The Chinese Classics (Prolegomena), James Legge [popular books of all time TXT] 📗

opinion was, ‘According to my view of our master, he is far superior to Yao and Shun.’ Tsze-kung said, ‘By viewing the ceremonial ordinances of a prince, we know the character of his government. By hearing his music, we know the character of his virtue. From the distance of a hundred ages after, I can arrange, according to their merits, the kings of those hundred ages;— not one of them can escape me. From the birth of mankind till now, there has never been another like our master.’ Yu Zo said, ‘Is it only among men that it is so? There is the ch’i-lin among quadrupeds; the fung-hwang among birds; the T’ai mountain among mounds and ant-hills; and rivers and seas among rainpools. Though different in degree, they are the same in kind. So the sages among mankind are also the same in kind. But they stand out from their fellows, and rise above the level; and from the birth of mankind till now, there never has been one so complete as Confucius [1].’ I will not indulge in farther illustration. The judgment of the sage’s disciples, of Tsze-sze, and of Mencius, has been unchallenged by the mass of the scholars of China. Doubtless it pleases them to bow down at the shrine of the Sage, for their profession of literature is thereby glorified. A reflection of the honour done to him falls upon themselves. And the powers that be, and the multitudes of the people, fall in with the judgment. Confucius is thus, in the empire of China, the one man by whom all possible personal excellence was exemplified, and by whom all possible lessons of social virtue and political wisdom are taught.

6. The reader will be prepared by the preceding account not to expect to find any light thrown by Confucius on the great problems of the human condition and destiny. He did not speculate on the creation of things or the end of them. He was not troubled to account for the origin of man, nor did he seek to know about his hereafter. He meddled neither with physics nor metaphysics [2].

[Sidebar] Subjects on which Confucius did not treat.— That he was unreligious, unspiritual, and open to the charge of insincerity.

The testimony of the Analects about the subjects of his teaching is the following:— ‘His frequent themes of discourse were the Book

 

1 Mencius, II. Pt. I. ii. 23-28.

2 ‘The contents of the Yi-ching, and Confucius’s labors upon it, may be objected in opposition to this statement, and I must be understood to make it with come reservation. Six years ago, I spent all my leisure time for twelve months in the study of that Work, and wrote out a translation of it, but at the close I was only groping my way in darkness to lay hold of [footnote continued next page].

 

of Poetry, the Book of History, and the maintenance of the rules of Propriety.’ ‘He taught letters, ethics, devotion of soul, and truthfulness.’ ‘Extraordinary things; feats of strength; states of disorder; and spiritual beings, he did not like to talk about [1].’

Confucius is not to be blamed for his silence on the subjects here indicated. His ignorance of them was to a great extent his misfortune. He had not learned them. No report of them had come to him by the ear; no vision of them by the eye. And to his practical mind the toiling of thought amid uncertainties seemed worse than useless.

The question has, indeed, been raised, whether he did not make changes in the ancient creed of China [2], but I cannot believe that he did so consciously and designedly. Had his idiosyncrasy been different, we might have had expositions of the ancient views on some points, the effect of which would have been more beneficial than the indefiniteness in which they are now left, and it may be doubted so far, whether Confucius was not unfaithful to his guides. But that he suppressed or added, in order to bring in articles of belief originating with himself, is a thing not to be charged against him.

I will mention two important subjects in regard to which there is a conviction in my mind that he came short of the faith of the older sages. The first is the doctrine of God. This name is common in the Shih-ching and Shu-ching. Ti or Shang-Ti appears there as a personal being, ruling in heaven and on earth, the author of man’s moral nature, the governor among the nations, by whom kings reign and princes decree justice, the rewarder of the good, and the punisher of the bad. Confucius preferred to speak of Heaven. Instances have already been given of this. Two others may be cited:— ‘He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray [3]?’ ‘Alas! ‘ said he, ‘there is no one that knows me.’ Tsze-kung said, ‘What do you mean by thus saying that no one knows you?’ He replied, ‘I do not murmur against Heaven. I do

[footnote continued from previous page] its scope and meaning, and up to this time I have not been able to master it so as to speak positively about it. It will come in due time, in its place, in the present Publication, and I do not think that what I here say of Confucius will require much, if any, modification.’ So I wrote in

1861; and I at last accomplished a translation of the Yi, which was published in 1882, as the sixteenth volume of ‘The Sacred Books of ‘the East.’ I should like to bring out a revision of that version, with the Chinese text, so as to make it uniform with the volumes of the Classics previously published. But as Yang Ho said to Confucius, ‘The years do not wait for us.’

1 Ana. VII. xvii; xxiv; xx.

2 See Hardwick’s ‘Christ and other Masters,’ Part iii, pp. 18, 19, with his reference in a note to a passage from Meadows’s ‘The Chinese and their Rebellions.’

3 Ana. III. xiii.

 

not grumble against men. My studies lie low, and my penetration rises high. But there is Heaven;— THAT knows me [1]!’ Not once throughout the Analects does he use the personal name. I would say that he was unreligious rather than irreligious; yet by the coldness of his temperament and intellect in this matter, his influence is unfavourable to the development of ardent religious feeling among the Chinese people generally; and he prepared the way for the speculations of the literati of medieval and modern times, which have exposed them to the charge of atheism.

Secondly, Along with the worship of God there existed in China, from the earliest historical times, the worship of other spiritual beings,— especially, and to every individual, the worship of departed ancestors. Confucius recognised this as an institution to be devoutly observed. ‘He sacrificed to the dead as if they were present; he sacrificed to the spirits as if the spirits were present. He said. “I consider my not being present at the sacrifice as if I did not sacrifice [2].”’ The custom must have originated from a belief in the continued existence of the dead. We cannot suppose that they who instituted it thought that with the cessation of this life on earth there was a cessation also of all conscious being. But Confucius never spoke explicitly on this subject. He tried to evade it. ‘Chi Lu asked about serving the spirits of the dead, and the master said, “While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?” The disciple added, “I venture to ask about death,” and he was answered, “While you do not know life, how can you know about death [3].”’ Still more striking is a conversation with another disciple, recorded in the ‘Narratives of the School.’ Tsze-kung asked him, saying, ‘Do the dead have knowledge (of our services, that is), or are they without knowledge?’ The master replied, ‘If I were to say that the dead have such knowledge, I am afraid that filial sons and dutiful grandsons would injure their substance in paying the last offices to the departed; and if I were to say that the dead have not such knowledge, I am afraid lest unfilial sons should leave their parents unburied. You need not wish, Tsze, to know whether the dead have knowledge or not. There is no present urgency about the point. Hereafter you will know it for yourself [4].’ Surely this was not the teaching proper to a sage.

 

1 Ana. XIV. xxxvii.

2 Ana. III. xii.

3 Ana. XI. xi.

4 �a�y, ���G, art. �P��, towards the end.

 

He said on one occasion that he had no concealments from his disciples [1]. Why did he not candidly tell his real thoughts on so interesting a subject? I incline to think that he doubted more than he believed. If the case were not so, it would be difficult to account for the answer which he returned to a question as to what constituted wisdom:— ‘To give one’s self earnestly,’ said he, ‘to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom [2].’ At any rate, as by his frequent references to Heaven, instead of following the phraseology of the older sages, he gave occasion to many of his professed followers to identify God with a principle of reason and the course of nature; so, in the point now in hand, he has led them to deny, like the Sadducees of old, the existence of any spirit at all, and to tell us that their sacrifices to the dead are but an outward form, the mode of expression which the principle of filial piety requires them to adopt when its objects have departed this life.

It will not be supposed that I wish to advocate or to defend the practice of sacrificing to the dead. My object has been to point out how Confucius recognised it, without acknowledging the faith from which it must have originated, and how he enforced it as a matter of form or ceremony. It thus connects itself with the most serious charge that can be brought against him,— the charge of insincerity. Among the four things which it is said he taught, ‘truthfulness’ is specified [3], and many sayings might be quoted from him, in which ‘sincerity’ is celebrated as highly and demanded as stringently as ever it has been by any Christian moralist; yet he was not altogether the truthful and true man to whom we accord our highest approbation. There was the case of Mang Chih-fan, who boldly brought up the rear of the defeated troops of Lu, and attributed his occupying the place of honour to the backwardness of his horse. The action was gallant, but the apology for it was weak and unnecessary. And yet Confucius saw nothing in the whole but matter for praise [4]. He could excuse himself from seeing an unwelcome visitor on the ground that he was sick, when there was nothing the matter with him [5]. These were small matters, but what shall we say to the incident which I have given in the sketch of his Life, p. 79,— his deliberately breaking the oath which he had sworn, simply on the ground that it had been forced from him?

 

1 Ana. VII. xxiii.

2 Ana. VI. xx.

3 See above, near the beginning of this paragraph.

4 Ana. VI. xiii.

5 Am. XVII. xx.

 

I should be glad if I could find evidence on which to deny the truth of that occurrence. But it rests on the same authority as most other statements about him, and it is accepted as a fact by the people and scholars of China. It must have had, and it must still have, a very injurious