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Chapter Six Artifice Is the Way
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Chapter Six Artifice Is theWay F In this chapter, I outline Xunzi’s understanding of human ethical and religious development.The first section sets the stage by considering Xunzi’s general conception of the Confucian Way. Here I explore and analyze his various evocative metaphors for personal formation, and the theories into which they are interwoven.The second section begins by relating the bridge concept of spiritual exercises to the early Chinese problematic of xiu shen 修身, usually translated as “self-cultivation.” The bulk of this section, and of the chapter as a whole, examines Xunzi’s general account of the exercises he advocates most strongly: study, ritual practice, and musical performance and appreciation.The third section pulls back to sketch Xunzi’s account of what might be called a ladder of ethical development and excellence, which includes four broad stages: the petty person, the educated man, the noble man, and the sage. FoLLoWing the Way Although many religious thinkers, including Augustine, make use of the idea of religion as a “way” of life, in early China the word Dao 道, aptly translated in its most basic sense as “path” or “way,” was uniquely important. What the real or best Dao might be was the ultimate topic of political, ethical , religious, and cosmological debate, and the idea was widely understood to encompass or at least involve all these realms.The word also provided the best way of referring to competing tendencies of thought and practice, and it was the closest available analogue toWestern ideas such as “religion” and “philosophy.” In lieu of a survey of the full range of early Chinese views of the Dao, I intend here only to give a sense of shared early Confucian presuppositions ◆ 151 ◆ about theWay, and of how this overarching term of art shaped Xunzi’s conceptions of human life and personal formation.1 As a word, dao refers primarily to a “path” or “way,” as noted above; but by the Warring States era (403–221 bce), dao had acquired more extended senses, such as the manner or method for doing something (e.g., the “way” to cook), a very broad sense of the “way the world is” or should be, and the teaching or guidance that can show one “the way” in any of these senses. Dao can also be used verbally to express the activity of guiding others along a path, or of following such a way oneself. Early Confucians regarded the Dao in its largest sense as “nothing less than the total normative sociopolitical order with its networks of proper familial and . . . sociopolitical roles, statuses, and ranks, as well as the ‘objective’ prescriptions of proper behavior—ritual, ceremonial, and ethical —that govern the relationships among these roles.”2 And yet it was just as much a way of life for individuals, relating one’s inner life to the broader life of the community and the natural environment, and even the cosmos as a whole.One crucial difference from the way of life promoted byAugustine must be noted immediately. ForAugustine, as the next chapter discusses in more detail, the ultimate telos of the Christian life is a perfected, eternal life with God after the final resurrection of the dead. For Xunzi and other early Confucians,theWay is its own goal—there is no ultimate telos beyond living out the Way in the world that all can readily observe.Though there were widespread early Chinese beliefs in some sort of spiritual afterlife (although still in communion with the living generations of a family line), early Confucians tended to downplay such speculation,and Xunzi explicitly rejects it.3 For Xunzi, the Way is a path through the world we presently inhabit, which is our true and only home.The intrinsic goods made available by following theWay are their own “rewards,” regardless of whether less important goods such as wealth and public acclaim accompany them or not.4 So Xunzi claims that the Dao itself simply is the practice of Confucian virtues of ritual propriety, justice, deference, yielding, dutifulness, and trustworthiness (16/77/5–6). The Way is very much a way of life for Xunzi, that mode of existence lived by the noble man (8/28/16) and above all the sage (8/31/5).The Dao is the sort of thing one must ti 體, “embody,” which consists of both deep understanding and practical mastery of theWay (21/104/6).5 This sense—that theWay itself, if properly followed, provides the best human life and is...