5.4: Confucius- Sage and Mage

In Han times many scholars, like Liu Xiang and Sima Qian, worked to recover historical records, ritual regulations, poems, and other texts that had been hidden away from the Qin prohibitions or destroyed when the imperial Qin library was burnt down. Texts were recited from memory, retrieved from walls and pits, collected, edited, and compiled into the Five Classics and philosophers as we have them today. Despite this activity, Han scholars claimed that Confucius had written or compiled all of the Classics. They relied on Mencius, who had said that Confucius compiled the Spring and Autumn Annals, a terse year-by-year account of the twelve rulers of his home domain of Lu between 722 BC and 481 BC.

The Annals entries are so short, so bafflingly dull, that their existence and transmission required explanation. The explanations led from Confucius being a historian, to his being an uncrowned king, a master of arcane knowledge, a prophet, and a god.

First, a legend arose that in recording what happened at the Lu court, where the moral and ritual order established by the Duke of Zhou five centuries earlier was falling apart, Confucius either could not (for fear of reprisal) or would not (out of loyalty to the Dukes) mention openly actions that reflected badly on them. So he encoded moral judgments on each event he reported in very subtle wording that only good and thoughtful readers could understand. It’s hard to see this in entries like

Autumn: the king under heaven dispatched his minister, Xuan, to come return grave gifts to the late Duke Hui and his duchess Zhongzi.

But according to the legend, Confucius realized that in his unpropitious time no-one could restore the Way. Instead, the terse entries of the Annals recorded a whole program of government. In code, Confucius criticized the rulers of Lu and by extension others like them, and turned his critique into a program for moral government. For instance, for the entry above, the commentary explains

The use of the word ‘return’ indicates approval that is should be so. That which Heaven and Earth give birth to cannot be the property of a single family: Those who have and those who have not should be interchangeable.¹²

Since no-one could actually see a government program in the text, two commentaries drew on oral traditions to explain what Confucius had meant, and a third text, the Zuo commentary, probably not originally related to the Annals at all, told good stories about the intrigues of those times.

Further, the existence of the Spring and Autumn Annals meant that Confucius himself held the Mandate of Heaven, but it was not recognized on earth. To understand the twisted logic here, we have to remember how deeply aristocratic the Zhou feudal system had been. In the feudal system, a lowly shi had no business writing a history and passing judgment on the feudal lords: that would have been deeply improper. But Confucius had written a history, and since he definitely would not have done anything improper, he must actually have been a ruler. Thus, Confucius must have been a king in the eyes of Heaven. Popular songs from Lu talked about Confucius caring for the people and wearing royal clothing: these songs were omens that confirmed the idea of Confucius as an uncrowned king.

But there’s more.

To write so subtly, Confucius must have had (Han people concluded) extraordinary insight into people’s actions and the cosmic Way. Stories arose demonstrating how his great insight enabled him to detect causes on the basis of bizarre clues. Once Confucius was in the state of Chen when another state attacked. In the course of the siege, a hawk with an arrow shot through it landed inside a fort. Confucius identified the hawk as having come from very far away, and then examined the arrow. Based on the type of wood and the style of the flint arrowhead, he recalled that back in early Zhou, five centuries earlier, King Wu had received this sort of arrow from the distant Shushen people. He gave the Shushen arrows to his daughter when he married her to the first Duke of Chen. So Confucius predicted that the arrows would still be there in Chen’s arsenal, and he was right. This arcane knowledge came with a moral/political message: Heaven must have sent the hawk to remind Chen to remember its old loyalty to the royal Zhou house. Confucius was an unsurpassed master of strange knowledge that gave clues to great mysteries.

For someone who can see great mysteries in small things, it is no trick to foretell the future, since the future, like the past, moves in patterned ways. Confucius was credited with compiling the Book of Changes, which was used for divination. In Han times, stories arose in which Confucius foretold what would happen, and the greatest of his prophecies was the rise of the Han empire itself. The Han victory had been a shock to many people, because Liu Bang, whose social status was even lower than that of Confucius himself, not only overthrew the great Qin empire (whose ruler had been a Zhou duke), but also defeated the aristocrat Xiang Yu. To have foretold that three centuries earlier would have been awesome, indeed.

An awesome human is not much different from a god, in the old, pre-ethical East Asian way of thinking that in Japan, after the arrival of Buddhism, was labelled “the Way of the spirits/gods” or Shinto (神道). With such extraordinary insight and the ability to foretell the future, Confucius became a god. A story grew up that Confucius’s mother had become pregnant after praying to a local hill god, or that she had dreamed of meeting a “Black Lord” in a dream; or that his birth was announced by black ravens that were the totem of the Shang royal clan, or that he was found in a hollow mulberry tree, also associated with the Shang. The birth was painless, and yet his mother abandoned him in the wilderness, where animals tended him. He grew to be eight feet tall, with a hill-shaped bump on his forehead (representing where his mother had prayed, and referring to his name Qiu, which means hillock or mound), a square face, a nose like the sun, ears like a river, the forehead of a dragon, and lips shaped like the Big Dipper constellation. He had the body of a water sprite, the spine of a tortoise, the paws of a tiger, and long forearms. His eyebrows had 12 colors; his eyes had 64 veins. There were designs on his palms and an inscription on his chest that said, “He will create the evolutions of the Mandate as set forth by celestial tallies that are to fix the future ages.” (One can understand why his mother abandoned such a weird-looking baby.)¹³

Confucius as uncrowned king, mage, prophet, and god: these seem strange to us. Many people now think that Confucius in fact was a diehard authoritarian who demanded absolute, unthinking loyalty to one’s ruler and absolute, unthinking filial obedience to one’s parents. But that Confucius, too, was invented in Han times. To understand why, we must first understand a bit about family life in Han law and practice.