Join us as Dr. Bin Song explores the riches of the Ru tradition and its intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual heritage. Dr. Song is a scholar of Ruism (more commonly known as Confucianism) as well as comparative philosophy, religion, and theology.
Hallo, my name is Bin Song. I am a Ru scholar, and a college professor in the disciplines of philosophy, religion and theology. This audio is written and recorded by me to guide your Ru meditation using the posture of sleeping.Sleeping meditation takes a very important role in Ru meditation. Rightly at the beginning of the Ru tradition, Mencius lived around 3 century B.C.E and was a staunch follower and wise interpreter of Confucius's thought. He wrote beautiful passages about “night vital-energies.” （夜气）. He likens human body to a mountain, and says that a daily good sleep for a human being will be like a regular amount of sunshine, air, rain, and other necessary natural elements to nourish a mountain. As a result, the mountain will become lush, vital and fertile, and it is going to grow, feed and bring joy to the life of many living beings. However, if humans are deprived of sleep, that will be like hunters and peasants who dare to use axes and hatchets to exploit the mountain every day. In this case, the mountain will eventually become bald and barren, and is completely stripped of any ability to nurture other beings. What is distinctive about Mencius's thought on sleeping meditation is that he says when people get a good sleep, and have a clear, calm, and sensitive mind in the morning as a consequence, this will help us to be more moral. This is because it will become easier for us to feel the interconnection of all beings in the world, and when a baby is about to fall into a well, or any other similar distress happens to our human fellows, we will be more likely to have a feeling of empathy and try to care and help them. In other words, if we have a good sleep to continually nurture the vital-energies within our body day and night, we will become more moral. I do not know how many classes of ethics in modern universities and colleges are teaching how to sleep, but as inspired by Mencius' thought and practice, I definitely believe they should.
Hi, My name is Bin Song. I am a Ru scholar, therapist, and college professor in the disciplines of philosophy, religion, and theology. The audio is written and recorded by me to guide your practice of cross-legged quiet-sitting Ru meditation.And this will be the second among seven postures of Ru meditation that I intend to introduce through this series of audio broadcast.The posture of cross-legged quiet-sitting originates from ancient Hinduism, and migrates to China following Buddhism in around the 2 century C.E As I mentioned in last audio, the attitude of the majority of Ru scholars towards this posture in the beginning was to resist it, or simply not practice it. The major reason is that this posture was normally practiced by monks and nuns in monasteries in a very isolated way at that time, and Ruism in general opposes social disengagement and isolation.
Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song in the course of “Ru and Confucianism” at Washington College.In this unit, we will discuss Xunzi, the last major Ru philosopher in the pre-Qin period of the tradition.As indicated by my teaching experience, beginning readers of the Ru tradition in the west normally find Xunzi (circa. 310-235 B.C.E)'s thought quite congenial. This is mainly because in a way blatantly contrary to Mencius, Xunzi thinks human nature is bad, and hence, the process of education and self-cultivation should not be envisioned as a course of re-discovering and nurturing something that is already within us. Rather, for Xunzi, to be a fully human is to find a teacher of authority to inculcate rituals and rules from without, so as to transform one's uncultivated inborn dispositions to something different. While presenting his moral philosophy, Mencius likes to use metaphors from the industry of farming to describe that moral development is like the process to prepare soil, sow seeds, grow sprouts and therefore, after all human efforts are duly executed, it would be up to the nature to take care of everything else. However, in a very contrastive way, Xunzi thinks the process of being humanized is like one to straighten a piece of shapeless wood using knife and file or to temper a chunk of metal stone using fire and water. In these cases, the craftsmen have to input their blueprints into raw materials so as to transform them into something with form and order. Emphatically, the power of transformation by no means belongs to those raw materials themselves.Since Mencius thinks education is to rediscover and enlarge something that is innate to each human individual, the role of teachers, books, and all other pedagogical measures is best to be thought of as being facilitative and heuristic, rather than being deterministic. Therefore, regarding the Classic of Documents which was looked at highly by the Ru school, Mencius said that “I would rather have no such a book called ‘documents' if I have to believe everything in it.” (Mencius 7B) Similarly, the most honored teachers in the Ru traditions are called “sages” or “sage-kings”; however, since the role of teachers for one's education was thought of by Mencius as being facilitative and heuristic, he did not believe sages were flawless, perfect and semi-divine beings. Instead, he commented that sages actually share the same innately good part of human nature with every other human being, and the excellence of sages consists in their persistent will to perfect themselves once they make mistakes. (Mencius 2B). Most importantly, since he thinks the nature plays a significant role in the process of one's humanization, Mencius is pious towards the all-encompassing “heaven” (天, cosmos), and describes the process of education as one of “preserving one's heartmind, nourishing one's human nature, and ultimately, serving heaven.” (Mencius 7 A)Because Xunzi holds a fundamentally different view from Mencius on the point of human nature, he disagrees with Mencius on all the points mentioned in last paragraph as well. Firstly, since the process of humanization does not involve the facilitating role of the nature, the Ruist term, Tian (天), lost its religious connotation in Xunzi's thought. Instead, Tian was understood by Xunzi as a purely natural process of life-generating; it provides the raw materials for human civilization to thrive. However, whether humans can manage and utilize these materials for their own purposes entirely depend upon human efforts. Xunzi claims that “Rather than following heaven and praising it, why not manage the mandate of heaven, and then, utilize it!” (Xunzi, chapter 17) Secondly, in Xunzi's pedagogical and political visions, it is up to the teacher with an absolute authority who relies upon their extraordinary intelligence to perceive principles which harmonize the relationships among human and comic being. Therefore, it is also these teachers who design civilizing rituals and rules to transform ordinary human beings' under-human, inborn dispositions. Accordingly, Xunzi thinks sage-kings, as the most honorable teachers in the Ru tradition, are impeccable, semi-divine figures, and people should never challenge their authority. For instance, when explaining why Yao and Shun did not need to abdicate their thrones, Xunzi denies that these sage-kings could be too old to retain their strength fit for a ruler. He says that:“As for the Son of Heaven (such as Yao or Shun), his power has the utmost weight, and his body has the utmost ease. His heart has the utmost happiness, and nowhere his intentions suffer being turned back. …. Thus, when he inhabits the palace, he is like a supreme spirit, and when on the move, he is like a heavenly deity … And so I say: there is such things as old age for the feudal lords, but there is no such things as old age for the Son of Heaven.” (Xunzi, Chapter 18, translation adapted from Eric L. Hutton.)In other words, since the entire country provides the best for their supreme leaders to preserve their life and execute their heavenly intelligence, none of them needs to relinquish their political power to others, and the country would be always governed in a superb way under their leadership.After I sketch the differences between Mencius and Xunzi as such, I believe you would understand better why, at the beginning of my lecture, I reported that starting readers of the Ru tradition in the west normally feel congenial to Xunzi's thought. This is because Xunzi's conception of bad human nature and his related thought on human transformation and government are not only similar to the Christian narrative of human fate as deriving from original sins, but also to the fundamental tenet of liberal philosophy that the state of nature of human beings always involves problems, and thus, it needs a contractual process of sociality and governance to rectify them. Nevertheless, seen from the emic perspective of the Ru tradition, Xunzi's view that rituals derive from the source of a super-human intelligence alien to ordinary human beings' inborn dispositions is a significant deviation from his Ruist predecessors. Although it is a good philosophical question to ask which of the contrasting views of Mencius's and Xunzi's is the right one from a non-temporal perspective, we still need to contextualize Xunzi's thought in its historical situation, and thus, ask ourselves: how did this deviation of Xunzi's thought come about at the first hand?In order to answer this question, it is helpful for us to recall all the major figures that our course has focused upon so far in the timeline since the beginning of the Ru tradition. They are the sage-kings Yao and Shun, the Duke of Zhou, the philosophers Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), and Xunzi. From an institutional perspective, there were three different kinds of political regimes each of these figures lived in, and thus, the difference surely influenced how these Ru masters envisioned and articulated their Ruist ideals of human society.In the time of Yao and Shun, the political institution is called the one of abdication, by which a supreme leader, while taking into consideration recommendations made by an assembly of tribal leaders, relinquished their power to a worthy human who normally did not share the same family name with them. The principle of Ru philosophy to embody in this institution is particularly “to treat worthies as worthy” (贤贤), or “to respect worthies” （尊贤）.However, the institution of abdication cannot be sustained for long since if one tribe becomes much more powerful than others, it may just refuse to abdicate their political powers and instead, take on patrilineal inheritance as the new standard of power transition. This was exactly what happened after the time of Yao and Shun, and Duke of Zhou had furnished the best philosophical articulation of this new feudal system. In the ritual system designed by Duke of Zhou to fit the feudal society, members in the same royal family are enfeoffed; as local leaders, they need to pay regular tributes to the king, and in the time of war and other national businesses, they must follow their king as a supreme leader as well. However, on issues pertaining to the organization of their own states such as economy, taxation, hiring officials, policing, etc., these enfeoffed lords enjoyed a great degree of sovereignty and autonomy. As analyzed in the section on Duke of Zhou, two principles of Ru philosophy were represented in this feudal system: “to treat family as family” (亲亲) and “to treat worthies as worthy.” The implication of the latter principle in the feudal system is easy to understand since local lords and the king need to employ able men to staff their courts; however, the principle of “treating family as family” is particularly important since the power was distributed according to the order of seniority in varying familial lineages, and thus, it would be crucial for maintaining a peaceful political order of a feudal system to abide by a strict family ethic.The elaborate ritual system designed by Duke of Zhou sustained Zhou Dynasty for quite a while. However, after several hundreds of years, the system was collapsing due to the same reason which once lead to the end of the institution of abdication, viz., in a feudal system, if local lords became too powerful, the king just could not control them. The time of Kongzi and Mengzi was such a period of war when those local lords once enfeoffed by the Zhou kings constantly fought each other. In face of the rampant social and political disintegration, the ideal of Kongzi, as it was followed by Mengzi, was to recover the original ritual system designed by Duke of Zhou. More distinctively, while transmitting ancient cultures, Kongzi and Mengzi distilled a philosophical kernel, viz., the transcendent virtue of Humaneness, from the Zhou ritual system, and hence, created new possibilities for the future development of the Ru thought.Nevertheless, in the late stage of the so-called Warring State period when Xunzi lived his life, there was a new political institution created by the belligerent states located in the northwestern periphery of the Zhou dynasty. In order to understand the deviation of Xunzi from his Ruist predecessors, the impact of this new institution upon Xunzi's thought cannot be underestimated. This is the institution of prefecture, by which the administrative power of a state is divided vertically, and the supreme leader retains their ultimate power to appoint officials in varying governmental tiers and to prescribe laws to manage varying offices. The system was designed solely for the purpose of centralizing authority, which turned out to be very effective to militarize a society so as to combat its external enemies.In a strict sense, this system needs neither to “treat family as family” nor to “respect worthies,” since its political power is distributed among governmental tiers according to neither the pedigree nor the virtue of a governmental official. Rather, as indicated by the most powerful state structured by this institution of prefecture, viz. the state of Qin, which also became the first unified imperial dynasty after the collapse of Zhou, commoners were either rewarded or punished by a set of laws designed for the singular purpose of assisting the central authority to build the domestic order, provide supplies, and win battles against other states in the field. In the intellectual history of ancient China, the philosophy to articulate the rationale of this new system of prefecture is called “legalism,” and it became one most important trend of political thought contemporaneous to Xunzi's Ruism.When Xunzi visited the state of Qin, he was impressed by the order of its society and the effectivity of its government. He praised it as “to be at ease, yet bring about order; to act with restraint, yet take care of all details; to be free of worry, yet achieve meritorious accomplishment – such is the ultimate in good government!” (Xunzi, chapter 16). However, being aware of that such an effective governmental system of Qin was based upon an overtly military state ideology, and thus, lacked a moral foundation advocated by the Ru tradition, Xunzi also predicted Qin's eventual perish.Therefore, the overall intention of Xunzi's thought becomes clearer to us after its historical situation gets clarified: in a time of unstoppable political crisis and social disintegration, Xunzi could by no means hold on to the original feudal system which once flourished in the time of Duke of Zhou. In this regard, he welcomed the creation of the system of centralized authority in the institution of prefecture with his full-heart, and saw it as a hopeful means to regain the unity and peace of civilization. However, while judging the prefecture system to have lacked a moral foundation, Xunzi tried to infuse the moral teaching of Ruism with the system so as to create a new type of institution to embody Ruism. While doing so, Xunzi modified the traditional Ruist conception of “rituals” according to the legalist standard of laws, and advocated that it is entirely up to the process of ritualization to transform the innately bad human nature. In other words, what Xunzi intended was to create a state ideology of Ruism to sustain the legalist institution of prefecture.Since Xunzi's thought can be understood as such, it will be of no surprise for us to re-read those deified depictions of Ruist sage-kings by Xunzi. Yes, in this Ruist system of prefecture, the central authority can only be envisioned as a supremely intelligent and virtuous human being who design the best rituals and laws to make the entire system revolve around their flawless political gravitas and moral charisma.However, one final question we ask to Xunzi would be similar to how we would respond to Plato's idea of philosopher king: is it ever realistic to expect that such a political and moral superhuman can ever be born throughout the entire history of humanity?
When Confucius passed away, his students built schools and academies which furthermore ramified to varying lineages of philosophical and religious thought. Within these lineages, there is one which is particularly favored by later Ruists, and in the second millennium of imperial China, it is also enshrined by scholar-officials as the orthodox version of Ru thought, the so-called lineage of Dao (道统). Allegedly, this lineage started from all those sage-kings discussed by the previous units of our course, such as Yao, Shun, Yu, King Wen, Wing Wu, and Duke of Zhou, continued with Confucius, and then, was finally passed down to Zeng Zi, the immediate student of Confucius as also the alleged author of the text “Great Learning,” to Zi Si, the grandson of Confucius as also the purported author of the text “Centrality and Commonality”, and eventually to Mencius.As indicated, Confucius, Mencius, Zeng Zi and Zi Si are the authors of four Ru classics: The Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, and Centrality and Commonality. Overall, these four books formed a new canon system, the significance of which in the second millennium even surpassed the Six Classics that Confucius originally taught in his own school.However, starting from the 221 B.C.E, the beginning point of Qin Dynasty, Mencius's status was not that prominent for the Ru tradition in the first millennium of imperial China. Yes, he was as important as being seen as a principal Ru thinker; his book was also taken as having furnished an important interpretation of Confucius's thought. However, during this earlier period, this interpretation did not grant Mencius the title, the so-called “Secondary Sage” (亚聖), through which later Ruists honored him as the sage only secondary to Confucius.Why so? Why were the emphases of the Ru tradition during the first and second millennia of imperial China different? The answer to this question can be explained as follows.There were two vast, long-standing, and unifying dynasties during the first millennium, viz., Han and Tang, and somewhat in-between them was another long period of social disintegration and political division. Seen from a historical hindsight, the most significant moment for the Ru tradition in this earlier period was that under the efforts of Ru scholars in Han Dynasty, Confucius's teaching was adopted as a state ideology, and thus, established its mainstream status in the intellectual and political history of ancient China once for all. However, this also means that Ruism was seen as a major resource for the statecraft and institutional structures of the emerging and developing imperial system of ancient China. More importantly, those impactful non-Confucian thought in the pre-Qin dynasty still existed and developed in their own terms (for instance, Daoism got established as a religion during this time); also, Buddhism migrated from India, and gradually took a strong root in Chinese people's spiritual life. In face of all these competing schools and traditions, it took time for Ru scholars to learn, interact, and incorporate their thought. In other words, the politically mainstream status of Ruism and the increasingly diversifying intellectual landscape of ancient China made the Ru tradition predominately focus upon elaborating the “ritual” side of Confucius's thought, rather than its inner-dispositional aspect of ethics and metaphysics. In other words, because Ruism was dedicated to constructing the political and societal ritual-system of imperial China and to confronting the influence of varying schools of thought, it had not yet developed its own all-compassing, holistic discourse which grounds those political and social rituals upon a sophisticated conception of human nature and furthermore, grounds this conception of human nature upon a cosmology which addresses the most generic features of beings in the universe.However, the situation changes quite drastically in the second millennium, when the so-called “neo-Confucianism”, viz., the form of Ruism in Song through Ming dynasties, arises and gradually regains the mainstream influence in the areas of ethics, metaphysics, and spirituality. Intellectually speaking, the competition and interaction among Ruism, Buddhism, and Daoism prepare the formation of Neo-Confucianism, and what Neo-Confucianism succeeds to provide is exactly the sort of ethical-metaphysics or metaphysical-ethics that completes the two layers of “grounding” mentioned above. In comparison with Han and Tang Ruism, we also find that Neo-Confucianism systemizes the teaching of the “humane” side of Confucius's thought, and thus, perfects the systemacity of Ruism into an unprecedented level.Against this background of the rising of neo-Confucianism, it is easier for us to understand why the status of Mencius was also rising in the same period. That's because Mencius's thought provided the backbone elements for the all-encompassing ethical-metaphysics needed by the Ru tradition in that particular historical situation.Now, let me enumerate several major points of Mencius's thought to help you understand his major contribution to the Ru thought.Human Nature is Innately Good.As explained before, there are three aspects of the golden rule of ethics in Confucius's thought: 1) the negative: do not do to others you do not want to be done, 2) the positive: do to others what you want to do to yourself, and 3) the corrective: treat people's wrong-doing to yourself with justice. In another statement (Analects 15.3, 15.24), Confucius also insinuated that this rule is one singlular thread to run through all his teaching.However, without knowing what one genuinely wants and desires, and thus, having a robust moral standard of right or wrong, we still do not know how to implement the rule. Confucius called the rule “the method of practicing humaneness” (仁之方, Analects 6:30), but without knowing the content of “humaneness” per se, the method has no substance to apply. In other words, without a clarification of what the genuine humanity consists in, the one singlular thread is just a formal string to connect no content.To continue Confucius's thought on the concept of “humaneness,” it was Mencius who furnished a systematic and substantial elaboration on what the “genuine self” of each human individual entails, and this also constitutes the most significant philosophical proposition in Mencius's thought: human nature is innately good.In a thought experiment (Mencius 2A), Mencius envisions every ordinary human being will spontaneously have a feeling of alarm and fright when seeing a baby about to fall into a well. Accordingly, if one does not act upon the feeling, they will spontaneously have another feeling of shame and disgust. If one succeeds to act upon those feelings and saves the baby, others will look at them with the feeling of respect and deference. Overall, these spontaneous reactions speak to the fact that every ordinary human being has an inner moral sense of right and wrong. So, these four interconnected feelings, the one of the commiseration of alarm and fright, the one of shame and disgust, the one of respect and deference, and the one of right and wrong, were thought of by Mencius as the manifestation of four character traits, viz., four virtues, which define the good part of human nature which distinguishes humans from non-human beings on the earth. And these four virtues are humaneness, rightness, ritual-propriety and wisdom.Once clarified about what is their genuine humanity, what each human individual remains to do is to nurture and develop these moral sprouts in gradually expanding social circles: family, community, state, and all under the heavens, just as what the three-phase and eight-step program of the Great Learning indicates. For me, this is a very wise way to elaborate the concept of “genuine self,” because it is focused upon virtues and moral excellences, rather than any rigid prescriptive rule to dictate what we should or should not do. In other words, under the general framework of those definitive virtues elaborated by Mencius, each individual can develop their own stable character traits in different situations and regarding different conditions of their life, and this approach to envisioning human self therefore maintains a balance between certainty and flexibility.In a more general term, I think of Mencius's proposition “human nature is good” as being both descriptive and prescriptive, since it describes a fact that could happen to humans' emotional reaction to a certain circumstance, viz., the stimulation of the aforementioned moral sentiments. Moreover, it is also prescriptive since it says that these moral feelings distinguish humans from non-human beings, and thus, everyone “should” hold on to them so as to re-discover and enlarge their humanity.Another very important nature of Mencius's proposition, which learners of Ruism nowadays often overlook, is that it is a conditional, rather than categorical statement. It implies that only under certain circumstances, human nature is good. Two such conditions were articulated by Mencius: firstly, humans need to intend to re-discover and maintain our good human nature in terms of seeking education and self-cultivation. (Mencius 4A) Secondly, the societal environment needs to be just and peaceful so that the good part of human nature is encouraged and practiced. (Mencius 6A) More interestingly, Mencius had a very unique thought to connect varying contemplative practices such as sleeping and meditation to his moral philosophy, and hence, this leads to the second most important point of Mencius's thought:Sleep well, Breathe deeply, and then, Your Human Nature would be Good.When addressing the question that since human nature is good, why so many bad things are committed by humans, Mencius thinks that this is like asking why a once verdant mountain can one day become barren. Mencius explains that if you continue to use axes and hatchets to destroy every sprout of plants naturally growing in the mountain, no matter how good the quality of soil is, the mountain still would not provide. By the same token, as long as one has a good sleep during a night, in the morning, they will naturally feel a clearer mind and a more sensitive heart to connect to beings in the world. In this case, people will be easier to feel their sympathy and co-existence with the world so that their innately good human nature is well-kept. (Mencius 6A)Based upon this exhortation to nourish one's “night vital-energy,” Mencius furthermore puts forward one most charming aspect of this thought: he is after all a mystic, and says that we should continue to nourish the nightly and early-morning sort of vital-energy up to a point when we can feel a union with the entire cosmos through the medium of these all-pervasive vital-energies, to which Mencius gave a remarkable name: the Oceanic Vital-Energies (浩然之氣, Mencius 2A).In other words, Mencius states that human nature is and should be good, since, as analyzed, the statement is both descriptive and prescriptive. But why can it be good in the final analysis? That's because humans evolve from the constantly life-generating process of the cosmos (天). Since the cosmos creates constantly and all-inclusively, each human individual, as a result of cosmic creation, can also take care of themselves and other cosmic beings because ultimately, every being in the universe is interconnected through the all-pervasive oceanic vital-energies.Because humans are envisioned as being endowed by the cosmos with a mission to manifest the all-creating cosmic power in the human world, Mencius articulates his understanding of human fate, which leads to the third most important point of his thought:Await, Straighten and Establish Your Fate: a Quasi-Stoic Point in Mencius's ThoughtSimilar to the ancient Greek Stoic thought, Mencius believes that a joyful, peaceful, and flourished human life consists in distinguishing what can from what cannot be controlled by human beings. So, fame, wealth, property, approval from others, all of these cannot be fully controlled by human efforts. There is a fatalist element of human life to determine whether one can obtain these things or not. However, Confucius once commented, “whenever I desire to be humane, I can be humane.” (Analects 7.30) Similarly, Mencius thought that whether one can practice good sleeping, breathe deeply to keep mindful and nurture one's inner energy, and hence, be dedicated to cultivating the aforementioned four virtues rooted in one's inborn moral sentiments is completely under human control. Therefore, Mencius taught that the focus of an exemplary human's life should be upon these controllable elements of learning and moral self-cultivation. (Mencius 6A, 7A, 7B) In time, the accumulated efforts of self-cultivation will lead to a feeling of self-contentedness and constant joy no matter what situation one happens to enter.However, in a slightly different mode from the Stoic counterpart, Mencius also believes that if one constantly focuses upon learning and self-cultivation, viz., the aspect of human life that is under our control, we can gradually change the seemingly uncontrollable aspects of human life as well. In Mencius's term, this is to “wait for one's fate.” (俟命, Mencius 7B) In this way, since we choose the right aspects of human life to focus on, Mencius also described the resulted situation of human life as “straightening our fate” (正命, Mencius 7A) ; eventually, we humans can also “establish our fate” (立命, Mencius 7A) in the sense that we fulfill the potential of being a human to the greatest extent, and thus, try our best to serve our cosmic consciousness which aims to advance the life-affirming power of the cosmos in the human world.So, in a word, if I have to use one sentence to summarize Mencius's thought in light of its significance in Neo-Confucianism, I will do it as follows:Find your genuine self in terms of four cardinal virtues, cultivate them using all contemplative practices, and eventually, establish the right path of your fate to fulfill the intimate position of your human life within the cosmos.
Ritual-abiding or goodwill? A Confucian Question.If we have to use one unit to focus on Confucius's thought, we should do so about the concept of Ren, translatable as humaneness, humanity, benevolence, kindness, goodwill, etc.The reason I said so is due to the historical situation that Confucius was facing when he tried to revive the Zhou ritual system to regain the peace of society in his time. Rituals, understood in the broad Ruist sense of “civilizational conventions,” changed since they are after all “conventions”. Even if we assume that none ritual prior to Zhou had never been considered by Confucius (which may be not accurate since he frequently mentioned ancient stories and cultures in the Analects), there had already been 5 hundred years passed after the event of “Duke of Zhou made rituals and composed music.” Yes, in Confucius's time, rulers of states frequently usurped power to perform rituals that were supposed to be solely performed by the emperor. In this case, it was clear to Confucius what rituals these local lords should not perform and thus, he also condemned these hegemons relentlessly. (Analects 3.1) However, for rituals that are of less outstanding status, people in different times and places are just doing them differently, or in certain cases, people may stop doing them even if scholars can find the historical evidences of these abandoned rituals. Therefore, in order to teach rituals to his students to serve a distinctive social and political purpose, Confucius must have been delved into a quite serious, systematic thought about the origin, function and purpose of ritual in general, so that he could have a standard to advocate certain rituals over others, and in certain circumstances, even to invent rituals fit for his time. A visible instance on the creative ritual practice of Confucius can be found in those analyzed educational principles (please look into unit 6 of the course) that Confucius implemented in the first private school he founded.So, what is the origin, function and purpose of ritual?Regarding the origin of ritual, Confucius said, once ritual is lost, we should seek it in the wild field, which means seeking it in the uncultivated, non-urban areas where people still keep their naturally kind and warm-hearted dispositions. (Analects 11.1) He also likened the creation of ritual to drawing pictures on a plainly white canvas (Analects 3.8), and this means that only when we possess a solid foundation of those inborn dispositions of human beings, we can start to design rituals based upon it. In a more concrete term, when he explained why, in his time, people needed to mourn for three years after their parents passed away, Confucius said that people normally “derive no pleasure from the food that they eat, no joy from the music that they hear, and no comforts from their dwelling” after their parents die (Analects 17.21), and therefore, they need a ritual to perform and abide by to help them to go through this difficult time of deep grieving.So, in the view of Confucius's, rituals are needed to express and manifest the naturally given inner dispositions of human beings. This view is highly understandable even from today's perspectives; for instance, we normally get excited, or feel somewhat different about ourselves when our birthday is approaching. It seems that we need something to mark this day, to celebrate what is meaningful to us, and also to project a conceivable future. All of these constitute the rationale of the perhaps most performed rituals of birthday party all over the world.However, although rituals manifest the inner dispositions of humanity, they can also discipline and refine the latter. The Analects 12:1 noticeably instructs that “Humanity is realized through enabling oneself to return to ritual-propriety,” and also that “Look not at what is contrary to ritual-propriety; listen not to what is contrary to ritual-propriety; speak not what is contrary to ritual-propriety; make no movement which is contrary to ritual-propriety.” Given all our previous discussions of the significance of 禮, it is not difficult for us to understand this aspect of Confucius's thought. Yes, the inner dispositions of humanity, no matter how naturally good they are, can serious go over their due measure, and become harmful. Think about the aforementioned mourning ritual, if there is no such a ritual to refine people's natural feeling of grief, this feeling may be indulged for too long a period of time, and for too intensive a degree. If this happened, the community surrounding the grieving person might not have any means to interact the person, and the ordinary activities in that person's life can also be greatly undermined. The same goes to every “goodwill” that human individuals may have towards certain aspects of life. For instance, I habituate myself to getting up early in the morning, and reading and writing as a scholar; however, in order to regather myself and maintain my creativity, I also drink a cup of coffee, do some meditation, and walk around the neighborhood every one or two hours when I am writing. If I only have a goodwill to balance the stillness and activities of my body without a routinely, materialized way to do it, the goodwill cannot be made true, and whether I have this goodwill at all can also be doubted.Since ritual both manifests and refines inner dispositions of humanity, when these inward and outward aspects of human living hit a perfect balance and harmony, Confucius has an overall term to describe this ideal state of human character and personality: 仁, the virtue of humanity or humaneness.Confucius once says that “if a person is not humane, what do they do with ritual-propriety? If a person is not humane, what do they do with music?” (Analects 3.3) So, to acquire the virtue of humaneness is the ultimate purpose of ritual performance. However, ancient Chinese characters normally have a cluster of meanings to apply in varying contexts. Treated as one among many virtues that Confucius advocated in the Analects, the virtue of humaneness refers to the sincere goodwill of human beings whenever we conduct ourselves kindly and benevolently in varying human relationships. However, seen as the cardinal human virtue on top of all virtues, the virtue of humaneness means “to love both oneself and the people” so as to fulfill the distinctive and all-encompassing human love in a cosmic consciousness. In other words, universal human love is how we realize what human beings can best achieve in an endlessly creating and renewing cosmos. Understood in both the minor and major meanings, the virtue of humaneness relates to rituals in a way that I can summarize as follows: Humaneness is the ontological origin, and existential purpose of ritual, while ritual both manifests, refines, and helps to nurture the virtue of humaneness. With this standard of ritual-propriety been set, Confucius can then select, invent and teach rituals in his school as a bunch of examples in this regard are indicated in the Analects.Last but not least, among all the ways of ritual-propriety that Confucius thinks can help to manifest and realize the virtue of humaneness, there is one that stands prominently. Confucius called it “the method of practicing humaneness” and instructed his students to employ this method uninterruptedly for their whole life. (Analects 15.24) This is normally called the “golden rule” of ethics in the Confucian case. It has three major, inter-related aspects:Firstly, the negative golden rule, which is told by Analects 15.24: do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself.Secondly, the positive golden rule, which is told by Analects 6:30: establish others what you want to establish yourself; help others to achieve what you want to achieve yourself.Thirdly, the corrective golden rule, which is told by Analects 14.34: when someone does something wrong to you, you should neither revenge nor tolerate. Instead, you should treat them with justice, viz., to correct their wrong-doing in a loving, but just and righteous way.Given our previous analysis of the relationship between ritual-propriety and humaneness, we will understand that none of these three aspects can be implemented separately. For instance, if you merely refuse to impose to others what you do not want to be imposed, but not proactively care and promote the well-being of your human fellows, your “humanity,” viz., the full potential to be a thriving human, will be greatly undermined. Most importantly, in mere reliance upon these three golden rules, we cannot become genuinely humane either. That's because the implementation of these rules, just as any other practice of ritual-propriety, originates from the inner and deeper source of humanity, and thus, must be based upon the re-discovery and nurturing of certain aspects of our innately given human dispositions. For instance, if you do not like to eat American cheese, according to the negative golden rule, you cannot feed the American cheese to whomsoever. For starving and poor people who need the cheese and nutrition, this cannot be said as a humane deed. Therefore, the implementation of ritual-propriety must be based upon our good judgement of which naturally given pre-dispositions lead to the co-thriving of human fellows. In a Confucian term, this means the practice of ritual-propriety is premised upon and checked by our inner virtue of humaneness. In other words, the so-called golden rule of ethics can be best described as a silver rule according to a Confucian perspective.The ritual-abiding behaviors alone cannot strengthen our goodwill to be a good human, while as analyzed before, the goodwill alone cannot guarantee us to be so either. An exemplary human should not let either aspect of the goodness of human life triumph over the other, and only when we reach an ideal balance between the raw and vibrant inner-dispositions and outward ritual-abiding behaviors, we can be called an exemplary human being, junzi. (Analects 6.18)
We have spent the previous units to talk about the name, the entering text, and several pre-Confucian exemplary figures of the Ru tradition. Now, we finally get to Confucius, which the English name of the Ru tradition, Confucianism, refers to.It was the Jesuits who gave us this name “Confucius” in around the 16th century. When they did so, they tried to pronounce how Confucius was honored by Chinese people at that time. Kong is the surname, and Fuzi, means “honored master”; so Confucius sounds like Kong Fuzi, and it was not the original name of Confucius. The original name of Confucius is Kong Qiu, and he has a style name called Zhong Ni. Qiu means a hill, referring to what the forehead of Confucius looked like; Zhong means that Kong Qiu is the second son in the family, and Ni refers to the place where Confucius was born, a hill called Ni in the state of Lu, the state that we have discussed as the place where the offspring of the Duke of Zhou were enfeoffed, and thus, it preserved many ancient rituals and cultures of Zhou Dynasty.I get into these fair details of Confucius's birthplace and his name because I want to express my general feeling towards Confucius's life: Confucius is such a real figure that his down-to-earth humanity stands very prominently among the leaders or founders of major world philosophies and religions. Firstly, this very human profile of Confucius is different from founding figures in the Abrahamic religious traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. From varying scriptures, we read a number of miraculous, nearly or fully divine deeds of these religious founding figures such as Jesus, Moses and Muhammad, which we barely find any resemblance in the case of Confucius. Secondly, the number of historical evidences we can gather about Confucius's life and thought surpasses other legendary thinkers, the reality of whose life we can normally just guess and speculate. For instance, many scholars doubt whether we can know anything sure about the life of the Gautama Buddha, or the life of Laozi, the founder of philosophical Daoism.However, this down-to-earth human face of Confucius does not mean that his life is merely human, secular, and thus deficient of all transcendent or spiritual commitment. As I will analyze in more details, the concept of “mandate of heaven” (天命) plays a significant role in Confucius's life, and he indeed tried to live a meaningful and powerful human life with a cosmic consciousness towards what humans can and should do within the entire universe. In this sense, the person of Confucius indicates a lifestyle which we can name as “this worldly spirituality,” and for me, because the lifestyle seems naturally fit into many aspects of human consciousness in modern society, I find it very appealing.The significance of Confucius to the Ru tradition is that he established the first private school in ancient China, and started to systematically study, teach and propagate ancient wisdom with an ultimate purpose of improving the society where he lived in. In other words, before Confucius, although legendary sages such as Yao, Shun and Duke of Zhou had furnished great wisdom for later generations to follow, all educational resources were monopolized by the government, and therefore, no commoner, which referred to people with no noble pedigree, could become an educated person. However, in the time of Confucius, the central authority of Zhou Dynasty was collapsing, and the official school system was crumbling. This situation furnished a historic opportunity for such a highly intelligent and dedicated human being, Confucius, to democratize the educational enterprise so that he could help his society through making education more accessible. This was unprecedented in ancient China, and in this regard, we can compare Confucius to Plato and Aristotle who opened the earliest schools of liberal arts in ancient Greece. This is also the reason why, comparatively speaking, we can have more historical evidences of Confucius's sayings and deeds, since he had a large group of students and followers, and his main social activities took place within or in connection to his school. Because of the huge impact of Confucius upon the Ru tradition which he helped to continue and incubate, he was almost universally respected by whomsoever pursued their education in any school system in the context of ancient China. So, without any surprise, Protestant missionaries named the Ru tradition as “Confucianism” in the 19th century partly because of the universal respect to Confucius that these missionaries have witnessed among ancient Chinese people, although as I explained before, the name “Confucianism” is a misnomer.Since the last topic to avoid in a course about “Confucianism” is Confucius, we will use two units to talk about Confucius. One is about his life and another is on his thought.There is no better way to decipher Confucius's life than his own autobiography. My teacher back at Boston, Prof. John H. Berthrong, once told me that this is perhaps the shortest, and also the most famous autobiography ever written by a human being, and it reads like this:The Master said, “At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning (or, establish my will on learning); at thirty, I took my stand in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood the Mandate of Heaven; at sixty, my ears were attuned to it [or, I obeyed it (the Mandate of Heaven) ]; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety (or, without overstepping the due measures).” (Analects 2.4 – Translation based on Slingerland.)Here, I will try my best to explain what Confucius looked like at each of these self-described stages of life. But I also highly recommend you to do the required reading, and watch the required video, so that you can get more details about how scholars have tried to confirm the details of Confucius's life. So, let's do it one stage after another:Stage One: “At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning (or, establish my will on learning).”Many books on self-care or success share a truism about human life: unless you want to be successful, you cannot be a successful person. The same goes to Confucius's life. He said he established his will on learning, and after 60 years of ceaseless learning (Confucius died at the age of 73, the year of 479 B.C.E), Confucius became the most learned person in his time.There are several factors to stimulate Confucius's will of learning.Firstly, he was born in a declined noble family, and as the youngest son of a concubine to his father, he definitely harbored a will to recover his family's honor. This will was best represented by one story in his earlier life. It was told by Si Maqian that when Confucius was a teenager, he tried to approach the noble family of Ji Sun, a man that held a great power in the state of Lu, to find needed connections to strengthen Confucius's own career. However, because Confucius was merely a son of a concubine, and hence, not noble enough, he was rejected. To his great dismay, Confucius realized that he could not rely upon his pedigree to get a stand in the society, and thus, he set his mind upon learning so that he can become a successful man through his own endeavor and hard-working.Secondly, the city where Confucius was raised in was the capital of the state of Lu, where many ancient rituals and cultures were preserved since the offspring of the Duke of Zhou were all enfeoffed in the state. However, Confucius was not allowed into official schools which at that time admitted students exclusively from noble families. Scholars guessed that Confucius's single-mother, the great woman of Yan Zhengzai, must have played a great role to nurture Confucius's interest in ancient culture. However, we do know that Confucius was mostly self-taught, and he just sought and tried to grasp any opportunity that he could learn from somebody or somewhere certain knowledge of the past of his country and culture. During the process, he also earned his livelihood while doing ordinary jobs such as being a bookkeeper of a granary and a shepherd.Stage Two: “at thirty, I took my stand in society.”Confucius once described part of the curriculum of his teaching as “Be inspired by poetry, stand on the rituals, and be consummate in music.” (Analects 8.8). Hence, when Confucius said he could stand in society when he was around his thirties, it means he commanded a sufficient amount of knowledge on the ritual system of the time so that he can earn his livelihood, raise his family, and thus, find a position in the society.In a more concrete term, this means that after at least 15 years of self-learning, Confucius was learned enough to open his school. He taught ancient classics, and six arts (ritual, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy and arithmetic) to people from all backgrounds, and thus, prepared them to get hired by varying governments and noble families. During the process, Confucius could definitely charge his tuition, and became economically independent. To be a teacher, an independent thinker and scholar, and to be economically independent because of teaching and thinking, these were all entirely new phenomena in ancient Chinese history, and the accomplishment of Confucius in this regard cannot be underestimated.Because Confucius took education as his major job, there were many verses in the Analects to indicate his wisdom on education. For instance, the following three principles of Confucius's philosophy of education are my favorite. First, “learning without a constant teacher” (學無常師), which means you cannot blindly follow any teacher, but instead, you need to learn from anyone who may benefit your learning. Second, “teaching without discrimination,” (有教無類), which means education should be universally accessible to people of all backgrounds. It is said that a bunch of dry meat can be taken by Confucius as the tuition to accept one student willing to learn; but Confucius also had some extremely rich students such as Zi Gong, a merchant coming from the state of Wei. This speaks to the fact that the admission policy of Confucius's school was flexible, and as the first school builder in ancient China, Confucius was indeed dedicated to broadening the accessibility of education. Third, “A noble-minded person cannot be like a utensil” (君子不器), which means everyone needs to learn broadly to be a good human being at first, and then, to be good at a specific career to serve a specific aspect of human society. This is very congenial to the western tradition of liberal arts, and probably a major reason why I choose to teach at a very historical liberal arts college in the U.S.Stage Three: “at forty, I became free of doubts.”At the age around 40, Confucius gathered much reputation because of his teaching and knowledge. He also started to seek opportunities of serving in government in his home state of Lu and its adjacent state of Qi. One event that marked the maturity of Confucius's knowledge is that the ruler of Qi once asked him about how to govern, and Confucius answered the question in a very concise way: “let the lord be a true lord, the ministers true ministers, the fathers true fathers, and the sons true sons.” (Analects 12.11) Since we already studied the Duke of Zhou, we find that Confucius's saying is a concise re-statement of Duke of Zhou's role ethics which was taken to be the key to all good human life and government: every human needs to shoulder their duty to fulfill their role in varying human relationships.In a word, in the age around forty, Confucius mastered his comprehensive and principled knowledge on human affairs, and started to apply the knowledge to realms of practical human life. In this sense, he described himself as being “free of doubts.”Stage Four: “at fifty, I understood the Mandate of Heaven.”At the age around 50, there is a major upgrade of intensity and change during Confucius's life.Firstly, he got to work in the highest level of the state government of Lu, and broadly engaged himself in economical, diplomatic, and military matters. Because he was so successful as a statesman and increased the interstate influence of Lu, the adjacent state Qi tried to find all means to undermine Confucius's position and the power of Lu. A cohort of courtesans were sent by Qi to the duke of Lu with a result that the duke indulged himself days and nights to totally abandon his state responsibility. This made Confucius realized that he had no more room to employ his political talents. He decided to leave his home state, and plunged into a journey of self-exile and wandering among states for another 14 years, with a hope that he might find an enlightened ruler to realize his political and social ambition.Secondly, another decisive event for Confucius's life around the age of 50 was that he started to systematically learn the Zhou Book of Change, 周易. This is originally a book of divination, but because it contains ancient wisdom of human life in a very condensed and comprehensive way, Confucius treated it mainly as a wisdom book to help him understand the position of human beings in changing societies and in the entire universe. If Confucius's knowledge before he learned the Zhou Book of Change was comprehensive in the practical sense that the knowledge could serve concrete teaching and governmental jobs, his understanding of human conditions after he learned the Book of Change was upgraded into an all-encompassing cosmic consciousness.Therefore, this is my understanding about why Confucius said that in his fifty, he could understand the “Mandate of Heaven.” Firstly, he knew his “talent,” viz., what he was good at and what he could contribute to society while establishing his own life in the society. Secondly, he knew his “limit”, viz., the practical obstacles that existed in his life to preclude his full flourishing. The dire political situation that his home state was trapped into definitely referred to this limit which urged Confucius's departure. Finally, he eventually comprehended the “mission” of his life, so that he would fearlessly exile himself in varying foreign states so as to try his best to fulfill the ultimate meaning of his life. In a word, under a cosmic consciousness, Confucius was crystal-clear of his own talent, would like to try his best to both acknowledge and overcome the limit of objective conditions, and finally, to fight his best to continually fulfill the ultimate mission of his life. Compared to the trope of this term “Mandate of Heaven” in early Zhou dynasty which was mainly used to legitimize a political regime, Confucius's understanding of the term is definitely more individualistic, more spiritual, and because of this, more relatable to contemporary readers.Stage Five: “at sixty, my ears were attuned to it [or, I obeyed it (the Mandate of Heaven) ].”The life of self-exile in order to find supportive and enlightened rulers is not easy. Confucius's life was under serious threat in several occasions. However, at the age around sixty, all these difficulties strengthened Confucius's cosmic consciousness on his “mandate of heaven” to a further phase, and the strengthened consciousness made him accept whatever may befall him with a total equanimity. For instance, when Huan Tui intended to kill Confucius, Confucius said: “it is Tian (heaven) itself that has endowed me with virtue. What need I fear from the likes of Huan Tui?” (Analects 7.23)More importantly, regardless of those difficulties that either put Confucius in a life/death situation or drove him to seek tirelessly enlightened rulers, eventually of no avail, Confucius was firm on his mission and would like to do whatsoever ought to be done regardless of consequences. For instance, when a hermit mocked him to say: “The whole world is as if engulfed in a great flood, and who can change it? … Wouldn't it be better to follow men like us, who avoid the world entirely?” Confucius's answer was that “A person cannot flock together with the birds and beasts. If I do not associate the followers of men, then with whom I associate? If the Way were realized in the world, then I would not need to change anything.” (18.6). Similarly, he also forcefully encouraged his sometimes quite frustrated students in this way: “it is humans who can enlarge the Way, not the Way that can enlarge humans.” (15.29)Therefore, with a firm belief in his Mandate of Heaven, Confucius accepted whatever may befall him in the evolving difficult situations of the 14-year self-exile with a total equanimity. In this sense, he can totally attune himself to the Mandate of Heaven without any doubt or complaint.Final stage: “at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety (or, without overstepping the due measures).”Confucius came back to his home state when he was 68. He was dedicated to studying ancient classics and teaching, and meanwhile, he was consulted on state affairs by the state while not pursuing any formal role in office. After decades of learning and practicing, Confucius was able to feel completely at ease with himself while still diligently pursuing those noble ideals of his life. So, in the age of fifty, he understood his mandate of heaven; at sixty, he obeyed his mandate of heaven; at seventy, he was his mandate of heaven, united himself completely with his mandate of heaven, without any second of his life to depart from the mandate.However, this completely free and easy-going way of life is not without stress and grief. Several of Confucius's best students died before him, his son also died earlier than him, and most importantly, until the end of his life, Confucius still didn't find any enlightened ruler to help him to realize his political ideal. In many of these occasions, Confucius overwhelmed himself with the feeling of sorrow and grief to the effect that even his students were doubting whether his emotions were appropriate. (Analects 11.9). However, Confucius would say: when you need to grieve, grieve in the best and right way! That's why he could follow his heart without overstepping the appropriate measure!This is exactly the Confucius whom we were familiar with: a down-to-earth ordinary human with an extraordinary level of cosmic consciousness while never giving up his dream to make the world be better!
The Duke of Zhou cultivated great virtues, governed his country well, and more importantly, made rituals and composed music to lay a foundation for sustainable human civilization. Because of this, he was treated by Confucius as the most significant founding father of Zhou civilization, and became Confucius's teacher secondary to none.
This episode, Dr. Song discusses the legendary sage-king at the beginning of the Ru tradition, Shun, who stepped onto the throne because of Yao's abdication.Yao accepted Shun's candidacy to become the next King, because the assembly of representatives recommended Shun's virtue of filiality (孝, xiao), and its another translation is “filial piety”. Because the virtue of filiality takes such a central role to the Ru ethic, Dr. Song focuses upon this topic when discussing Shun.
FeaturesHostingBlogMy AccountHi, My name is Bin Song. I am a Ru scholar, and a college professor in the disciplines of philosophy, religion, and theology. This audio is written and recorded by me to guide your practice of Ru meditation using the posture of quiet-sitting on a chair.As I explained in How to Breathe during the Ru Meditation, the focus upon a specific posture is less important than the focus upon breathing for the practice of Ru Meditation. However, this does not mean that one should not practice varying postures of Ru meditation. Instead, I would like to emphasize that compared to breathing, it is equally important that practitioners can command all the static and moving forms of “postures” so as to extend the state of energy equilibrium, or the state of centrality in a Ruist term, to both static and moving states of our body.Let me use one metaphor to explain it. The state of centrality achieved during the breathing practice is like the inner body of a lake, while the static or moving postures of body during the practice of Ru meditation are like the surface of the lake, which is sometimes still but sometimes agitated depending upon the weather and the environment. The goal of Ru meditation can be described as such: if our life is like the life of a lake, then, no matter what surface state the lake is experiencing, our inner body is always tranquil, quiet and full of vital energies. For achieving this goal, it is much more important to encompass both static and moving postures of meditation, rather than merely focusing upon any specific one of them.Let me explain the significance of varying postures of Ru meditation in another perspective. The practice of concrete postures of Ru meditation is to model in a micro scale what happens more frequently in a broader macro scale of life. As I will explain in this series of audios, I intend to introduce 7 postures of Ru meditation: sleeping, cross-legged quiet-sitting, quiet-sitting on a chair, standing, walking, eight brocade exercise, and the yang-styled 24-move Taiji martial arts. As you heard, some of these postures are more static, and some of them are more dynamic. However, human life is obviously more complicated, more social, and more far-reaching than the performance of these concrete meditative postures.From the perspective of Ru philosophy, being able to deal with real life issues, conducting oneself properly in varying human relationships, and constantly embodying the major principles of Ru metaphysics and ethics, such as harmony and humaneness, in one's daily life, are of course far more important than commanding good meditative postures and ideal breathing. Nevertheless, the benefits we get from the practice of Ru meditation is that it can help human individuals to realize those metaphysical and ethical principles in a micro scale, and then, gradually, to enable us to be an exemplary person, the Ruist junzi, in those broader stages of human life.As mentioned by one of the canonical texts of Ruism, the Great Learning ??, before one can govern a state, or align one's family, everyone must be dedicated to cultivating their persons. So, before we are more sufficiently involved in varying stages of human life, we should be dedicated to the practice of Ru meditation. And the gist of Ru meditation is, firstly, to achieve the state of energy equilibrium, or the state of centrality, during one's breathing practice, and secondly, to extend this state to the practice of both static and moving postures of Ru meditation. As mentioned, we will introduce 7 postures in our audios for you to practice this gist.Among all these 7 postures, let's talk of one of the most Ruist at first, which is quiet-sitting on a chair.So far as my research shows, the invention of this posture by Ruists took place in the same time when the so-called “neo-Confucianism” arises to react to the increasingly flourished Buddhism in ancient China. And the timeline is around the 10th or 11th century.As I mentioned in the brief introduction of Ru meditation, Ru practitioners are scholars and scholar-officials. Apart from the dedicated works of learning, education, and scholarship, they had so many things to care and manage in their households, schools, the governments and other workplaces. This means, even if they were fond of meditation, their occupied life schedule required them to immediately get out of meditation, and deal with tangible issues in their life. In this way, the normally Buddhist style of meditation, which requires a crossed-legged posture, a secured and quiet space, and sometimes an extended time period of practice, would be thought of by these Ruist scholar-officials as too isolated and socially disengaged. Therefore, rather than crossing one's legs and letting every thought come and go in one's mind in an isolated space, why not quietly sit on one's chair, to clear one's mind, re-gather oneself, to nurture an attitude of reverence towards things at hand, and thus, stay centered in one's everyday life? This is the central motif for Ru practitioners to invent and practice this posture of quiet-sitting on a chair in this period of time.Before I describe to you the major points of the posture, let me elaborate its characteristic and significance a bit more. “Chair” is a very normal piece of furniture, and you can basically find it in any place where your life is seriously engaged. It is in your study room, in your office, around family dinner table, in your classroom, or in any other private or public meeting room. Therefore, if you know how to meditate on a chair, at least for a few minutes or even some seconds, you will know how to remain centered, focused, and re-energized in your daily life.Let's imagine that you are right now in a very important conference with your colleagues and boss in a business meeting room. The boss is going on and on, sometimes on the topic, and sometimes not. Although you know the meeting is important, you feel quite exhausted by it. Then, you can start to meditate on your chair. You just need to sit nicely according to the method I will describe in the following, put your vision broadly on objects in front of you, and then, focus on your breath. Once you have a deep, slow breath, you start to let those bossy words appear on the screen of your inner-mind; you understand them, follow them, but your attention is actually put on the entire universe, the heaven, the earth and the human beings, which include but is not limited to those words. In this way, you can nurture a specific kind of attitude of reverence, dedication and seriousness towards your own work and your own worth, while being able to reenergize yourself during this work time in an uninterrupted way. You get it? Right? So the benefit to meditate on a chair is huge.Let's use another example to explain. Almost every adult has an experience of being interviewed for a job. Before you meet those interviewers, as a candidate, you are normally required to sit for a while in a room or a space separated from the interview room. I will tell you, this will be a perfect space and time to do a quick quiet-sitting meditation on a chair. Close your eyes, focus on your breath, feel all the energy flowing around you who are right now sitting nicely in the middle of heaven and earth. You need to remind yourself that you are special, you are unique, and while attending to the needs of those interviewers are important, you also need to be awesomely authentic to be and do yourself. And then, you take a deep breath; start to visualize everything you have prepared or anticipated for the interview. Per my experience, this practice of quiet-sitting meditation on a chair will contribute very positively to your interview.Sounds good? Yes, remember the three features of Ru wisdom: simple, consistent, and adaptable to change. You already get two instances why it is so in the case of quiet-sitting on a chair.Now, a final example before talking of its method. You know, almost no couples do not fight. We are human beings, we have our own views, and arguing with each other between a couple in our household is not only inevitable, but indicates that we invest our life upon each other, we care each other, and care our family. However, if inappropriate emotions are intertwined with inappropriate words during the process, squabbles will develop into fights, and fights will develop into wars. So, how can you nicely exchange ideas with your spouse without getting mired into these annoying and exhausting family in-fights? I will tell you, when your spouse forcefully expresses their views, you can quietly sit on your chair using the method of Ru meditation. At this moment, you pay attention to your breath, calm it down, and you listen to your spouse carefully and peacefully. During the process, you intend to nurture an inner feeling of love, mutual-bond and respect even though you also need to manifest your genuine self and exchange ideas with your spouse. Since the quiet-sitting meditation happens rightly during the middle, it will greatly calm down yourself, and thus, prevent the interaction between a couple from deteriorating into an undesirable family in-fight.Good, enough examples for the significance of this posture. Let me get to the method part. The method of quiet-sitting on a chair is actually quite simple. It comprises the following several major points:(1) Make sure your hip a bit higher than your knee. This may mean you need to put a cushion under your hip, or, you need to sit towards the edge of a chair. A chair with a hard surface will be better than a softer one, since sitting softly would make people sleepy. A too high chair which cannot have you put your feet, or a too low chair where you need to squat a bit to sit, is not ideal for beginning practitioners either. However, most chairs are not made as such, so you will find it fine to meditate using this posture almost everywhere.(2) While sitting on a chair, the position of your backbone is really the key. Starting from our neck, our backbone caves in, caves out, and finally, caves in again towards our tailbone. So, make sure you neither pop up your chest to make the backbone super straight, nor slouch yourself to block your tract of breathing. Make sure you can feel the natural stacking-up of varying parts of your backbone skeleton: cave in, cave out, and finally, cave in again. In a word, the key to sit rightly in this posture is that you need to use minimal efforts to position yourself so as to make varying parts of your body naturally and harmoniously fit together. In a Ruist term, you need to find the pattern-principle ? of your body so as to sit there nicely and joyfully.(3) After you position your backbone well, then, your head naturally lines up with it. No nodding, no looking upwards; neither shall your head lean towards either of the sides. Still, let's follow the same principle, use your minimal effort to make varying parts of your skeleton fit together.(4) For your eyes, you can either close them or leave a slice of vision broad and open, just as what I explained in the previous audio on Ru breathing.(5) The distance between your feet is about the same as your shoulder. Maker sure it neither too wider nor too narrower. Your toes are forward, but do not make them rigidly forward, like right in the angle of 90 degree. No, you do not need to do that. You just need to give yourself a little bit discipline, line up with the effortless position of your body, and then, sit there nicely and quietly.Basically, the look of your upper body in this posture will be exactly the same when you do crossed-legged quiet-sitting. However, since this is sitting on a chair, your lower body has its unique position.After you sit in this way, you just need to focus on your breath using the method of Ru breathing which I explained before.Good, that's all about quiet-sitting on a Chair. If you have any questions or comments to discuss with me, I would look forward to seeing them below the audios. You can also send me an email you can find in the contact part of my website, or find me in the facebook group “Friends from Afar: a Confucianism group.” Have a nice one, and You take care!CREDITS:Opening Music: Ta-da! By Siddartha Corsus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...?)Closing: Music: Endless forms most beautiful by Sidartha Corsus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...?)Source: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/SiddharthaArtist: https://siddharthamusic.bandcamp.com/LINKS:www.binsonglive.wpcomstaging.com
Hallo, this is Prof. Bin Song at Washington College. This unit of the course “Ru and Confucianism” will help you understand when is the beginning of Confucianism, or should we say, the beginning of the Ru tradition, and what the earliest democratic political institution in ancient Chinese civilization looks like.It is an extraordinary task for Ru scholars to talk about the beginning of the tradition. This is because the beginning, as it is described by Ru classics such as the Classic of Documents and discussed by Confucius in the Analects, expresses the ideal of the Ru way of life, and therefore, is more a concept of morality and politics, rather than one of time and history. As one of my favorite ancient Chinese poets, Du Fu (712-770 C.E), mused: the purpose of his poetry-writing is “to help the emperors to become as magnificent as Yao and Shun, and to turn people's morals and customs back to be that simple and amiable.” (?????, ?????)As also indicated by Du Fu's verse, the beginning of the Ru tradition starts from the stories of rulership by the sage-kings, Yao and Shun. The times when these kings lived were respectively called Tang and Yu, and according to the best archeological evidences we can estimate today, we are talking about almost two thousand years before the life of Confucius (551-479 B.C.E).To consider the time of Yao and Shun as the beginning of the Ru tradition does not mean that there is no notable leader prior to Yao and Shun. Instead, if you read histories such as Si Maqian's “The Record of the Grand Historian,” you will find an even older lineage of legendary kings in ancient China, such as King Yan, King Huang, and the King of Fu Xi. However, please remember, Confucius himself is also a historian. Among the six classics he compiled to teach his students, there are one grand history and another local history. The grand history is titled as the Classic of Documents (??), and it is opened with the chapters about Yao and Shun.So, why did Confucius decide to put Yao and Shun at the beginning of the history which matters greatly to the Ru tradition? From Confucius's discussion on related topics in the Analects, we find two reasons: firstly, the factuality of anything beyond the time of Yao and Shun passed down to Confucius's purview was hardly to confirm (Analects 3.0). Secondly, which is more important, the personalities and rulership of Yao and Shun represented an ideal of the Ru way of life so that later Ruists can take this ideal as a supreme guidance to evaluate, live through, and contribute to varying regimes, societies and times (Analects 8.19, 15.5). In this sense, the stories of Yao and Shun, together with the one of Duke of Zhou whom we will focus on later, are major resources of Confucius's thought, and should be studied carefully by students interested in the Ru tradition today.Understood in this way, the crucial lesson we need to learn about the stories of Yao and Shun is: what kind of ideal of Ruism did they represent? To answer this question, we will focus upon Yao in this episode, and Shun in next one.Do you still remember the text we once read about the Great Learning? It lays out a very concrete program of self-cultivation and social engagement for a Ru learner, starting from cultivating inner excellences, proceeding through loving and renewing the people, and aiming finally at abiding in the highest good, which is elaborated as peace and harmony throughout the world. Now, let's read the opening paragraph of the Classic of Documents, and see how extraordinarily these two texts are related:“Yao was reverential, intelligent, cultured, and thoughtful – naturally and without effort. He was sincerely courteous, and capable of all deference. The bright (influence of these qualities) was felt through the four quarters (of the land), and reached to (heaven) above and (earth) beneath. He made the able and virtuous distinguished, and thence proceeded to the love of (all in) the nine classes of his kindred, who (thus) became harmonious. He (also) regulated and polished the people (of his domain), who all became brightly enlightened. (Finally), he united and harmonized the myriad states; and so the black-haired people were transformed. The result was (universal) concord.” (Adapted from translation of James Legge)In other words, Yao started to cultivate himself with all needed qualities to live a self-content personal life, and to govern a country well. Then, he was dedicated to aligning his extensive family; finally, he influenced the people beyond his family, and succeeded to unite a myriad of states under the heaven! Because he did this so well, he looked “natural and without effort” while achieving all of these! This effortless achievement was described by later Ruists as embodying the virtue of “non-action” (wu-wei), a sign of the highest moral achievement of a Ruist sage.If you continue to read these opening chapters of the Classic of Documents, you will find details of Yao's policies by which he could achieve this effortless good governance. For instances, he appointed able and virtuous talents to varying governmental posts, and set reasonable rules for the promotion of these governmental officials; he cherished the value of education, and established offices to take charge of educating the people, particularly about how to better human relationships within families; he also governed the country primarily through the moral impacts generated by virtuous leadership, elegant music and rites, while secondarily through establishing laws and punishments.However, although these ways of governance by Yao all represent the Ru ideal to a certain degree, none of them can surpass the influence of the institution called “abdication,” (??) which is about how to transition the supreme political power to the next King.According to the Classic of Documents, when Yao turned into old, he summoned an assembly of regional leaders to decide how to transition his power to next king. Firstly, these leaders recommend the son of Yao, but Yao denied it because he thought his son was not good enough to be a candidate. Then, all these leaders recommended Gun, a regional leader in an aristocratic family; although Yao did not quite agree with this either, he finally yielded to the majority opinion of the assembly. However, after nine years of probation, Gun failed to prove that he was an ideal candidate mainly because he did not stop the big flood in those years. Then, Yao had to summon the assembly again, and said it can recommend a bright man even if this entails “ to raise a person who is poor and lives remotely.” (?????). Eventually, the assembly recommended Shun, who was a very poor man in the lowest class but became well-known because of his filial conduct within his family. Then, Yao accepted this candidate and started another long period of probation until Shun's final appointment.As constructed by contemporary scholars, the procedure of this institution of abdication possibly consists of six steps.First, leaders from different regions of a country will form an assembly of representatives;Second, the assembly, together with the incumbent king, will nominate multiple candidates for the future king;Third, the nominated candidates have a chance to answer raised questions for entering the next step;Fourth, after the Q&A test, the assembly and the king will decide collectively through a majority vote who will be appointed to different levels and posts of government for a long “probation” period of three to thirteen years per cases we know;Fifth, at the end of this probation period, the incumbent king will decide whether to accept the candidate as the head of the government;Sixth, if approved by the king, the candidate will be the head of the government, and when the incumbent king passes away, the head of the government will become the new king. During the tenure of the head of government, the king-elect does not have the power to appoint new officials until the incumbent king passes away.Given these six steps of abdication, anyone familiar with the imperial history of ancient China will find how distinguishing it is. The later Chinese history is one of dynasty after dynasty, and each dynasty is ruled by a royal family with its distinctive surname. These royal families either overthrew the previous dynasty or unified a disintegrated country through sword and blood. Within a given dynasty, the transition of supreme political power from one emperor to another is largely following the rule of the inheritance by the eldest son, but not without cruel and violent political struggles for it.In contrast, the institution of abdication prevalent in the time of Yao and Shun succeeded in transitioning power with peace, and the balancing power from the assembly of regional leaders also gives us a glimpse into how the idea of “democracy” is not entirely alien to the minds in the earliest stage of Chinese civilization. More importantly, the willingness of Yao to yield his power to a poor commoner with an entirely different family name from him speaks to one most important Ruist principle of ideal politics: that is “to respect worthies” (??), which means to guarantee that the most able and virtuous people can be appointed to the governmental positions fit for their talents. In the later development of Ruist political philosophy, this “human” element was also thought of as the most important one for good governance within a fixed political institution.Unfortunately, this earliest democratic institution of abdication does not last long. As you may have noticed, the supreme leader, the king, still held a mighty power in the system, so if his power grows out of balance, it will be easy for him to pass on the power to his son, and thus, end this institution once for all. This was exactly what happened to the successor of Shun, namely, Yu, who passed on his throne to his son, who established a new dynasty called Xia. And starting from Xia, Chinese history waved farewell to the ideal politics of Yao and Shun, and became one of dynastic politics dominated by competing royal families. In this later type of imperial politics, the best Ruist scholars can aspire for is, as Du Fu's poetry indicated, to help their emperor to return to be like Yao and Shun, but these scholars would never be able to dream to be the emperor themselves. Because of this, the original Ruist principle of “respecting worthies” central to the earliest democratic ideal is also dramatically undermined.In a contemporary perspective, the most effective political regime we know so far which can achieve peaceful transition of political power is the western type of liberal democracy. However, the reason why liberal democracy can achieve this is based upon multiple institutions supporting its key ideal of government for the people, which include the universal suffrage, the competition among multiple parties, the check-balance among governmental branches, etc. In comparison, the most original form of democracy in ancient Chinese civilization, the abdication, still predominantly relied upon the personal choice of the supreme leader, and although it contained some democratic element, its institution was still very premature regarding its lack of those corresponding supporting systems in contemporary liberal democracy. However, even so, the central idea of “respecting worthies” based upon a system of meritocracy and power balance still sheds a great light upon even those contemporary practices of liberal democracy. Today, what Ruist scholars are particularly concerned is how to incorporate this uniquely Ruist meritocratic and democratic political philosophy into the contemporary practices of liberal democracy so as to perfect it and make it more fit for facing the challenges of human society today. In this regard, I hope the study of the most original democratic idea at the beginning of the Ruist history will bring much inspiration.References:Book of Yu ??, translated by James Legge.???, “?????”, ????????2003??3?, pp.125-150.Further Recommended Reading:Sungmoon Kim, “Confucian Constitutionalism: Mencius and Xunzi on Virtue, Ritual, and Royal Transmission,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 73, No.3 (Summer 2011), pp. 371-399.
Three major points for the meditative breathing practice in a Ruist manner: breathing using belly muscles, attention to the three parts of each round of breathing, unity of harmony between body, air, heart-mind, and environment. This episode is to explain these three points for beginning practitioners. More resources on Ru meditation can be found at https://binsonglive.wpcomstaging.com/...?. Music is from Ambient – The Ambient by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...?) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-...? Artist: http://incompetech.com/ CREDITS:Opening Music: Ta-da! By Siddartha Corsus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...?)Closing: Music: Endless forms most beautiful by Sidartha Corsus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...?)Source: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/SiddharthaArtist: https://siddharthamusic.bandcamp.com/LINKS:www.binsonglive.wpcomstaging.comRate This Podcast
Hallo, this is Prof. Bin Song at Washington College. This episode is to let you know what to read first when learning Confucianism, or as I explained in the first episode, what to read first when learning the Ru tradition.In general, the Ru tradition emphasizes practice more than theory, doing more than saying. However, for beginning learners, one most frequent question we can expect is still: what should I read first? After all, without ideas to guide, we can barely practice anything.To answer this question, normally, many people will go to the book called the Analects (in Chinese, ??), which is a book to have compiled sayings of Confucius and conversations between Confucius and his students, as their first pick. They may think since “Confucianism” is called “Confucianism,” and since there is one book all about Confucius's original sayings, the Analects is naturally the first choice.I would not recommend you to do so mainly because of two reasons:Firstly, the Analects is like a book of collected notes among Confucius's students to help themselves to continue the enterprise of social and political activisms that the school of Confucius originally aimed for. Since this is a notebook, without understanding the overall nature of that enterprise, it is very easy for beginning learners of Ruism to get lost among the so many detailed and minute discussions recorded there. This is also perhaps the reason why among beginning learners of ancient Chinese philosophy, Laozi's Dao De Jing turns out to be more popular. When you open the Dao De Jing, and read its first verse “the Dao that can be said is not the genuine Dao,” you will say wow! And each chapter of the Dao De Jing reads like a philosophical treatise, very thematized and organized. However, when you open the Analects, it says “The Master says: Learn and timely apply what you have learned, is it not a joy?”; Ok, it feels warm, wise, a little bit breezy, but definitely not quite a wow. If you continue to read, you will find Confucius and his students are talking about so many concrete issues of human life in general and their society in particular, which include how to treat family, how to learn, how to govern, how to do one's business and duty, how to speak, how to listen to music, etc. As I said, without a pre-understanding of the overall nature of Confucius's school and his pedagogy, we will easily get lost when we read his students' notes. If you give up the book and your interest of the Ru tradition right away because of this, believe me, this will be one of the most misguided decisions you made in your life.Secondly, if the Analects is the notebook compiled by his students, what textbooks did Confucius use to teach his students? They are supposedly more, or at least equally important than the notebook, right? These textbooks were of six kinds, and they were pre-Confucian ancient classics compiled by Confucius to teach his students: the Odes (poetry), the Documents (ancient history), the Rites (think about the meaning of Ru we explained before), the Music (which we cannot find today since it is said to have been lost during later dynastic changes), the Change (the famous divination book), and the Spring and Autumn (the history of Confucius's home state). In other words, after Confucius passed away, the Analects would be a notebook to guide new generations of Ru learners to study those ancient Classics. This situation makes the first pick of the Analects by interested beginning learners even more problematic, because without understanding the overall purpose of Confucius' pedagogy, and the nature of the Ru community he helped to incubate, we really do not understand what is at stake in that would-be first pick.Fortunately, Ruist leaders have faced a similar issue to tackle in history, since they also need to introduce the Ru tradition to beginning learners. And their response starting from the ninth century in the common era is to read a book with a much smaller size than the Analects, which is titled as Great Learning ??. The text of Great Learning was originally one chapter in the Classic of Rites, and as instructed by those Ruist leaders, the first opening section includes the words said by Confucius, and it later parts are about the commentary written by Confucius's student, Zeng Zi, on Confucius's words. This arrangement of the text is also very typical to many Ru writings: the first part is called “Classic” ?, and the second part is called “Commentary” ?. I attach my own translation of the Classic part of the Great Learning here, together with my interpolated annotation. If you are a student in the course of “Ru and Confucianism,” I would require you to read carefully every word on this chart. Here, I will mainly read the translation part.So, now, you understand why this text was chosen by those Ruist leaders as the entry text to the Ru tradition, right? In this text, the Ruist enterprise of self-cultivation and social activism is programmed as concretely as three phases in the first paragraph, eight steps in the third, and with a method of daily meditation or self-contemplation described in the second paragraph. With such a concrete structure of learning and its explicitly stated ultimate goal, everything to learn down the road will be nicely fitted into a mindset, and therefore, beginning learners will get a greater sense of orientation regarding their overall understanding of the Ru tradition.As for the interpretations of this text, at the first glimpse, particularly when you read my annotation in the chart, the text seems pretty much self-explanatory. However, I would like to warn you beforehand that the text also turns out to be among the most debated texts in the intellectual history of Ruism. Each mentioned term, such as “attain the knowledge,” “the investigation of things,” “feeling content,” and so on, undergoes an unusually intensive scrutiny and debate among Ru thinkers in history. Without any exaggeration, I will say the entire history of the so-called Neo-Confucianism, which lasted from 9th to 19th century across different East Asian countries, is one history of debate on the terms of the classical part of the Great Learning. In particular, two major competing lineages of learning in Neo-Confucianism, the school of principle and the school of heartmind, derive from their different understandings, and their accordingly different practical methods of social activism surrounding the key term “knowledge” mentioned in the third paragraph of the Great Learning. This phenomenon is also not surprising because since the Great Learning is the first text one needs to read when starting to learn the Ru tradition, everything they learn later will be constantly referred back to this foundational text, and therefore, people would intensively debate each other depending upon their overall experience of Ru learning and human living.Nevertheless, as the instructor of this course, I have my own understanding of the text. In the following, I will stress several points of my understanding beyond what I have said in the annotation. This will give you an initial guidance for your further learning of the Ru tradition, but in the long run, given your understanding of the tradition gets more mature, I do hope you can have your own understanding of the text, and are able to apply your understanding to the benefits of your life.Firstly, the position of “individual” in this Ruist pedagogy is very special. If the understandings of human self in world philosophies and religions are put in a spectrum, Buddhism will lie at the far left since it thinks humans essentially have no self whatsoever. Whereas, Thomas Hobbes' idea of “everyone is the enemy against everyone” in the pre-societal state of nature will lie at the far right because human selves are thought of as irreducible atoms with their counteracting forces pitted against each other. However, as indicated by the Great Learning, the Ru understanding of self will lie rightly in the middle. The program of great learning starts from the strengthening of human self, namely, the manifestation of excellences in each individual in the three-phase paragraph, and the cultivation of one's personal life in the eight-step paragraph. But these individual self-strengthenings are all envisioned as serving broader social and political goals such as loving people, aligning one's family and bringing order to the state. In other words, according to the Ruist conception in the Great Learning, individuals thrive their lives in human networks and relationships, and the flourishing human networks also depend upon how strongly and thoroughly the individual proceeds in their self-cultivation. A sort of mutual harmony between community and individuals registers here.Secondly, the meditative method described by the second paragraph is also very special. Terms such as “feels settled,” “become tranquil,” and “become content” are beautiful to describe the deep meditative experience of a Ru learner. However, the meditative practice is seamlessly embedded in a program of social activism that unabashedly affirms the value of this-worldly daily human life and social activism. I once described this type of meditation as “meditation in motion,” and made a whole serious of youtube videos to explain how we can practice this in the contemporary world. In my view, this type of meditation is very fit for modern professionals, and we will spend quite a time in this course to discuss and practice this type of meditation.Thirdly, as discussed in unit 1 of this course, I once emphasized that the Ru tradition is extraordinarily broad and deep, since Ru care about everything in the civilization. It is philosophy, religion, and a way of living all at once, while not being constrained by any of these. Now, after reading the Great Learning, I hope you understand more why I said so. If looked at more closely, we find the “peace throughout the world” is a very sublime and transcendent goal pertaining to one's position in the entire cosmos, and underneath it, “bringing order to one's state” is about politics, “aligning one's family” is about society, and “cultivating one's personal life” through working on one's heartmind, intention, and knowledge is about individuals. Understood in this way, the division of human knowledge prevalent in modern universities and colleges does not quite hold on to this holistic thinking of Ruism. That's because none of this dimension of human flourishing can be realized without the other. Therefore, if one intends to pursue education and self-cultivation according to this Ruist program, one really needs to broadly learn, broadly communicate, and solidly build their own business in a robust human network on the basis of constantly bettering and strengthening themselves. I would say this Ruist pedagogy envisioned by Confucius embodies the spirit of liberal arts par excellence. It intends to continually liberate human individuals through flourishing human civilization, and vice versa. Because of this, I also think the text of Great Learning is worth reading by every student of liberal arts, and this is also another reason why we read it right here, right now.Recommended Further Reading:Daniel K. Gardner, The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition (Hackett Publishing Company: 2007)Andrew Plaks, Ta Hsueh and Chung Yung (The Highest Order of Cultivation and on the Practice of the Mean) (Penguin Books, 2003).CREDITS:Opening Music: Ta-da! By Siddartha CorsusClosing: Music: Endless forms most beautiful by Sidartha CorsusLINKS:www.binsonglive.wpcomstaging.com
Ru (Confucian) Meditation is based upon a disciplined practice of breathing. This episode explains the history, philosophy and distinction of Ru meditation. More resources on Ru Meditation can be found at https://binsonglive.wpcomstaging.com/...? CREDITS: Opening Music: Ta-da! By Siddartha Corsus Closing: Music: Endless forms most beautiful by Sidartha Corsus LINKS: www.binsonglive.wpcomstaging.comBackground Music from Ambient – The Ambient by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...?) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-...? Artist: http://incompetech.com/
TRANSCRIPTION:Hallo! This is Bin Song, a philosophy and religion professor at Washington College. During the process of preparing this first unit of the course “Ru and Confucianism,” I ask myself: what do I want to say to students and friends who have never seriously learned Confucianism?Think about how historically long-standing and geographically far-reaching the tradition of Confucianism has been, and we will find this is not an easy question to answer. And the situation to urge us to ask this question is also very unique: right now, Confucianism is generating global influences beyond what it has been traditionally in its pre-modern forms. In other words, it is entering a new era to migrate from East Asia to the north Atlantic and global world, and only in an area where the Confucian thought takes a minority role, the question just asked becomes especially urgent.However, there is a convenient way to start the conversation. Just as what normally happens to people's self-introduction to each other in a new meeting, the first thing we need to remember is their names. Therefore, why not let us talk about the English name of the tradition, Confucianism?Throughout years, whenever allowable, I always try to push the conversations I was involved in about Confucianism to a realization that Confucianism is a wrong name. And my reason for this is very simple: Confucianism, this name, is not how the tradition historically called itself, and it was invented by Protestant Christian missionaries in around 19th century in a special period of western colonialism and with a very special purpose, the purpose of Christian mission, which is quite alien to the nature of the tradition those missionaries designated as such. However, a basic logic of respectfully naming is that the name we address people should sound agreeable to them; or at least, it should be recognizable by them as their name. None of these standards stands strongly in the case of “Confucianism,” and therefore, today, we should rectify our historical mistake, change it to how the tradition historically called itself, namely, the Ru tradition or Ruism. Meanwhile, what is more important is to understand what this term “Ru” means, and why the tradition chose this term as its name. I attached some articles, video and social media links below so that you can check the details if you want to know more about this sort of conversations.While I made these efforts to explain the erroneous nature of the name of Confucianism, one of the most stimulating, or “provocative” should I say, push-back my interlocutors gave is that: who cares? It is just a name. Right or wrong, people use it to make reference; and as long as it is useful in the way that people understand it whenever it is mentioned, who cares that it is a wrong name?Well, I think this push-back is particularly interesting because it can lead to an even richer conversation about almost everything related to the Ru tradition in the contemporary world. So I will try to respond to it here step by step.Firstly, scholars in the discipline of philosophy indeed do not quite care whether “Confucianism” is a wrong name or not. This is because philosophy is normally understood as not pertaining to people's religious identity. When philosophers study “Confucianism,” they think they are studying something similar to “Marxism,” “Platonism” or any other philosophical theory or doctrine that is named by a founding or major thinker.However, if we look into how the Ru tradition starts, evolves and in particular, interacts with other traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism and Catholicism, we find that largely, Ruism is indeed not a membership tradition which has a clear-cut institutional boundary between insiders and outsiders. However, a person could still strongly identify him or herself as a Ru while conversing with other people who have their strong religious identities such as with a Buddhist, Daoist, or a Jesuit Catholic. A similar case to help you understand this situation is that today, a person may decide to practice Stoicism as her comprehensive way of living; clearly, in the West, Stoicism is not a church-based religious tradition, but if a person proclaims that she would like to be a Stoic, we still need to listen to this claim and address her spiritual identify in a careful way. So, understood similarly, despite not a membership tradition, because Ruism affords to be a comprehensive way of living, the practice of it can still engender a strong consciousness of spiritual self-identity in the contemporary world. If this is the case, I do think philosophers should be more sensitive to the right or wrong way of naming “Confucianism.”A caveat about the last paragraph is that I used a crucial term “spiritual” to define the attitude of human life pertaining to one's vision of the entire world, and in line with this vision, one would like to transform her whole personality. Understood in this way, a spiritually sharp and adept human can be philosophical or not, religious or not, theist or not, and therefore, the inclusiveness of the term “spiritual” will be very useful for us to talk about different belief systems or comprehensive ways of living without being confused by the ambiguous meanings of philosophy vs religion particularly when these terms are used across cultures and traditions.Good, this is the case for philosophers. Then, secondly, scholars in the discipline of religious studies indeed care about the naming issue of religions or religion-like traditions more than philosophers. This is not surprising because from the beginning of the modern discipline of religious studies, scholars have tried to study religions objectively, and while doing this, one principle of terminology is that descriptions of religions ought to be recognized by religious insiders. A great example is that scholars have realized that “Muhammadanism,” a name prevalent in use around the same time when “Confucianism” was invented, is actually a wrong name. Muslims had their strong reasons to assert that this historical name of “Muhammadanism” is actually blasphemous. It was invented and imposed by religious outsiders, which is contrary to their own faith, since what the Islamic faith requires Muslims to “yield to” (the meaning of “Islam”) is Allah, the monotheistic singular God, not any human figure, even including their prophet. In face of this critique from religious insiders, scholars started to understand Islam more, and eventually eliminated the term “Muhammadanism” from contemporary English vocabulary.By the same token, the strongest argument I read from scholars in the contemporary religious studies was from Dr. Wilfred C. Smith, who published the book “The Meaning and End of Religion” in 1963. His reasons to change the name of Confucianism to something like “the tradition of classicists” in order to match the Chinese term ? is very similar to my own, namely, Confucianism is an alien name to the spiritual self-identifiers with the Ru tradition.However, since religious scholars typically pursue their studies in a detached and objective manner, a higher degree of advocacy on the change of the name will still depend upon how many spiritual advocates of Ruism and empathetic scholars would like to stand up to push the boundary of the public understanding of the Ru tradition.For me, I spiritually identify myself as a Ru, but I am a cosmopolitan Ru who cherishes the values of impartial scientific researches, religious pluralism and critical thinking, since I believe all these values are intrinsically implied by the teaching of Ruism. For me, the most valuable reason to advocate the rectification of the name of Confucianism is that I believe people need to understand the meaning of the term “Ru” ?, and why the Ru tradition chose this term as its name in tandem with a variety of schools of thought in the context of ancient East Asia.According to the most influential commentary of the Classic of Rites, called the “Standard Meanings of the Classic of Rites” (????), which was compiled in Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E) and later taken as a textbook for the system of civil examination, the term Ru has two meanings: firstly, “soft”, and secondly, “moisten.” The meaning of “soft” derives from the expectation that a Ru knows how to interact with humans and the nature in a civilized way, and these civilized human beings will intrinsically long for non-violence, peace and harmony. The meaning of “moisten” refers to the fact that the way a Ru can achieve non-violent transformation is through learning and practicing everything that distinguishes humans from other species. In Chinese, this distinctively human thing called ? is translated mostly as ritual, but actually refers to a cluster of civilized phenomena such as social etiquettes, moral conventions, civil and religious ceremonies, law and political institutions, etc. Overall, ? can be each and every possible manifestation of human civilization. But why is the idea of “moisten” related to this concept of ?? This is because although ? civilizes human beings, if misused, ? can also be oppressive. Think about all those social etiquettes in a patriarchal, or a racially segregated society; they indeed set a rule for humans' interaction, but they are also oppressive. Therefore, according to the Ru tradition, a Ru should learn and practice the right ? so that ? can continually benefit and nourish all people's life, and therefore, the image of “moisten” or “watering” is invoked to indicate that the right purpose of ritual-performance is to nourish people's life, rather than oppressing people in the name of order and hierarchy.We will definitely spend more times to talk about ? in future episodes. However, seen from the naming issue of the Ru tradition, the central role of this concept ? to the Ru tradition speaks to several points which I think are uniquely valuable and thus, worth studying by all people around the world.Firstly, the Ru tradition constantly operates its discourse upon a “civilizational” perspective. In other words, what distinguishes civilization from other worldly phenomena and how to sustain the civilization on the earth continuous with the non-human nature are two broadest questions that a Ru asks whenever they think about concrete minor issues. This civilizational orientation clearly distinguishes Ruism from other traditions in ancient Asia such as Daoism, which emphasizes the value of the non-human nature more than the complexity of human civilization, and Buddhism, which tends to deny the distinctive nature of any being including human beings. Today, this civilizational orientation of Ruism is very much needed since humanity today is facing unusual challenges, such as global warming, pandemic and destabilized international politics, and we need a genuinely global and civilizational perspective to guide human practices to tackle these challenges.Secondly, despite aiming to sustain human civilization, Ruism perceives clearly the ambiguity of the phenomenon of “civilization.” Not everything in a civilization is worth commending, and some aspects of it, such as those undesirable rituals, can become seriously oppressive. In this way, Ruism's attitude towards civilization is to perfect it, improve it in a process, rather than to celebrate it regardless. Clearly, this also fits the ambiguous nature of human civilization today. It is far from perfect, although it is also worth sustaining by its own right.Thirdly, this civilizational perspective makes the Ru tradition unusually broad and deep, and thus, be very hard to be categorized. Is it a philosophy, a religion, a way of living, or an expression of the special civilization continually existing in the Eastern part of Eurasia continent? If we learn the tradition down the road, we will find that it is all of them, but not constrained by any of them. Therefore, it is an unusually demanding ideal to become a Ru, since everything about civilization will be concerned by them.However, since life is short, limited, and lacks meanings for all of us, why not take on some ideal of human life that is genuinely sublime and noble? If the ideal makes any sense to you, from this moment on, let us remember the meaning of Ru ?, and try to pronounce Ruism or the Ru tradition with the old name of “Confucianism” kept in mind.CREDITS:Opening Music: Ta-da! By Siddartha CorsusClosing: Music: Endless forms most beautiful by Sidartha CorsusLINKS:www.binsonglive.wpcomstaging.comTony Swain, “On Confucianism and Religion”, in Confucianism in China :An Introduction, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 1-22.Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013): 45-76Bin Song's discussion with scholars of comparative philosophy on Ru and Confucianism: http://warpweftandway.com/should-instead-confucianism/.Bin Song's discussion with scholars of sinology: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sinologists/permalink/3211240495599467/.Email: ruismpodcast@gmail.com
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