the long Korean connection to Confucianism and other aspects of
Chinese culture has been completely severed. In Vietnam, due to its now
official use of a romanized script since its wide implementation in the early
twentieth century, access to works in Chinese, except among a few scholars, has
become virtually impossible. Japan with its much greater use of Chinese characters
than any other country outside of China could perhaps have been expected to
have a closer, more continuous link to Confucianism, but, at the present time,
in Japan it is as in the past less distinctly separated from the totality of
Japanese culture.
Beyond this, when Confucian texts use any language other than the original
Classical Chinese, this is really a step away from the original. The translation of
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Confucian texts into local vernaculars further contributes to the presumed,
particularized national versions of Confucianism. Among scholars and the
general population, the lack of some minimal familiarity with the original texts
has further weakened the place of Confucian studies in the heritage of East
Asia. In addition, no known East Asian universities recognize Confucianism or
Confucian philosophy as fields of study within their philosophy departments’
curriculum. This has not only contributed to Confucianism’s loss of philosophical
integrity, but it has also led to its further loss of distinction and a lessening
respect for it as a philosophy.
I would propose that in order to really understand what Confucianism is, not
just as a philosophy but also as a way of life, it is primarily necessary to
localize it by historically contextualizing it in its place of origin. It is necessary
to think of the time and place where it arose, to think of the small state of Lu
where Confucius lived in the Spring and Autumn period (771-479 B.C.E.) of
Chinese history. It is also necessary to think of the Realpolitik of that time. Lu
was one of the contending states which comprised the disintegrating Zhou
dynasty in the fourth century B.C.E. At this point, it is necessary to be
constructivist and to assume that Kong Qiu, or Confucius, if he really existed,
was apparently one of a cultivated few who somehow knew about and attempted to
preserve the culture of the noble, but adumbrated, late Zhou state and the
standard it had set for civilization as he imagined it. The Analects reflect that he
felt that something sublime had been lost with the decline of the Zhou and
that he had a disdain for the lack of greatness and refinement in his own
disordered and possibly dangerous time. Viewed in this context, one can
possibly move more than half way toward understanding the mind of Confucius
in the fourth century B.C.E., Zhu Xi in thirteenth century China or those in
the late nineteenth century in China, Korea or elsewhere.
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119
Based on this role for Confucianism, I conceptualize it as a method of
authoritatively creating order, resolving conflict, setting a standard of decorum,
fixing human relationships and defining what is “ours,” no matter the given
Asian society. This is why I would further suggest that perhaps the whole aim
of Confucianism, properly understood, was to be a system designed to overcome an
ancient, localized chaotic situation, and, as a prescription for that situation,
provided civilizing applications in areas beyond the ancient Zhou state of Lu.
Its highest objectives, although originally elitist, seem to have been peace,
harmony and justice. These might be the goals of any civilization. This is also
to say, as another Confucian scholar told me, the values of Korean yangban
society were neither the whole of, nor did they represent, true Confucianism.
So, we might still read something such as this statement recently carried in
an English newspaper in Korea: “Fashion and physical appearance play a crucial
role in Korean life. And because of Korea’s Confucianistic roots, it has always
been important to conform with society.” Yet, we should also be reminded that
in 1967 one team of researchers on Korean society and Confucianism had
already concluded that “Confucianism will continue to decline gradually in influence
and eventually become only a memory rather than the weak but functioning
movement which it remains today.”10)
10) Yi Myonggu and William A. Douglas, “Korean Confucianism Today,” Pacific Affairs 40, no. ½
(Spring-Summer, 1967), pp. 43-59.
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Model Curriculum
(1315-1756)
Late Qing
Curriculum
Chosŏn
Đại Nam
Japan
Before 8 sui (歲)
4-5 sui
5 se
8 tuổi
10/12 sai
Levels 1-3
Analects
Classic of Filial Piety
Doctrine of the Mean
Great Learning
Book of Rites
Spring and Autumn
Annals
Elementary Learning
Abridged History of
Japan
Classics of Filial Piety
Changes
Odes,and
HistoryClassics
Levels 4-8
Primers:
Primer:
Primers:
Primers:
Xingli zixun
性理字訓
Qianziwen 千字文
Mengqiu 蒙求
Thousand Character
Text (Qianziwen)
ThousandCharacter
Text (Ch’ŏnjamun)
Ki’mongpyŏn
Tongmong sŏnsŭp
Yuhap
Kyŏngmong yo’kyŏl
Myŏngsim pogam
Sohak
Tonggam
Sa’ryak
ThreeCharacter Classic
Family Exhortations of
Ming Dao
Thousand Character
Litany
Asking the Way in
Elementary Studies
Five Word Poems for
Youthful Studies
Classic of Filial Piety
Classic of Loyalty
8 to 14 or 15 sui
5-11 sui
13 se
11 tuổi
Xiaoxue 小學
Four Books: 四書
Great Learning 大學
Analects 論語
Mencius 孟子
Doctrine of the Mean
中庸
Three Character
Classic Hundred
Surnames
Works on poetry
Four Books:
Great Learning
Analects
Mencius
Doctrine of the Mean
Four Books:
Analects
Mencius
Doctrine of the Mean
Great Learning
Five Classics:
Poetry
Documents
Changes
Spring and Autumn
Annals‫٭‬
Filial Piety‫٭‬
Chinese dynastic histories
Seven Classics:
Filial Piety 孝學
Changes 易經
Documents 書經
Poetry 詩經
Ritual and Rites 禮記
Rituals of Zhou 周禮
Spring and Autumn
Annals 春秋
After 15 sui
Daxue zhangju
Lunyu jizhu
Zhongyong zhangyu
Lunyu huowen
Mengzi huowen
Classics review
Calligraphy 3-4 years
Four Books plus
Classics of Filial Piety
and Poetry
Ko’munjinbo
12 sui
Recitation of the
Four Books
13 sui
Review of Four Books
and Five Classics
Erya Dictionary
poetry exercises
14 sui
Record of Rites
Spring and Autumn
Annals
Zuozhuan
Composition
Exercises
15 sui
Rituals of Zhou
Decorum Ritual(義理)
17 sui
history collections
After 15 se
Munja yujip
P’yŏnjit’u
Ch’ŏktok
Kandok
Character and
rhyming
dictionaries
15 tuổi
Five Classics:
Songs
Documents
Changes
Rituals
Spring and Autumn
Annals
After 15 tuổi
Early Chinese
histories
and after 1834
Minh Mạng’s Maxims
Chinese History
18 Dynastic Histories
Doctrine of the Mean
Great Learning
Kongzi jiayu
Mencius
Analects
Nihon gaishi
Zuozhuan
writing
Enshiro shisho
Shiji
Hanshu
Odes, History
Mingchen yenxinglu
Zizhtongjian
Level 8
Shishuo xinyu
Xunzi
Wenzhongzi
Comprehensive Mirror
Badaqingang tongzi
Mozi
Zhuangzi
Level 9
Works of Tansō
Mozi
Guanzi
Reflections on Things at
Hand
Level 9 (continued)
Quanxilu
selected poetry
selected prose
Confucianism
121
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