11. Mark Csikszentmihalyi on Early Confucianism

In this interview, we learn how Kongzi become the pivotal sage of early Chinese history, and what new discoveries teach us about the Confucian tradition.

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

PA: We are going to talk about Confucianism, and it seems to make sense to start with the man often known in English as Confucius. We keep calling him Kongzi, but you can call him whatever you want. And I thought we could start with a question about him. And maybe this is the most obvious question, but I think it's still worth asking: Why is it that he, among all the other sages of the time and all the other intellectuals in this fairly vibrant culture that we've been studying, why did he have such a powerful influence already by the Han period? So just to remind listeners, the Han period goes from 221 BCE to 220 CE, and as we've already covered, he's being used to educate the elite and so on already by that time. How did he ascend so quickly to be such a central figure?

MC: He's really important for different reasons at different periods of Chinese history. If we're talking about the Han, there's already quite a gap between his lifetime and the Han dynasties. It's about 250 years from his death to the beginning of the Han. The traditional dates are 551 to 479, and it's about 400 years from his death to the first biography of Confucius, around 100. And so the pre-Han period - the time between Confucius' death and the Han is usually referred to as the Warring States - and then at the very end, the Qin period, that we don't know so much about the status of Confucius. We know that there are certain texts, the Mencius or Mengzi, which speak very highly of Confucius. Confucius or Kongzi is quoted and lauded in texts like that. And often those are texts that later become called Confucianist texts. In terms of evidence, what we have from the Warring States period are what seem to be freely circulating kind of sets of conversations between Kongzi and usually his disciples. In Han texts, so that's the 221 BCE to 220 CE period. In Han texts, they go back and say, where did the Analects come from? The Analects is now the best-known collection of these dialogues of Confucius. And they say a couple of things. The Han texts say, 'Well, they were collected by his disciples.' They're records of conversations that they kept. And then after Confucius' death, they were judged or selected by these disciples and made into a collection. So for a long time, I think people believed that the Analects really dated back all the way to the time of Confucius' death. But I think more recently, archaeological finds have caused us to somewhat to revise that picture, or at least revise the certainty with which we thought the Analects dated back to 5th century BCE or thereabouts. And even since 2020, there have been two archaeological finds. One was a text that was looted and then was donated to Anhui University, I think published around 2022. I think photographs of it were published. And this is a text called Zhongni Yue. Zhongni is another name for Confucius. And these passages, some of which are in the Analects and are attributed to Confucius. And then there's another that was found in Hubei at a place called Wangzhazui. And this one was archaeologically excavated. And this is called Kongzi Yue, or 'Confucius Says'. And these are texts that are dialogues, just like in the Analects, but which either don't have parallels or have parallels to the Analects or the Li Ji, the Records of Rights, or the Mengzi, which is that other early so-called Confucian text. And so what this really shows is that there were multiple collections of sayings of Confucius or dialogues with Confucius. There's another set of looted texts that now are in the Shanghai Museum from the Warring States period, which are disciples' specific collections, that is conversations between Confucius and individual disciples. And so they're collected that way. So what we have is, we don't have evidence that the Analects itself goes back, but we have evidence that during the Warring States period, there were multiple collections of Confucius dialogues in circulation. There's a scholar named Rens Krijgsman who calls these 'traveling sayings'. So the Analects could well and certainly contains old material, but as a collection, it's really around 150 BCE, which is over three centuries after Confucius' death that we first see it cited by name, and a text called the Hanshi Waizhuan several times. We also know that there are versions, for example, from the Court of Hejian around 155 BCE. And so what we see in terms of status is that he's one of several people who are quoted quite often, but he has this particular authority that's fairly unique in the Warring States period. By the Han, he, and the texts that he's very interested in, like the Classic of Odes that he teaches as disciples, these become classics at that time. And Kongzi, especially in the second and first century BCE, variety of reasons is associated with... not the examination system yet, but the forerunners of that. And so it's in the Han that you begin to get almost, sometimes it's called the Han orthodoxy of Confucianism, but certainly the tradition of the kind of scholarship that Kongzi does and the ritual knowledge becomes supported by the state and expertise in those areas becomes the type of knowledge that officials are selected based upon whether they have that or not. And so that's the transformation. We know there were these circulating, traveling sayings in the Warring States period, but really it's the transitions during the Han period that seem to have made Confucianism, Confucianism.

PA: Yeah. It's almost like what's influential is a genre of writing, the genre of this character, Kongzi, saying things more than he himself being influential, right? Because the mass of evidence is so widely dispersed, right?  

MC: That's right. And I think that there were other candidates for this very wise, very authoritative person who we see in the Warring States period, but who fall by the wayside as Kongzi becomes the- Or who don't.

PA: Like Laozi, who's sometimes depicted actually meeting Kongzi in the two of us, like the two sages, face off of the heavyweights kind of scene. So he's not the only one.

MC: Right. That's true. I think with Laozi, there's one text in particular that's associated with Laozi. And it's in a way, generically, Laozi is rather different in terms of the topics that are treated. And so it's almost as if Kongzi is the one who has this kind of political, ethical, ritual set of topics that he becomes the main source for.

PA: I guess that a lot of people, when they think about Kongzi, the Analects they think of sayings, or these little exchanges with students and so on. But there is this whole other kind of text, which is the biography of Kongzi, which may include sayings obviously, but then it also includes putative information about him: like where he was born, his political career, and the extent to which it was successful, how he dealt with it, not being successful, and so on. Can you say something about how our understanding of these biographies has been shifting, in part, precisely because of something you already mentioned, which is these newly discovered texts?

MC: Yeah. So this is really one of the reasons that this period now that we're in, which is... I don't know what you would compare it to, maybe in the 1940s, you had Nakama, and the Kulun texts discovered in the Near East and North Africa. And the amount of archaeological excavation going on now is just continuously transforming our picture of early China. And recently, one of the tombs I haven't mentioned yet, which is a tomb of Liu He, who was a member of the imperial family and actually served as Emperor of China during the Western Han for less than a month, and was then demoted to the Marquis of Haifeng, which is this area in Jiangxi province. So he died in 59 BCE, right as you really get the Analects and Kongzi becoming very, very important in terms of Han court politics and Chinese philosophy in the late Western Han period. So this tomb was discovered very recently, and it's got this object that has a biography of Kongzi/Confucius next to a picture of Confucius. And then in a kind of a raid, there are five of his disciples also pictured in two columns, and they have biographies next to their pictures. And this was on a stand for a mirror that was owned by this emperor or former emperor, we're not sure when in his life he got it. But this is the earliest known picture of Kongzi and those disciples, and gives us an actual first century or maybe late second century BCE example of his biography. What's interesting is that his biography didn't, as far as we know, start to be written until right around that time. The earliest we had before this in terms of transmitted text was Sima Qian in his Shiji around 100 BCE. He has a biography of Confucius too. And so one of the questions is why is it that we have these circulating sayings, but no one is really interested in recreating the life of Confucius, or putting it all together until Sima Qian? And then just a few decades later, we get this mirror stand with a kind of similar but slightly different version of this biography? And one of the things I think is going on is that the disciples are as important as Kongzi on this mirror. I mean, they're all the same size, these pictures, and they all have biographies. And the excerpts from the Analects or maybe not excerpts, the parallels to the Analects on the mirror seem to talk a lot about Confucius's evaluations of these disciples. And so the aspect of Confucius's life and abilities that it seems to be focusing on is his ability to evaluate or to tell what the personality is of those disciples or maybe adjust his teachings to the particular strengths and weaknesses of those disciples. But in any case, it's Confucius with his disciples, which all of a sudden seems to be really important on this mirror stand version of this biography. So when we look at the kind of sudden interest in biographical writing that we see in the middle of the Western Han period - that is around 100 BCE, again, 400 years after Confucius's death - we see that the biography of Confucius is kind of one genre; and Sima Qian has one chapter dedicated to this where he emphasizes a lot of the kind of auspicious signs around Confucius's birth, the portent that happens when he realizes he's never going to be a kind of sage king, and just emphasizes these aspects, his official career and things like that. Whereas the mirror stand one is somewhat different. It's less about the omens are almost not mentioned. There's absolutely no mention of his official career. And in fact, it talks about... despite the fact he wore the clothing of a commoner, he was studied by ministers and rulers. So there's a slightly different kind of depiction. And I think that's because the mirror stand is much more focused on his evaluations of his disciples. And it's true the Shiji also has a chapter on the disciples: they divide the disciples by those who do virtuous actions, those known for their speech, those known for their governing, and those known for their kind of mastery of literature. But the mirror stand puts those together in a way and focuses on the evaluations Confucius makes of the disciples. And there is a passage attributed to Confucius in the Han that the role of the ruler is to choose virtuous ministers. And I think that part of the reason that Confucius becomes so important during the Han is not kind of because of his theories of statecraft or something like that, as much as, among the disciple community, he played the role of the evaluator and the selector and the person who used the right pedagogy to train each of these individual disciples with their different personalities. And in a way, that was the model that they painted on this mirror stand that the emperor would look at every day. And that's not really an answer that we had before we discovered this mirror. One of the questions was, 'Well, why in the first century BCE all of a sudden does Confucius become such an important figure? And why does the analytics in particular, which may have become compiled only a century earlier or so, why suddenly is the Analects being used by officials in the training of the crown prince? And why is it quoted so much more?' And perhaps it has something to do with that aspect of it, that Confucius was in a way a model for evaluating character of people, screening people who would be good ministers. And so it's the characterological, the Analects used as a characterological text.

PA: I love that idea of the Analects as a model for job interviewers. It's so interesting that here the actual physical evidence is so important. Obviously, this mirror stand you've been describing does have text on it. But for example, the fact that, as you mentioned, the pictures of the disciples are just as big as the picture of Kongzi, that's really important, your interpretation of the whole piece. And I think that as historians of philosophy, we aren't really accustomed to thinking about the way the material evidence could help guide us in our interpretation of the tradition. But here that seems to be the case. Are there other examples where that happens?

MC: The two objects that many people are familiar with, if they've gone to museums like the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, are the kind of bronze vessels from early tombs. In my Confucianism class, we read the inscription on the Dao Yuding, which is a Western Zhou bronze sacrificial vessel that was in a tomb. And it has many of these bronze vessels, or bells, sometimes are found in tombs, are inscribed. And this one has an inscription. It has a very strong expression of a certain dimension of kind of early political philosophy that is one tributary into the kind of culture that then Confucius re-synthesized, or kind of created a new tradition out of these diverse strands. So if you look at these bronze vessels and tombs, on one hand, you can see the kind of political dimension. Like in this Dao Yu ding, it talks about how the vassal who owns this will put food for their ancestors, but it emphasizes that the king granted the owner of that vessel a certain status and commemorates that. But then it also tells the story of how Tian, this kind of powerful cosmic force, or sometimes translated as 'heaven', not a great translation, but how Tian gave the king himself his power because of this moral authority. And so it creates this kind of homology between heaven granting the king their power and then the king granting the owner of the vessel their power. And so it's a really clear and concise kind of expression of a certain type of political thought or cosmo-political thinking that is one of the strands that goes into Confucianism. But at the same time, these vessels are also about ancestral sacrifice. And I think that speaks to another strand that is woven into the tradition by Confucius, and that's the importance of ancestral sacrifice. So if you look at the Liji, the records of ritual, you have these accounts of how to perform sacrifice to your parents after they've died. So King Wen, this cultural hero and one of the founders of the Zhou dynasty, what one does first is one undergoes this kind of fasting and purification, and then you give the offerings to your parents. But it's very important that you sacrifice them as if they were there, you visualize them. And the text is all about the proper kind of emotional reactions to have as you visualize them and present the offerings: what are the correct feelings, what to guard against... And in a way, that's this other strand, the kind of ethical or the kind of moral training dimension of early Confucianism, because this way is not the fact you present the offerings, it's not just feeding the ancestors. It's doing so with the correct intent - the correct affect. And in a way, I always feel that the way these vessels are used, the fact these vessels are so ornate in the elite tombs; or even in the non-elite tombs there are kind of pottery versions of these ornate vessels, right? So the complexity of them and the kind of cost to put them in tombs is expressing the importance of how you present the offerings, not just that you present it. And really, that becomes a model for a kind of virtuous action and how to train yourself to kind of inculcate the moral virtues that are at the center of the teaching program that Kongzi uses in the disciple community to try to develop a certain set of virtues in the disciples as he trains them.

PA: That's great because that gives us a real kind of physical object to go with something we've talked about a lot in the podcast, like filial piety and respect for the ancestors and so on. There is this other dimension of early Confucian culture, which I would think can't show up in the physical evidence, and this is music and also dance, because you can't dig up music and you can't, I mean, unless someone invents a time machine and we go back and video record the dancing, all we have is, I guess, textual descriptions of these events, right? So would you say that music and dance lie tantalizingly beyond the purview of the historian, or can we do better than that?  

MC: Well, I mean, the textual record does talk quite a bit about the role of music and dance for the early Ru. We might want to distinguish between this term Ru, which is this group of specialists in scholarly approach to the past and the classics and ritual. Kongzi identifies as within that social group in some way, and then Kongzi's synthesis of it, because Kongzi comes out of that tradition, but he develops a new way of talking about it. And instead of placating the spirits, really the participation and ritual is about inculcating something in oneself, right? And so this is why it becomes so powerfully associated with the kind of moral training that is the reason people go back and place them at the beginning of the Chinese philosophical tradition often. But the Ru were experts in these rituals, and so Mozi, who's this kind of much more consequentialist voice, roughly contemporary with Confucius, criticizes the Ru quite a bit. And so he says at one point that 'they decorate their appearances and wear these adornments all in order to kind of bewitch the generation'. And 'they play songs and drums just in order to attain followers'. He's very critical of it. And it's interesting to use the word tantalizing. He uses the word bewitching or almost hypnotizing. So he's very critical throughout the ages, this association. Even if you go to the Confucius' birthday, teacher's day celebrations in Taiwan or Korea, it's all music and dance. And so they were known for this, right? But then in terms of Kongzi's repurposing of this dimension in the Lunyu [i.e. the Analects], for example, he talks quite a bit about a ritual in music and their role in this kind of self-transformation. And music is a crucial metaphor. There's a homonym for music, which is kind of joy or happiness in Chinese. And I think there are texts... I wrote a book on a text called The Wuxing, the Five Kinds of Conduct, or Five Kinds of Action, where musical resonance is used as a way of talking about how sages influence each other across time, or how the moral ruler transforms the people in this kind of almost magical way and musical resonance is used. And so music is really key to the textual tradition in the late Warring States period and the Qin Han periods. So I think that despite the fact we don't have soundtracks, although at Wangzhazui we appear to have some type of musical notation if we can figure out what it means. But we do know that in the court, the accelerated texts tell us that there were these complicated dance and musical performances that were part of the kind of state ritual observances that the emperor took part in. And there were hereditary families who were musicians and dancers. And there were many dozens of these hereditary officials who took part in these performances. So as you say, it's tantalizing. We can't actually discover it. But as we discover the lists of various administrative functions and we learn some of these contexts that we're discovering, tell us what the requirements were to become people who played or worked as part of these performances, we begin to get a bit of a fuller picture.

PA: We've mentioned that passage where Kongzi is confronted with this elite family, which is using I think eight rows of dancers. And this is a number of rows that was reserved for the emperor, I guess. So Kongzi says, 'Oh, this is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable.'

MC: Right, it's lese-majesty. Yeah. There are a number of times. You have to get the number of sumptuary vessels exactly right for your position. You don't want to overdo it because that's kind of a sign that you're getting too big for your britches.

PA: Right. It also goes together with this, everything has to be carefully considered and has to be done according to the ritual. And it's almost like it's not the rule that matters: it's following the rule and doing it in the right way.

MC: Yes. And that's especially important. And I think that a number of times in the early record, you get sayings of Confucius that it's not just the music and the ritual: it's that it's being used in the correct way.

PA: Just one last question. From what you've been saying, it actually sounds like this broader rule culture, and maybe Confucianism in particular, did have quite an impact on at least the social elite. Do you think that that's a fair assessment of what happened or is it maybe a distortion caused by the fact that a lot of our access to this culture is through texts written by people who would like us to believe that?

MC: Just as there were a number of tributaries going into the kind of synthesis that Kongzi seems to have created, so too there are a number of different kind of perspectives from which that kind of toolkit that Kongzi created are portrayed in later culture. And so, there are times in Late Imperial China, and even in the Modern Period, where certain virtues like filial piety and loyalty are singled out from the other elements of that toolkit and elevated by the state who want citizens who are loyal. But they discourage the parts where you say things like, 'if your ruler is overtaxing the people, you should go along with it' in some way. So there are different elements that are singled out and portrayed as the Confucian message at different times. And so, it's hard to even talk about Confucianism. 'Whose Confucianism?' is always the question I want to ask when I hear something like that. But I think that if we're talking about the early period, which we've been doing, there are not just dialogues with disciples, but also dialogues with rulers. And in those contexts, a lot of the focus is on things like... Well, I mentioned the proper selection of 'What are the criteria, which one uses, and how do you evaluate people who would be ministers or officials?' One of the main themes of the Analects that people don't pay as much attention to is the number of times Kongzi says, 'Actions are more important in evaluating someone than their words. Pay attention to that.' The checks on rulers, there are all these in both the Analects, but especially in the later Mengzi, there are all these kind of persuasions designed to keep the ruler from spending all their time in the Imperial hunting reserve. But instead, focus on spending your resources to the advantage of the people of the state. And really, the impact of the type of checks on desires and imperial power, that aspect of Confucianism, I think, is really part of the reason that it becomes kind of important in the Qin Han period. For the first time, you get this imperial system where instead of a set of warring states, you have a much more unified empire. And the need to, in some sense, check that power grows organically with the absolute power of the Emperor. And so when you read something like Mengzi 1a7, which is one of my favorite passages in the early Chinese corpus, which is this masterful dialogue between Mengzi or Mencius - the person who the text is named after - and this ruler. And Mengzi is trying to convince the ruler that he has within him the type of moral dispositions that he cultivates, then he will be a better ruler. And central to it is not just reacting compassionately when he sees an injustice, but also inferring where injustices might be outside of his vision, and applying his kind of moral judgment and his sympathy to (kind of) the people who are in trouble that are not right in front of him. And I really feel that one of the reasons for the longevity of these texts is the symbiosis they have with the Chinese imperial state. And they really are, in a way, a good check on that element of the imperial system. That's one way of answering that question. You can answer that question a number of different ways, but that was the one that I thought of.