Hallo, this is Prof. Bin Song at Washington College. This episode is to let you know what to read first when learning Confucianism, or as I explained in the first episode, what to read first when learning the Ru tradition.

In general, the Ru tradition emphasizes practice more than theory, doing more than saying. However, for beginning learners, one most frequent question we can expect is still: what should I read first? After all, without ideas to guide, we can barely practice anything.

To answer this question, normally, many people will go to the book called the Analects (in Chinese, ??), which is a book to have compiled sayings of Confucius and conversations between Confucius and his students, as their first pick. They may think since “Confucianism” is called “Confucianism,” and since there is one book all about Confucius’s original sayings, the Analects is naturally the first choice.

I would not recommend you to do so mainly because of two reasons:

Firstly, the Analects is like a book of collected notes among Confucius’s students to help themselves to continue the enterprise of social and political activisms that the school of Confucius originally aimed for. Since this is a notebook, without understanding the overall nature of that enterprise, it is very easy for beginning learners of Ruism to get lost among the so many detailed and minute discussions recorded there. This is also perhaps the reason why among beginning learners of ancient Chinese philosophy, Laozi’s Dao De Jing turns out to be more popular. When you open the Dao De Jing, and read its first verse “the Dao that can be said is not the genuine Dao,” you will say wow! And each chapter of the Dao De Jing reads like a philosophical treatise, very thematized and organized. However, when you open the Analects, it says “The Master says: Learn and timely apply what you have learned, is it not a joy?”; Ok, it feels warm, wise, a little bit breezy, but definitely not quite a wow. If you continue to read, you will find Confucius and his students are talking about so many concrete issues of human life in general and their society in particular, which include how to treat family, how to learn, how to govern, how to do one’s business and duty, how to speak, how to listen to music, etc. As I said, without a pre-understanding of the overall nature of Confucius’s school and his pedagogy, we will easily get lost when we read his students’ notes. If you give up the book and your interest of the Ru tradition right away because of this, believe me, this will be one of the most misguided decisions you made in your life.

Secondly, if the Analects is the notebook compiled by his students, what textbooks did Confucius use to teach his students? They are supposedly more, or at least equally important than the notebook, right? These textbooks were of six kinds, and they were pre-Confucian ancient classics compiled by Confucius to teach his students: the Odes (poetry), the Documents (ancient history), the Rites (think about the meaning of Ru we explained before), the Music (which we cannot find today since it is said to have been lost during later dynastic changes), the Change (the famous divination book), and the Spring and Autumn (the history of Confucius’s home state). In other words, after Confucius passed away, the Analects would be a notebook to guide new generations of Ru learners to study those ancient Classics. This situation makes the first pick of the Analects by interested beginning learners even more problematic, because without understanding the overall purpose of Confucius’ pedagogy, and the nature of the Ru community he helped to incubate, we really do not understand what is at stake in that would-be first pick.

Fortunately, Ruist leaders have faced a similar issue to tackle in history, since they also need to introduce the Ru tradition to beginning learners. And their response starting from the ninth century in the common era is to read a book with a much smaller size than the Analects, which is titled as Great Learning ??. The text of Great Learning was originally one chapter in the Classic of Rites, and as instructed by those Ruist leaders, the first opening section includes the words said by Confucius, and it later parts are about the commentary written by Confucius’s student, Zeng Zi, on Confucius’s words. This arrangement of the text is also very typical to many Ru writings: the first part is called “Classic” ?, and the second part is called “Commentary” ?. I attach my own translation of the Classic part of the Great Learning here, together with my interpolated annotation. If you are a student in the course of “Ru and Confucianism,” I would require you to read carefully every word on this chart. Here, I will mainly read the translation part.

So, now, you understand why this text was chosen by those Ruist leaders as the entry text to the Ru tradition, right? In this text, the Ruist enterprise of self-cultivation and social activism is programmed as concretely as three phases in the first paragraph, eight steps in the third, and with a method of daily meditation or self-contemplation described in the second paragraph. With such a concrete structure of learning and its explicitly stated ultimate goal, everything to learn down the road will be nicely fitted into a mindset, and therefore, beginning learners will get a greater sense of orientation regarding their overall understanding of the Ru tradition.

As for the interpretations of this text, at the first glimpse, particularly when you read my annotation in the chart, the text seems pretty much self-explanatory. However, I would like to warn you beforehand that the text also turns out to be among the most debated texts in the intellectual history of Ruism. Each mentioned term, such as “attain the knowledge,” “the investigation of things,” “feeling content,” and so on, undergoes an unusually intensive scrutiny and debate among Ru thinkers in history. Without any exaggeration, I will say the entire history of the so-called Neo-Confucianism, which lasted from 9th to 19th century across different East Asian countries, is one history of debate on the terms of the classical part of the Great Learning. In particular, two major competing lineages of learning in Neo-Confucianism, the school of principle and the school of heartmind, derive from their different understandings, and their accordingly different practical methods of social activism surrounding the key term “knowledge” mentioned in the third paragraph of the Great Learning. This phenomenon is also not surprising because since the Great Learning is the first text one needs to read when starting to learn the Ru tradition, everything they learn later will be constantly referred back to this foundational text, and therefore, people would intensively debate each other depending upon their overall experience of Ru learning and human living.

Nevertheless, as the instructor of this course, I have my own understanding of the text. In the following, I will stress several points of my understanding beyond what I have said in the annotation. This will give you an initial guidance for your further learning of the Ru tradition, but in the long run, given your understanding of the tradition gets more mature, I do hope you can have your own understanding of the text, and are able to apply your understanding to the benefits of your life.

Firstly, the position of “individual” in this Ruist pedagogy is very special. If the understandings of human self in world philosophies and religions are put in a spectrum, Buddhism will lie at the far left since it thinks humans essentially have no self whatsoever. Whereas, Thomas Hobbes’ idea of “everyone is the enemy against everyone” in the pre-societal state of nature will lie at the far right because human selves are thought of as irreducible atoms with their counteracting forces pitted against each other. However, as indicated by the Great Learning, the Ru understanding of self will lie rightly in the middle. The program of great learning starts from the strengthening of human self, namely, the manifestation of excellences in each individual in the three-phase paragraph, and the cultivation of one’s personal life in the eight-step paragraph. But these individual self-strengthenings are all envisioned as serving broader social and political goals such as loving people, aligning one’s family and bringing order to the state. In other words, according to the Ruist conception in the Great Learning, individuals thrive their lives in human networks and relationships, and the flourishing human networks also depend upon how strongly and thoroughly the individual proceeds in their self-cultivation. A sort of mutual harmony between community and individuals registers here.

Secondly, the meditative method described by the second paragraph is also very special. Terms such as “feels settled,” “become tranquil,” and “become content” are beautiful to describe the deep meditative experience of a Ru learner. However, the meditative practice is seamlessly embedded in a program of social activism that unabashedly affirms the value of this-worldly daily human life and social activism. I once described this type of meditation as “meditation in motion,” and made a whole serious of youtube videos to explain how we can practice this in the contemporary world. In my view, this type of meditation is very fit for modern professionals, and we will spend quite a time in this course to discuss and practice this type of meditation.

Thirdly, as discussed in unit 1 of this course, I once emphasized that the Ru tradition is extraordinarily broad and deep, since Ru care about everything in the civilization. It is philosophy, religion, and a way of living all at once, while not being constrained by any of these. Now, after reading the Great Learning, I hope you understand more why I said so. If looked at more closely, we find the “peace throughout the world” is a very sublime and transcendent goal pertaining to one’s position in the entire cosmos, and underneath it, “bringing order to one’s state” is about politics, “aligning one’s family” is about society, and “cultivating one’s personal life” through working on one’s heartmind, intention, and knowledge is about individuals. Understood in this way, the division of human knowledge prevalent in modern universities and colleges does not quite hold on to this holistic thinking of Ruism. That’s because none of this dimension of human flourishing can be realized without the other. Therefore, if one intends to pursue education and self-cultivation according to this Ruist program, one really needs to broadly learn, broadly communicate, and solidly build their own business in a robust human network on the basis of constantly bettering and strengthening themselves. I would say this Ruist pedagogy envisioned by Confucius embodies the spirit of liberal arts par excellence. It intends to continually liberate human individuals through flourishing human civilization, and vice versa. Because of this, I also think the text of Great Learning is worth reading by every student of liberal arts, and this is also another reason why we read it right here, right now.

Recommended Further Reading:

Daniel K. Gardner, The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition (Hackett Publishing Company: 2007)

Andrew Plaks, Ta Hsueh and Chung Yung (The Highest Order of Cultivation and on the Practice of the Mean) (Penguin Books, 2003).

CREDITS:

Opening Music: Ta-da! By Siddartha Corsus

Closing: Music: Endless forms most beautiful by Sidartha Corsus

LINKS:

www.binsonglive.wpcomstaging.com