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Understanding the Confucian Analects (April 1998) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin
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Understanding the Confucian Analects
Tu Wei-Ming Speaks in Bradley Lecture Series
By JOHN MARTIN
Historian, philosopher and educator Tu Wei-Ming analyzed one of the world's oldest works of social thought, the Analects of Confucius, in the Bradley Lecture series.
Recorded after Confucius's death, misunderstood and maligned in the West, and denounced during the Cultural Revolution, the Confucian Analects, Professor Tu argued, nevertheless reflect a coherent, humanistic philosophy unrivaled for its sustained influence on a large number of people.
Mr. Tu presented his lecture, "Personal Knowledge, Moral Community and Spiritual Transformation: Reading the Confucian Analects, on Feb. 26 to a capacity audience in the Library's Montpelier Room. Director of Scholarly Programs Prosser Gifford introduced Mr. Tu, noting that his address was the first in this year's Bradley series, a program devoted to the critique of important texts of political and social thought, to focus on "a work created outside the Atlantic world." Mr. Gifford also directed the audience's attention to two editions of the Analects supplied by the Asian Division for display. The first, "A Complete Collection of the Four Books and the Five Classics," a rare printing that dates to the Yung-lo Period of the Ming Dynasty (1403-1424), is in near pristine condition. The second, a standard 19th century English translation by Oxford orientalist James Legge, suffers from acidification.
Scholars believe that China has had a continuous culture for some 7,000 years. If so, the Chinese social organization has held together more human beings for a longer period of time than any other known to history. Confucius (K'ung Fu Tzu) lived from 551 to 479 B.C. The Analects, Mr. Tu, said, are not considered one of the five great ancient Chinese classics, which Confucius himself studied and transmitted. The distillation of a lifetime of teaching, study and contemplation, the Analects represent an attempt to preserve Confucius's teachings about man's proper relation to himself, his community, the state and the natural world.
Despite its place as a cornerstone of Chinese social thought, the Analects, said Mr. Tu, achieved only a modest reputation in the West. German philosopher Georg Hegel dismissed the text, which he believed held "no real speculative thought." Max Weber, the late-19th century German sociologist and economist, said the Analects praise the value of submission for the sake of established social order and lack the developed idea of the inner person revealed in the world's great philosophical works. Misread, the text seems to be no more than a random collection of proverbial utterances, a kind of ancient Chinese Poor Richard's Almanac. Thus, Confucian ideals have been trivialized and blurred by the popular practice of prefixing "Confucius says ..." to so many aphorisms.
Misunderstanding of the text is partially a result of the work's origins, Mr. Tu explained. Set down two generations after Confucius's death by his disciple's students, the Analects, written on bamboo strips, thus have no single author. Confucius's devotees selected examples of their most cherished encounters with their beloved teacher. The creation of the Analects was not systematic, but an act of collective memory. Those who look for a sustained argument or unified tract, therefore, are invariably disappointed.
Nevertheless, Mr. Tu maintains, the text succeeds in capturing Confucius as an essential human being. "Confucius as a person is very vividly revealed in the Analects. We know his likes, dislikes, frustrations, mannerisms and concerns."
Applying the values of the Enlightenment to the Analects also does them a disservice, since the Confucian worldview is not reductionist. The word "Confucian" itself cannot be rendered easily in Chinese, Mr. Tu says, because it embodies more than the philosophy of a single person. "Confucian" in Chinese means "The Way of the Scholar" or "The Way of the Cultivated Person." Confucius developed his ideas from an older cultural tradition, reflected in ancient texts he studied and revised, such as the Book of Change, the Book of Poetry, the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Book of Documents and the Book of Rights. His vision of humanity is multidimensional. Humans are not defined by their rationality, their use of tools or their manipulation of language. Rather, humans are primarily aesthetic, social and political. They possess a shared historical memory and are metaphysical beings concerned with the ultimate meaning of life.
Confucius himself never attained the purest manifestation of the Confucian tradition, that of "the Sage-King," the ultimate embodiment of the political and the moral. Much has been made of his failed political ambitions, but it is wrong, Mr. Tu believes, to view Confucius as just a frustrated politician. Politics, to Confucius, was moral leadership and exemplary teaching. His refusal to play by the rules of the day denied him high office, but that very failure allowed him to secure an important place as a teacher to the political classes and to establish in East Asia the notion of personal virtue, rather than power or wealth, as a source of influence and authority.
Eventually, knowledge of his teachings, including the Analects, became required to pass "examination," the mandatory test for entry into the civil service of ancient China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
According to Mr. Tu, the Analects do present serious philosophical thought, such as the idea that human beings, through endless self-transformation and spiritual growth, "become the humble servant, partner and co-creator of heaven." Then there is the dialectic of "minimum requirement vs. maximum realization," the recognition that man's claim to humanity depends on irreducible values of civil interaction, even when his best efforts fail to produce perfection. Like the personal knowledge and spiritual transformation they promote, the Analects cannot be understood formulaically, nor is the goal of human perfection a place at which one consciously arrives at the appointed time. "The person in the Confucian view," says Mr. Tu, "is an open system, not a static structure."
Despite the apparent randomness, Mr. Tu concludes, a common humanistic theme binds the Analects and ensures their continued relevance to modern society in East and West. "The Confucian perspective," he writes, "entails an unceasing spiritual transformation. It is not simply a search for one's inner spirituality, but a concern for the establishment of a fiduciary community of humankind as a whole."
A professor of Chinese history and philosophy at Harvard University, Mr. Tu has written numerous books on Confucian learning, humanism and philosophy, including Neo-Confucian Thought in Action (1976); Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (1980); and The Way, Learning and Politics: Perspectives on the Confucian Intellectual (1988). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Mr. Martin is in the Copyright Office.
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