Chapter 7 China 259are apt to describe ritual as “empty” and thus “inauthentic” to the self, or merely
“going through the motions.” But for Confucians, the authority of society and
the ancients is what constitutes morality, and the rituals that have come down
from them to us are empowered by that authority and by Heaven itself. Zhu Xi
(Chu Hsi) said: “Ritual is the manifested authority of Heavenly principle.”
There is no value in any “authentic selfhood” that does not come from these
sources. The young may be born with the potential for goodness, but that poten-
tial is not fulfilled in a vacuum. It is fulfilled in the moral forms given by society.
It is the rituals of social life that bind society together and bind individuals
to the social order. It is the same li that structures society into a hierarchy of
authority and power. “The order that li ought to bind together is not simply a
ceremonial order—it is a sociopolitical order in the full sense of the term,
involving hierarchies, authority, and power. The li must themselves support this
authority and power” (Schwartz 1985:68). This fundamental and far-reaching
system is summarized in the “Three Bonds”: official to monarch, son to father,
and wife to husband. Li governed them all. Family and state were part of the
same moral structure; all were ordained by Heaven. The man of virtue, who
fulfilled li and ren, Confucius called by the term junzi (chun-tzu). Prior to Confu-
cius, this was a title given to the hereditary nobility, a word meaning “prince,”
but Confucius held that any morally cultivated person could become a junzi;
thus it took on an individualistic, achieved sense. (Victorian translators used
“gentleman,” another archaism to modern ears.) The junzi conducts himself
morally and according to li in all his roles: as son, as father, as husband, as offi-
cial. Women should also conduct themselves according to li, which limited
their possibilities to daughter, wife, and mother. Much later, in the eighteenth
century, Confucians began to obsess about women, and a cult of women’s
purity arose, but Confucius himself had very little to say about women.
Confucius and Laozi provided the dominant strands coming down from
the Eastern Zhou to later ages. It may have been the extraordinary influence of
Sima Qian’s great history, the Shiji (Shi Chi), which kept them alive after the
brief dark times to come in the Qin dynasty. Sima Qian brings their differences
alive in stories, probably apocryphal, about their meeting. According to him,
Confucius once went to Luoyang to consult with Laozi about the li of the
ancients. Laozi scoffed that the ancients were now nothing but decaying bones.
He said, “I’ve heard that merchants keep their goods buried deeply to make it
look as if they have nothing, and that a junzi will pretend to be stupid. So give
up your pretenses, your mannerisms, and your extravagant claims. They won’t
do you any good. That’s my advice to you.” Confucius returned to his students
and said: “I know that birds can fly and fish can swim and beasts can run.
Snares can be set for things that run, nets for those that swim, and arrows for
whatever flies. But dragons! I shall never know how they ride wind and cloud
up into the sky. Today I saw Laozi. What a dragon!”
If, to Confucius, Laozi, with his lofty indifference to society, was an
ungraspable dragon, Confucius’s legacy was far greater. His teachings became