The Age of the Sages: The Axial Age in Asia and the Near East

17. The World of Confucius

17 The World of Confucius In our first glimpse of China’s religious history, we discussed the prominent practices and beliefs of the preaxial period, which included divination, ancestor reverence, ritual sacrifices, and gods and ghosts. Those ancient concepts and practices endured into the Axial Age and up to modern times. In this chapter, we will examine the transition to the Axial Age and introduce the most influential individual of that era, the sage Confucius. In subsequent chapters, we will study the fundamental elements of Confucian thought, how they were interpreted by others, and some significant opposing viewpoints, including the religion of Daoism. The Early Zhou Dynasty Scholars are not absolutely sure when the Shang dynasty began—probably in the fifteenth or fourteenth centuries bce—but we know when it ended. In or about the year 1045 bce, the Shang rulers were deposed by another aristocratic family, the Zhou dynasty, who established the next period in Chinese history. The Zhou dynasty lasted, at least in name, some eight hundred years, until it was supplanted by the Qin dynasty in 221 bce. These dates mean that the Zhou dynasty roughly spanned the entire Axial Age. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CHANGES To help us comprehend the religious dimensions of this period, it is essential to discuss its salient political and cultural aspects. The Zhou dynasty is traditionally traced to a King Wen, who was known as the “cultured king” and was credited with refining the book of divination called the Yi Jing. Despite his title, “King” Wen never actually ruled China. Wen had been a feudal lord who was imprisoned by the last Shang king. When Wen’s son Wu overthrew Shang rule, he freed his father from imprisonment and bestowed on him the honorific title “king,” although Wu himself was the actual ruler. When King Wu died at an 165 early age, his younger brother Dan became regent for Wu’s thirteen-year-old son. Dan was better known by his title, the Duke of Zhou. These figures in the early history of the Zhou dynasty—especially the duke—came to be regarded as the paragons of leadership and moral behavior by later Chinese, particularly Confucius, who reported that he had frequent dreams about the duke. Despite the high regard later Chinese had for these early Zhou rulers, Zhou culture was initially not nearly as sophisticated as the Shang dynasty it replaced. Zhou culture lacked writing but quickly adopted the Shang writing system. It also appears that the Zhou rulers embraced parts of Shang religion. The Zhou kings gave a fiefdom to the Shang family members so they could continue to worship and sacrifice to their ancestors. The Zhou rulers themselves probably worshiped the Shang ancestors, even though they had ousted the descendants of these ancestors! THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN Like the Shang kings, the Zhou rulers worshiped a high god, in addition to the countless local spirits and divinities composing the heavenly bureaucracy. In Zhou theology, this Supreme Being was called Tian, a term that is ordinarily translated as “Heaven.” In the Shang dynasty, tian was simply a generic term for the heavenly realm, but in the Zhou era, the idea of tian became more ambiguous. The Zhou people considered Tian a personal deity, a being conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms, like Shangdi; in fact, the Zhou rulers originally used the names Shangdi and Tian interchangeably to refer to the highest god. Over time, however, more impersonal associations came to dominate Zhou theology, and heaven was regarded basically as an ultimate principle, like asha in Zoroastrianism. So tian could now mean both a personal god and an impersonal principle. But the crucial difference between the Zhou and the Shang concepts of the highest power pertains to morality. From our discussion of the Shang oracle bones, we recall that the gods, from the highest on down, simply had no interest in how humans behaved toward each other, and they did not make moral behavior a condition for granting favors. But Tian did care. This attribution of moral qualities represents a significant shift from preaxial understandings of the gods and is part of the general ethicization process we have seen throughout several axial centers. 166 | The Age of the Sages “The crucial difference between the Zhou and the Shang concepts of the highest power pertains to morality: In Shang religion, we recall that the gods simply had no interest in how humans...