Unit 3

English 203:  Literature of the NonWestern World

Explication:
Reading: 545-65.

Analects:

1.1:    Is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out?
Americans already know this.  We generally assume that knowledge should be useful.  If I was successful in the previous lesson, you should have the idea that Mandarins are not likely to get dirt under their manicured fingernails.  They give orders, but someone else does the physical labor.  You might also understand that being involved in day-to-day administrative affairs could often become boring.  The people you were involved with in doing your job would not be as well educated or refined as you.  Among those as refined & well educated as yourself, you can imagine that a good deal of culturally elitist banter went on.  Confucius is prodding his students to go in the other direction: to use their knowledge less for their own enjoyment & pride, & more for public service.  He urges them to find satisfaction in using their knowledge to help others.  What if those you serve are unappreciative? 
Is it not gentlemanly not to take offense when others fail to appreciate your abilities?

2.1:  Virtue can be compared to the Pole Star which commands . . . without leaving its place
The idea of Confucian leadership is that one sets an example to thereby inspire others to excel.  It isn't so much that you are immobile.  The idea is that you do not have to try to micro-manage every subordinate's job.  If he sees that you are sincerely dedicated to the cause (public service), he will not wish to disappoint you or be the weak link that causes a project to fail.
Guide them by virtue.
Double standards -- where you expect your subordinates to work harder than you do -- fail.  Threats, physical coercion, & punishment indicate a failure of leadership: 
keep them in line with the rites
If you display a sense of dignity, professionalism, & dedication, your subordinates will aspire to similar standards in their work.  Do you see how much the Confucian program relies on the sanction of embarrassment?
besides having a sense of shame, [they will] reform themselves. 

2.4:  At 15 I set my heart on learning; at 30 I took my stand; at 40 I came to be free from doubts; at 50 I understood the Decree of Heaven; at 60 my ear was attuned; at 70 I followed my heart's desire without overstepping the line.
This is perhaps the most famous of the aphorisms in the Analects.  It suggests 2 or 3 things.  It suggests that the Confucian program for perfecting human life requires nothing but effort.  The fully realized person (ren) attains that status through effort, not because he was born with some special endowment or talent that the rest of us don't possess.  Secondly this passage makes it clear that becoming an accomplished person is not comparable to having a lot of money in the bank.  It is not a matter of possessions or degrees or patents or Nobel prizes.  It is a style of life, an ethical attitude, a lifelong sense of monitoring one's behavior in order to improve it; something like monitoring one's tennis backhand or swimming stroke.  It is not Christian faith.  Nor is it scientific understanding.  It is a matter of elegantly solving problems because of an attention to detail & an access to a huge inventory of models (li) that you know because of your education.  Thirdly, the perfection of human life is not grounded in the transcendental.  St. Paul was struck down by some transcendent power.  He says that the power that saved him (or made his life authentic) was something beyond his control.  Confucius illustrates the opposite.  The factors that "save" you or make your life exemplary are totally within your power or grasp.  God does not save you; you save yourself.  Of course Confucians would not talk about "saving," since this is a Christian term.  They would understand "saving" in the sense of being saved from remaining like a monkey.  They would talk about being accomplished, being recognized as exemplary.

2.19:  Raise the straight & set them over the crooked & the common people will look up to you.
Pretty simple, isn't it?  Promote the honest.  Promote those who can objectively or truthfully demonstrate excellence.  Everyone professes this, but what do we see at our jobs & in politics?  Flattery, malicious conniving & covert bribery ("you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours") seem to be the road to advancement.  The one thing such Machiavellian or "real-world" tactics cannot produce is respect.

3.8:  He has not lived in vain who . . . is told about the Way [Dao].
It wasn't just the followers of Lao-Tzu who talked about the Dao.  However, when Confucians talked about the Dao they did not have in mind some pre-existing pattern.  Confucian Dao is entirely cultural.  It is largely the record (li) of the lives of role models (ren).  Thus you see in the next passage an allusion to someone named Hui who is so insightful that:
"When he is told one thing he understand ten."

3.10:  having listened to a man's words I go on to observe his deeds.
Again this is obvious: deeds speak louder than words.  But remember the Chinese Mandarin context.  Don't most people suspend ethical expectations when they are ushered into the presence of famous, accomplished, & charismatic people?  We may carp about the governor or president or Bill Gates at the coffee shop, but if we were invited to an audience with them, most of us would gush & fawn over the great. These are exactly the people that Confucius has in mind, admonishing them, as 1.1, that eloquence is the beginning of real service to others.  The point of the game of life is service, not vanity.  Paradoxically, we are most honored & loved, not when we arrogantly triumph over everyone else (even in a nonviolent game of eloquence), but when we help others to improve their lives.

3.26  To bring peace to the old, to have trust in my friends, & to cherish the young.
Notice the emphasis on duty.  You are a link in the chain of culture.  You should feel gratitude to the old from whom you have received so much (parents, teachers, the emperor) & recognize the profound obligation to pass down what you received to the next generation.

6.20 To be fond of something is better than merely to know it, & to find joy in it is better.
The problem with a system that places so much emphasis on behavior, tradition, form, ritual, & etiquette is that it has to de-emphasize the subjective element of how deeply one is committed to the program.  As we saw from the Books of Songs & Ruth Benedict's work, how you feel is less important than doing your duty.  Conversely, if you do your duty, no one should inquire too much about your attitude, your "faith" or sincerity.  If the performance of duty is enough, the system seems vulnerable to phoniness or to allowing people to simply go through the motions without much commitment or sincerity.  Precisely because of this vulnerability, "sincerity" is a frequently repeated & important element in Confucianism.  The program is suppose to make you a better person; ideally, something close to a perfect or fully realized person.  It cannot do that, if you are not sincerely dedicated, if you don't "find joy" in the program.

7.3:  It is these things that cause me concern: failure to cultivate virtue, failure to go more deeply into what I have learned
Confucius repeats the need for sincerity of effort.  It isn't enough to know the rules of the game.  One must be a superlative player; one must cultivate virtue in the 5 human "games" or relationships.  You do that by treating li (what you know or have been taught) as a coach's advice to enhance your performance.  In Confucianism there is no "salvation by faith alone."  As in sports, the expectation is that you only "know" it, if you can do it.

7.16:  Wealth & rank attained through immoral means have as much to do with me as passing clouds.
Familiar morality to us.  But not identical with Western outlooks (Greek/scientific or Christian).   Remember that there are no absolutes in the Confucian outlook.  Everything we do has the status of a game.  So, why not cheat to win?  The answer is that you may succeed in fraudulently winning a single match or even a number of games, but you will not be a true master.  Perhaps you can evade your piano lessons or math lessons.  The more you "succeed" in this kind of fraud, the worse it is; the more embarrassed you will be when you are found out.  Imagine that you are very successful at cheating your way through school.  What happens when you graduate & are incapable of doing what you supposedly were educated to do?  A former student recently gave me an example.  He got a job at Microsoft & was placed on a team with a young woman who had a degree in CS but who could do nothing with a computer that merited paying her a salary.  Perhaps she was polite & personable & could repeat memorized answers, but she had done nothing in the way of practice.  Consequently, her attainments (the BS degree in CS) were as fleeting & vaporous as passing clouds.

7.27:  The Master used a fishing line but not a cable.
Our Western folk adage, "you can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink," offers a parallel to this point.  Ideally, Confucianism should inspire & not compel.  Aristotle might disagree.  He argued that:
The soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits
in order to find joy in doing what is noble.
Passion seems to yield not to argument but to force.  The character, then, must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble & hating what is base  (Nicomachean Ethics 10.9.25-30).
     There is probably not much of an argument here.  Aristotle was perhaps thinking of Socrates, for whom the only legitimate force was that of logical self-evidency.  Like Confucius, Aristotle suggests that young children should be taught habits instead of reasoned with.  At some point in the process of growth & development, one must not expect to be coerced into doing what is best.  A fragile fishing line should be enough to entice the sincere student to pursue the right direction.

8.4:  3 [fundamental] things:  stay clear of violence . . . [be worthy of] being trusted . . . avoid being boorish.
Violence & coercion by the police or military are necessary for social order, but they cannot compel anyone to wish to become elegant, refined, or accomplished.  Brute force can only cage the monkeys among us until they, hopefully, begin to trust their masters; trust that they are sincerely offering them a superior way of life.  One does this by patiently illustrating refined behavior & not becoming boorish.  If some monkeys remain deviant, it is a regrettable personal failure (that a person's life is tragically flawed), but it has no bearing or authority in regard to the "games" that civilized people play, viz., the 5 human relationships.

8.13  Enter not a state that is in peril . . . .  It is a shameful matter to be poor & humble when the Way [Dao] prevails in the state.  Equally, it is a shameful matter to be rich & noble when the Way falls into disuse in the state.
The first part of this continues the thinking above: violence is chaos or an emotional state in which making a judgment about excellence or appropriateness is impossible.  Notice that there are implied games here: the political/military game of force, sanction, & coercion.  That game has to be settled or well-ordered before the Confucian "game" of elegance & excellence can begin.  Confucius does not condemn the games of power & money.  He simply recognizes that these are more rude or elementary games.  Most Westerners recognize something comparable in comparing a Babbitt figure (from Sinclair Lewis' novel) to Einstein or some similar genius devoted to an abstract culture like mathematics or music.  Babbitt is immensely richer & undoubtedly more powerful, but he is a barbarian incapable of even recognizing the "games" that Mozart, Isaac Newton, or Bertrand Russell could play.  I will repeat -- because the point may have been deflected -- that there is nothing inherently wrong with any game, including those focused on brute power or money.  You will find that India makes this point more directly, recognizing a kind of hierarchy of games.  If you are worried about physical violence or poverty, you cannot very well play sophisticated games precisely because you are worried about these more elementary concerns.

9.14:  Once a gentleman settles amongst them, what uncouthness will there be?
I doubt this will work in junior high school, but the idea is familiar in Confucian thinking: that the program is about inspiration, not coercion.  The life of the accomplished (ren) should attract the monkeys by its demonstrable excellence.  The point can even be made that the monkeys are content with their monkey behavior because they have never seen civilized, much less elegant performance of the 5 human relationships.  Seeing this is something like seeing Tiger Woods play golf or Venus Williams play tennis.  It should inspire the monkeys to recognize higher standards & more sophisticated games.

9.23:  Only when a man reaches the age of 40 or 50 without distinguishing himself in an y way cane one say, I suppose, that he does not deserve [respect].
Ah, no final exams until you are 50!  The historic program of Confucianism in East Asia was notorious for intolerance & exactitude.  Something like Jesus of Nazareth meets the Spanish Inquisition -- how could Christianity have gotten there by professing to imitate Christ?  In the Confucian case, it is clear that Confucius did not advocate inflexible or arbitrary standards.

11.26: This passage argues "the meaning of life."  The first student suggests (like the Greeks) that life is a battle & courage is the essential virtue.   The next student suggests public service.  The idea of increasing the population suggests something of a "brain drain" or silicon valley process.  The idea is that the population increases because the quality of life is so good that people migrate to live there.  The third speaker is more modest in his claims, suggesting that he would be satisfied to simply help maintain li.  The fourth speaker avoids the battle or struggle metaphor entirely, saying that he would be most proud to simply go swimming, "enjoy the breeze on the Rain Altar, & then to go home chanting poetry."  The point is that life is to be enjoyed.  All three metaphors suggest the ephemeral: water, breeze, & singing.  This passage sounds almost Taoist in its advocacy to seize the moment & appreciate the aesthetic dimension of Dao (the path of life).  It also implies the hierarchy or needs that we talked about above.  You can enjoy the breeze only if you are not worrying about your physical safety, paying the bills, etc.  The point is that all that lower order work has been done.

12.2:  Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
This is sometimes called the Confucian Silver Rule to suggest that it is very close to the so-called Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

12:10:  Make it your guiding principle to do your best for others & to be trustworthy in what you say.
This again sounds familiar to Westerners, who are unlikely to perceive the tacit context or worrisome sense of obligation.  It may not entirely be the case, but Confucius admonishes his students to do their best for others & be trustworthy in order to avoid embarrassment, rather than to express love or compassion for those to whom you are dedicated.

12.19:  What would you think if, in order to move closer to those who posses the Way, I were to kill those who do not follow the Way?
What need is there for you to kill?  Just desire the good yourself & the common people will be good.
Violence is not respected in Asia.  There is no Asian counterpart of the great Achilles, who may be full of himself (a narcissist), but who is disarmingly awesome.  There is also no counterpart to Moses & David who do Yahweh's will by killing the Canaanites.  There is no eternal God who tells people what to do through prophets.  Consequently, there is no essential or holy work to do.  No evil to struggle against.  There is only ignorance, thoughtlessness, rudeness, lazy self-indulgence, & the like.  The way to get rid of these is not to threaten or punish, but to inspire people to play more interesting & satisfying games:
13.1:  Encourage the people to work hard by setting an example yourself.

13.20:  What must a man be like before he can be said truly to be a Gentlemen [to be refined or a role model, nearly perfect]?
Confucius says he must have a sense of shame.  This sounds so weak to Westerners who would be likely to answer the question with images of faith or righteousness or power or truth.  All of those orientations to the world profess in transcendentals or absolutes.  One has faith in God because one believes that God is above & unaffected by the processes of the world.  One feels just & not guilty because he believes that righteousness is somehow not a matter of cultural variation or fashion, but grounded in some form of absolute virtue.  Thus Plato could share this outlook with Christians.  None of this outlook exists in Asia, which believes that the first or fundamental "truth" is a verb, not a noun.  Life is a process, not a thing.  We first have experience before we can conceptualize bits & parts of it by recourse to language.  We literally have a life before reflecting on it using the mirror of language. Language itself (containing ethics & God talk) is social.   In any case, the true gentleman (ren) continues to be concerned about duty, about letting some other person down who is relying on him.

14.35  In my studies, I start from below & get through to what is up above.
This is another famous part of the Analects.  Here Confucius denies that he is anything special.  He is not a prophet nor an aristocrat.  He claims that his humanity is identical with ours.  Fully realized human beings (ren) possess nothing special that enables them to perform so excellently, except for the obvious.  They are more disciplined, more industrious, more reflective, etc.  No one can offer to live your life for you.  Salvation makes no sense in the Confucian outlook.  Your life is your own.  Confucius can only offer advice about how to live more elegantly with less embarrassment & anxiety.

15.31  I once spent all day thinking without taking food & all night thinking without going to bed, but I found that I gained nothing from it.  It would have been better for me to have spent the time in learning.
Historically Confucius himself could not have been arguing against Buddhism here.  If Confucius actually said this, he would have been criticizing Taoist wu-wei (no action, hence something like mediation).  More likely, this passage was written by a Confucian disciple at a later date when Buddhism became popular in China.  In any case, the criticism is obvious & equally obviously directed at Buddhist methods.

18.6  [A husband & wife] were ploughing together yoked as a team.
Would it not be better if, instead of following a Gentleman who keeps running away from men, you followed one who runs away from the world altogether?
These spouses are Daoists or proto-Daoists.  Rude farm labor was suppose to be more primal & honest than the elitist administrative service offered by Confucian scholars.  The point is not to drive the oxen (people) but to become one of the people (oxen).  The Gentleman who runs away from the world of men altogether is Lao-Tzu, the fabled ideal role model of Daoism.  Confucius' answer is succinct & philosophically sophisticated:
One cannot associate with birds & beasts.  Am I not a member of this human race?
This is a direct criticism of the Daoist belief that the Dao is a transcendental; that the Dao somehow precedes the arrival of people & language.  It also criticizes the Daoists believe that the best answer to any problem is a spontaneous, instinctive response.  Thus there is no need to study li for precedents.  The last sentence emphasizes that the only notion of Dao that makes any sense to people is cultural.  Everything we know, down to the very conceptions we have of our identity, is cultural.  Language is cultural. You did not invent it.  Mom taught it to you.  If the Dao exists in some other way than as culture, it must remain unknown & irrelevant to people who swim or breath only in the medium of culture.

Chuang Tzu:

I mentioned Lao-Tzu, who is usually recognized as the author of the Dao de Ching.  Unfortunately our text does not include this work, which is easily available on the Internet & in print.  We do have work by Chuang Tzu (557-65), who also advocates a Daoist outlook.  You might recognize a class conflict between Confucianism & Daoism.  Confucianism preaches that education produces the good life.  Daoism suggests that Confucian education is pedantry focused on insignificant detail: 
p.558    Great understanding is broad & unhurried; little understanding is cramped & busy.  In sleep, men's spirits go visiting . . . . .  Day after day they use their [conscious] minds in strife . . . .  Their little fears are mean & trembly.
 

Many students initially find Daoism more attractive than Confucianism.  Sleep & dreams sound better than getting up to come to class.  If the right answers do not spontaneously come to you, it must be because the questions are petty.  Ah, but this is when students lose interest in Daoism; because you can't have it both ways: that is to say, that the exams are petty but you want a high grade anyway.  When the Daoist say they are petty, you must understand that it is an invitation to walk away, to drop the class.  A fun little book, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, by Bill Porter makes this clear.  In the 1980s Porter went looking for Daoist hermits in southwest China who told him about Daoist practice, saying such things as these:

You can't be in a hurry.  You have to be prepared to devote your whole life to your practice.  This is what's meant by religion.  It's not a matter of spending money.  You have to spend your life.  Not many people are willing to do this (Porter 82).

If you really want to follow the advice of Chuang-Tzu and Lao-Tzu, you literally have to drop out & do nothing for years:
It takes at least 3 years of physical training before your mind is quiet enough to understand the Tao (Porter 66).
Taoism teaches us to reduce our desires & to lead quiet lives.  People willing to reduce their desires or cultivate tranquility in this modern age are very few.  This is the age of desire.  Also, people learn much more slowly now.  Their minds aren't as simple.  They're too complicated (Porter 55).

In this outlook, Jesus doesn't "save" you, the Dao "saves" you.  It save you from wasting your life by playing all the refined games that Confucians believe constitute the superior life of cultured human beings.  Paradoxically, the Dao cannot be conceptualized.  The bell rings only because the metal surrounds an empty space.  Our emotions erupt from a similar indiscernible depth (the unconscious):
Joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, fickleness, inflexibility [stubbornness], modesty, willfulness, candor, insolence -- [such emotions are nothing but] music from empty holes, mushrooms springing up.
The important thing is to watch them & not react to them: 
Let it be!  Let it be! (558)
Man's life has always been a muddle like this (559).

There is nothing to fix, no duty or obligation to perform.  The more you do, the more muddled life becomes.  Stop doing & start watching.  You are not admonished to watch others (as Confucians do).  You are suppose to practice "bare awareness" that watches each emotion or perception, not allowing these to push you into the realm of the conceptual where you will play Confucian games:
The sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of Heaven.  [He has achieved a state of mind] in which "this" & "that" no longer find their opposites.  He has no use [for categories], but relegates all to the constant [recognizing perceptions as mental mushrooms instead of stimuli that cause action].  He relies upon this [method] alone, relies upon it & does not know he is doing so [because bare awareness has no content or theory; nothing to learn or argue about].  This is called the Way [Dao] (560).

The Dao is a verb.  It is the temporal flow of life.  Every attempt to conceptualize it fails.  We grasp only the trace of where it was a moment ago or a century ago.  Everything discernible rises from this silence & eventually sinks back into it, including us. The first trace of the Dao in discernible "things" or perceptions is characterized by a tensional duality, a kind of electrical polarity of positive & negative that do not merge.  If they did, the result would be silence, unity, the indiscernible again.  These are yin (female, passive) & yang (male, aggressive):
Because right & wrong appeared, the Way was injured
The unity of Way was injured by the appearance of love -- i.e., man's likes & dislikes (561, n.8)

The Daoist model for human behavior, which is the counterpart to the Confucian ideal of ren, is a hippie, social dropout, or wise hobo:
The sage . . . leaves the confusion & muddle as it is [without trying to fix anything] . . . .  Ordinary men strain & struggle; the sage is stupid & blockish [about ritual, etiquette, & the social games that Confucians play].  For him, all the ten thousand things are what they are [instead of being illustrations of some comprehensive theory]  (563).

The sage embraces things.  Ordinary men discriminate among them [liking this, hating that, trying to change things]  & parade their discriminations before others [as personal accomplishments] (562).

Refraining from action includes a kind of moral neutrality:
The way I see it, the rules of benevolence & righteousness & the paths of right & wrong [all codified by Confucian ethics] are all hopelessly snarled & jumbled (563).

The sage does not literally leave the world, but leaves the urban world of sophisticated games, choosing a life of voluntary poverty & simplicity.  Game players are awake to the rules of their various games.  They focus on conceptions & are asleep or unaware of perceptions.  But conceptions are built up from perceptions.  Perceptions are primal; conceptions are artificial.  Perceptions arise from the Dao; conceptions are arbitrary games that create anxiety & ultimately leech away one's life with worries about trivia:
Only after he wakes does he [the Daoist sage] know it [his former life, our lives] was a dream.  Yet the stupid [us, Confucians] believe they are awake, busily & brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman--how dense!

Interestingly Chuang-Tzu seems almost to agree with Confucius about the recognition that all culture (including religion) is human culture.  It is all relative & arbitrary.  Etiquette might decree that it is only polite to eat with the fingers of your right hand (as in India) or to eat with blunt chopsticks (as in China) or with pointed chopsticks (as in Japan) or with various forks (as in the West).  Which of these is the correct way to eat?  There is no  general or absolute answer.  You can only answer when the context is supplied: "in south India it is correct to eat food from a banana leaf with the three fingers & thumb of the right hand."   All human knowledge is like this, including our conceptions of the divine.  They are human inventions, like paintings.  They express our emotions (remember the mushrooms?) but do not name or connect with anything outside language.  How could you test this supposed link?  You cannot.  Language is confined to its own game; it cannot go beyond what it does.  Daoists believe that there is something before & outside language, but that obviously language cannot name it.  The Dao (reality) is silent & indiscernible.  It cannot be named:
Whom shall we get to decide what is right? (564).

Culture is bias.  There is no neutral culture that offers the unbiased truth.  It makes little sense to prefer eating one way over another (or one religious ritual over another); even less sense to argue about it.  We should try to forget about such meaningless rituals & conceptions:
If right were really right, it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument.  If so [that things are so; Truth] were really so, it would differ so clearly from not so [illusion or lies] that there would be no need for argument [or analysis].  Forget the years [of study]; forget distinctions.  Leap into the boundless [aesthetic] & make it your home! (564).

In our next lesson you will read Chinese poetry that mostly advocates Daoist values.  In you do not "leap into the boundless" (like the heroine at the end of the new movie, Crouching Tiger, Leaping Dragon), please go to the top & click on the next section: Questions.