Relation to Others, Community

A Confucian relates to other people first through the prism of their family.  A person's family, both alive and in Heaven, comprise a special set of relationships and cultivating those relationships is the beginning of all relationships.  Often when reading Confucian Sages one gets a sense of logic applied to human relationships.  They want to know the very beginning of humaneness, and then what is the next step, and then the next.  Where does it all begin?  Well, it begins with the family.

Ancestor worship both honors the family but also connects the Chinese to place and to clans; it is the nature of ancestors that a large number of people will share a common ancestor.

The next level of importance, analogous to relations in a family, is relation to authority.  Kings and government officials deserve special respect.  Relations with authority builds from the filial bond.  Those in authority are like parents and its important to give them the respect you would give a parent.  They, in turn, respect you by receiving the gift of your regard and providing ethical leadership.

A Confucian is always aware of hierarchy and supports it.  Consequently, as society changes, especially with the change in women's status at work and in the family, Confucianism will need to change. 

Being a good supporter of a hierarchy is not the same as loving your neighbor.  Although Confucius made the connection between the special relationships (the five: parent to child, husband and wife, older sibling and younger sibling, friend to friend, and householder to official) and society as a whole, there has always been discussion in China about this area of ethics.

Chinese Sages that came after Confucius all addressed this issue slightly differently. Mozi, a Sage from a different class than Confucius, preached non-violence and ren for all. Armstrong writes:

As with Confucius, the single thread that held his philosophy together was ren, but he believed that Confucius had distorted this compassionate ethic by limiting it to the family.  In his view, the clan spirit of the aristocracy was at the root of many of the current problems: family chauvinism, competitions for prestige, vendettas, and sumptuary expenses.  He wanted to replace the egotism of kinship with a generalized altruism. Everybody must feel toward all others exactly what he felt for his own people."others must be regarded like the self," he said; this love must be "all -embracing and exclude nobody"(270).

A hundred years later, Mencius, as he is known in the West, defined ren as benevolence, and claimed that it flowed naturally from all people.  Ren needed cultivation and one began with family but needed to generalize from those relationships.  That generalized feeling would create more feeling. Armstrong writes:

The Golden Rule was crucial.  This was the virtue that made the junzi (mature person) truly humane and brought the individual into a mystical relationship with the entire universe. "All the ten thousand things are there in me," Mencius said in one of his most important instructions. "There is no greater joy for me than to find, on self-examination, that I am true to myself.  Try  your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence [ren]" (305-306).

Supreme Being, Absolute

Confucianism has an Absolute that is called Heaven. Obviously Heaven is a translation, but it's unlike many other Confucian concepts which are introduced to the West with their Chinese word and are then roughly translated. The Chinese word remains as part of explaining and naming the concept. Implied in this continued use of the Chinese word is that the translation is an inexact approximation of the concept.  Use of the Chinese word reminds you that you need to hold the concept loosely in your mind until you can build a context for it.

Li is explained using the Chinese word. Li is the concept of using ritual and propriety to honor family members, ancestors and rulers. Ren receives the same treatment, it represents the ideal relationship between two people.

Heaven, however, is often used without its Chinese name, Tien or Tian. Perhaps because Tien is a word with many interpretations. Sometimes when it is used as a pair with Earth as in, Heaven and Earth, it sound very much like the Heaven of Christian terms. I am not sure why the word Heaven is used in this way since it causes confusion in Western minds.

When Tien is used in a traditional folk way it is a spirit place where the ancestors are ruled over by a supreme ancestor (Shang Ti). (Smith 183) With the ancestors there, Heaven is a spirit rendition of our world, with its own version of influence peddling (take care and reverence your ancestors and they will help you). Ancestors can be influenced with money and favorite foods. This way of looking at heaven has roots that predate Confucianism. All Chinese religions refer to this Heaven and the ancestors in it. Huston Smith's take on Confucianism was that the balance in Chinese society had grown to cede too much control to Heaven. Confucianism brought Chinese thought back into the world; back to Earth. (185)

Heaven in Chinese history has a special connection to Kings and Rulers. The Kings were connected to Heaven in a way that others were not, making them a kind of nexus with Heaven. A King's ancestors were powerful semi-divinities in Heaven. Confucianism democratized Heaven a bit, giving more people access to their ancestors and a way to impact and connect with Heaven. A King's ancestors would be higher up in the hierarchy of Heaven then your ancestors but you still were connected. This access to Heaven was always a special responsibility of Kings and Emperors but was still available to all with identifiable ancestors.

Just as the Christian concept of a monotheistic God can range from the very personal to the highly theoretical, Heaven does also. Some Confucianists, now and in the past, regard Heaven as an ideal rather than actual, and ancestor worship as a way of connecting with their heritage. Tien is as plastic as Western concepts of God. One translation of Tien is "an impersonal force that watches over human affairs" (Fieser 160).

Neo-Confucianists of the Middle Ages mixed in more of Buddhism and Daoism into Chinese religion. The connection with Heaven still involved the ancestors but the way of connection was influenced by the idea of qi. Mencius, an early Confucian sage who lived between 400-300 BCE thought that by living a very good life of honor and right relationship one would create a "flood-like qi" that would "...fill the space between Heaven and Earth. It is a qi which unites rightness and the Way" (Armstrong 305). In other words, how one lived in right relation, with ren, created qi which connected one powerfully with Heaven. The ideal was a life that made the connection with Heaven a seamless continuum.