The Penguin History of the World

The whole late first millennium era was marked by disorder and growing scepticism about the criteria by which the right to rule was recognizable. The price of survival for the princes who disputed China was the elaboration of more effective governments and armed forces, and often they welcomed innovators prepared to set aside tradition. This can also be said of systems rivalling Confucianism which were evolved to satisfy Chinese needs. One was the teaching of Mozi, a fifth-century thinker who preached an active creed of universal altruism; men were to love strangers like their own kinsmen. Some of his followers stressed this side of his teaching, others a religious fervour which encouraged the worship of spirits and had greater popular appeal. Laozi, another great teacher (though one whose vast fame obscures the fact that we know virtually nothing about him), was supposed to be the author of the text which is the key document of the philosophical system later called Daoism. This was much more obviously in competition with Confucianism for it advocated the positive neglect of much that Confucianism upheld – respect for the established order, decorum and scrupulous observance of tradition and ceremonial, for example.

Daoism urged submission to a conception already available in Chinese thought and familiar to Confucius, that of the Dao or ‘way’, the cosmic principle which runs through and sustains the harmoniously ordered universe. The practical results of this were likely to be political quietism and non-attachment; one ideal held up to its practitioners was that a village should know that other villages existed because it would hear their cockerels crowing in the mornings, but should have no further interest in them, no commerce with them and no political order binding them together. Such an idealization of simplicity and poverty was the very opposite of the empire and prosperity Confucianism upheld.

All schools of Chinese philosophy had to take account of Confucian teaching, so great was its prestige and influence. A later sage, the fourth-century Mencius (a Latinization of Mengzi), taught men to seek the welfare of mankind in following Confucian teaching. The following of a moral code in this way would assure that Man’s fundamentally beneficent nature would be able to operate. Moreover, a ruler following Confucian principles would come to rule all China. Eventually, with Buddhism (which had not reached China by the end of the Warring States Period) and Daoism, Confucianism was habitually to be referred to as one of the ‘three teachings’ which were the basis of Chinese culture.

The total effect of such views is imponderable, but probably enormous. It is hard to say how many people were directly affected by these doctrines and, in the case of Confucianism its great period of influence lay still in the remote future at the time of Confucius’s death. Yet Confucianism’s importance for the directing élites of China was to be immense. It set standards and ideals for China’s leaders and rulers whose eradication was to prove impossible even in our own day. Moreover, some of its precepts – filial piety, for example – filtered down to popular culture through stories and the traditional motifs of art. It thus further solidified a civilization many of whose most striking features were well entrenched by the third century BC. Certainly its teachings accentuated the preoccupation with the past among China’s rulers which was to give a characteristic bias to Chinese historiography, and it may also have had restrictive effects on some forms of scientific enquiry. Evidence suggests that after the fifth century BC a tradition of astronomical observation which had permitted the prediction of lunar eclipses fell into decline. Some scholars have seen the influence of Confucianism as part of the explanation of this decline. Overall, China’s great schools of ethics are one striking example of the way in which almost all the categories of her civilization differ from those of the European tradition and, indeed, from those of any other civilization of which we have knowledge. Its uniqueness is not only a sign of its comparative isolation, but also of its vigour.