What Does Confucius Have to Teach UUs?
SERMON
MVUC, July 12, 2015
I am David Keegan, and I have been a member of this church for
the past two years or so. For the past 45 years or so I have been
studying or working on China, as an academic and PhD in Chinese
history, and then as a State Department Foreign Service Officer,
and most recently as an academic again, now teaching China
policy at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.
Last Fall, Reverend Kate organized a class to view a six-part video
of the history of Unitarian Universalism by Ron Cordes, called
“Long Strange Trip.” It was really excellent. At the end of the last
video Ron Cordes offers some closing philosophical thoughts, and
he suggests that Confucian humanism is a part of the heritage on
which modern UUs draw.
Well, I got into the car after the video was finished and drove
home with my wife – Sally with her PhD in Chinese literature, and
we both puzzled over what Confucianism, such an integral,
embedded part of the Chinese tradition and mindset, could
possibly offer UUs?
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Ever since that evening, I have been reading and thinking and
talking to Sally to answer the question I took from Ron Cordes –
does Confucianism has anything to teach UUs and what that might
be. (I would add that Sally may not agree with how I have
answered that question.)
To begin our search for an answer, let me start with another story .
. .
Mencius, a 5th century BC disciple of Confucius, told a story
about a village well. For most Chinese of that time, life revolved
around the village and the village well. Every morning every
family would dispatch someone to the well for water, and a little
socializing. Everyone was there, and all the gossip was there. So,
one morning you pick up your family’s clay water jug and head off
to the well.
As you laugh with your friends and wait your turn to get water,
you notice a toddler waddle up to the edge of the well and sit
down, looking around, perhaps picking up a pebble, and perhaps
peering over the edge into the well. No parents or older siblings in
sight, but hey this is a village, that’s OK. Suddenly, out of the
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corner of your eye, you notice that he’s wobbling. Is he going to
fall in? What are you going to do?
What would you do, and why? And, what lessons would Confucius
and Mencius find in your actions?
Footnote. Their real names were Kongzi and Mengzi. A 17th
century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, writing home to Rome,
invented the Latinized names Confucius and Mencius.
Let us begin with: who was Confucius, what was his philosophy,
and why did he develop his philosophy?
Confucius lived during the 6th century BC, at a time when the Zhou
dynasty had ruled north central China for about 600 years, and the
empire was falling apart, fragmenting into small states each
competing to conquer the others and become the next great empire.
New technologies, including both better plows and more deadly
spear, created an era so violent and uncertain that it would soon be
called “The Warring States Period.”
As local warlords forced farmers to build their fortresses and fight
in their armies, misery spread, and a large number of thinkers
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looked for ideas that might return China to an age of peace and
plenty. They were called “the Hundred Schools,” and they
competed among themselves to persuade local rulers that they
could help them become the next emperor of all China. Confucians
were one school, and Daoists, whom you may have heard of, were
another.
The Warring States would end about 250 years later, in 221 BC,
when the king of one state, Qin, finally conquered all the rest of
the warlords to become emperor and unify China. You may know
this emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, from his tomb in Xi’an with its
thousands of terra cotta warriors. His advisors had persuaded him
that the next big idea in governance was laws. The emperor would
rule by laws. Everyone would know what they had to do, and the
punishment if they failed to do it. For example, there had been
many ways to write Chinese characters. NOW the Qin made a law
that there was only one way to write Chinese characters, another
law regulated how long the axles would be on carts and wagons.
There was a law for almost everything – and there was a
punishment specified for violating each of these laws. The Qin
emperor was not a nice guy, and he decided that his brand of laws
and enforcement, called Legalism, would be the only school of
thought. So, he collected the books from all of the other schools
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and their authors. The books were burned and the authors buried
alive. Fortunately for us, a few books, including Confucius’s
sayings, survived.
The Qin emperor feared Confucianism because Confucius had
completely rejected the idea of ruling by law.
Confucius said that if there were laws, people would obey them
only when they had to and evade when they could. Laws would not
bring unity and coherence to society. Confucius sought instead to
restore some element of morality and stability to the lives of the
rulers, elites, and ordinary people. He looked for something that
people would accept and internalize.
That brings us to the heart of our discussion – what Confucius
might teach Unitarian Universalists.
While the legalists wrote draconian laws, and the Taoists said that
everyone should follow nature and abandon civilized life,
Confucius turned to “tradition.” In a sense Confucius rewrote the
rules that had been transmitted down from the Zhou warriors who
first conquered China; he took that warrior’s code and transformed
it.
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Confucius began by insisting that morality exists only within
communities. I cannot be moral by myself. I learn and we learn to
be moral when we interact with others. We practice to be moral.
Our first interactions happen within our families and friends –
within what Confucians called the “five relationships” -- father
and son, husband and wife, older brother and younger brother,
friend and friend.
These relationships were not new with Confucius, but he insisted
that they were more than biology, more than hierarchical power.
They were webs of reciprocal commitment. Confucius insisted that
one could not say that he is a father simply because he has
children. Only if he offers care and feeding, but beyond that love
and compassion, can he really be called a “father.” Confucius
would not accept that you were a filial child because you made
sure your parents were well fed and housed. He would simply
respond that an animal would do as much. To be a filial child, you
must show them consideration, love, and respect. Confucius would
insist that to be really a child, a husband, a wife, or a friend, you
needed to do more than just play the part.
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Before I get to the question of what more, let me reassure those of
you who have been counting that I am aware that I announced five
relationships and only listed four. For Confucius, the fifth
relationship (in fact he listed it as the first among the five
relationships) is between ruler and subject. The ruler must care for
his subjects, and the subjects must respond with loyalty and
respect. Essentially, Confucius said to leaders that the key to power
was to treat their subjects as they would their family – as loving
parents, not rapacious libertine autocrats.
Confucius argued that his brand of ethical government had two
advantages over rule by laws –
First, people would follow the ruler because they wanted to do so
out of compassion and respect, because they felt they had a
committed personal relationship to the ruler, and
Second, it was far more flexible, if you know the basic principles
of how to act, you can then act properly even if you’re hitting a
completely novel problem. There would be no requirement for
endless books of laws and punishments.
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So, how should we act, what are the keys to being a good
Confucian?
The first is humaneness or “Ren”. In fact the character is written in
two parts – the character for a person on the left and the character
for the number two on the right, so – if you dissect the character
means “two people together.”
Confucius asked how two people should act toward each other, and
he answered simply that they should act with compassion, with
love, with humaneness. That in fact a human, also pronounced ren,
is someone who acts with humaneness.
Second, Confucius insisted that humane conduct is not optional.
All of us have an obligation to act with humaneness – to treat
those around us. We have an obligation to act as a loving parent, a
loving partner, a filial child, a loyal friend. We all have an
obligation to nurture that humaneness in those around us. If we do
so, we will also extend that obligation to acting as good and loyal
subjects to our ruler, in our terms today as decent compassionate
citizens of our society and nation. This is how we fully embody
our humaneness, and we are required to be humane citizens.
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Confucian step three is ritual. or “Li.” This is how you actually
carry out your obligation to act humanely.
You become humane, you become ethical through “ritual.” That
does not mean great rituals with organs and choirs and incense,
although Confucius apparently really liked ceremonies. The most
important rituals are the ones that soak into our lives to point we
often don’t notice them – “Please . . . thank you . . . after you
. . . yes m’am . . . no sir . . . yes mom . . . may I? – -- -a handshake, a hug, a smile, a look of concern, flicking your
headlights to signal someone that they can turn in front of you.
I defy any of us to count the number of different ritual gestures like
these we have used since we got out of bed this morning, or even
since we arrived here.
Rituals are much more to a Confucian that the grease of social
intercourse. They are the thousand ways that we say “You matter
to me. I respect you. I value who you are and what you do.”
And a Confucian would stress the moral importance of rituals two
steps further.
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First, it is not enough to do these gestures absent mindedly. We
must do them with intent, with spirit. We must bring the meaning
to the action in order to be fully human. In an American context –
although it would horrify a Chinese – you should look someone in
the eye when you say good morning.
Second, human beings are not moral in nature and then show our
morality by ritual actions. We become moral by learning ritual
behavior and then learning to mean that ritual behavior.
I have often heard MVUC referred to as “this beloved
community.” A Confucian would counter that it is beloved only we
intentionally and deliberately act in rituals among ourselves to
make it so.
The fourth and final step of Confucian ethical action is “virtue.” Or
“de.” Before Confucius, “de” was the quality of a great warrior, a
great archer. Confucius said that his virtue was the power built up
by someone who fully developed his humaneness by acting
consciously and intentionally in ritual with all of those around him
– with wife, child, brother, and friend.
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That ritual virtue is attractive, even charismatic. A magnetic power
that draws people toward him or her. It has an almost magical
ability to make people notice, to make people say I want to be near
that person, I want to be like that person.
For Confucius, this is how the humaneness of family and friends
can change politics. Someone who has that virtue can be a great
ruler. He does not need to conquer. In fact, to be fully virtuous, he
cannot conquer. But, people in his country and in neighboring
states will “vote with their feet” and seek to be governed by a ruler
with virtue. Developing the attractive power of humaneness is also
the core of what acting as a Confucian means in organizations
large and small, whether a church or the U.S. Government.
Despite these strengths, it doesn’t take much thought to realize that
the Conf ethics have their flaws, and there are three weaknesses
that I think should concern Unitarian Universalists:
1. Obligation and loyalty diminish at the square of distance – a
Confucian may be more likely to care for family and friends
than strangers – this can mean it is better to be corrupt in
public office if I will make my family and friends more
secure, more wealthy;
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2. An ethics of human relationships may have little room for
loyalty to nature, creation, all things – human relationships
are the measure of all that is important
3. Confucianism sprang from and retained a hierarchical, maledominated system (For example, the husband/wife
relationship is considered reciprocal, but Confucius saw it as
equivalent to the reciprocal relationship of ruler and subject. )
Beginning in the second century AD, Buddhism arrived in China
from India and brought with it a universal morality that helped
overcome the first two of these weaknesses.
Beginning in the 11th century. two great thinkers, Zhu Xi and
Wang Yangming, preached that the personal loyalty, the ethical
commitment, the sense of committed relationship to family and
country that Confucius taught, should be extended to all people, all
the ten thousand natural things. Just as a Confucian should show
personal concern for a brother or sister, that Confucian should treat
all people, all the natural world with that same personal concern,
just as she would her mother and father.
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In a sense the result was a Confucianism in which compassion was
extended by Buddhist universalism – a Confucianism in which we
are all brothers and sisters.
The third flaw – Confucianism’s male-dominated hierarch -- would
survive until the twentieth century and the collapse of the last
dynasty in 1911. Confucians and all Chinese shocked at their
defeat and humiliation by the West, and they began to reform their
society, to make it stronger by learning from the West – a West
just beginning to give women the vote. Since then, Western and
Asian societies have been equally challenged to change our
societies so that all people – women and men – do in fact have
equal value.
STANDING BY THE WELL
So, back to the story we began with. You’re standing by the village
well, or at the edge of the pool in your development, or on the
dock behind the Torpedo Factory in Old Town. You’re holding
your family’s water jug, your digital camera, a birthday present for
your parent or partner. You see the toddler start to wobble. You
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don’t know her name. You don’t know her parents. Maybe you do.
Maybe they’re really annoying people.
What do you do?
Do you say to yourself “not my problem,” “I’m sure her parents
are around here somewhere”? Or, perhaps you think “I’m sure I’ll
get a lot of credit if I save her. Maybe even my picture in the
paper.” Or, do you turn away?
Oops, she’ll really wobbling now . . . you’re running out of time.
What are you going to do?
Confucius and his disciple Mencius predict that in your core you
are human, you are humane. And, the more you have built up your
humanity through seriously intentionally doing the thousand small
rituals of morality in community the more likely that . . . you’ll
drop your water jug, your SLR, your birthday present, and pull the
child away from the edge. You’ll do it without thinking, without
asking “What’s in it for me?” That is what these small rituals do to
us. That is what Confucius teaches UUs.
THE END