Древний Китай. Том 2: Период Чуньцю (VIII-V вв. до н.э.)

The essence of the content of the newly written chapters was that once there lived the great and wise Emperor Yao, who possessed the sacred te and brought harmony first to his close relatives, then his countrymen, and later on the whole world which resulted in an epoch of prosperity. Yao did not give the power to his son, whom he did not consider suitable for that but chose the worthiest among the worthy, Shun, who became famous for the ability to observe the norms of family way of life in unfavourable conditions (a weak father, a quarrelsome stepmother, a nasty stepbrother). Yao gave two of his daughters as wives to Shun in order to check him once again. Shun stood this test honorably: his family was according to the norms. Then Yao, while he was still alive, gave Shun reins of government in T'ien-hsia. Shun managed to become a worthy successor of Yao. He divided T'ien-hsia into 12 parts and appointed governors to rule them, ordering that wise and capable should be promoted. Shun improved his relationships with vassals by formulating the Code of punishment and personally controlled the activity of administrators by rewarding or punishing them according to the results of their work. After Shun, who also did not dare to pass over the power to his son, whom he did not consider worthy and wise enough for that, the power was granted to one of his best assistants, Yu. It was from him, who passed the throne over to his son at the request of the people, that a faceless dynasty Hsia obviously invented by Chou-kung long before that, began.

The ideologeme about the three great leaders, thus absorbed not only the names borrowed from other tribes but also some vague ideas of the past that not always had the throne been passed over from the father to the son. The main thing put forward was the idea of a wise centralized governing, obviously opposed to the destructive feudal disunity of the Ch'un-Ch'iu period. The whole prehistory of T'ien-hsia was described in a few pages of the chapters in question that now start the canonic text of Shou-king. The prehistory was presented in the way Chou historiographers understood it and, what is most important, the way it should have looked like taking into consideration the spirit of the general cyclic scheme of dynasties and the didactic purposes of the composition. The scheme of Chou-kung although ingenious but still bare, nameless and eventless, was finally replaced by an elaborate and detailed history, full of names and events. The way a history should be. This history had an enormous influence on next generations.

Confucius (551–479 ВС), a real genius among the Chinese, admired the deeds of the great wise men Yao, Shun, and Yti and had no doubt about their greatness or reality. The rest of his contemporaries and especially people from further generations treated the ancient wise rulers in approximately the same way. There is no wonder about that. An idea that seized masses possesses extreme strength. This aphorism of Marx helps understand why the idea of creating a centralized empire has already become since Confucian times (the last third of the Ch'un-Ch'iu period) a sort of a focused impulse. That was the challenge of the epoch, and everyone, who could and managed to formulate the answer, tried to respond. One of the best responses belongs to Confucius. Like all his predecessors and contemporaries, Confucius was not religious for the simple reason that there was no developed religion in ancient Chinese society by that time and superstitions were mainly typical for common people. But Confucius was a great thinker who took a sober and pragmatic view of things surrounding him.

His ideas succeeded to develop the best from the ancient traditions-the ancestor cult, filial piety, feelings of humanity (benevolence), righteousness and responsibility for those whom you lead, the principle of mutuality, constant acquisition of new knowledge and self-perfection, competitive spirit and strife for the best. These ideas were later written down by his disciples and compiled in the famous treatise Lun-yu. Confucius educated his disciples to work for the rulers with the purpose of reforming the system of administration and facilitating its — in contemporary terms-defeodalization. Confucius deliberately desacralized many ancient concepts, in particular, the sacred virtue te, turning it into a normal quality of a decent person. The Confucian social ideals of a noble man tsun-tzu and its antipode hsiao-jen determinated those who were ready to dedicate themselves to the good of the people and those who only thought about the mean personal benefit. Confucius most probably included in the last rank those nouveaux riches, who began to rise and distinguish themselves by their wealth at the end of his life, when the social and economic changes in the ancient Chinese society became already visible.