Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chinese Thought in Modern American Life

For Maureen, Maggie, and Aidan

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making. It reflects my continuing education in Chinese philosophy, a process still in its rudimentary stage. I have, to paraphrase Confucius (Analects 2.4), turned myself to learning, have taken a stand on a few issues, but am very far from having no doubts—which makes me, intellectually, less than forty years old! Many generous colleagues have helped me but there is much I do not yet know about this vast and wonderful field. Whatever mistakes or misinterpretations there are in this text are mine and mine alone. For what I have learned, however, I must express my gratitude to those who have helped me along the way.

A seminar organized in Beijing by Daniel Bell, of Tsinghua University, including Chris Panza, Randy Pereenboom, and several of Daniel's graduate students provided helpful early feedback. Tian Chenshan hosted me for a talk at Beijing Foreign Studies University and shared his insights. I also gained much from a conference on Confucianism in a Post-Modern World at Beijing Language and Culture University. The Johns Hopkins–Nanjing University Center gave me an opportunity to present some of my ideas to an audience of intelligent Chinese and American students. In the United States, a lecture at Bennington College, organized by Paul Voice, and a colloquium at the Oakley Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College brought critical scrutiny to bear on my arguments. Colleagues in the Department of Asian Studies at Williams also read and discussed a chapter, providing constructive criticisms. Most notably, Christopher Nugent has consistently drawn my attention to translation problems, though I fear he will still be dissatisfied with some of my choices. In addition, over the past decade I have shared portions of this work with my own students at Williams. They have been my partners in education: I have learned from them as we have learned together. One of those students, in particular, also served as a summer research assistant: thank you, Ran Bi.

Several other people have helpfully read and commented on chapters. My thanks goes to Kim Gutschow, Leanne Ogasawara, and Tracy Finnegan.

Much of my thinking on Chinese philosophy has evolved through my blog, The Useless Tree (http://uselesstree.typepad.com). That forum has brought me into contact with many scholarly and incisive thinkers who have shaped my understanding in myriad ways: Manyul Im, Stephen C. Angle, Stephen Walker, Alexus McLeod, and Bill Haines stand out in this regard. They, and many other serious students of Chinese philosophy can be found at the group blog: Warp, Weft and Way (http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com).

An especial note of gratitude is owed to Michael Boylan, who edits for the Public Philosophy series at Wiley-Blackwell. He recognized the potential of my initial manuscript and carefully commented on every chapter, making this a better book in the process. Five anonymous reviewers have provided constructive comments. Thanks also to Jen Bray at Wiley for bringing the volume to fruition.

The time that this project has taken has been time subtracted from familial and social life. My wife and daughter have borne my distraction with good humor and encouragement. Maureen and Maggie are constant reminders of what Confucius means when he tells us that the love of our family is the starting place of our humanity. And, of course, Aidan, my son, has been and continues to be an inspiration for all that I do.

Text acknowledgments

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

From The Analects of Confucius by Burton Watson, trans. Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

From The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu by Burton Watson. Copyright ©1968 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

From Mencius by Irene Bloom, trans. Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

From The Analects of Confucius, translated by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. Translation copyright © 1998 by Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

From Laozi, Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall. Copyright © 2003 by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

From Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Robert G. Henricks. Translation copyright © by Robert G Henricks. Used by permission of Ballantine books, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

Other sources: copyright © 1996 by David Hinton from The Analects, Confucius, reprinted by permission of Counterpoint; copyright © 2000 by David Hinton from Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, reprinted by permission of Counterpoint; copyright © 1998 by David Hinton from Mencius, reprinted by permission of Counterpoint; copyright © 1997 by David Hinton from Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters, reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

Introduction

Two black men approach each other on a New York sidewalk. Their steps are deliberate, their expressions resolute but not severe. As they get close enough for speech, they exchange familiar salutations: What's up? Each raises his right arm, forearm cocked back and fingers cupped, and then smoothly reaches a hand to the other. They grasp hands at the thumb and close them together into a mutual fist. After a firm squeeze, they open their hands and slowly let their fingers slide across each other. Finally, they curl their right hands into free fists and gently tap them together.

This, or some variation on the theme, is an everyday scene, something recognizable to many Americans. We think of it as uniquely contemporary, something emerging from African-American culture and extending to American culture more broadly in the here and now. What most of us probably do not realize is that it is also a deeply Confucian act.¹

Yes, Confucian, as in the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius. Let me explain.

Confucius believed and taught that ritual action was the glue that holds civilized society together. By ritual, or li in Chinese, he meant not only the grand commemorations of life's defining moments—marriages, births, deaths—but also the meaningful symbolic gestures of everyday life. Good etiquette in greetings and farewells meant a great deal to him, as did recognition of moral achievement. Noble-minded persons, who strive to live a humane life, must take care to show proper respect, props in contemporary American terms, to others. And we do this by adhering to established rules of civil conduct rooted in the norms of a particular community.

Everything about the interaction of the two men mentioned above is designed to communicate solidarity and sociability. As with any style of handshake, the actions are ritualized: they are devised to convey a particular message. If that specific manner of greeting were not used in that context, it could signal aloofness, perhaps even hostility. The gestures may appear to be natural and spontaneous but they are, in fact, intentional and deliberate. Indeed, specific elements of the performance vary from time to time and place to place, and keeping up with and understanding the subtleties of such variations is itself a part of the ritual quality of the conduct.

This is not to say that American culture is thoroughly Confucian. Vast differences obviously exist between the cultural landscapes of ancient China and contemporary America. Whatever those differences, however, an awareness of Confucian thought allows us to appreciate the full social significance of a daily activity that we might ordinarily overlook.

And that is my point in writing this book: to illustrate how ancient Chinese philosophy is helpful for understanding and living in a modern American world.

I am not the first person to make this claim. For hundreds of years, at least since the Jesuits started to systematically translate and interpret the classic texts in the sixteenth century, Westerners have learned a great deal from ancient China. In the past few decades, philosophers have redoubled their efforts to build bridges between Chinese and Western thought. But these recent efforts have not fully succeeded in expanding awareness of Chinese philosophy beyond a relatively small number of academic specialists. How many of us, in our daily lives, ever call upon the ideas of Confucius or Zhuangzi? How many of us ever encounter allusions to these authors in our reading or conversations or television viewing or web surfing?

In our popular culture some aspects of ancient China are widely known and practiced, albeit in revised modern forms. Feng Shui is now fairly familiar to many Americans, as is acupuncture and other aspects of traditional Chinese medicine. Daoism seems to pop up in all sorts of places, from New Age music to various book titles beginning with "The Tao of…" This is all for the good and shows how we continually reach back to other times and places to find ideas valuable for our current circumstances. And if we can do this for easily absorbable cultural fragments, then, without too much effort, we should be able to bring more challenging and rewarding texts into our daily lives. That is my goal.

So, I have written this book not for academics, philosophers, and Sinologists. They have other places they can go to deepen their knowledge of the Chinese classics. This volume is for a general audience, people who have an interest in seeing how ancient Chinese thought might cast new light on the present day but who are not yet familiar with the time-honored works.

In order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Confucianism and Daoism, I focus on familiar social and ethical debates. After a brief survey of some key concepts of the two philosophies, I apply them to various issues common to modern American experience, questions that emerge across the arc of a human life. Birth is where it all begins, so we start, in Chapter 2, by analyzing several controversies associated with human birth: abortion, in vitro fertilization, and fetal stem cell research. From there we move on to childhood, whether it should be treated as a moral status different from adulthood and whether children who break the law should be tried as adults. Career questions come next, followed, in subsequent chapters, by marriage, public and political life, and, finally, end-of-life issues. Along the way we will reflect upon Confucian and Daoist reactions to, among other matters, gay marriage and adoption, work versus family conflicts, and right-to-die claims.

I hope that the book will serve as an introduction to ideas from a different time and place. No assumption is made here of any prior exposure to, or understanding of, these philosophies. The goal is to present different reasons, derived from classical texts, for familiar ethical beliefs. Daoists and Confucians, for example, differ on the question of abortion—Daoism is generally against it, while Confucianism is more accepting—but not for the reasons we often hear in contemporary debates. They each have a unique perspective, which will unfold over the course of this book. Whether Daoist and Confucian reasoning might change someone's mind now is a matter for each reader to decide. My undertaking is simply to bring those ideas, which I believe are coherent and applicable, into the discussion. They are worthy of our consideration and just might persuade us.

The book will also contribute to our understanding of what Daoism and Confucianism can be now. For centuries Chinese writers and thinkers have amended and revised these philosophies. Western scholarship is extensive. There are many, many contending interpretations. We will not review these academic disputes here, nor anywhere in the present volume. Rather, I will simply put forth what I believe are reasonable accounts, drawn from close readings of translated classical texts, of how Daoism and Confucianism would respond to contemporary issues. Of course, not everyone will agree with my interpretations and assertions. There is nothing I would enjoy more than to inspire another author to put forward a contending Confucian account of, say, gay marriage. Bringing the ancient texts into contemporary debates, and debating what these great books might mean in modern contexts, is my primary purpose.

If it succeeds, this book will show the curious reader how something like a greeting between two African-Americans might resonate with Confucian sensibilities of ritual and benevolence. More than that, it may demonstrate how dead Chinese men might actually be able to help us moderns and postmoderns in managing life's worries and sorrows. And it might also serve as a pathway into further reading of the old books themselves.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I have a personal stake of sorts in this task. I am a walking endorsement of the contemporary value of ancient Chinese thought.

It happened years ago, when my son, Aidan, was born with profound disabilities. He was our first child and my wife and I had little direct experience to draw upon in those initial confusing days of new parenthood. So, when things went bad on the tenth day of his life, we were cast adrift into every parent's nightmare: doctors solemnly intoning that our baby might die at any time and, if he did live, he would be physically incapacitated and mentally disabled. They turned out to be right in some ways. Aidan was very limited in conventional terms. He could never speak or see or stand or walk. His mental aptitude did not develop beyond that of an infant. He had an intractable seizure disorder, a tube in his stomach and a tracheostomy in his neck. But the doomsayers were wrong on certain fundamental questions. I came to see that Aidan's life, precisely as it was unto itself, was as valuable as any other. The regret and sadness I felt initially subsided to a comfortable acceptance of the fullness of his own existence. When he died, at age fourteen, I grieved not for what he had lacked in his life, but for all that he had brought into the lives of others, now diminished in his absence. And it was Chinese philosophy that helped me see that truth.

I had recourse to classical Chinese texts because they are a part of my professional life. Teaching contemporary Chinese politics is my job. To facilitate that work, I read and speak modern Mandarin. The topics I study have led me into Chinese history and literature and philosophy. So, I had some background, though not a great deal, in certain strains of Chinese thought, especially Daoism, when Aidan was born. As I struggled to make sense of his condition, I found myself drawn back to the Daodejing and Zhuangzi. I read and re-read them, in several English translations, and found some comfort there, especially in Zhuangzi, which tells us:

…the real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things. There's nothing that is not real and nothing that is not sufficient. Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange—in Way they all move as one and the same. In difference is the whole; in wholeness is the broken. Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again.

(Hinton, 23)

Way, here means something like the complex totality of all things. Zhuangzi said to me, through this passage, that Aidan had his place in the world. Whatever kinds of assumptions people might have made about who he was and what he could or could not do, he was as much a part of humanity as any other. That, and many other insights, helped bring me along to a fuller understanding of Aidan. It changed me, as a person and as a writer. On the latter score, I gradually moved away from academic writing and took up the telling of Aidan's story and the ways in which it is illuminated by ancient Chinese thought. A book, Aidan's Way, came out of that effort.²

With this present book, I am continuing along the path that Aidan started me on years ago. After finding consolation in Chinese philosophy then, I have now come to realize that the ancient writings can provide new perspectives on a wide range of contemporary quandaries. This volume is not about expert textual explication, because I am not an expert textual explicator. It is about reading the great books in various English translations, trying to appreciate what they were talking about, and applying that thought to our own, very different, time. And in that way, I believe, we can all give props to thinkers of great subtly and grace.

Sources

I will focus here on Confucianism and Daoism. Each of these philosophies has a long history and various forms. We cannot exhaustively review all facets of these rich traditions—that would be a book in itself. So, the question of which come from Confucianism and which come from Daoism must first be settled.

I will focus on certain early, pre-Qin Dynasty (i.e. before 221 bce), texts. My reason for doing so is, at first, personal. I like the early texts, their wisdom, their poetry, their feeling. They are also obviously important, forming as they do the bases for the different traditions as they stretch forward into time. Within them are the key ideas of each philosophy. But in making this choice, and not including texts and variations that come later, certain results follow.

In the case of Confucianism, I will draw upon the Analects and Mencius, both of which are included in the classics of Confucian education. These are the most widely cited sources in this tradition. The former was most likely compiled by various followers of Confucius over several decades in about the fifth century bce; the latter is attributed to students of another Confucian thinker, Mencius, dating from about the third century bce. Other early texts will not be referenced, for reasons of succinctness: we cannot do everything and the Analects and Mencius provide a good start for bringing Confucian ideas to bear on modern questions. To wander further afield would complicate the project with various interpretive controversies, which are not necessary to the work at hand. Given its nature, it is best to keep the enterprise focused on key ideas and texts.³

Another consequence of the choice of texts is the exclusion of significant adaptations and revisions of Confucianism after the Qin Dynasty. Indeed, most of what we understand as traditional Chinese Confucianism was established in the Han Dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) and afterwards.⁴ We will not consider how the philosophy became a state ideology during the Han, nor how it was reinterpreted as neo-Confucianism during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) to accommodate the emergence of Chinese Buddhism. We will not dwell on the various efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to modify Confucian thinking in the face of Western modernization. These are all interesting and important issues, but they are not our concern. This is not a book about the variants of traditional Confucianism, but, rather, about what the oldest sources of the tradition might mean today.

Along these lines, it must be stated clearly that any modern application of Confucian thought must reject its age-old connections to male domination.⁵ While it is certainly true historically that Confucianism was used by men to subordinate women, it is also true that the core concepts of the philosophy can be separated from those earlier functions and be expressed as a more universal ethical framework. I concur with those scholars who believe that Confucianism better lives up to its own moral standards when it is gender neutral.

Daoism also must be defined more precisely. In this instance a distinction can be made between philosophical Daoism and religious Daoism.⁶ Although the two tendencies have probably always existed side by side—neither can claim clear historical precedence—they represent different sensibilities.

Religious Daoism is rooted in indigenous Chinese spiritual beliefs and devotional practices that stretch far back into history. In the later Han dynasty, roughly the second century ce, identifiable sects emerged. Despite numerous doctrinal and geographic variations, religious Daoists generally recognize a pantheon of deities who are solemnly worshipped, drawing from a repertoire of sacred rituals. But I will not delve into this fascinating world because my interests run more in the direction of philosophical Daoism. No value judgment is intended in this choice; it is simply a matter of personal preference. Religious Daoism may have relevance for modern questions, and the answers it provides will at times be different than those offered by philosophical Daoism, but that is not the object of this book.

Philosophical Daoism is secular; it does not rely upon the invocation of divine beings or gods. Spirits and ghosts make occasional appearances in some texts, but there is no necessity to invest these figures with immortality or omnipotence or omniscience. They are simply a part of "Dao," or Way (defined in the next chapter). As theoretical assertions, Daoist ideas can stand or fall by themselves without any claim of sacred significance. This is what I like about philosophical Daoism: we can analyze it, apply it, think about it, and, if it does not seem to work, we can revise or discard it without danger of upsetting established religious dogma.

Some scholars reject the separation of philosophic and religious Daoism, arguing that the two have always been interrelated, and that may be true to a certain degree. But it is also true that there has long been a self-consciously articulated non-religious philosophical Daoism (daojia, as opposed to daojiao, in Chinese) with an ancient pedigree in Chinese history. We can carry forward this outlook as an authentic form of Daoism. As long as there has been Daoism there have been philosophic Daoists, thinkers who do not make it into a religion.

As for which Daoist volumes will be consulted, we will focus on the two most famous texts: the Daodejing, thought to have been originally composed some time in or before the fourth century bce; and Zhuangzi, parts of which were possibly written in the fourth century bce. There are various interpretive debates surrounding these texts and their authorship but I will mention here only one point of controversy. I tend to agree with those scholars who doubt the historical existence of a single person named Laozi who purportedly wrote the Daodejing. This puts me at odds with religious Daoists who deify him. I mean no disrespect. My project, applying philosophical Daoist ideas to contemporary American problems, does not rely on the existence or non-existence of Laozi. What matters are the ideas as found in the extant texts, not the authors. I will not, however, refer to Laozi as the author of the Daodejing. On the other hand, I do accept the existence of a person named Zhuangzi (or Zhuang Zhou), who may have had a hand in the composition, but was not the sole