Q: You said that we should take Confucianism seriously, because it was a system of thought that held together a country that is twice the size of Europe for two and a half thousand years. If Confucianism has had such a huge effect on the China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Vietnam, then why does it remain something of a mystery?
A: The answer comes from my wife’s (官本阳子) research. The Confucians have allowed their thought to be a mystery, because they never explained their thinking to outsiders. Confucians believe their ethics are universal human moral values. Every human, by virtue of being human, is expected to understand and share Confucian ethics, so there is no need to explain to “outsiders,” because they do not—cannot—exist.
In other words, Confucianism has never addressed the issue of the insider-outsider chasm that characterizes other major religions of the world. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam developed as the faiths of minority groups struggling against more powerful social majorities. These traditions, therefore, have sharp focus on insider-outsider chasm.
Judaism’s most important religious holiday is Passover, which commemorates and celebrates the Exodus. This is the story of how Moses led the Jews out of rich, powerful, and idolatrous Egypt where they had been slaves; how Moses received the Commandments; and how the Jews settled down in their promised land, to form their own new nation under the protection of their one true God. Exodus depicts the righteousness of Jewish people as the opposite of the sinful Egyptian masters who had enslaved them. By defining Jewishness as the opposite of Egypt, the Mosaic Law establishes the theme of the righteous minority (religious insiders) versus the mighty but evil majority (religious outsiders).
Christianity’s most important holidays are Christmas and Easter. Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ and Easter commemorates his death. Christ died on the cross as the leader of an anti-establishment religious group. Jesus’s Passion—the story of his persecution, death, and resurrection—is the defining story of Christianity. It depicts Christians as those who suffer persecution because of their faith; they suffer at the hand of corrupt and ignorant authorities who cannot grasp the truth of Christian belief. The chasm of insider-outsider (believer versus non-believer) is prominent.
Islam also emphasizes the insider-outsider chasm. Hearing the voice of God in the desert, Mohammed surrendered to Him. “Islam” means “surrender” (to Allah’s will). Mohammed embraced the monotheistic faith of Islam amidst polytheistic Arab society. Mohammed became a religious and social rebel who defied the prevailing social convention. Mohammed and his followers were not welcomed by the polytheistic majority, so they moved from Medina to Mecca to escape persecution. They subsequently triumphed over their former persecutors. In the Islamic pilgrimage called Hajj, one of Five Pillars of Islam, Muslims try to retrace this journey of Mohammed and his earliest followers. The Islamic insider-outsider chasm is most clearly expressed in the traditional Islamic notion of dividing the world into Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-harb (the House of War).
Even Buddhism shares the characteristics of challenge to and detachment from the prevailing society. Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, was born a prince and lived in luxury. At the age of 29, shocked to discover that many of his subjects lived in poverty and sickness, Siddhartha left the palace and his family, and pursued a life of extreme asceticism. After many days of fasting, he achieved Enlightenment, where he found the Middle Way, a disciplined moderation that is neither self-indulgent nor self-punishing. Through his Enlightenment, he moved into a different stage of being and became the Buddha who exists outside of the bounds of regular human society. The Buddha started off as an insider, but ended up as an outsider. Buddhists, who become monks and nuns in imitation of the Buddha, similarly leave their familial and social bonds behind to become outsiders and are very much considered as such.
The insider-outsider distinction in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam remind their followers that others do not share their faiths. They have a tradition of telling dramatic stories of conflict between believers and non-believers. Though they do not tell such tales of conflicts, Buddhists have always tried to enlighten non-Buddhists to their truths. In contrast, Confucians do not know how to explain their beliefs to those who do not share Confucian ethics, because, according to their thinking, such humans do not exist.
Mencius, who explained Confucius to the world in the way that Paul explained Jesus, said that if you saw a baby about to fall into a well, you would feel something. That feeling is the beginning of ethics, the essence of civilized life, and the foundation of Confucianism. You cultivate that feeling, extend it to your family, then to your neighbors, and eventually to all of society. If you don’t feel moved by a baby about to fall into a well, then you are not human. End of argument, at least from the Confucian point of view.
When the Mughal dynasty came to rule India in the sixteenth century, the Muslim conquerors called the Indians who did not convert to Islam the Hindus. Grouped together under a new name, the very diverse Indians were forced to forge a new self-identity as the Hindus vis-à-vis their Muslim rulers. Confucians knew no such encounters until the mid-twentieth century, when the Communist government under Chairman Mao started to denounce the traditional values of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism (as well as the “corrupt bourgeois Western capitalists”) in an attempt to reshape Chinese culture into Mao’s brand of agrarian communism. Since Mao’s death in 1976, the Chinese have been rediscovering and reclaiming their cultural traditions. Even the Communist Chinese government, that once denounced Confucianism, now promotes the idea of a “harmonious society” and now calls their official language-teaching program the Confucian Institute. It declared in 2008 that it would build the “Chinese Cultural Symbolic City” centering on Confucius’s birthplace in eastern Shandong province; it is projected to be a city-sized monument celebrating traditional Chinese culture, with its focus on Confucius. New Confucian schools are popping up in China and books on Confucianism have made the bestseller list. The process of forging the Confucian identity—or of figuring out how to explain it to outsiders—is starting only now.
By tying together intellectual principles and pragmatic effectiveness in such commonsense terms, Tad Waddington has produced a work worth reading, rereading, and pondering, especially in our times when “in the realm you care about, the human realm, the nature of the world matters less than the stories you tell yourself about the nature of the world.”
—Timothy C. Wong, Professor of Chinese, Arizona State University.
http://www.amazon.com/Lasting-Contribution-Think-Accomplish-Meaningful/dp/1932841296/&tag=lastincontr07-20