China and the West

Pound, Ezra. Mang Tsze : the ethics of Mencius [ID D29085].
孟子
I am convinced that the most fantastically foolish or at best crassly inadequate notions both of Kungfutsu and of Mang tsze are current not only among the weak minded but among that class which, if it can't quite be considered an intelligentzia, has at least a greater domesticity with books than has the average reader.
A Chinese female in the U.S. has been lamenting in print that although chinamen greatly outnumber the Chinese girls in America these girls have the deuce of a time finding husbands. The men go back to China for wives, they say the girls with an American 'education' are brainless.
And this I take it arises from our occidental habit of never looking at anything. I may be inattentive. I have no doubt whatsoever that my long-suffering friends consider me inattentive} but on the other hand I am not a distracted infant, and I have on occasion seen more than was meant for me, or even, in the case of Gaudier's sculpture and Wyndham Lewis's drawings back in 1911to 1914 more than some others did.
Nevertheless we occidentals do not see when we look. Kim had an education. I doubt if we occidentals ever receive one. Having drawn an ideogram, quite a simple one, three times WRONG, I am humbled but not in any dust of the Occident. It was a simple picture, a bureaucrat (or minister) faced by a member of the public, thereby forming the verb 'to sleep', occurring in the sentence: Mencius put his head on his stool (or head rest) and slept. It was not difficult to write, and it looked wrong when done wrong. I committed the same error three times running before I found out what was wrong, and whatever be my 'low' for idiocy I find traces of at least similar failure in sinologues. This note is the result of an experiment, necessarily personal but which I must describe if the reader is to judge its results. During August and the first half of September 1937, I isolated myself with the Chinese text of the three books of Confucius, Ta Hio, Analects and the Unwavering Middle, and that of Mencius, together with an enormously learned crib but no dictionary. You can't pack Morrison or Giles in a suit case.
When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look or the characters and the radicals to go on from. And my contention is that the learned have known too much and seen a little too little. Such of 'em as knew Fenollosa profited nothing.
Without knowing at least the nature of ideogram I don't think anyone can suspect what is wrong with their current translations. Even with what I have known for some time I did not sufficiently ponder it. The Ta Hio is of textures far more mixed than Pauthier's version. I see no reason to doubt the statement that it was a family possession, and that the actual bamboo tablets had got out or order and some of them lost, any more than I doubt the ethnographic evidence of the portrait of Confucius, as likely to be authentic as any bust of a Caesar.
This diversity is not due to any failure of unity in the meaning of the Ta Hio. No one has brought out the contrasts of style from the magnificence of citation to the terseness and lucidity of Kung's statements. Kung was an anthologist and a shortener.
With Pauthier under my hand for 23 or more years and the Confucian matter in that form long familiar I had never read through Pauthier's Mencius. In the french he seemed merely prolix and inferior. The original gives ample reason for the four books appearing together, and my title is for a reason. Mencius nowhere turns against Kung, all of Mencius is implicit in Kung's doctrine. This doctrine is one, indivisible, a nature extending to every detail as the nature of being oak or maple extends to every part of the oak tree or maple. Mencius has gone into detail as, let us say, Van Buren goes into detail from a Jeffersonian basis.
By taking the 'ethics of Mencius' I include the ethics of Kung. Yet if I tried to ascribe some of the opinions here about to be exposed, to Kungfutsu I might be accused of trying to modernize them or of seeing too much in the original text. In Mencius several cardinal lines are explicit, the most squirmy Ersatz-monger will have difficulty in worming away from them.
What I mean by not looking at the text can be shown by the very nice little story of Kung in discouragement saying— 'It's no go. We aren't getting anywhere. I think I'll get a raft and float about at sea for little. And the one of you chaps who will go along, will be Yu.'
The elected disciple throws out his chest at the compliment, and Kung continues, 'Yu likes danger better than I do. But he wouldn’t bother about getting the logs'.
Implying I think that logs are used to make rafts. Nevertheless the translator in question talks about 'exercise of judgment', losing we believe the simple and Lincoln-like humour of the original. (2)
For the LOGS are there in the ideogram very clearly. Whatever later centuries may have done about political platforms etc., and the raft ideogram appears to show a log and claw and a child, (3) hinting sylvan (if riparian) origin.
材 (1) 桴
(1) Note similar process in meaning in the greek uncut forest, and the stuff of which a thing is made, matter as a principle of being.
I am not denying certain ambiguities in the text or in certain statements in ideogram but there are also certain utterly unambiguous uses of ideogram. You must distinguish between the inclusive and the ambiguous.
Ambiguity and inclusiveness are far from the same.
The specialist will often want a more particular statement inside the inclusive one, but the including statement can be perfectly categoric, in the sense of having its frontiers clearly defined. And this is not in the least the same as straddling the category's fence.
In ascribing ideas to Mang tsze I shall limit myself to what seem to me utterly clear cases of statement. Any borderline cases will be noted as such, and where I am stumped I shall ascribe no meaning.
I do, on the other hand, object to under-translation. I do not think that I have a better mind than Confucius. Mencius' great merit is that he did not think he had a better mind than Confucius. (There are numerous cases recorded of Confucians refusing to be had by such suggestions re themselves.) When I get a good idea from the ideograms I do not think it is my idea. If by any chance my ideas are better than those of the Man of Tsau's offspring, then, of course, my tablet should be placed in the Temple and my views replace those of earlier sages. But I consider it unlikely that occasion for this will arise. What matters is the true view. If my views are better than those in the ideogram, pray do accept them, but accept also the burden of proving it.
The ethics of Mencius are Confucian. The spelling Mencius is all right if you take count of the way some people pronounce latin. Kung-fu-tsu. Chung Ne, Kung, Confucius all refer to the man of Tsau’s son. Nobody now in anglo-saxon countries pronounces a c as tsz.
Serious approach to Chinese doctrines must start with wiping off any idea that they are all merely Chinese. Mencius had an holy fear of cranks and idiots, and nearly all the most recent forms of idiocy had already pullulated in his time, among sectaries of one sort or another. As to subversiveness, the editor of the Criterion may for all I know still be waiting for me to review a volume of chínese philosophy which I found too rancid to mention. After finding the text too rancid for use I turned to the introduction. (The translator has merits of efficiency, his english must have been as slippery as the original, and in this introduction he delighted me with the statement that all except the most hard-boiled Confucians had swallowed his author.)
Thanks to nature, destiny, or Kung fu tsu, I did not swallow him.
Nevertheless before we can have any serious discussion of Chinese philosophy we must agree on terminology. We must decide more clearly than has, I think, yet been done, which ideograms correspond to what terms of good latin. Directio voluntatis. Dante's view upon rectitude rimes certainly with that of Mencius.
Here (Analects IV,IV) is luminous doctrine reiterated in Mencius.
尚志
I cannot think that the translators have been careful enough in correlating their terms either with those having great contents and elaborate precisions in Christian (catholic) theology, or with those of greek philosophy. [Since writing this, though not necessarily altering the mentioned conditions of things, Routledge announces 'Soothill and Hedous' Dictionary of Chinese-Buddhist terms', and Motoschiro's Gree-Japanese dictionary has been published]. Apart from latin (and greek) theologians I doubt if we have any occidental theologians. We have a word 'sincere', said to date from Roman luxury trade in faked marble. The Chinese have a sign which is translated by this word of english. But the Chinese sign implicates quite definitely naming the emotion or condition.
誠
Which you can tie up if you like to the first chapter of Leone Vivante's Originality nel pensiero. There are two ideograms, one middle-heart, which might be translatable by sincere in its now current meaning, and this other sign: the word and the action of fixing or perfecting (just given, ideogram 5).
忠
All of which comes out of the Confucian answer when asked about the first act of government: 'call things by their right names'.
正名
There is a third sign recurring and again recurring, of the man who stands by his word.
信
The conditions of my experiment, if you will consider them, implied not being distracted or led off into the mazes of the dictionary with its infinite (i.e. unbounded) interest and interests. Having been three times through the whole text and having perforce to look at the ideograms and try to work out the unfamiliar ones from their bases, I should have now a better idea of the whole and the unity of the doctrine, at any rate I believe that I have, and that the constants have been impressed on my eye.
Clearly what they translate virtue is the greek arete
仁
it is not mediaeval virtu, though it is radically virtus from vir. It is, in Chinese, the whole man and the whole man’s contents. This is or should be impressed on the eye.
The sick part of our philosophy is 'greek splitting', a term which I will shortly re-explain. The Confucian is totalitarian. When the aims of Shun and Wan were set together, though after a thousand years interval, they were as two halves of a tally stick. (Even the greatly learned translator has translated this 'seal' in the text with a foot-note to say 'tally-stick'.
符
That things can be known a hundred generations distant, implied no supernatural powers, it did imply the durability of natural process which alone gives a possibility for science.
I take it the Mencian affirmation is of a permanent human process. There is no reason for me to tone that down with the phrase 'I take it'. The doctrine is clear. But the effects of the doctrine are startling when Mr. D. tells me he suspects Soothill of modernizing his version of Analects.
Mencius distinguishes a tax from a share, he is for an economy of abundance. Riches are due to exchange. The man who wants to lower the standard of living should end as an earthworm. Simple-lifers are half wits. All this is perfectly clear and utterly non-semitic in the original text.
The Semitic is excess. The Semitic is against ANY scale of values. The Church in the middle ages evolved an hierarchy of values.
It is mere shouting for the home team to pretend that the so-called Christian virtues were invented A.D.I to A.D.32 in Judea.
'If a man died in a ditch Shun felt it as if he had killed him'. This of the Emperor Shun.
'Is there', said Mang Tsze, 'any difference between killing a man with a club and a sword? '
'No,' said King Hwuy.
'Is there any difference between killing him with a sword and with a system of government?'
This is not the Chemin de Velours. There are perfectly good reasons why this philosophy does not get more publicity.
The cabinet ministers who can face it? I know of none in London or Paris.
Greek philosophy was almost an attack upon nature. That sentence cannot stand as it is, but may serve to disturb excessive complacencies.
The school of Kung included intelligence without cutting it from its base.
You can no more fake in this company than you can fake in a science laboratory. But you are not split into fragments. The curse of European thought appeared between the Nichomachean notes and the Magna Moralia. Aristotle (as recorded in the earlier record) began his list of mental processes with TeXne, and the damned college parrots omitted it. This was done almost before the poor bloke was cold in his coffin.
Greek philosophy, and european in its wake, degenerated into an attack on mythology and mythology is, perforce, totalitarian. I mean that it tries to find an expression for reality without over-simplification, and without scission, you can examine a living animal, but at a certain point dissection is compatible only with death. I believe Leibniz felt this, and that Gemisto Pleton felt it.
Without knowing the Book of Rites it would be foolish to talk on Mencius’ position in this regard further than to note what is actually said in his writing. There is an allusion to banishing the spirits of the fields and grain and electing others. I doubt if this is compatible with pejorative superstition. The point relevant to my title is that at no point does the Confucio-Mencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature. The man who pulled up his corn because it didn't grow fast enough, and then told his family he had assisted the grain, is Mencius' parable. The nature of things is good. The way is the process of nature, one, in the sense that the chemist and biologist so find it. Any attempt to deal with it as split, is due to ignorance and a failure in the direction of the will.
Whence the Mencian does not try to avoid concrete application. Marx and Hegel break down when their ideas come to be worked out in conduct. My contention is that you can quite clearly judge what Mencius would have thought of specific situations in our time, and to support this I shall now quote, first from his talks with King Hwuy of Leang:
Your dogs and swine eat the food of men and you do not make any restrictive arrangements.
Your people are dying from famine on the roads and you do not know how to issue stores for them. When they die you say it is owing to the year. How does this differ from killing a man and saying it was not I but the weapon?
and a few lines lower:
Is there any difference between killing a man with the sword or with a system of government? Beasts devour one another... there are fat horses in your stables (while people die of famine)... this is called leading on beasts to devour men.
In another place he defines 'leading on the earth to devour men', that is in a prince’s wars for more territory. 'In the Spring and Autumn there are no righteous wars, some are better than others'. Spring and Autumn is the title of Confucius' history text book.
I have found very curious opinions as to Kung's formalism. L. Vivante recently showed me ‘a horrible reference book’ as he called it, where the condensing ass had cited nothing but details of Kung's behaviour and several rules of formality.
Anyone who had read the text of Kung and Mencius in even a passable translation would know that at no point and on no occasion do such rules ask one to overstep common sense. There are times for politeness and times for prompt action. Discretion in perceiving the when is basic in Confucianism.
There are two elements in the 'rules of propriety'.
A. the expression of finer feelings and a resultant standard of behaviour on occasions when no graver and more impelling circumstance demands their abrogation. This is the permanent part. There is (B) the part relative to the times of Confucius. Certain ceremonies served, I think, as passports, such as the complicated Guard's salute. To-day a man not a guardsman would give himself away if he tried it without preparation.
When you hadn't a telegraph, some of these ceremonies would have served to show the authenticity and also the nature of the man who turned up at the frontier.
The three years mourning is scarcely in the New England blood. It was not universal in China. Mencius justifies it as being more civil and human than allowing one's dead to lie in ditches and be chewed by stray animals. From which he dates the idea of having any burial customs at all. There is no doubt that latins and nordics differ greatly in their feeling for funerals. This is not my prime concern, nor do I introduce it save to protest against taking the Chinese texts on the subject out of focus and out of the Mencian sense of their origin. His ideas on where to begin improving the social order are more to my point and our time.
Therefore an intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that they shall have sufficient to serve their parents, and sufficient wherewith to support their wives and children: that in good years they shall be abundantly satisfied, and in bad years shall escape danger of perishing.
Only men of education can maintain a steady heart without a fixed livelihood.
The steady or fixed heart is part of the directio voluntatis. The commendable have it, and work inside themselves, the uncommendable look out for lucky chances. Permit me a longer quotation from (Book VII) Tsin Sin, i, Chap. 22 & 23.
At fifty warmth cannot be maintained without silks and at seventy flesh is necessary to satisfy the appetite. Persons not kept warm and supplied with food are said to be starved and famished, but among the people of King Wan there were no aged who were starved and famished.
Let it be seen to that their fields of grain and hemp are well cultivated, and make the taxes on them light... so that the people may be made rich.
Let it be seen that the people USE (caps, mine) their resources of food seasonably and expend their wealth on the ceremonies, and they won't be able to exhaust it at that.
The 'ceremonies' here would cover the equivalents for greek drama, and the outlay for latin processions at the feast of the Madonna, etc. They are of the amenities.
People cannot live without water and fire. Knock at a door in the dusk of evening no one will deny you water and fire....
When pulse and grain are as abundant as water and fire, how shall the people be other than humane.
(Here the ideogram for ARETE, entire man.)
仁
The question of tax is here specified. Other passages clearly define the root difference between share and impost. 'Nothing is worse than a fixed tax.' A fixed tax on grain is in bad years a tyranny, a tithe proper, no tyranny. If, as he brings out against the simple lifers, a country cannot do without potters it certainly cannot do without governors. As for an emperor tilling his fields, it is mere shop front, no one ever expected him to make his own clothes as well, in fact, 'is', he asks, 'the imperial function the only business compatible with doing one's ploughing, potters and carpenters being exempt? '
In the conditions of 500 and 400 B.C. if you cut the tithe lower than 10 per cent, you could live only as the 'dog and camp-fire people'. If you raised it above 10 per cent, for traders ana people in the centre of empire and above the NINE FIELDS share system for rurals and border folk, you would have tyranny.
The analogy of the nine fields system to Rossoni's ammassi in present-day Italy is notable.
It is OF the permanence of nature that honest men, even if endowed with no special brilliance, with no talents above those of straightness and honesty, come repeatedly to the same answers in ethics, without need of borrowing each other's ideas.
Shun and Wan had a thousand years between them and when their wills were compared they were as two halves of a tally stick.
節符
From Kung to Mencius a century, and to St. Ambrose another six or so hundred years, and a thousand years to St. Antonino, and they are as parts of one pattern, as wood of a single tree.
The 'Christian virtues' are THERE in the emperors who had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than the body and eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so far as governing the people went, it begins with a livelihood, and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is sheer bunkum and rotten hypocrisy.
The level of civilization recorded in these ideograms is higher than anything in the near eastern tradition.
It is only in the evolved Roman sense of proportion that we find equal sanity.
There is a root difference between ah immoderate demand or a law which takes no account of the nature of things and the Mencian hierarchy of values.
'Our' hierarchy of values shines from the Divina Commedia, or one can at least use that work as a convenient indicator of it. Both the catholic mediaeval and the Chinese hierarchies and senses of proportion are infinitely removed from Semitic immoderation. When Europe flopped from the state of mind of St. Ambrose and St. Antonino into pre-Christian barbarisms we suffered a not inconsiderable setback. The thing we flopped back to is unpleasant. It was and still filthily is usurer’s measure. Let us try to avoid words that could give rise to partizanship and say, you can no more consider Western civilization without the Roman component than you can consider the Orient and leave out the Chinese Imperial order, which already in Kung's time recognized an historic process, including the alternating periods of order and of confusion.
The ethic of Kung and Mencius is not registered in words of irresponsible fanatics. The Semitic component in Christianity is anarchic and irresponsible. Take the record on its face value, it is of a sect in a rebellious and irresponsible province, and for a kingdom, specificly in the words of its founder, not of this world but the next.
The Christian ideal has been recognized as something different, something NOT evolved without Constantine and Justinian and those who built it with them. Civilization consists in the establishment of an hierarchy of values, it cannot remain as a mere division between the damned and the saved ... with alternate wailing and hysterical merriment.
Mencius' sense of responsibility is omnipresent. It is in man to himself. Governing of the Empire was specificly NOT among the sage's desires, or at least not regarded by him as a simple pleasure. Out of office he attends to his own internal order, in office to that of as much of the state as is entrusted to him. But at no moment is he irresponsible. His desideratum: to gather and teach the most intelligent of his contemporaries, unless by good fortune he find a sage from whom he can learn, but in any case not to start teaching prematurely and not to teach his own ignorance.
The alibi of the irresponsible is often a false one, those who say they can do nothing because they lack talent, could at least refrain from deleterious action. This phase of Mencian doctrine has, I think, been grossly exaggerated in our superstition as to the nature of Confucianism. It is set out as the MINIMUM and universal requirement, not as a maximum.
The earlier politico of ammassi was as follows: in a square divided in nine equal parts, the central one was cultivated by the eight surrounding families, and its produce went to the administration, this was commuted to a ten per cent, on central or as you might say in the metropolitan areas where 'things aren't as simple as all that. In irregular country a just equivalence of what would be equal measuring of flat acreage.
Marketing customs similarly equitable. The profit motive is specificly denounced. I mean that you will get no more accurate translation of the ideograms in Mencius' talk with King Hwey than 'profit-motive'.
Mercantilism is incompatible with Mencius. Cheap evasion and evasiveness are impossible anywhere near him.
Naturally men love life. Mencius professes a taste for fish and bears’ trotters, but there is an order of preference. Some things are worth more than others. Life is not above rectitude.
If anyone in calm mind will compare the Four Classics with the greatly publicized hebrew scriptures he will find that the former are a record of civilized men, the latter the annals of a servile and nomadic tribe that had not evolved into agricultural order. It is with the greatest and most tortuous difficulty that the Sunday School has got a moral teaching out of these sordid accounts of lechery, trickery and isolated acts of courage, very fine and such as could be paralleled in the annals of Mohawks and Iroquois. Any sort of objectivity, taking the record as it stands, must arrive at something like this conclusion.
Jehovah is a Semitic cuckoo's egg laid in the European
nest. He has no connection with Dante's god. That later concept of supreme Love and Intelligence is certainly not derived from the Old Testament.
Numerous invasions of China have destroyed several strata of civilization, but this in no way detracts from the Mencian wisdom, nor does even Mr. Lin Yutang's brilliant picture of Chinese folly, which latter is a portrayal of universal stupidity.
In every country idiots treat the branch as the root. If you deprive Confucianism of its essentials among which are the sense of proportion and timeliness, if you take isolated remarks and cut them off wholly and utterly from the rest of the four books, naturally the text can be quoted in defence of five hundred follies.
The Rules of Propriety are to be observed under certain circumstances and at the proper times, obedience and respect have their limits.
Some sort of time focus must be applied.
It may quite well be that Confucius and Mencius are a hormone that could be more vitally effective in the West today than in a China busily engaged in livening up the business of the Acceptance Houses. Apropos which I understand that a living Kung has stated in private conversation that his Most Illustrious Ancestor is now more regarded here than in Pekin. Foreign loans for munitions do not enter the Analects.
When Pih Kwei stated that his irrigation system was better than the Emperor Yu's, Mencius pointed out that the latter had led off the excessive flood water to the sea 'according to the natural law of waters', whereas Pih Kwei had merely dumped his into a neighbouring state. Mencius declined to regard this bit of scaltrezza as an improvement.
I have no doubt that if the Acceptance Houses succeed in piling up a sufficiency of Chinese debt to Europe and then induce hefty or half-starved occidentals to try to collect it, even China might wake and the great final and definitive armageddon, yellow peril, etc. become as actual as our American civil warwas, becauseof the South's debts to our (N.Y.) city.
Naturally if you neglect the root of the Doctrine the rest will wither, and a neglect of its basic wisdom is undoubtedly apparent among the less wise Chinese.
Neither that country nor any other has ever suffered a glut of sages.
'Dead!' said Mencius on hearing that P'wan-shing Kwoh had received a high government post in Ts'e. After execution, a disciple asked M. 'How did you know this would happen?' 'He was a busy fellow', said Mencius, 'with a little talent. Just enough to get himself condemned to the scaffold.'
The 'busy' exists in the four classics with just the shade that has given it a derogative sense in the argot of Edgar Wallace's crooks. Not meaning 'cop' in Chinese but indicating why the crook calls the policeman a busy. A better word than busybody and more aromatic.
If the reader jumps every verb meaning CHANGE or MOVE, if he remains blind to the verbs meaning RENEWAL and neglects every allusion to 'changing what is not good', naturally he can reduce the rest of Mencius and Confucius to a static and inactive doctrine, inactive enough to please even the bank of Basel and our western monopolists. But this would mean excising a great deal of the original text.
In fact it can't be done. You cannot so ignore the bright ideogram for the highest music,
樂 (1) 變
[(1) The central stroke in lower half of this ideogram should be straight not hooked.]
although I believe the dictionaries call it something different, though they all agree that it is connected with motion (I should say river
⻍ (1)
[(1) Used in composition a spart of a sign.]
traffic, but don't want to insist).
This constant pageant of the sun, of process, of the tree with its 'small, white, small' (ideogram 12) does not give any clear-headed spectator the feeling of deadness and stasis.
There are categories of ideogram not indicated as such in the dictionaries, but divided really by the feel of their forms, the twisted as evil, the stunted, the radiant.
The mountain itself has a 'nature' and that nature is to come forth in trees, though men cut and sheep nibble.
Tsin Sin, pt. 1, xxxiii, 2, is our solidest join with Dante. 'What is the scholar’s aim? ' (Scholar here being also officer.) There follows one of the shortest verses, “Mang tse said”, then the sign for “raise” and the sign for "will".
(vide ideogram 4.)
They translate it 'exalt the aim'. This is definitely Dante's directio voluntatis, with no ambiguity possible. The top of the will sign is the scholar-officer sign, and its base the heart. The lifting up is structural.
Nevertheless Dante's 'god above' exists in an ideogram. No one with any visual sense can fail to be affected by the way the strokes move in these characters.
The 'above', Plato's power above the heaven; lateral motion; the tree trunks; the man who stands by his word; the qualities of these signs are basic and no one who does not perceive them can read ideogram save as an ape.
Man, man, man, humanity all over the page, land and trees.
The people who take up one point and spoil the totality 'neglecting a hundred other points' are un-Mencian. They 'lift up and grind one, and hang up and cover a hundred'.
Condensing from the Third book of Mencius (the T'ang Wan Kung) and from other passages, I find the belief that 'without government services distribution and use of resources will be insufficient'. I find definite statement as to what conduces to borrowing, and its results. I find an interesting series of five characters, the meaning of which someone may say that I force.
The first contains the knife radical, plus pearls or precious shell, and certainly means draw an outline, make a pattern of (it is used also as a particle 'derivative from that'). It is followed by wealth, use, not enough.
It might apply to production, but it appears to me to apply equally to the distribution. The 'use' is utterly undodgeable. It does not mean exhaust.
'If he levy a ground tax and do not tax goods or enforce proper regulations without levying tax. . . . Merchants will store goods in his market.' I.e. one OR the other not both.
All through there is the sense of need of a proper (not an improper) income for administrative expenses.
'No tax out of season.' 'No better system than mutual aid, none WORSE than a fixed tax.' A tithe is another matter.
Government's job is to feed the people, that is its FIRST job. (This not to be confused with Kung's 'get the right names'. That 'Ch'ing Ming' is the first step toward conditioning the government to do its work.)
Anyone who mistakes Kung or Mencius for a materialist is a plain unadulterated idiot. Their philosophy is not in the least materialist, it is volitionist.
(1) Arms and defences, (2) food, (3) the faith of the people, if they must be given up, be it in this order.
'Let Mulberry trees be planted about the homesteads with their five mow (land measure) and persons of fifty may be clothed with silk. In keeping fowls pigs and swine let not their times of breeding be neglected, and persons of seventy may eat flesh. Let there not be taken away the time that is proper for the cultivation of the farm with its hundred mow, and the family of 8 mouths that is supported by it shall not suffer from hunger. Let there be careful attention to education in schools...
All this is on an infinitely higher level than Mosaic lex talionis. It is all out, over, and above the balderdash that was inflicted on my generation of Christians.
I am not inveighing against the best Christian ethic or against the quality of Western mind shown in Bishop Grosseteste's treatise on light. I am against the disorderly tendencies, the anarchy and barbarism which appear in poor Christian teaching, fanaticism and superstition; against the lack of proportion and failure of objectivity when dealing with texts extant, and, naturally, against the insularity which credits Byron with having invented a kind of writing that had been used by Pulci.
But if we are ever to communicate with the orient, or cohabit a planet rapidly becoming more quickly circum-navigable, had we not better try to find the proportions, try perhaps to collect some of our own better writers (of the ages) to present to our oriental contemporaries, rather than offer them an unmixed export of grossness, barbarities, stove pipes and machine guns? Several young men in Tokio seem pleased to meet Cavalcanti. I have no doubt that even the Ten Remnants [A title given to several elderly gentlemen of the Empress Dowager's time, now, alas, disappearing] could have found something admirable in our tradition had it been more tactfully shown them.
Lady Hosie's introduction to a recent reprint tells us that the Four Classics 'have been relegated to University study and are no longer the main preoccupation of Chinese schools'. She dates the essay 1937, which year has brought the natural consequence of unusual idiocy in the form of Japanese invasion. If China had got to this point, naturally there would be an invasion, and quite naturally some Chinese would, as they do, hold the view that such an invasion is to be welcomed.
Lady Hosie, M.A. Cantab., regards the degradation as temporary. Tuan Szetsun is old. Certainly a nucleus of sanity exists in China. The West needs the Confucian injection.
The Four Books have survived Ch'in Shih Huang (the gorilla who ordered these books to be destroyed) and China was not effaced by that pimple.
The blots of my correction are not dry on this quotation from Lady Hosie before a still later bulletin confirms an old belief to the effect that any order in China proceeds from a Confucian centre. Chang Kai Shek 'the Christian general' and the one man who got a little order out of chaos took to using Confucian slogans a little too late, thereby confirming another text of the philosopher.
I am not in this essay trying to give a modern Chinese feeling about the effects of such Confucianism as survived in China in 1900, and Mr. Lin Yutang will probably admit that the citizen of a chaos which has long lacked a certain code of ideas and perceptions is bound to see that code differently from the citizen of a chaos wherein such ideas have long been abused.
I am putting the original text against Semitic insanity and against Socrates. If the shoving of it into University study in China were intended to bring it with fresh impact on to more
thoughtful minds??... if... but was it? and is, in any case,
the adolescent any fitter to receive it than the child?
Obviously Mr. Yutang knows its worst side — Obviously certain practices come to us dated China 500 B.C. and we brush very lightly over them. They have not affected our lives and cannot. Seven inch planks for one's coffin or cremation is all pretty much one to us.
In any case there are or were practices. Soaking our occidental selves in the quite clearly illuminated principles of Confucius would hardly bring us out into certain Chinese forms. In fact, for us to take up odd rites would be, as it were, 'sacrificing to a spirit which does not belong to us, ' and therefore against Mencian and Confucian good taste, anyhow.
I do not see the abuse as inherent in the principle of Confucius, whereas the Semitic is schizophrenic essentially. People who talk about 'something deeper in their nature' which laid the Chinese open to Buddhism, seem to me to have failed lamentably to LOOK at the Mencian text.
In any case I am dealing with ethics and not with cosmology, imaginary, pneumatic, or 'scientific', granting that Mencius hadn't the Western female to deal with and that the captious may think he over simplifies in this domain, or rather avoids it, though he can't be said to deny its importance. But the abuses of the 'system', mentioned by descriptive writers, are incompatible with the root. This I don't propose to argue save with someone who has passed the Pythagorean time of silence. The putting order inside oneself first, cannot be omitted from Confucian-Mencian practice if that is to be valid. Any other course is sheer fake.
Faith without works is fake, and the Mencian suggestion is that one should act right before formulating the axiom tried in act, and thereafter follow it.
The ethic of Confucius and Mencius is a Nordic ethic, a Nordic morale, if it has been boggit in laissez faire and tropical indolence that cannot be blamed on its shape. It is not quietistic. It is concentrated in the Mencian parable: 'An Archer having missed the bullseye does NOT turn round and blame someone else. He seeks the cause in himself.'
Mencius is very difficult to summarize, yet as Legge cannot be suspected of collusion with credit cranks and new orthologic economists I add a few sentences and phrases from his version:
'Resources arising from government,' that is to say the increment of association. So far as I know this is the earliest clear formulation of it.
'If a man can prevent the evils of hunger and thirst from being any evils to his mind...'
'Hostile states do not correct one another.'
'The way of the people is this: if they have a certain livelihood they will have a fixed heart. If they have not a fixed livelihood . . . there is nothing they will not do in the way of... moral deflection.'
'What leisure have they to cultivate propriety and righteousness?' 'Only men of education are able to maintain a fixed heart without a certain livelihood.'
To treat the needy as criminals is not governing decently, it is merely trapping them.