12.6 — East Asia: Confucius, Laozi, Shinto

A different question was asked here, and it is worth noticing before anything else.

The Indian and Abrahamic traditions ask what is ultimately real and how a person is released or saved.

The Chinese traditions mostly ask how people should live together, and treat the metaphysical question as either secondary or unanswerable.

And they are not exclusive. A Chinese family could and routinely did perform Confucian rites for the ancestors, consult a Daoist priest, and observe Buddhist practices, without anybody experiencing that as contradiction. 12.1's belief-organised versus practice-organised distinction is at its sharpest here.

Confucius

Kong Fuzi, roughly 551 to 479 BCE, in a period of political collapse and constant warfare.

He was a minor official who could not get the position he wanted, travelled from state to state trying to persuade rulers to adopt his ideas, was largely ignored, and taught students.

And he claimed to be transmitting rather than inventing — recovering the practices of an earlier and better-ordered age.

The core

Five ideas, and they interlock.

Ren — usually translated benevolence, humaneness, or human-heartedness. The central virtue, and Confucius refused to define it cleanly, giving different answers to different students — which is 9.3's adhikara and 6.1's method arriving in China.

Asked once, he gave the negative version of the golden rule: do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

Li — ritual, propriety, the correct forms. And this is the idea outsiders find hardest.

It covers ceremony, manners, the right way to address somebody, the correct conduct at a funeral, and the details of everyday courtesy.

And Confucius's claim is that the forms are not empty. Performing the correct outward action shapes the inward disposition — you become respectful partly by behaving respectfully, over years.

Which is Aristotle's habituation (10.4) and 8.11's practice, and it is the same finding: the behaviour comes first.

Xiao — filial piety. Obligation to parents, living and dead, and by extension the whole structure of family relationships.

Junzi — the exemplary person. Originally meaning "son of a lord," and Confucius redefined it to mean a person of moral cultivation regardless of birth.

That redefinition is the same move as the Yaksha's answer (3.10) and the Buddha's ordination of a barber ahead of nobles (6.10). Three traditions, same century, same move: taking a word that meant high birth and redefining it as conduct.

And the rectification of names. His claim that social disorder begins with words not matching realities — a ruler who is not behaving as a ruler, a father who is not being a father. If names are not correct, he says, language is not in accordance with the truth of things, and affairs cannot be carried on to success.

The honest problems

The system is hierarchical. The five relationships — ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, friend and friend — are four hierarchies and one equality.

And obligations run both ways in the theory — the ruler owes benevolence, the father owes care — and in practice the framework was used for a very long time to justify subordination, particularly of women.

And it produced an examination system that lasted over a thousand years, which was genuinely meritocratic in principle and produced a bureaucracy of enormous competence and enormous conservatism.

Daoism

And the deliberate opposite, from the same period.

The Dao De Jing, attributed to Laozi, of uncertain historicity, and the Zhuangzi, which is funnier and philosophically sharper.

The Dao

The way, the course, the pattern of how things are.

And the first line of the text tells you what you are dealing with: the dao that can be spoken is not the eternal dao.

A book that opens by saying its subject cannot be put into words, and then continues for eighty more chapters.

Wu wei

The central practical idea, usually translated "non-action" and better rendered as "effortless action" or "not forcing."

It does not mean doing nothing. It means acting in accordance with the grain of a situation rather than against it.

The images are consistent: water, which is the softest thing and wears away rock; the empty space in a bowl, which is the part that is useful; the hub of a wheel, which is useful because it is empty.

And Zhuangzi's version is a story. A cook cuts up an ox, and his blade has not been sharpened in nineteen years, because he does not cut through bone — he finds the spaces that are already there and moves through them. He no longer looks with his eyes.

Which is the best description of expertise anybody has written. The novice hacks; the master finds the gaps.

The politics

And Daoism has one, and it is anti-Confucian.

Confucius wants correct forms, education and cultivation. Laozi says that is the problem: when the great dao was abandoned, benevolence and righteousness appeared.

The claim is that the need for elaborate morality is evidence that something has already gone wrong, the way a family that talks constantly about filial duty is a family with a problem.

And the political preference is for a small state, minimal government, and a ruler so light-handed that the people say afterwards that they did it themselves.

Zhuangzi

The best writer of the tradition, and two passages that everybody should know.

The butterfly. He dreamt he was a butterfly, and woke, and did not know whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man. 9.8's three states argument, told as a joke.

And the useless tree. A carpenter passes an enormous old tree and does not stop, because the wood is worthless — twisted, knotty, no good for anything. And that is precisely why it is enormous and old. Every useful tree was cut down.

Which is a genuinely uncomfortable observation about what being valuable to other people costs you.

Shinto

Japan's indigenous tradition, and it is the least doctrinal thing in this Part.

Kami — usually translated "gods" and better as "spirits" or "presences."** Anything that inspires awe can be a kami: a waterfall, an ancient tree, a mountain, a rock, a remarkable person, an ancestor. They are not omnipotent, not necessarily moral, and are extremely numerous — the traditional phrase is "eight million kami," meaning uncountable.

And the central concern is not sin but purity. Contact with death, blood, illness or disorder produces impurity, and the response is ritual cleansing rather than repentance. The water basin at a shrine entrance, where you rinse your hands and mouth before approaching, is the everyday form of it.

There is no founder, no scripture in the Abrahamic sense, and very little doctrine.

And it coexists with Buddhism completely. The Japanese formula — Shinto for birth and marriage, Buddhism for death — is close to literally true, and most Japanese people participate in both and would not describe themselves as religious.

One honest note: Shinto was reorganised by the state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into an instrument of nationalism, with the emperor's divinity as its centre, and that construction was dismantled after 1945. The pre-modern and post-war tradition is not the same thing as State Shinto, and conflating them is a real error.

What East Asia contributes

Three things this volume takes from it.

The forms shape the person. Confucian li, Aristotle's habituation, and 8.11's practice all say the same thing, and the Chinese version is the most detailed about how ordinary courtesy does the work.

Wu wei: find the gaps rather than cutting through bone. The cook's blade after nineteen years is the best image of mastery in this volume.

And the useless tree. A real observation about the cost of being valuable, and it is worth sitting with rather than dismissing.

What to carry from this page

Do not impose on others what you do not desire for yourself. The negative form is more usable than the positive one, because it does not assume everybody wants what you want.

If names do not match realities, nothing can be carried on to success. Watch for the word that has stopped describing the thing.

The need for elaborate morality is evidence that something has already gone wrong. Uncomfortable, and frequently correct.

And the master finds the spaces that are already there. The blade has not been sharpened in nineteen years.

Next: 12.7 — what fasting, pilgrimage and ritual actually do to a person, examined without either piety or dismissal.