A History of the World (16 page)

But it involved a pacifist and tolerant attitude, which made it a public matter, not simply a private practice; and it was open to everyone, of whatever past creed or social position or race. In the centuries after the Buddha’s death his followers tapped into attitudes already present in Indian thinking – the renunciation of wealth and power, vegetarianism, pacificism – and extended them into a ‘do unto others’ creed. By contrast, Christianity would become intertwined with the very worldly and aggressive power of the later Roman Empire, and Islam would arm itself even more dramatically.

Buddhism was indeed different. In essence, it was a radical rejection of everything that goes to make up what we call history – earthly empires, developing technological skill, changing political systems and ideas. The Buddha says, Walk away from all that, and instead look
inside yourself. So it is hardly surprising that, with one exception we shall come to later, Buddhism rarely features as a history-shaping system of belief. This does not mean it was not hugely influential. It spread to the countries of South-East Asia, where superbly elaborate Buddhist temples and courts would emerge, under the patronage of Buddhist kings. The influence of Buddhist monks and art in China was huge, and it spread from there to Korea and to Japan, where the story of its early art seems at times almost completely a Buddhist one. Buddhism would be persecuted in most of these places. It did not, however, produce a political or imperial system of its own; the Buddha would have been aghast if it had.

In India itself, Buddhism would later be almost exterminated until modern times, and it was only under the Victorian British Raj that the Buddha’s existence as a real, historical figure came to be acknowledged. All the same, it remains a very important belief system. Bodhgaya, where the haggard former aristocrat meditated his way to enlightenment under the fig tree, is today perhaps the most attractive of the pilgrimage sites of the world’s great religions. Calm, smiling, saffron- and plum-shrouded monks and nuns from Thailand, Burma and Sri Lanka chant under the shadow of an ancient temple. There is a refreshing air of cheerfulness, and the religious tat is more meagre, cheaper and less obtrusive than in Rome, Jerusalem or (I suspect) Mecca.

What, meanwhile, of the even greater contemporary civilization to the east of India?

Kongzi’s Mid-life Crisis

Aged fifty-four, a middle-ranking bureaucrat in a failing, riven state had had enough. He resigned as minister for law and order, said goodbye to most of his friends and went off on a thirteen-year ramble. This was not a Buddhist search for solitude and enlightenment, but a political journey. After visiting many rival states and finding little employment, the civil servant came home again, amused and rueful at his relative failure. By the time he died, he had attracted a small group of friends and followers. The career of Kong Fuzi, or Kongzi, or ‘Confucius’ (in the Latinized version of his name made appealing to
faltering Western lips by Jesuit missionaries two thousand years later), was hardly stellar.

Yet his influence was huge. For good or ill, Confucius was treated as a kind of god by scores of Chinese emperors, and had a huge effect on Chinese life. Reviled by Mao Zedong and the original Communists, in the year 2012 his influence is growing again as new generations of Chinese search for values beyond threadbare Communism or materialism. A state-sponsored and fairly dreadful film has been made about his life. In the central Confucian temple in Beijing – one of around three thousand such temples – where emperors once worshipped the thinker, small children, sent by parents anxious to impart something more than mere facts, are again being taught his ideas.

Depending on one’s view of the row about Buddha’s dates, the two men were alive at roughly the same time. The Chinese were more careful with records, and we believe Kongzi lived from 551 to 479
BC
. Like Siddhartha, he was born in a marginal state and at a time of civil strife and war, in which the old order was being challenged. If India had her yellow-robed forest ‘seekers’, China had her wandering philosophers, by tradition hundreds of them. Like the Buddha, Kongzi communed with rulers without coming under anyone else’s sway; like the Buddha he preached the importance of doing unto others as you would like them to do to you; like the Buddha he never came close to asserting his own divinity. But he too would later become the focus of a semi-religion that elevated him into mythical status.

Kongzi’s China was divided, like the Buddha’s India and golden-age Greece, into rival states. After his death it too would plunge into vicious local wars. Instead of Athens, Corinth, Sparta, Panchala, Maghada, Sakla and the rest, China had the states of Wei, Zhou, Song, Han and Chu. But politically, China was if anything even more chaotic. The chronicles for the time list more than 140 states, whose rulers and priests behaved in ways that contemporary Greeks, Persians or Indians would have understood. They tried to divine the future by reading the cracks on the burned shoulder-bones of cows, or the undershells of turtles, which was no sillier than the Greek habit of listening to the ramblings of women who had inhaled poisonous vapours, or the Roman penchant for fingering chicken entrails.

What made China different was that it had been united. This was the source of Kongzi’s deep conservative romanticism about a lost
past. The states of Kongzi’s time were themselves the shattered shell fragments of a much greater China, that of the Zhou dynasty which had lasted for more than seven centuries, following the fall of the Shang. Chinese imperial history can sound impenetrable to outsiders, but at this stage the story is pretty straightforward. The Shang were the first historically certain dynasty, following the cloudy story of the Xia and Da Yu.

Shang China was, like early India, a much wilder place than it later became, with extensive forests and impassable marshes, not yet drained for rice. Where Chinese civilization probably first took root, along the Yellow River, roaming animals included tigers, bears, elephants, rhinos and panthers; the climate was fierce, with cold winters and very hot summers, as well as the regular flooding. Shang society was, again, in some ways like early Aryan India, an aristocratic and warrior hierarchy setting much store by raiding and hunting, living off the backs of an impoverished peasantry.

Like the Assyrians and Persians, the Shang fought from chariots and used powerful bows. A cascade of subkings, dukes, local rulers and fighters derived their position from the emperor. Their cities and fortresses were built with walls which, when dug up today, are still sharp-edged and hard. They had wooden buildings in the same longeaved and rectangular pattern of later Chinese architecture. (The wood eventually gave way to brick and the thatched roofs were mimicked in yellow and green glazed tiles, but the essentials remained for a remarkably long time, China being untouched by the imported styles and hybrids that gave European architecture such diversity.) After lives spent in their square, pillared country homes, the Shang nobility were given lavish burials, with superb bronze vessels, silks and lacquered coffins. They were addicted to human sacrifice, and huge numbers of servants and prisoners seem to have been murdered and partly dismembered to keep Shang aristocrats company on the way to the afterlife.

It was not all dark. Under the Shang, extensive terraces were built for agriculture, land was cleared and more canals were dug. Remarkably, a script of at least four thousand characters, found written on diviners’ animal bones, bears enough resemblance to modern Chinese for archaeologists to be able to read some of it straight off. Shang culture looks in many respects like the world of the Aztecs, with their
human sacrifices and complex, gnarled art. Just as in central America, an attractive human-scale ‘folk art’ had given way to ever more complex, severe, encrusted ritual designs, which seem to mirror the more forbidding society developing in cities and palaces.
²⁰
Shang bronzes are particularly famous, quite extraordinary achievements in casting. But they inspire only admiration; they are not appealing.

The Shang were ousted by the long-lasting Zhou, and it is to them that Kongzi looked back with dazzled admiration. One historian says that the Shang deserved to go: ‘Drunkenness, incest, cannibalism, pornographic songs and sadistic punishments enliven the catalogue of liturgical improprieties.’
²¹
The man who more than any other put an end to such poor behaviour was the headmasterly Duke of Zhou. His older brother won a great victory over the Shang around 150 years after the siege of Troy, at a site called Muye, but had then retired home and died. Since the king’s son was too young to take over, the duke led a regency council, which eventually overwhelmed the earlier dynasty and established the Zhou as its replacement under ‘the Mandate of Heaven’.

This is an important concept in Chinese history. As a new ruling family from the edge of Shang China, the Zhou had to tread carefully. They needed continuity to keep the loyalty of the followers of the ousted dynasty. Later dynasties would have the same problem. So the Duke of Zhou declared that the Zhou were merely the tools used by a just Heaven to punish the Shang. Given this job by Heaven, the deal required that the new king must be reverent and kind. The duke said: ‘As he functions as king, let him not, because the common people stray and do what is wrong, then presume to govern them by harsh punishments . . . In being king, let him take his position in the primacy of virtue. The little people will then pattern themselves on him throughout the world.’
²²

This was a crucial doctrine for Kongzi. A virtuous king produces a virtuous people. Thus begins a chain of obligation and mutual service. If everyone acts according to their role, trying to be whatever they are – mother, baker, teacher, soldier – as well as they can, then the good life and the good society emerge. ‘Knowing your place’ is a positive social virtue, not merely submissiveness. This is a family-based and profoundly anti-individualistic way of thinking; but if we, in our extremely (and excessively) individualistic culture do not try to
understand it, we have no chance of understanding Kongzi, or Chinese history, or indeed today’s China either.

After explaining the Mandate of Heaven to the people, the Duke of Zhou stood down and handed back control to the rightful king, his nephew – a modest gesture rare in the Chinese story. Kongzi spoke a lot about the duke. The heyday of the Zhou dynasty was for him and his generation a little like the age of lost heroes was for the Greeks of the same time. But by his day the system devised by the Zhou, which had parcelled out the Chinese heartland into subsidiary principalities, had completely broken down. The principalities, with their own cities, became effectively hereditary, then started to harden into rival independent states. One historian puts it beautifully: the House of Zhou ‘now burned only as a wraithlike source of ultimate authority in a world where all the states and principalities had freely entered into a struggle for survival . . . bonds of lineage and loyalty were losing their hold’.
²³
The time in short, was out of joint. Kongzi would come to think that he was born to set it right.

He was born, apparently, in Chanping village in the Lu kingdom. Lu’s connections with the failing dynasty were particularly poignant; the Duke of Zhou himself had returned to run Lu after handing back control of China. So Lu was a rare, loyal vassal of the Zhou, or meant to be. It is said that Kongzi’s father was a famous warrior and strongman called Zou He, who married a ‘woman of the Yan clan’ and made love to her ‘in the wilds’, or by some accounts on a sacred mound in the forest. The boy was born with a deformed head, either a lump on the skull or a depression, and a strangely sunken face.
²⁴
He grew up to be notably tall. In the China of the time, he might well have been abandoned to die. That he was not may explain Kongzi’s lifelong devotion to his mother. His father died early, and though he could claim the status of gentleman, just about, Kongzi seems to have had a tough start.

In the
Analects
, or collected sayings, which provide the most authentic-sounding record of Kongzi himself, he says: ‘I was poor and from a lowly station; that is why I am skilful in many menial things.’ He was educated, however, and managed to make a career working for the struggling and divided Lu state. He was a keeper of livestock and grain for the family of Lu’s chief counsellor, then became minister of public works, then minister of crime (or law and order). Kongzi
married, though little is known of his wife, and he may have divorced her. Since he robustly mocked writers who made up things they did not know, we had better watch our step. The later Chinese historian Sima Qian says Kongzi was actually quite a successful civil servant. Under his regime, ‘lamb and pork sellers stopped charging inflated prices, men and women walked on opposite sides of the street and no one picked up things left on the road’.
²⁵

At this point, we need to confront what is the biggest obstacle to a modern appreciation of Kongzi – his obsession with ritual and the correct performance of rites. The rites governed funerals, celebrations, daily meals and meetings between people of different stations: it has been estimated that a properly educated gentleman had to obey some 3,300 rules. What we know of this period comes from a sparely written history of Lu, mainly diplomatic, called
The Spring
and Autumn Annals
, which may have been written by Kongzi himself; and from the
Zuo Commentary
on them.

‘Spring and Autumn’ was merely a contemporary poetic way of saying ‘a year’, or ‘annual’, but it is now the way this entire period of Chinese history is named. The chronicles are heavily concerned with proper authority, status, procedure and rites; and for Kongzi getting the rites right was of paramount importance, as already mentioned. It was probably a failure to apportion the ritually correct amount of meat after a sacrifice that led to him storming out of his job and taking to the road; and when his mother died he insisted on the full set of rites, old-fashioned and expensive as they were. He mourned her for three years.