For some reason, heading out for a 5 week trip to South East Asia, I retrieved my 1972 copy of Herbert Fingarette’s classic study of Confucianism to take with me: Confucius–The Secular as Sacred.  There was some motivation to it of course.  While Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia are overwhelmingly Therevada Buddhist, Vietnam mixes large dollops of Buddhism with Confucianism and even Catholicism, along with strong pieties to ancestors, not present else where.  I thought it would be interesting to try again to understand this powerful non-religious belief system of the Chinese, and in some measure account for the acknowledged differences between the Vietnamese and their neighbors.

As it turns out, reading it has been a marvelous counterpoint to the omnipresent Buddhism of the places we have been staying — in which behavior is constantly shaped by belief in merit, devotion, luck and the intervention of the Buddha or any number of deities of one origin or another, depending on the locale and even town or particular temple. Explanations for success and failure are constantly attributed to events and relationships in past lives, not –as Confucius would have it– to proper execution of the li.

What Finagarette does in his short (79 pages) essay is take apart the prevailing and by then received translations of The Analects (by Whaley, Creel and others) to argue that Confucius had nothing of the psychological or interior concerns regarding motivation and belief — inherent in Buddhism or western morality.  His was a behavioral analysis, not about guilt, retribution and punishment but about disruptions to the li, the vast interlocking puzzle of human conventions and ritual.

…his references to the ‘inside’ and to the ‘private’ are always by way of locating one source of sickness, lack of moral development.  Success, the positive characterization of moral development, is always a matter of objective comportment — of the reciprocal good faith and respect expressed specifically and concretely in the li.

His template for ritual behavior is the handshake, which he uses to illustrate how form and action come together to give participants a sense of each other, through a ritual rightly (or wrongly) done.  As he develops this idea of the li he takes from contemporary notions of speech-acts, in which speech is not simply commentary but an act itself, as when an authorized person says “I now pronounce you husband and wife” to show that all human intercourse is convention based.  It is in the proper carrying out of these conventions that we become most human.

Virtue does not exist in isolation; there must be neighbors.  Man is transformed by participation with others in ceremony which is communal.  Until he is so transformed he is not truly man but only potentially so…

It is a strange notion for a westerner, saturated with psychological views of life, attributions to the ego and the id of our behavior and attempts to change through mediation, mind-work and spiritual development what we think and feel, to even consider that all of this may be not only superfluousness but a distraction to the full experience of being human

Even stranger is that Confucius, for all his concern with moral conduct, seems to have no concern with what is central to Abrahamic religions — guilt.

…the ground for guilt is some immoral act or betrayal of someone other than oneself  but the object of guilt is oneself. Ultimately, guilt is an attack upon oneself, whereas shame [of the Confucius teaching] is is an attack upon some specific action or outer condition.  Shame is a matter of ‘face,’ of embarrassment, of social condition.  Shame says ‘change your ways you have lost honor or dignity.’  Guilt says, ‘change yourself, you are infected..’

Of course Confucianism has a reputation for being deeply conservative, for enforcing filial piety and ancient strictures on behavior, blocking any advance into modernism with all its innovations — to which a good Confucianist would happily plead guilty, but with a caveat.  It is only in the perfection of adherence to the li in which we are fully realized and li, being ritual, has deep roots.  However, it is by renewing, constantly, our relation to the li that we renew society itself, becoming new.  Old rites turned into new, as it were.

I’m not making an argument for its rightness as a code of living, but for the intriguing textual analysis Fingarette made, showing how translations and interpretations of Confucius had led readers astray, attributing psychological concerns to Confucius where none could have existed.

It is double interesting in observing the rituals in the many Buddhist temples I have been in, how the two systems of moral behavior overlap.  While the devotee may believe her offerings of food, money, prayers are necessary communications, received by the Buddha, they are also highly ritualized.  Even if there is no Buddha or deity listening, the li, the rite, may be shaping the believer in good relations with others.

A fascinating set of ideas.  You’d be well repaid by chewing them over.