Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In early China there were two kinds of deities – ancestors and sky gods. Everyone worshipped their ancestors, whose souls were believed to animate living humans. But the aristocracy also worshipped Shang Di, the supreme god who ruled from on high, together with the gods of the sun, moon, stars, rain and thunder. Shang Di was identified with the founder-ancestor of the race and all noble families traced their descent from him.¹²⁵ The hallmark was eating meat. There were three forms of religious functionary: the shih, or priest-scribes, whose duty was to record and interpret significant events, which were regarded as omens for government; the chu, or ‘invokers’, scholars who composed the prayers used in the sacrificial ceremonies – they became ‘masters of ritual’, making sure that the correct form of sacrifice was preserved (just like the Brahmans in the Buddha’s India); the third group of religious figures were the experts in divination, the wu, whose duty was to communicate with the ancestor spirits, usually by way of the so-called ‘Dragon bones’.¹²⁶ This practice – ‘scapu-limancy’ – was not discovered until the end of the nineteenth century, but some 100,000 bones have now been collected. The wu would apply a hot metal point to the shoulder blades (scapulae) of a variety of animals, and interpret the resulting cracks as advice from the ancestors. The soul was represented on these bones either by kuei, a man with a large head, or a cicada, which became the accepted symbol of immortality and rebirth. Around the time of Confucius, the idea developed that everything there is, is the product of two eternal and alternating principles, yin and yang, and that within each person there are two souls, the yin-soul and the yang-soul, one deriving from heaven, the other from earth.¹²⁷ The yin was identified with kuei, in other words the body; the yang was the life principle and the personality. The aim of Chinese philosophy was to reconcile the two.

Confucius was born near Shantung at a time of great warfare but also of great social change, and he was shaped by both processes. Cities were growing in size (up to 100,000 inhabitants, according to some sources), coinage had been introduced, and commercial progress was so marked that certain areas were already well known for particular products (silk and lacquer in Shantung, iron mining in Szechuan). Most particular to China was the class known as shih (inflected differently from the shih, priest-scribes, mentioned above): these were families of noble descent who had slipped down the social scale and become commoners. They were not merchants but scholars, educated but dispossessed of their former cachet. Confucius was of this class.

Bright enough to be educated at a school for the aristocracy, his first job was as a clerk in the state granaries. He was married at nineteen but little is known about his wife and family.¹²⁸ He was greatly influenced by Zi Zhaan, the prime minister of Cheng, who died in 522 BC, when Confucius was twenty-nine. Zi Zhaan introduced the first law code in China, the text for which he ordered to be inscribed on bronzes and displayed publicly, so that all would know what rules they were expected to obey.¹²⁹ A final influence on Confucius was the prevalent scepticism which the Chinese then felt towards religion. There had been so much war that no one any longer believed in the power of the gods to aid kings, with the result that many temples – historically the most prominent buildings in the cities – had been destroyed. The fact that prayer and sacrifice had failed so dismally created circumstances for a rise in rationalism, of which Confucius was the finest fruit.

He and his most important followers, Motzu (c. 480–390 BC) and Mengtzu (Mencius, 372–289 BC), were members of an important group of thinkers, the so-called ‘hundred schools’ (= a great many). Confucius’ learning gradually established him a reputation, and he was given a government job, along with several of his students. But he resigned, and journeyed on the road for ten years, after which he set up a school – the first in Chinese history – taking students from all classes of society, and where he could begin to broadcast his ideas more effectively. His main concern was an ethical life, facing the problem of how men can live together. This reflected China’s transition to an urban society. Like the Buddha, like Plato and like Aristotle, he looked beyond the gods, and taught that the answer to an ethical life lies within man himself, that universal order and harmony can only be achieved if people show a wider sense of community and obligation than their own and their family’s self-interest.¹³⁰ He thought that scholarship and learning were the surest way to harmony and order and that the natural aristocrats in the sort of society he wanted were the sages.