The Penguin History of the World

Within Confucius’s interest in reanimating the old, the principle of each man’s duty to perfect his own character reigned supreme. But the civilized human being should also regulate his outward behaviour so that it conformed to the precepts set by the ancients. Much as the Christian Bible was to do later, Confucius believed that a principle of the reciprocal sense of ethics would help in this regard; he said that ‘what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others’. He believed that the study of history was the key to all moral improvement and improvement in statecraft. And just as much as he stressed loyalty as the supreme virtue, he stressed the need for forthrightness, even in adversity. The non-opposition to illegitimate orders would lead to the ruin of a country: ‘The superior man’, Master Kong stated, ‘has neither anxiety nor fear.’

Confucian texts were later to be treated with something like religious awe. His name gave great prestige to anything with which it was associated. He was said to have compiled some of the texts later known as the Thirteen Classics, a collection which only took its final form in the thirteenth century AD. Rather like the Old Testament, they were a somewhat miscellaneous collection of old poems, chronicles, some state documents, moral sayings and an early cosmogony called the Book of Changes, but they were used for centuries in a unified and creative way to mould generations of China’s civil servants and rulers in the precepts which were believed to be those approved by Confucius (the parallel with the use of the Bible, at least in Protestant countries, is striking here, too). The stamp of authority was set upon this collection by the tradition that Confucius had selected it and that it must therefore contain doctrine which digested his teaching. Almost incidentally it also reinforced still more the use of the Chinese in which these texts were written as the common language of China’s intellectuals; the collection was another tie pulling a huge and varied country together in a common culture.

It is striking that for the rest of his life (he died in 479 BC) Confucius had so little to say about the supernatural. In the ordinary sense of the word he was not a ‘religious’ teacher (which probably explains why other teachers had greater success with the masses). He was essentially concerned with practical duties, an emphasis he shared with several other Chinese teachers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Possibly because the stamp was then so firmly taken, Chinese thought seems less troubled by agonized uncertainties over the reality of the actual or the possibility of personal salvation than other, more tormented traditions. The lessons of the past, the wisdom of former times and the maintenance of good order came to have more importance in his teachings than pondering theological enigmas or seeking reassurance in the arms of the dark gods.

Yet for all his great influence and his later promotion as the focus of an official cult, Confucius was not the only maker of Chinese intellectual tradition. Indeed, the tone of Chinese intellectual life is perhaps not attributable to any individual’s teaching. It shares something with other oriental philosophies in its emphasis upon the meditative and reflective mode rather than the methodical and interrogatory which is more familiar to Europeans. The mapping of knowledge by systematic questioning of the mind about the nature and extent of its own powers was not to be a characteristic activity of Chinese philosophers. This does not mean they inclined to other-worldliness and fantasy, for Confucianism was emphatically practical. Unlike the ethical sages of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, those of China tended always to turn to the here and now, to pragmatic and secular questions, rather than to theology and metaphysics.

The period that followed Confucius’s death – known as the Warring States, lasting roughly from 481 to 221 BC – in many ways stood for the opposite of everything that the great sage had insisted on. An era of disunity produced a time of intense warfare as the inter-state system created around the Zhou dynasty’s long decline broke down. The most powerful states engaged in a series of wars which created countries of a new kind, organized for maximum military benefit. With militarization came a number of military innovations: convex bows and iron lances, stronger than anything seen before; mass infantry formations, intended for offensive battles; better trained cavalry and better armour and helmets; and the development of siege warfare, which laid waste to cities and whole states. The most representative text of the time was not by any of the period’s many philosophers, but a military compendium called The Art of War, by a strategist (of somewhat doubtful historicity) named Sunzi.

Sunzi’s principles were those of inner cohesion and outward duplicity. According to The Art of War: