CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY AND WESTERN CULTURE
It is not realised in the West how much the modern movement in Japan
owes its power and vitality to a native movement which welcomed change.
In Japan Buddhism had failed, the one school of Confucianism which
believed in change was dominant, and therefore it was a comparatively
easy matter to introduce the extensive changes of Western civilisation.
There was no religion with roots deeply entwined in the hearts of the
people to oppose such a change. Shintoism had not yet been
rediscovered and established, and it consisted merely of a mass of
superstition, without any literature or organisation. Thus it was the
combination of these facts, with the threatening attitude of Western
powers, which made all the prophecies of men who knew the East untrue.
No one understood the vital power of the movement in Japan. If, thirty
years ago, some one had written a book to prove that Japan would one
day defeat Russia, people would have laughed at the suggestion, and the
authority of people who had lived in the East all their lives would
have been quoted to prove that an Eastern race could never fully accept
Western civilisation. The prophets were misled by {164} the precedent
of India and Turkey. The Western civilisation is met there by
religions whose tenets are opposed to Western thought, and as long as
those religions hold, Western views will make but small progress; but
in Japan there was no such religion, and in China to-day there is no
such religion. The Buddhism of China, like the Buddhism of Japan, may
satisfy the cravings for spiritual religion of the uneducated and the
ignorant; but the thinkers of both races--the statesmen, the writers,
the leaders--are uninfluenced by Buddhism. Taoism has contributed to
the thought and superstition of China, but is in no way now an
important factor in her development; the philosophy of Confucius is the
one vital force in the land.
Its doctrines are in no way opposed to our civilisation; it teaches
mainly that a man must be sincere to his own higher nature; it has a
profound belief in the greatness of human nature, and a very inadequate
explanation, therefore, of the failures of that nature. That man must
be sincere, so that the full beauty of his nature may appear, is one of
its main tenets, and that this beautiful thing must be decorated with
knowledge is a natural corollary. It undertakes the reform of the
world, by convincing the ruler of his duty, and through him compelling
the ruled to tread the right path, contrasting here very strongly with
the religion of our Bible, though perhaps not with political
Christianity. All through its teaching there is an underlying
suggestion that {165} subjects will obey their rulers not only
outwardly but also inwardly in their opinions and convictions.
Confucianism does not believe in government by the people, of the
people, for the people; but it believes very strongly in government for
the people by the rulers. Many of its maxims might be cut out as
texts, and hung up in the House of Commons with great appropriateness.
It constantly pictures a well-ordered peaceful state, in which the
dignity of government is well maintained, and where the working-man
shall profit by his work through justice and peace, and the trader grow
rich in confident security. In all this teaching it is not opposed to
Western civilisation. Confucius advocates the reform of society by the
action of the State. Thus the sanitary laws, the education laws, the
temperance laws of the West are thoroughly consistent with the teaching
of Confucius. Where that teaching differs from the West is that it
disbelieves in democracy. Yet Confucianism cares nothing for a man's
birth: all men are born equal to the Confucianist as to the Christian;
and so Confucianism has, for many centuries, welcomed people of the
lowest birth as Governors, if they could pass the requisite
examinations, and, having given every opportunity to men of all classes
to become officials, it entrusts them and not the people with the
government of the country.
In another way Confucianism is opposed to Western civilisation.
Confucianism believes intensely in the dignity of government; their
classics are full {166} of examples of people who, at the risk of their
lives, defied kings and maintained the dignity of their positions; and
this doctrine of dignity is consequently very deeply ingrained in
Chinese thought; it is in reality the base of that curious doctrine of
"face" by which a man will do anything rather than confess that he is
wrong. A great missionary recounts how his wonderful work at Tientsin
was once threatened with destruction because a boy from the south of
China knocked a boy from the north off his bicycle, with the result
that the college was soon divided into two factions on the question as
to who should pay for the injured bicycle. The matter was only with
difficulty arranged by the President paying for the bicycle and
charging it to the guilty boy; but the boy did not mind paying--he
minded confessing that he was wrong. There was another case in this
same college where a boy had been induced to confess privately his
sorrow that he had wilfully insulted a master. He was prepared to
suffer expulsion rather than confess his fault openly. He was
miserable at the prospect of leaving the college, and when a great
appeal was made to his better feelings to say that he was sorry, he
shook his head sadly. At last he was asked, "Have you never allowed
you were wrong in your whole life?" "No," he said, with a look of
pride, "_never_." Odious and detestable as this doctrine is in private
life, I think I have the authority of St. Augustine for saying that it
is a maxim of good government that however wrong an {167} order may be,
a superior should not confess his error, so necessary is this doctrine
of dignity to government. Thus the Chinese expression "face" has been
commonly accepted as a good English expression when speaking about
governments.
No doubt it is this sense of dignity which gives such authority to the
Chinese official. In many ways it may be an element of weakness. I
was surprised to learn that the officials in the Yamen had never been
in the shops of the city; it is beneath their dignity. Goods are
brought to them and they buy in their own houses. For instance we were
told how in Changsha two patriotic bas-reliefs were put up in a shop,
one of them representing the Westerns bringing tribute to the Emperor
of China, and the other depicting a Western woman, chained and
dishevelled, being led in as a slave. Of course our very excellent and
most efficient representative, Consul Hewlett, made instant
representation to the Governor and the objectionable figures were
removed; but the Chinese officials claimed that they were completely
ignorant of what was happening in the shops of the town, because they
never went there.
It is obvious that this high estimation of dignity makes much of
Western government antipathetic to a Chinaman; he cannot sympathise
with a civilisation which admires government by noisy agitation, vulgar
posters, indecent journalism. Such an agitation as that in favour of
women's suffrage is inconceivable and disgusting beyond words to the
mind of {168} a Chinese thinker; that women, whose dignity is such that
they should never be tried in a public court; that educated ladies,
whose names, in China, must scarcely be mentioned owing to their
exalted position, should wrestle in a public crowd and be arrested, is
one of those mysteries in Western government that the dignified Eastern
mind can never hope to understand.
Confucianism, considered by itself, is not unfavourable to Western
civilisation, and its great influence in China will no doubt largely
accelerate the Westernisation of that vast empire. For instance, the
policy of education is one which has been followed by China for many a
long year; all that the Chinese are doing is to alter the object of
that education. It used to aim at giving men a complete knowledge of
the Chinese classics; now it aims at giving them in addition a
knowledge of the West and of natural sciences; and so such an eminent
Confucian scholar and such an ardent Conservative as the late
Chang-Chih-Tung was the foremost advocate for a Western education.
Again the development of the Press on Western lines takes place rapidly
in China, where newspapers have long been known, and which boasts of
being a country possessing the oldest newspaper in the world, the
_Peking Gazette_. Translations of Western literature issued by the
Christian Literature Society are read with avidity by a race that
esteems literature highly, no matter with what subject it deals, {169}
and who has no worse an epithet for one of its emperors than
"book-burner."
Though Confucianism is not antipathetic to Western civilisation as a
whole, and by its philosophy and literature encourages education in
Western ideas, yet those ideas will, I fear, be fatal to that mighty
system of ethics that has kept China together, and has enabled her to
conquer her conquerors so many times. The countries that have never
known Confucius are succeeding far better than the countries that have
been taught by him. The fact that he always claimed that any race who
followed his teaching would be prosperous, coupled with the fact that
China, with her splendid resources and immense population, is far
poorer and weaker than nations who know nothing of his teaching, is
sufficient to bring its own condemnation to this philosophy. There is
a marked difference in the teaching of Christianity and Confucianism in
this respect. Christianity, by the example of its founder, teaches
that the world must be reformed through the individual; and that the
destruction of a State, whether it be Jerusalem or Rome, is only a
painful incident in the upward advance of mankind. If every Western
State were destroyed, the true Christian would only pause longer over
his reading of the prophet Jeremiah; but when China, the home of
Confucianism, realises her powerlessness in the face of the West, in
sorrow and regret she will close the books of Confucius, as the books
that guided the {170} State to destruction, even though that teaching
was pleasant and beautiful.
A great Chinaman realised that this was the position of Japan, and told
me that he did not believe that in Japan any one really believed in
Buddhism or in Confucianism or in the new-found Shintoism; and that, as
they had not yet accepted Christianity, they were in a state, odious to
the Western and Eastern alike, of being without moral guidance in this
world. The position of Japan to-day will, in all probability, be, both
in regard to the constructive and destructive effects of Western
civilisation, the condition of China to-morrow, unless indeed
Christianity can fill the vacant place in Chinese thought. Never
before has such an opportunity been presented to the Christian world as
this vast mass of population included under the name of China, left
homeless by the action of world thought.
Those millions of people, for instance, who yearn for a spiritual
religion, and who have found in times past some comfort in the confused
and corrupt faith of Chinese Buddhism, are now ready with open ears to
listen to any one who is prepared to teach them a higher and more
spiritual religion. The Confucian scholar who realises the debt that
China owes to the teaching of the sage, and yet who feels that Western
civilisation is sapping his authority and leaving China without a moral
guide, welcomes readily the teaching of the moral philosopher who is
prepared to show that Confucianism is essentially {171} right and has
evidence of Divine truth within it, but that it only errs in not
realising that the complete salvation of man can only be accomplished
by those who appeal to his spiritual nature as well as to his moral
sentiments.
If Christianity conquers China, one of her first actions will be to
reinstate Confucius in the position from which Western materialism has
dethroned him; but the task would be infinitely easier if Christians
could take effective action at once. Every day that passes makes the
position more difficult. Every Confucian scholar who shuts up his
books and opens the books of the materialistic philosopher of the West,
will prove an additional obstacle in the way of the Christianisation of
China. The great danger is that the West, ignorant of what is
happening in the East, will let this opportunity pass and allow Western
materialism to establish itself as a force in China, as it has
established itself as a force in Japan. The world is full of examples
of lost opportunities; let us hope that China will not have to be added
to that sad category.
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