Thoughts on a Shrinking World, Mass Migration, and Changing Customs

Under the Mongol dynasty in China, the Yuan, unprecedented numbers of Westerners -- Uyghurs, Tibetans, Turkestanis, Persian, Arabs, Russians, Ossetians, Armenians, and even the odd Frank, like Marco Polo -- migrated to the country. Once they migrated there, receiving high position in the Mongol-run administration, many, if not most, stayed, and their sons and grandsons began adopting Chinese customs.

The attitude of Chinese to this differed. Leaving aside a small cranky minority in South China who still maintained loyalty to the defunct Song dynasty, most Chinese scholars were proud that people were coming from all over the world and converting to Chinese ways. But what about those who changed their surnames and customs to adopt those of China? Was that a good thing? Some thought that truly filial and Confucian Westerners would not change their family name and hence insult their ancestry as something to be gotten over. Others thought it was natural for people to change their name and customs when entering a new world.

Here is a sample of viewpoints on this phenomenon drawn from Chinese-language essays of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The source is Chen Yuan's Western and Central Asian in China Under the Mongols, translated by Qian Xinghai/Ch'ien Hsing-hai and L. Carrington Goodrich. (I have modernized the spelling, but I haven't necessarily referred to the original Chinese to check, so I cannot vouch for the correctness of each phrase or terminology.)

Wang Li in his Linyuan ji, thought it showed how the Mongol Yuan dynasty has expanded the brotherhood of man.

The language and tastes of the people of the Western Regions differ from those of the Chinese. Although since the days of Han and Tang intermarriage has occurred, still each retained his own racial allegiance and could not live permanently in the other's domain. How could those born in the lands of the West be interred in Jiangnan [the lower Yangtze area]. Now under our imperial house of the Yuan, when the foundation of the empire was being laid, the people of the Western Regions rendered valuable service. By the time of the Renovating Founder [that is, Qubilai/Kubla Khan], the land with the Four Seas had become the territory of one family, civilization had spread everywhere, and no more barriers existed. For people in search of fame and wealth in north and south, a journey of a thousand li was like a trip next door, while a journey of ten thousand li constituted just a neighborly jaunt. Hence among Western people who served at court, or who studied in our south-land, many forgot the region of their birth, and took delight in living among our rivers and lakes. As they settled down in China for a long time, some became advanced in years, their families grew, and being far from home, they had no desire to be buried in their fatherland. Brotherhood among peoples has certainly reached a new plane (p. 252).

Liu Yin in his Jingxiu wenji thought the custom of changing one's surnames to fit Chinese models a sign of bad morals. The Guli family of the Jurchen (a people of Manchuria, ancestors of the later Manchus) had taken on the Wu surname, and Liu Yin comments:

When I heard this, I said that this was a great mistake. The family surname had been received by the clan's forefathers and handed down to posterity, and the lineage should not be confused in the slightest degree. . . . They have of their own volition cut off their own roots, and allied themselves with another family. This is indolence and drifting with the current (p. 236).

Other critics like Wu Hai in his Wengaozhai ji, blamed this on careerism. Officials would receive surnames from the government and would not refuse them, lest doing so impede their careers:

The idea was that the new family name, bestowed by the Son of Heaven, could not be refused; while the old name had been handed down by his ancestors and should not be discarded. [A friend of his had showed him his genealogy, where he had listed both family names, old and new, side by side]. Hence both were retained. The moral sense of the people at present is enfeebled. People are bent on acquiring official position and wealth. Some have willingly sacrificed their ancestral heritage and adopted that of this country in order thereby to gain promotion in their careers. Is there one who has accepted a surname bestowed on him and yet is reluctant to give up the old one? On glancing over this genealogical record I could not but feel regretful. One may hope that people who have given up their forefathers may take a look at this record, be moved by it, and change their course of action (p. 237).

Others, like Song Lian in his eulogy of Pu Bo, a Muslim whose family settled in S. China, argued that when situations change, culture should change too:

The people in countries of the Western Regions had no family names; they were known rather by the tribes to which they belonged. They were unsophisticated and their affairs simple; as a consequence, it was easy for them to get along in this way. As to Master Pu [Pu Bo, a man of the Muslim Arghun people of Inner Mongolia], his family lived for three generations in regions of China known for their culture [i.e. in the Lower Yangtze]. He equipped himself with understanding of the History and the Odes [books in the classical Chinese canon] and put into practice the principles of our rites and rules of propriety. His old name he kept, however, which is not as it should be. On consultation with fellow officials and scholars he adopted Pu as his surname. In former times when the people of rank of northern Dai [northern Shanxi, on the northern edge of China proper] followed the rulers of the Northern Wei [a early Mongolic dynasty of the fifth-sixth century AD] and pushed down into Henan, they all followed Chinese customs, changing their three and four syllable names to those of one syllable, and in other respects adopting Chinese ways. The step taken now by Mr. Pu coincides with ancient principles and current practice. Were he not a man of unusual insight, he would not have seen this. Those who abide by ordinary practice might say that their forefathers did not introduce the change. That is because they are unqualified to talk about accommodation [or changing to conform]
(p. 240).

Wu Chen praised Shadi, with the courtesy name Xingzhe, for the adoption of the Chinese system of given names (ming) and courtesy names (zi), the later bestowed by respected colleagues or teachers. He was a member of a sayyid (descendant of Muhammad) family from Central Asia which settled in Yuan China and achieved high position, :

In remote antiquity, people had given names, but no courtesy names -- a sign of their simplicity. In ancient times people had both given names and courtesy names -- a sign of their culture. Within the nine provinces [of China], civilization was emphasized, as it was in medieval times and thereafter. Outside the nine provinces simplicity was stressed, just as it had been in remote antiquity. This difference in practice has existed throughout the ages. The domain of the reigning [Mongol Yuan] dynasty is the most extensive one of all times. All countries, both those within and without the nine provinces are in this domain and form one household. Each having its own customs, it has not been possible to unify them . . . . [Wu Chen then describes how he was given a courtesy name by his fellow officials] What is commendable in this Chinese custom is that the rules of what is right and proper, as laid down by the Duke of Zhou and Confucius, are admirable. Whoever esteems the rules of the Duke of Zhou and Confucius should follow them. Those who think highly of them but fail to follow them are untrue to civilization; they esteem culture, but are false to it. This is not like the genuineness of esteeming simplicity . . . (p. 228).

For others, the answer was to adopt a surname that had some connection with one's ancestry, thus preserving both a justifiable loyalty to one's ancestry and a fitting appreciation of culture. The Xie family of Uyghurs, for example, chose a rare form of this name due to its use in the Chinese transcription of Selengge, the river in Mongolia where his ancestors had come from centuries earlier. Xie Chaowu's name was based on the Mongolian cha'ur "warrior." So Wang Deyuan wrote about him in a eulogy thus:

Xie Chaowu, courtesy name Angfu, was a Uyghur. His given name was Mongol and his courtesy name Chinese. Men spend their life in different regions. As he continued to use the name of his tribe and did not forget his ancestor, he was filial. As he served in a glorious period of the house of Yuan and continued to use his given name not forgetting his country, he was loyal. In studying the standard literature of the Chinese, he freed himself from the charge of illiteracy. In continuing to use his courtesy name he did not forget his teacher, which indicates his sensibility. Being dutiful, loyal, and wise, his moral foundation was laid (p. 143).

For some adaption was a difficult process in which they had to try to find some common moral principles between their ancestral principles and their adopted country's mores and ethics. Xu Youren records the ambivalence of Heshu, another Muslim migrant to China -- and also reminds us that many immigrants made no effort to adapt:

When our house of Yuan launched expeditions against the countries of the northwest, the Western Regions were the first to become part of our realm. Accordingly, many more natives of the West were accorded high positions than those of other lands. Great merchants monopolized advantages in operating profitable enterprises on land and sea. They occupy key places in well-known cities and regions throughout the empire, and enjoy their large incomes, but few are successful in adapting themselves. They live in this country, are clothed and fed here, but they still cling to the customs of their own countries. Heshu, however, declared: 'I do not dare to alter our customs, and thereby become estranged from my own people. I wish only to change what is contrary to moral principles. I have lived in this country, been clothed and fed here, and shared the life of its people. I take no pleasure in altering our ways in order to conform to the customs of this area. But when I reach a decision about them, I wish to conform to that which is right. One of my ancestors came to China as an ambassador and his bones lie buried here. Can I afford to ignore the Odes, History, Rites and Music? [These are books in the Chinese classical canon.] When customs are dissimilar due to differences in underlying principles, should I follow them?' Ah! Heshu was certainly good at adapting himself in the way Mencius proposed [a reference to where Mencius tells the story of people who reformed non-burial of the dead simply by natural feeling, without ever being taught to conduct burials]. According to their mores [that is, Muslim ones], they did not erect monuments at the tombs of their ancestors, but he did so (p. 243).

These are the cultural options still today, in a shrinking world of mass migrations. Perhaps the most distinctive element is the sense of attachment to a particular land, in which the migrants are "fed" and "clothed" by the land, and hence owe something to it.

This is a part of China you don't hear much about, but it brings back memories.

At dawn the next day, we were awakened by the sounds of clanging pots. Outside the bus, hotel workers were cooking in a makeshift kitchen. The rice congee (basically a watery boiled rice) they prepared was the diet of Chinese babies and "very healthy," our stalwart tour guide, Frank Wang, assured us. It became our staple, sometimes supplemented with pickled vegetables and small pieces of pork salvaged from the hotel's refrigerators.

And this too.

Even when the food is bland (rice congee!) or too salty (pickled vegetables), there something about the Chinese ability to joke and share and be neighborly in conditions of extreme physical discomfort that is really touching. Not to mention the goofy games that build school spirit, like here.

On the other hand there's this bit of nasty amateur theodicy, or should I say Buddhodicy?

Worldly Asceticism and Chinese Christians

Here's a funny factoid (I'm getting this from memory and haven't relocated the source). At Yale, the Buddhist club is entirely white in membership, while Campus Crusade is 60% Asian.

Something of the background to this comes from a book I read a while ago: Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities by Fenggang Yang. The writer's story itself is fascinating. Like Jim Ault, he went to a Christian church (here's their web page) to do sociology and ended up being converted. Unlike Ault, who became a documentary film maker, Yang eventually got a respectable academic job (more here), and perhaps for that reason his book lacks the luminescent beauty of Spirit and Flesh -- academia is pretty tough on good story telling.

The book was based on his work in an independent evangelical church for ethnic Chinese in the DC area (main services are in Mandarin with English and Cantonese translation and a separate earlier service in English). His aim was to solve this puzzle: if Chinese immigrants to the US are interested in preserving their culture, why do they convert to Christianity, especially in the narrow evangelical form? And if they are interested in assimilating, why do they attend a Chinese church, instead of a mainstream American one?

Without denying that conversion is first and foremost a matter of the Spirit (he's a Christian, remember?), he makes a strong case that the church he studied saw Chinese Christians neither as assimilating, nor as not assimilating, but rather constructing an "adhesive identity" in which their Christianity functions as a means of identifying with the best of both American and Chinese identities and rejecting what is evil in both.

With regard to Chinese identity, as immigrants (many have crossed multiple boundaries, such as mainland to Taiwan, Taiwan to SE Asia, SE Asia to USA, and so on), they find their Chinese ethical beliefs relativized -- Christianity offers a way to re-anchor them in a transcendent moral framework. Yang summarizes:

Religious conversion in postmodern pluralism can be an act of preserving traditional culture. Postmodern pluralism has a tendency to relativize traditions. The Chinese highly value their cultural traditions, especially Confucian moral values, but traditionalism alone cannot justify the authority of such a system of ethics.* These Chinese immigrants find a good match between Confucian moral values and evangelical Christian beliefs, and the conservative Chinese faith provides an absolute foundation for their cherished social ethics. Therefore, religious conversion to evangelical Christianity indeed helps these people to maintain their Chinese identity. Without the institution of the Christian church, the preservation of traditional Chinese culture could have been more difficult within postmodern pluralism (pp. 198-99).

Christian universalism is, he concludes, constructive not destructive of traditional Chinese culture -- albeit only when that culture is understood as rejecting Buddhism and other explicitly religious elements. "While universalism is achieved, particularism is also affirmed."

Their Christian faith also affirms their American identity. The church Yang studied is a conservative Christian one, one that strongly affirms the basic story of conservative Protestantism: America was built on Christian principles, but has gone astray through forgetting those principles. As one Taiwanese writer wrote in the church newsletter:

The founding spirit of the USA is originated from Christian doctrines. American laws and the humanitarian spirit all have roots in Christianity. Internally this made the American social political system healthy, the nation strong, and the people prosperous. Internationally, then, the USA can advance her military, political, and economic developments, and has become the leader of the free world (p. 123).

A guest pastor preached in Chinese:

We have to work hard to uphold God's words in America . . . We have seen the decline of the strength of the U.S. and the emptiness of American churches. We should have a sense of responsibility for this nation and for all peoples in the world. We must take up the burden to evangelize all peoples in America and the world, not just the Chinese (p. 125).

Statements like this are found all over conservative Protestantism in the USA, but they have added significance here in being written and spoken in a ethnic Chinese church, to an ethnic Chinese audience, and even in Chinese. The implication is clear: Chinese Christians can know and embody the spirit of our founding fathers better than most Americans do -- because they are Christians .

Central to this adhesive identity is the "worldly asceticism" of this generally high-achieving Chinese congregation, embodied in success, thrift, temperance (teetotalling), and sexual restraint and marital fidelity. Yet these "Protestant" values, Yang typically finds enunciated most explicitly in contrast to the surrounding American society, indeed in contrast to the American church.

Here's a story about thrift from comments at a Board meeting:

American society is a consumerist society. This consumerism has influenced our American-born kids. They want to buy this and buy that without thinking of necessity. The kids are indulged too much (p. 110).

And when the pastor bought a house that cost $350,000, and received a non-interest loan from the church, he was criticized"

We should keep expenditures within the limits of income 量入爲出。This is a good Chinese tradition. A good Christian should follow this principle even beeter. When you take up a huge financial burden [like Pastor Tang did], how could you live in peace and focus on ministries for the Lord (p. 111).

"Pastor Tang" was voted out in 1995.

In discussing sexual restraint, Yang quotes a mother of three teenagers:

I was worried for my second son. He is a high school student. The teens fellowship group [which is mostly English-speaking ABC's or American Born Chinese] once was on the edge of becoming a social and dating club. Several parents were worried about this when they sensed the tendencies, but we didn't know what we could do. These are youth at a rebellious age in this free American society. But God is really wonderful. Right then the assistant pastor [who was a white American] gave a sermon: "True Love Waits." It was an excellent sermon. My boy understood the preaching very well and liked it very much. The pastor asked these young people to make a commitment to God, write it down, and keep if for themselves, that they would wait for the true love. After that the teens fellowship returned to normal (p. 113).

Yet American churches can also a source of corruption. One guest preacher told a story about how a big church near a university campus invited two Asian student Christian fellowships (one Chinese and one Indian) to have a joint activity at church. The Chinese and Asian Indians students made the food while the Americans would prepare the program:

The food was of course very delicious, but the program was just unbelievable. The host church provided bingo games -- a kind of gambling -- and belly dancing. During the dance by a half-nude woman, the Christian students were so embarrassed that they all tried to hide their heads. It was just so awkward.

This is the problem of American churches. They have become empty physically and spiritually. . . In these seminaries the Bible is taught as not credible or believable. There is no prayer. Professors of theology smoke in the class and grow ponytail hair. How could these people speak God's words? . . . All failures of America today are because of their rejection of God (pp. 123-24).

Here's a story about success, from a pastor's sermon as paraphrased by Yang:

A Chinese family used to attend an American church. The parents became unhappy about their daughter's getting some B grades in school. When they asked about it, the girl replied, 'I have done my best.' When they asked again, she ruffled, 'I am doing better than many of my friends in school and church. They get C's and B's but their parents still love them without a fuss. Why are you so harsh on me.' The daughter felt disappointed to be Chinese, and the parents felt helpless to respond. Later they found a Chinese church and switched there. After a while, the girl came to tell her parents, 'Compared with other parents in the church, you are not really harsh.' Her gradual change pleased the parents (p. 116).

Yang comments: "A changed reference group and her growing Chinese identity, nurtured in the Chinese church, helped this girl to excel in school."

He also quotes a popular woman speaker in Chinese churches, who uses the American ideas of pride, self-confidence, and "dare to be different" in distinctly, well, different, ways:

"Having American friends is necessary for your kids, but only to a certain degree. . . . Some Chinese children become problem teenagers because they are too Americanized. Don't say 'We must immerse ourselves in American society.' What is American society. Student who are participating in math contests are seen as nerds by [white] American girls. We need to teach our kinds 'Dare to be different.' Teach them to have self-confidence about what they do and be proud of what they are. We must have rules. For example, don't allow your kids to stay overnight with other kids."

She went on to say that white American parents, including those who attend churches, often have low expectations of their children. They ask their children to "do your best," which is often only an excuse for failure. Mixing with such children could bring bad influences on Chinese children. She suggested that it would be more desirable to mix with children of immigrants, such as Asian Indians or Koreans, because they were more conservative in moral values. Better yet, she suggested, bring your children to the Chinese church:

"It is necessary to have friends after school . . . The Chinese church provides this. In the fellowship group it is easier to provide such an environment. We Chinese have a proverb, 'He who stays near vermillion gets stained red, and he who stays near ink gets stained black' 近朱者赤，近墨者黑。Mencius's mother moved three times 孟母三遷 [in order to have good neighbors for her child]. It is very important to have proper friends (pp. 115-16).

Again as Yang points out, they defend their selective distance from American society not just in terms of preserving Chinese traditions, but also in terms of adhering to universal Christian values. "The Chinese church is a plausible structure that helps these immigrant and their children maintain their distinctive value system.

But it is important not to exaggerate the degree of separation . Speakers have to exhort Chinese parents to find Chinese (or at least Asian) friends for their children because structural integration is so universally presumed. Measurable success in mainstream American society is a universal goal. Yang wrote:

Why should one succeed? What is the purpose of success? This would be an important research question. However, I could not even ask this question directly in my interviews because it would sound silly or out of place. Success is a goal that is taken for granted (p. 108).

(He does conclude that success is seen as a way to give glory to God and especially to prove to non-Christian Chinese that Christians are not ignorant or supersititious.)

Elsewhere he writes:

New Chinese immigrants generally trust the educations system, so they send their children to public schools and prestigious universities; they trust the economic system, so they work hard and invest wisely to gain tangible rewards; they trust the socio-legal systems, so they seek gradual changes toward equality. However, they do not trust the media and entertainment industry for encouraging liberal moral values and unconventional lifestyles (p. 197).

This overall trust in American institutions is a rather striking difference between Chinese conservative Protestants and white conservative Protestants, who are notoriously suspicious of these institutions.

I find a few things particularly interesting about this picture:

1) the degree to which Chinese-American Christians have come to treat Christianity as the fulfillment of the Law -- the Confucian law. This model, of Christianity being the only way to preserve the spirit of what I call the "archaic law" in modern society, is something they are trying to live out right now.

As he notes on pp. 147-48, the church newsletter is called "Living Waters" and has John 7:37-38 -- but the first issue also had on the mast-head a poem by the famous Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi:

A square pond opens up like a mirror;
In it glowing light and white clouds are waving together.
No wonder this lagoon is so clear
Because from the springhead comes the living water.

觀書有感

半畝方塘一鏡開
天光雲影共徘徊
問渠那得清如許
為有源頭活水來。

Lovely, isn't it? And to make it better, the title is "Afterthoughts on reading the Book." OK, well, the book he meant wasn't the Gospel, but then again, the book David meant technically wasn't the Gospel either -- although the Gospel was found in it.

2) In emphasizing thrift and frugality and "worldly asceticism" more generally, I think Yang's Chinese church members have really identified an area where American churches have strayed far from the Weberian Protestant ethic and the teaching inculcated in Proverbs. I was embarrassed by the American Christian of those stories. If Americans were straying from this to sell all they have to the poor that would be one thing, but they are instead straying from this to buy McMansions, electronic gadgets, closets full of clothes, and endless nights out at restaurants. I don't usually do the moral scold thing (at least I try not to) but this is really worth scolding about.

What did John Wesley say? "Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can." Maybe it's a dangerous phrase, because most people seem to think "Well, I'll work on that first one, and maybe the second, and when I've got 'em down cold, I'll see about the third", but if you do all three, not just one or two, you will do good for your own soul and others'.

3) Their relentless pursuit of success I am less certain about, although with it goes the trust in mainstream institutions. Both are quite different from many streams in American evangelical-dom in which meritocratic success seems to happen if at all, by chance. Are Yang's church members gaining the world to lose their soul? Let us hope not -- but the possibility can't be denied. And let us hope that their trust, which is in itself always a good thing, will be not be betrayed. I don't think anyone has ever said it before, but I do believe "It is better to have trusted and been betrayed, than to have never trusted at all."

4) Their way of understanding Christian universalism as fulfilling and completing both their Chinese and their American identity is worth considering, regardless of one's ethnic or national origin. "Adhesive identity" as Yang says makes one comfortable in more than one identity and more than one place. This could be a fruitful way of phrasing Paul's conception of the simultaneously Jewish-Gentile Christian church, as I've tried to describe it here. The New Testament is bi-cultural and one can reasonable expect that certain insights in it are best achieved by those who are likewise bi-cultural.

God grant that this will be the motto for this Chinese church's Confucianism and Americanism:

I have more understanding than all my teachers, for Your testimonies are my meditation
I understand more than the aged, for I keep Your precepts (Ps. 119:99-100).

*Why not? Traditionalism here is basically "Confucianism" and that is unable to serve as a transcendent justification for three reasons: 1) Confucianism in China itself was attacked as being part of the old "feudal" system -- many reflective Chinese find it no longer tenable purely on its own as a basis for ethical behavior; 2) Confucianism is above all a system of social and political ethics and the American system is not Confucian; and 3) the Chinese he studied are professionally and occupationally thoroughly integrated into American life and do not want to be in a traditionalist enclave.

Father and Ruler: Twin Foundations of Human Life?

There is no life without a father, no supports through life without a ruler. Yet for generations people say, "Loyal duty and filial piety are not equally perfectible." How can this possibly be true? Ruler and father provide the grand foundation for human ethics, loyalty and filial devotion constitute cardinal principles for vassals. How inconceivable that the two, rather than complements to be practiced together, might actually prove mutually harmful! The problem lies, quite simply, with whether the motivation is selfish or selflessly righteous: when acting selfishly, both virtues are diminished; when acting righteously, both virtues can be attained.

Should a son, if his father deploys armies against his ruler, follow his father or follow his ruler? I say, "It is enough that one's physical being honor its dwelling place, while one's ethical will abide by righteous principle." A person who physically dwells with the monarch should abide by the monarch; one who physically dwells with the father should abide by the father. The follower of a ruler must then decline his ruler's charge, indicating, "A son cannot injure his father, so I wish not to receive a command." He should protest to his father as well, "Can you not relinquish your army and revert to our ruler?" Then, if his ruler suffers defeat, the subject dies honorably for him; if his father falters, the son completes mourning duties for his father before resuming service to his monarch. The person who follows his father, on the other hand, must warn him, "As my ruler cannot be targeted for assault, can you not leave your army and revert to our ruler?" Then, if the ruler suffers defeat, he dies honorably for him; if his father fails, he submits to punishment and awaits the pardon of his ruler, resuming service after completing mourning for his father.

No person in ancient times understood filial devotion like Shun, none understood righteous principle like Confucius and Mencius -- men meticulous about ruler/subject, father/son relations. Had they tragically confronted such dilemmas, they would have acted only in this manner. With reference to Congjing and the Zhuangzong emperor, the former accepted death as the cost of abiding by his ruler -- an event to lament! (Ouyang Xiu, trans. Richard Davis, Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, p. 151).

This short essay encapsulates in brief form so many themes, I can only briefly touch on two of them here.

1) Are there real moral dilemmas? Is public virtue and private virtue the same thing? Here Ouyang Xiu states his emphatic belief that no, there are no real moral dilemmas and no there is only one virtue, which is appropriate for both public and private life. "Only after a man serves his parents with filial piety can he serve the ruler with filial devotion," he says elsewhere (p. 233). Can we dismiss this as merely the "Chinese" view? Can we say that not having ever heard the Machiavellian insight that private virtues can be public vices and vice versa, he was simply a dogmatic thinker put forth his ideas without any vivid experience of opposition. Obviously not since, the whole point of the essay is that many practical Chinese of his day were convinced that private and public morality did not coincide, that sometimes to be a good public official or general, one had to be a bad son (a rather extreme example of that is here).

As I've written before, Ouyang Xiu is typical of the Neo-Confucian in the intensity of his belief in the complete congruence of morality at all levels and his resulting emphasis on duty. (One of the most arresting examples of this is the life of Lian Xixian, from which a tidbit can be found here.) Sima Qian, on the other hand, is much more willing to admit the idea that public and private morality might not be totally congruent, or that what is right might be adjusted to some degree according to circumstances.

2) Is government something that appeared late in the history of humanity, an invention or formation of the bronze age, or is it something as fundamental as fatherhood? Ouyang Xiu expresses here the assumption that government is necessary for life and equally fundamental. Ibn Khaldun, the famous fourteenth century Arab historian thought the same:

Consequently social organization is necessary to the human species. Without it the existence of human beings would be incomplete. God's desire to settle the world with human beings and to leave them as His representatives on earth would not materialize. This is the meaning of civilization . . .

When mankind has achieved social organization, as we have stated, and when civilization in the world has thus become a fact, people need someone to exercise a restraining influence and keep them apart, for aggressiveness and injustice are in the animal nature of man. The weapons made for the defense of human beings against the aggressiveness of dumb animals do not suffice against the aggressiveness of man to man, because all of them possess those weapons. Thus something else is needed for defense against the aggressiveness of human beings toward each other. It could not come from outside [the human race], because all the other animals fall short of human perceptions and inspiration. The person who exercises a restraining influence, therefore, must be one of themselves. He must dominate them and have power and authority over them, so that no one of them will be able to attack another. This is the meaning of royal authority*.

It has thus become clear that royal authority is a natural quality of man which is absolutely necessary to mankind. The [Greek] philosophers mention that it also exists among certain dumb animals, such as the bees and the locusts . . . . However, outside of human beings, these things exist as the result of natural disposition and divine guidance, and not as the result of an ability to think or to administer (Ibn Khaldun, trans. Franz Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah, pp. 46-47).

It is one of the major changes in modern thought since the nineteenth century that very few would no assert that royal authority (=sovereignty) is a "natural quality of man which is absolutely necessary to mankind." Ibn Khaldun recognized, as Ouyang Xiu would as well, that there were places where sovereign authority was weak or even virtually absent, yet he did not think that such places were the remnants of mankind's original condition (the legendary "hunter-gatherers" that are our touchstone of natural humanity) but aberrant examples under unusual conditions. One can only speculate about the immense importance of this assumption, that government is some late appearance on the human stage, not part of essential human nature, to the nineteenth and twentieth century libertarian and insurrectionist theories of government.

Ironically, the notions of the eons of government-less "hunter-gatherer" existence defining human nature was first created by anthropologists, and yet the whole enterprise of such deductions about human society in the prehistoric period (for that is what they are -- deductions) has been declared to be an illusion by more than one prominent anthropologist. If that is the case then the viewpoint of Ouyang Xiu and Ibn Khaldun may be worth a new look.

*That is, sovereignty (which Ibn Khaldun knew only in the monarchic form).

"A great many things keep happening" -- but me posting is not one of them.

I've been very busy lately and posting will probably be light for a while. I'll try to dig up some draft I forgot about and put it up.

Tom R asked me my views about Taiwan's renaming of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall as the "National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall" (pro side argued here).

Briefly: I dislike renaming things in general. And when they have been renamed, I approve of people going back to the old name. For example, renaming St. Petersburg as Petrograd and then Leningrad was a bad idea. Good to go back to St. Petersburg.

But what about if the now repudiated regime actually built the city or street or bridge or memorial or whatever? So that it never had any name other than the objectionable one? (Like for example, Washington DC, which has no pre-American plutocracy identity). Or Sukhbaatar city in Mongolia? Named after the founding hero of the revolutionary-morphed-into-Communist regime there which democratized in 1990? I'd say let 'em stay the way they are.

But Chiang Kai-shek is a bad man! Well, I'll grant a lot of your points about him, but it is not truthful, to say that this is the "Democracy Memorial" when it was built to commemorate Chiang Kai-shek. And as Gresham Machen reminded us in a different context, "honesty is not one of the lesser matters of the law."

History is messy. Communists build economies. Colonialists kill hundreds of thousands and leaves great railways. Little islands acquire their independence by becoming the redoubt of a corrupt party that abhors their cause. Cleaning up names is a way of cleaning up the ironies of history. And that's a bad thing: one that keeps on happening.

Wei Xiang's Considerations on War and Monstrous Crimes

During the Fundamental Repose 元康 years (65-62 BC) the Huns* 匈奴 sent some of their armed men to attack the Han 漢 garrison and military farm in Kioshi 車師**, but were unable to force a surrender. The emperor† consulted with the general of the rear Zhao Chongguo 趙充國 and others, hoping to take advantage of the apparent weakness of the Hun kingdom by sending a force of men to attack the western portion of their territory and intimidating them from making further trouble for the regions west of China. Wei Xiang‡ 魏相 , however, submitted a letter to the throne opposing such a plan of action and saying:

"I have heard that military action which is designed to rectify disorder and punish violence is called a campaign of righteousness; such a campaign is the mark of a true king. Action and arises unavoidably when an enemy launches an attack against one's own forces is called a campaign of response; such a campaign will be victorious. An action which arises from petty wrangling and spite, from ire and vexation that can no longer be restrained, is called a campaign of anger, and such a campaign will end in failure. An action which has as its object the exploitation of someone else's land or treasures is called a campaign of greed and it will face defeat. An action in which one party, relying upon the superior size of its territory and boasting of the large number of its people, sets out to overawe its enemy by a show of force is called a campaign of arrogance, and it is doomed to annihilation. These five categories are not merely something contrived by men but have their basis in the Way of Heaven.

"In recent times the Huns have consistently manifested a spirit of good will, immediately returning to China any subjects the Han who happened to fall into their hands and refraining from violations of the border. Although there has been a scuffle with the garrison troops of Kyoshi, it is scarcely important enough even to merit notice. And yet now I hear that the various generals are planning to call out troops and move into Hun territory. Ignorant as I am, I am at a loss to know what name to assign to a campaign such as this!

"The border regions these days are beset by poverty and want, father and son sharing their pelts of lamb and dog, eating the seeds of grasses and herbes, ever fearful that there will not be enough to sustain life. It would be hard in such a time to launch a military campaign. They say that war is always followed by a year of dearth -- this is because the anguished and suffering spirits of people bring injury to the harmony of yin and yang. Thus, although the troops that march forth may win victory, there is bound to be sorrow and suffering in its wake, and this suffering, I fear, will bring about unusual occurences such as natural calamities and disasters.

"These days there are many men serving as governors of provinces or prime ministers of vassal kingdoms who are not fitted for their jobs; the customs and folkways have grown frivolous and corrupt, and flood and drought visit us without respite. According to the statistics for the past year, there was a total of two hundred and twenty cases of sons or younger brothers who murdered their fathers or elder brothers, or wives who murdered their husbands. If I may say so, thi is an 'unusual occurence' of far from petty proportions. Yet those who attend Your Majesty fail to worry about this and instead propose to call out trops to repay some trifling grudge against some far-off barbarians. This is perhaps what Confucius 孔子 meant when he said, 'I suspect that the threat to the Jisun 季孫 family lies not in Zhuanyu 顓臾 but within its own screens and walls.'§ I hope that Your Majesty will consult with the marquis of Pingchang 平昌侯, the marquis of Lechang 樂昌侯, the marquis of Ping'en 平恩侯, and other knowledgeable persons in careful deliberation before reaching a final decision."

The emperor heeded his advice and abandoned plans for an expedition against the Hun kingdom.

From the Han shu 漢書 of Ban Gu 班固, chapter 74. Translation (with a few modifications) from Burton Watson, from his Courtier and Commoner in Ancient China: Selections from the History of the Former Han Dynasty by Pan Ku, pp. 178-180.

*In Chinese, Xiongnu. Recent research by Etienne de la Vaissiere has demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that in name at least the Xiongnu are the equivalent of the later Huns of India, Eastern Europe, and Hungary. See his "Huns et Xiongnu," Central Asiatic Journal 49 (2005), 3-26.
**Roughly the area of modern Turpan/Turfan in Xinjiang, then as now, ruled by China, but mostly not Chinese ethnically.
†Emperor Xuan of the Han, who had barely escaped death in his great-grandfather Emperor Wu's purges, began his life as a commoner, and become along with Emperor Wen the best emperor of the Han dynasty.
‡Then prime Minister of the realm.
§Analects xvi:1. The Jisun, a very powerful ministerial family of the ancient duchy of Lu was preparing to attack the tiny state of Zhuanyu, which it claimed was a threat to its power. (Note the text I've cited uses the older transcription system.)

A Shocking Bull's Eye

(More in occasional snippets from Ouyang Xiu's history of the chaotic tenth century in China in Richard L. Davis's fine translation). Click here for the previous entry). The painting shows a siege from the Japanese invasion of Korea; more here).

Ouyang Xiu's broad argument in his Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, is that disorder in the family and disorder in the state go together. Once begun at the close of the great Tang dynasty by (avoidable) rebellions and disorders, the disorders in family and state reinforced each other until the human condition becomes virtually animalic. Thus the Five Dynasties period between the Tang and the Song (Ouyang Xiu's own dynasty) was a serious cautionary tales. One of the clearest examples and expositions is as follows:

It was AD 937. Ruling North China was Emperor Gaozu of the Jinn dynasty, a general of Shatuo Turkish origin, who had come to power in the wake of an invasion of the Heartland by the Kitans to the north east. One of the regional commanders, Fan Yanguang, rebelled. He appointed a man named Li Yanxun to command the fortress of Weizhou. In response, the emperor sent Yang Guangyuan to siege the city:

Named chief director of [rebel] infantry by Fan Yanguang 范延光, Li Yanxun 李彥珣 was entrusted with the city's defense. Yang Guangyuan, the emperor's commissioner of bandit suppression, knew Yanxun to be a native to the [nearby] city of Xingzhou and that Yanxun's mother was still there. Guangyuan sent a messenger to Xingzhou to retrieve her and bring her in sight of the walls of Weizhou to show Yanxun, hoping to sway him. Yanxun shot and killed her upon with his arrow. Once the chief rebel Yanguang emerged to surrender, the Emperor Gaozu of the Jinn dynasty named Yanxun prefect of Fangzhou. Senior officials insisted that he deserved execution for killing his mother, yet Emperor Gaozu argued that an amnesty order had been issued [to all the rebels in exchange for their surrender] and his credibility could not be compromised. Yanxun was later executed for bribery.

We Woefully Lament: Human nature requires prudence with the familiar. Therefore the Prophet/Lawgiver*, a man steeped in benevolence and righteousness, exudes devotion without sloth and moderation without compulsion in the teaching of others. He aspires to acquaint the people gradually with virtues for purposes of converting them, familiarity over the long haul fostering good habits. The common people lack knowledge: accustomed to witnessing good, they accept goodness; accustomed to seeing vice, they accept vice.

The chaos of the Five Dynasties has remote origins. Since the decline of the Tang [which had finally falled thirty years before this] and attendant wars and famine, fathers could not nourish sons and sons could not care for parents. At the onset, it was by mere misfortune that flesh-and-blood kin failed to protect each other, causing rites and rightousness to dissipate by the day, the charity of parents and the compassion of children to wane. After prolonged familiarity with these conditions, an all-pervading breakdown set in, as fathers and sons engaged in villainous acts of mutual destruction.

For the Five Dynasties era, the catastrophe and killings defy description. Human nature makes the love for parents a universal instinct and unfilial conduct a universal abomination. But when Yanxun stretched his bow to shoot an arrow into his mother and Emperor Gaozu acquitted him with a pardon, beyond symbolizing Yanxun's inability to appreciate his actions as abominable, it further shows Gaozu's condoning a deed not deemed perverse. This can scarcely happen except under the weight of bad habits over a long time. In the Analects, Confucius says, "In constitution we are close, in habits far apart." When carried to an extreme, men's hearts do not differ from animals and beasts. Is it not harrowing? Based on the abominable conduct of Yanxun, who acted wilfully with no sense of perversity, or an emperor such as Chu, who severed bonds with his own father, the failure to recognize wrong characterized an entire age (Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, pp. 417-18; Chinese text in 新五代史，卷 51, pp. 580-81).

*Davis's translation here has "Sage" for shengren 聖人. I think "sage" has quite the wrong connotations. The sheng is not just a man who hears and knows the will of Heaven, but one who then announces it to humanity effectively as the right way of life. This can be conceived of in either a more charismatic or a more rationalistic way, but the idea of effectively leading men to follow the instructions and intentions of Heaven and Earth (the understanding of which again can range from virtually God to impersonal nature) is an essential part of the concept. Hence I prefer Prophet or Lawgiver. The term sheng is applied sometimes by Chinese Christians to Jesus and regularly by Chinese Muslims to Muhammad, who is called zhisheng 至聖, the perfected sheng. The greatest of such prophets are the pre-historic kings, and of course Confucius and his successors. At least in theory, however, every emperor is also supposed to be a sage/prophet/lawgiver.

The Archaic Law: To Recapitulate It or Spiritually Repudiate It?

I have been reading Rene Girard lately and find it immensely stimulating, even though I often feel, like Marx with Hegel, that to be read correctly he has to be stood on his head. Even so, the insights gained are tremendous. Let me cite here simply his definition of religion:

Any phenomenon associated with acts of remembering, commemorating, and perpetuating a unanimity that springs from the murder of a surrogate victim can be termed "religious" (Reader, pp. 26-27).

In this sense, one may indeed wonder whether Buddhism for example, is a religion, but one can be in no doubt that every conquest or revolution is a religious act, and every state founded by revolution or conquest -- and that about covers them -- is a religion in the Girardian sense. Girard tends to avoid the political realm, but it is unavoidable in this connection. When he does touch on it, he produces similarly brilliantly illuminating apothegms:

Political power has been rooted in the crowd since the foundation of the world (p. 214).

In the Secret History of the Mongols, for example, Chinggis Khan's killing of his half-brother Begter, and of his blood-brother Jamugha is a presented implicitly as the sacrifice of a surrogate victim, which produces unanimity and a blessing.

Girard is quite popular with both First Things writers (here, here, and here, for example) and the Reformed Dougs in Moscow, Idaho and their supporters (here, here, and here, for example). I wonder very much about whether they have in fact understood him, since in many ways his interpretation appears to be rather contradictory to Catholic or Refomed theology. Let's note a few things that might cause problems: he acknowledges that he is the first person to read the Gospels in the way that he does (p. 183), that the orthodox "sacrificial" interpretation of the Gospels has obscured its true utterly anti-sacrificial significance from the first years of the apostles (p. 193), that the appropriation of the logic of the Gospel for the defense of culture and social order is in fact the work of Christians who are the Antichrist (p. 207), and that Girard himself rediscovered it solely through reading the text of Scripture (pp. 183-84). Every plank of radical restorationism is in place. Know what you are getting into, if you read him.

And yet, somehow it doesn't feel like heresy. Let's leave aside the extraordinary light he sheds upon his favorite Biblical texts. Let's take his reading of the founding fall. It is not Adam and Eve, whom he virtually never mentions, but Cain's murder of Abel. This is heresy -- or is it? Isn't this the basis for John saying that Satan was a liar and a murderer from the beginning? That instigating murder was Satan's primal intervention into our history? And although Girard seems unaware of the fact, Prudentius's Christian poems also treat Cain's murder of Abel as the real inception of sinful humanity. To rediscover by chance strands of ancient Christian thought long ago consigned to the attic; that is something worth paying attention to.

But the reading of Girard has suffered from inadequate contextualization. What is the context in which we ought to read him; what is his fundamental problem? He began as a literary scholar, reading the nineteenth century novels. He then turned to anthropology, exploring the byways of obscure native religions. Most of his writing now centers on Biblical interpretation and exegesis. However he got there, however, his mature writings are fundamentally an attempt to resolve a single problem: what is the relation of the Old Covenant and the New? Or to put it a bit differently (and perhaps a bit misleadingly for Augsburg Evangelicals): what is the relation of the Law and the Gospel?

But it must be always remembered Girard is a thinker who relates Christian revelation to the full scale of human cultural diversity. Or to put it differently, he emphasizes how the Christian Gospels are the fulfillment and supersession not simply of the Mosaic Law, but of all sacrificial law, all sacrificial "mythology" (i.e. all the historical, yet mysticized murders of innocent substitutes). In short, one could take the python myth of the Venda in South Africa, and show how the life and death of Jesus exposes and unwinds the mechanism commemorated and sanctified by that myth, just as it exposes and unwinds the mechanism commemorated and sanctified by the death of Achan (to chose a Biblical example not addressed by Girard).

Let me put Girard and the Law-Gospel problem in historical context. The religious legacy of mankind goes back to five archaic Laws given to peoples in a band from west to east in Eurasia, and embodied in the scriptures reverenced in continuous line until today. They are Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric hymns in Greek, the Law of Moses and the Former Prophets (Joshua-2 Kings) in Hebrew, the Avestan in Old Persian, the Vedas in Sanskrit, and the Five Classics in Chinese. This is the earliest stratum of the cultural heritage, directly or vicariously, of virtually all of humanity.

What do these have in common? That they are Laws for theocratic states in which the divine will is knowable through divination (urim and thummim, the milfoil straws, entrails), in which the divinity takes pleasure in the sweet savor of burnt animal offerings, in which purity regulations govern all aspects of life, particularly relating to discharges from the body (semen, blood, spit, etc.), in which the duty to procreate is universal and in which both war, the death penalty, slavery, and polygamy/concubinage are accepted without remark as part of the order of life, and in which revelation comes in one sacred language to one sacred people surrounded by barbarian gentiles.

What is the problem of Girard? It is the perennial problem since the middle of the first millennium BC, of what to do with this era of revelation, when so much of it seems so barbaric and primitive, so much superseded by the later revelations of the prophets and sages. Yet those prophets and sages themselves, paradoxically, reverenced these revelations as being the classic patterns of ideal society.

In general, the problem of religious diversity and cultural heritage has been approached by trying to identify which of these five languages holds the truest and the best revelation. What should we take as the text teaching us the true and fundamental pattern of life? The Iliad and the Odyssey? The Law of Moses? The Vedas and Upanishads? Once that is decided, then we decide which interpretation of that Law is the truest. (This is the procedure of Pascal, more or less: start with the Jews who are obviously a unique people, and then ask whether the New Testament makes sense as a fulfillment of the Jewish Law.) But Girard offers implicitly another way of conceptualizing the problem: given that all of these archaic texts share so much, perhaps we should ask, what is the general type of relation which these archaic texts have to the later revelation of Truth? What should our relation be to the Laws for a theocratic kingdom of sacrificial scapegoats and purity laws separating clean insiders and unclean outsiders? Not least because each one of them came under radical attack by foreign conquest, intellectual questioning, and the importation of new teachings and texts.

There are five possibilities:

1) Repristination: to reemphasize these laws and in so doing rebuild the sacral social order. The Confucians were fortunate in having a kingdom still found on the land and in having archaic classics which seems to be among the least "archaic" in spirit (perhaps because large chunks achieved final form only in the first century BC), and at times followed this. The laws of Islam seem also to have the features of repristination of a streamlined and modernized law of Moses. (One of the peculiar aspects of Islam is how a highly "advanced," not to say philosophical, concept of God is yoked to an archaic-seeming law.) The theonomist stream of Puritanism was in some ways another example of this.

2) Rationalist Dismissal: the whole archaic law has no normative value whatsoever, and probably was forged. It is primitive, backward, and superstitious. Stop reading it, and if you read it, dont take it seriously. This position has been greatly strengthened since the eighteenth century by the increasing doubts over authenticity surrounding all the archaic classics.

3) Reinterpretation: Here the archaic Law is seen not as something intended to be applied in real life but to teach us about the control of the passions, or the soul's search for God. Much of later Confucian interpretation of the Yijing, or Talmudic midrash and allegorical readings of the Scriptures would belong here, as would Neo-Platonic allegorical exegesis of Homer and other myths. Much of Vaishnavite and Shaivite Hinduism has this relation to the Vedas, I would guess.

4) Spiritual Repudiation: The old law did not teach the right way of liberation or salvation, which was revealed only later. While many of its basically religious, supernatural presuppositions are still accepted, as texts, the archaic laws are a source only of cultural and historical heritage devoid of normative force. Buddhism largely takes this line toward the Sanskrit scriptures, and Quakerism and Marcionism do the same for the Law of Moses, while Stoicism does the same with the Greco-Roman religious law.

5) Recapitulation: The old law is recapitulated, summed up, in one episode or instance or prophetic life, which is then perpetuated by reenactment. The old law is thus not exactly rejected, but not repristinated either. I don't know enough about Mithraism or Manichaeism to say if this definitedly is, as I suspect, the primary model of how they relate to Zoroastrianism, but this certainly is St. Irenaeus's interpretation of the relation of Christianity to the Law of Moses.

What is Girard saying then? Two things he is certainly rejecting: repristination and rationalist rejection. Likewise allegorical reinterpretation is not on the agenda. Girard wishes to take the archaic law at its word -- it really is about pleasing God and sacralizing the socio-political order by offering up innocent victims in sacrifice. The real question is, then, is he offering a new spiritual repudiationist reading, in which Christ points out the nullity of the old law, or else a recapitulationist reading? Repudiation might seem the obvious choice, except that it seems to lead into rationalist dismissal, which he likewise repudiates. He also sees the Mosaic Law as less clearly archaic than the archaic laws of other peoples: the Law is the message of Christ struggling to get out from a still partly archaic and sacrificial context. Since I believe he is not really correct about this and that the basic features of the archaic law are visible at the heart of the Hebrew classics, one could say that in a sense he is a offering a reinterpretation, along the lines of the wheat and the chaff.

But this is the red thread running so much of human literary, religious, and humanistic culture today: what do we do with the archaic classics and the ideal they present of sacralized theocracy founded on sacrifice and ritual cleanliness? If we don't dismiss them, can we ever get free of war and violence? But if we do dismiss them, do we become strangers not just to our own ancestors, but to ourselves? And if we reinterpret them, aren't we being dishonest? I do believe that recapitulation is the only way to reject the ideal of archaic theocracy but still understand ourselves and our ancestors, and that Christianity is the only viable program of recapitulation, and hence the only point of view from which the archaic classics -- not just the Hebrew ones, but any of them -- can be understood in the twenty-first century (the example of this type of analysis done here might explain what I mean). But that means it is all the more necessary that we get recapitulation, and how it sums up all the archaic classics, right.

Ouyang Xiu and One-Pointed Concentration

Given the overwhelming response I got for my previous post about Shusun Tong, I know you are all waiting with bated breath to hear Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (also spelled Ou-yang Hsiu, pronounced "Oh-yahng she-oh") give another side of the Eastern Classicist ethos in his biography of Feng Dao. (Seriously, my blog is now the tops for English-language references to Shusun Tong on Google. Pretty impressive, eh?)

Well, here it is -- and I'll even make a point about Lutheranism at the end . . .

Feng Dao 馮道 was a Confucian official of the tenth century. This was a time when North China ran through five dynasties in as many decades, while ten kingdoms divided up the southern half of the country.* While the generals were fighting for the throne, the Confucian officials were trying to maintain some kind of order. Ouyang Xiu (that's a page from his collected works in the picture) was writing a century later when the Heartland, China, had been almost all unified under the Northern Song. From the chaos of ruptured family relations and shattered dynasties he wanted to learn something about how for over a half-century men had been incapable of escaping this nightmare and returning to the Way set forth in the Classics.

As Ouyang Xiu begins his biography -- and I cite here Richard Davis's distinguished translation, pp. 438-443 -- Feng Dao appears to be the exemplary official writers of his own time had taken him to be. Ouyang Xiu writes:

Dao*** could be frugal to the point of severe self-deprivation. When the princes of Jinn and Liang [rival commanders, one a Shatuo Turk and the other a renegade peasant rebel, fighting over the corpse of the defunct Tang dynasty] faced off from opposite sides of the Yellow River, Dao lived in a thatched hut within the military compound and slept simply on bundles of straw, rather than on a sleeping mat. And whenever receiving a salary, he found quiet contentment in lavishing it on servants, permitting them to enjoy the same food and wine as he. Commanders then given to abducting the beautiful girls of the vanquished often presented some to Dao, who could not well reject them, so he would furnish a separate room as accommodation while inquiring about their original father or husband, discreetly returning the women.

Taking leave as academician to mourn for his father, he found his native Jingcheng plagued for years with famine, so Dao relinquished all his possessions to relieve the villagers, retreating to the wilderness to till the land and haul his own firewood. When others let their own lands grow wild or lacked the strength to till themselves, he would quietly proceed at nighttime to till for them. Such persons might later express embarrassed gratitude, yet Dao saw nothing particularly noble in his deeds.

But as Ouyang Xiu goes on, we notice Feng seems to be lacking something:

Dao served Emperor Mingzong [ethnically, a Shatuo Turk, and emperor of the Latter Tang dynasty] as minister for more than ten years, and after Mingzong expired, he ministered to Emperor Min. In the wake of the Prince of Liu's rebellion at Fengxiangfu, and Emperor Min's flight to Weizhou, Dao led official multitudes in welcoming the usurping Prince to the capital. The Prince became Emperor Fei, Dao ministering to him. Emperor Min was still alive and at Weizhou at the time of Fei's accession, but perished in an act of regicide three days later. Emperor Fei subsequently transferred Dao locally as governor of Tongzhou, extending honors as duke a year later. Dao likewise served the the Latter Jinn** after its conquest of the previous Latter Tang** dynasty, the Jinn monarch, Gaozu, naming him dignitary for public works with ministerial powers, honorary dignitary of education, and concurrent director of the Secretariat, while elevating his noble status to Duke of Lu. He ministered to Emperor Chu once Gaozu passed away, receiving honors as grand marshal and Duke of Yan as noble rank; reassignment to the Kuanggguo and later Weisheng governorships later ensued.

Feng Dao even served the Kitans [a Mongolic people who had invaded from the northeast] after they had annihilated the Jinn, meeting [their ruler] Yelü Deguang for an audience in the capital . . . Dao followed Deguang upon his return north, as far as Changshan then reverted to the new Latter Han** dynasty upon the accession of its Emperor Gaozu, serving as grand preceptor with the prestige-rank of fengchaoqing. He further served the Zhou Dynasty when it conquered the Han, Emperor Taizu of Zhou** honoring him as grand preceptor and concurrent palace secretary.

Now after this recital, the historian thinks it justified to tip his hand and draw some conclusions:

A youthful Feng Dao succeeding in making a name for himself by dint of contrived manners, and as high official, strove to impress others with his staid demeanor. Having served four royal houses and ten sovereigns, he increasingly presumed upon bygone merits to glorify himself. Yet courtiers of the age, the wise and witless alike, all celebrated Dao as senior statesman and heaped praises on him. Yelü Deguang once asked of him, "How are we to render assistance to the commoners throughout the world?" Dao responded with a riddle, "Times like ours would be hard to salvage even for the Buddha, should he appear. Only a man like Your Majesty will do." The Kitan decision not to exterminate the commoners of the Heartland [that is, North China] is uniformly attributed to the goodwill fostered by Dao through such deeds -- deeds of flattery.

To do Feng Dao justice, Ouyang Xiu explains how he discouraged at least for a few months the Zhou dynasty's founder, a successful general, from usurping the throne and deposing his Han dynasty predecessor.

Having once thwarted Taizu in his ambitions, Dao tends by observers to be exonerated of complicity in the demise of the Jinn and Han dynasties. Yet he never seemed especially upset at witnessing the death of rulers or the dissolution of empires.

Then Ouyang cites Feng Dao's own words to draw a portrait of him that makes him the true Lutheran living out the doctrine of vocation, doing his duty while recognizing that the good things of this world were created for our enjoyment. He draws this picture -- and shudders with revulsion:

In a world beleaguered by the universal chaos and alien invasion that gravely imperiled the fates of all living souls, Dao adopted "Old Man of Eternal Joy" as his pen name. He even composed a letter of several hundred words celebrating service to four different houses, plus the Kitans, only to find glory in the offices and titles acquired. "I have been filial to family and loyal to dynasty" he proclaims, "and experienced being a son, brother, official, teacher, husband, and father, as well as a begetter of sons and grandsons. In occasionally opening a tome or drinking a draft, but also in consuming food, savoring songs, or enjoying human beauty, I have always found contentment with the times. And with age, I found contentment within. What joy could be greater?" And so goes the language of his autobiography!

A spirit naturally Lutheran! Enjoying the good things of life, trying to help out where he can, and bending with the times. Whichever general murders the emperor, he will find Feng Dao, the truly conscientious civil servant doing his best to administer government in a fair and humane fashion. But whether the dynasty lasts or not, whether one general kills the emperor and takes his place -- that's not my department!

To Ouyang Xiu, Feng Dao had everything but principle. Feng Dao was proud that he had survived and even thrived in an age of chaos, without losing his own rectitude -- to Ouyang Xiu it was too much flexible bending with the times that made the chaos. Looking back from the stable Song dynasty, he saw men of the Five Dynasties had allowed chaos to happen because they refused to follow the principle of loyalty:

Without integrity everything is acceptable, without shame anything is done. When ordinary men are so disposed every sort of catastrophic turmoil and devastating defeat can occur. Worse yet, when high officials will accept or do anything, chaos for the world and peril to empire can scarcely be eluded.

Indeed to his shame the generals and vigilantes were more principled than the scholars, whom the classics should have trained:

For the entire Five Dynasties era, I found three officials of complete virtue and fifteen to die honorably in service -- rather than serve the enemy of their lord. It is perplexing that a great many literati presented themselves as Confucians and claimed to study antiquity, enjoyed the remuneration of mankind -- by receiving a public salary -- and served its empire. However, inasmuch as those to act on principles of righteous loyalty hailed solely from the ranks of military leaders and warriors, it only affirms the total absence of peers within Confucian ranks. Did literati of less lofty virtue so disdain the times that they dared not surface, their revulsion for the prevailing tumult notwithstanding? Or were monarchs then too undeserving to reach them?

To illustrate his point, Ouyang Xiu presents a story of the widow of an official returning home from a distant assignment of her husband's where she had been when he died. She travelled with her son and the corpse of her husband to bury at their home town. If one woman can evince such moral girth, he argued, then surely the age produced others gone unnoticed by history:

Heading eastward, she passed through Kaifengfu and stopped at an inn, where the keeper refused her lodging owing to the suspicious spectacle of an unaccompanied woman with child in hand. [Was she a prostitute? perhaps he was thinking]. The sun had already set and Woman Li refused to leave, so the innkeeper grabbed her arm to evict her. The woman now let out a long wail of protest in peering at the heavens, declaring, "How have I, the wife of another man, failed to protect my chastity by allowing this arm to be touched by another? And surely, I cannot permit a single arm to defile my entire body!" So, drawing an axe, she lopped off her own arm. [In a twisted kind of way, this reminds you of something, doesn't it? See here and here] Roadside observers then surrounded and comforted her, some pointing their fingers accusingly at the innkeeper as others wept. Upon learning of the matter, the custodian of Kaifengfu informed the court and tapped official funds to provide medicines to cover the wound. He extended generous relief to the Woman Li, and had the inkeeper flogged with a light rod.

Ouyang Xiu comments:
We lament: Literati lacking similar regard for their moral repute, men suffering shame for the simple sake of survival should be considerably ashamed to learn of this woman's integrity.

A while ago, I present two portraits, of a Lutheran champ and a Lutheran chump. What I was hoping one of my commenters would point out is that the Lutheran chump seemed, well, much more Lutheran. Fond of the good life, genuinely kind and humanitarian, aiming for peace, wary of pressing his opinion on things above his pay grade, Elector John George was a wonderful person and a complete failure either as a defender of German rights or of Lutheran existence. As for the champ, Gustavus Adolphus, with all his activity, his combination of soaring rhetoric and willingness to see blood shed in rivers, his intensity and restlessness -- in general it strikes me, as it did his contemporaries, as vaguely Reformed, in temperament, if not in doctrine.

The temperament advocated by Lutheran leaders savors powerfully of Feng Dao. Uwe Siemon-Netto has been calling for Lutheran political leaders in America. He has set before us a portrait of an exemplary Lutheran:

There is no Lutheran law – no Christian law – against earning a decent wage. We are not called to asceticism. We are not called to eschew a good glass of wine, a tasty meal, the blessings of a lovely home and an excellent car.

You can be rich and still heed your calling out of love for your neighbor, centering on the You rather than the Me. One of those was my former boss, the German newspaper magnate Axel Springer, a confessional Lutheran. He was a self-made billionaire.

He owned a villa in the best section of Hamburg, a castle in northern Germany, a manor house in Berlin, a sumptuous property on Sylt Island in the North Sea, an island in Greece, a ski lodge in St. Moritz and a town house in London. Se he was no pauper.

Still, Axel Springer bore a heavy cross. In the 1960s and 1970s he was subjected to terrorist attacks, and constant demonstrations by extreme left-wingers, not because of his ample bank account but for the unfashionable things he did for the wellbeing of his readers, his staff, and his fellow Germans, and the world community.

Then the world thought Berlin was lost, he moved his company headquarters from Hamburg right to the Berlin Wall. When all others seemed prepared to write off 17 million East Germans, he set himself up for public ridicule by campaigning relentlessly for Germany’s reunification.
When others paid no more than lip service to the reconciliation between Germans and Jews, he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into this cause.

He donated huge amounts of money to Israel and made every one of his journalists sign a covenant promising to work for this reconciliation – and for a transatlantic partnership with the United States, a partnership the German left tried to undermine since 1968.

Axel Springer was clearly a Lutheran with a sense of calling, working out of love for his fellow man.

As far as personality goes, I was born to be, at my best, a John George, a Feng Dao. I look at Woman Li and see an escapee from the insane asylum. On this question, I have long ago recognized that I don't have freedom of the will.

But maybe it's my "hard Puritan" ancestry, but somehow I can't get it out of my head that people who make other people uncomfortable, who cut off their hands and put out their right eyes, and do justice and let the heavens fall (so often on the heads of people who had nothing to do with the matter at all), who seem to be afflicted by principles the rest of us have only a nodding acquaintance with, that such people are the kind who can actually listen to Jesus and do what He says.

At least, that is, when they're not actually insane.

*Curious sidelight: three of those dynasties were founded by commanders of the Shatuo Turks whose descendants later converted to Christianity in the eleventh century, a story I've written about here and here.

** Tang, Jinn (Tsin or Chin) Han, Zhou (or Chou): if you know a little of Chinese history, you may recognize these as names of great dynasties -- but in fact these are all pathetic epigones, who adopted the dynasty names of glorious predecessors to catch a gleam of their reflected glory.

***Dao by the way is his given name. Chinese put the family name first, but then use only a person's given name for abbreviation in writing.

(Part of) Where I Was Coming From on the Last Post

So what was I trying to say here about the execution of Saddam Hussein? At the most general, that the objectors have no sense of the importance of time in judging political actions. That ways and means which work wonderfully in one time will lead to disaster if applied at another, and that the maxims that must be internalized to maintain a state are fatal to those attempting to establish a state.

Sima Qian 司馬遷 ( also written Ssu-ma Ch'ien, pronounced roughly suh-mah chih-yen) said this in a hundred different ways in his wonderful Records of the Grand Historian, and he did it with a light touch; none of my heavy breathing and straining for effect.

In his chapter 99, he is telling the story of Shusun Tong 叔孫通, who served Liu Bang 劉邦 (the emperor Gaozu 漢高祖), who in the chaos and rebellions that marked the end of the Qin dynasty found his way from being a peasant to being the founder of the Han dynasty.

When Shusun Tong surrendered to the king of Han [the future Emperor Gaozu of China's first imperial dynasty], he was accompanied by over 100 Classicists* who had been studying under him. However, he did not recommend any of them to the king, but instead spent his time recommending all sorts of men who had originally been outlaws or ruffians. His disciples began to curse him behind his back, saying "Here we have served the master for a number of years until at last we are lucky enough to surrender and join the forces of the king of Han. But now, instead of recommending us for positions, he spends all his time recommending a bunch of gangsters! What sort of behavior is this?"

Shusun Tong got word of what they were saying, and told them, "The king of Han is at the moment busy dodging arrows and missiles in a struggle for control of the world. What could a lot of scholars like you do in such a fight? Therefore I have first recommended the sort of men who can cut off the heads of enemy generals and seize their pennants. Wait a while! I won't forget you!

The king of Han made Shusun Tong an erudite and awarded him the title of lord of Jisi. In the fifth year of the Han dynasty, after the entire empire had been conquered, the nobles joined at Dingdao in conferring upon the king of Han the title of Supreme Emperor, and Shusun Tong arranged the ceremony and titles to be used. [Early Chinese Classicists saw public ritual and decorum as both vital to government and the area in which they were the experts.] The emperor completely did away with the elaborate and irksome ritual which the Qin [the previous tyrannical dynasty] had followed and greatly simplified the rules of the court. His followers and ministers, however, were given to drinking and wrangling over their respective achievements, some shouting wildly in their drunkenness, others drawing their swords and hacking at the pillars of the palace, so that Emperor Gaozu worried about their behavior. Shusun Tong knew that the emperor was becoming increasingly disgusted by the situation, and so he spoke to him about it. "Classicists" he said, "are not much use when one is marching to conquest, but they can be of help in keeping what has already been won. I beg to summon some of the scholars of Lu [the homeland of Confucius, which still had the best reputation in Classical studies] who can join with my disciples in drawing up a ritual for the court. . . .

"You may try and see what you can do," replied the emperor. "But make it easy to learn! Keep in mind that it must be the sort of thing I can learn!"

Shusun Tong accordingly went as an envoy to summon some thirty or more scholars of Lu. Two of the Lu scholars, however, refused to come. "You have served close to ten different masters," they replied, "and with each of them you have gained trust and honor simply by flattering them to their faces. Now the world has justbeen set at peace, the dead have not been properly buried, and the wounded have not risen from their beds, and yet you wish to set up rites and music for the new dynasty. But rites and musci can only be set up after a dynasty has accumulated virtue for a period of a hundred years. We could never bring ourselves to take part in what you are doing, for what you are doing is not in accord with the ways of antiquity. We will never go! Now go away and do not defile us any longer!"

"True pig-headed Classicists you are, indeed!" said Shusun Tong, laughing. "You do not know that the times have changed!"

After a month of practice the ceremonies were conducted, with the officials drawn up in strict ranks, the emperor arriving on a litter, blessings from the nobles, ritual wine, and toasts:

Anyone who did not perform the ceremony correctly was promptly pulled out of line and expelled from the hall. During the drinking which followed the formal audience there was no one who dared to quarrel or misbehave in the least. [Imagine that!] With this, Emperor Gaozu announced, "Today for the first time I realize how exalted a thing it is to be an emperor!" He appointed Shusun Tong his master of ritual and awarded him 500 catties of gold.

(from Sima Qian, trans. Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty I: pp. 241-244.)

Of course the "pig-headed Classicists" had their own eloquent spokesmen, such as Ouyang Xiu, writing a 1,000 years later who in making his biography of the figure of Feng Dao eloquently denounced a man quite like Shusun Tong as a lubricious hypocrite. But I'll present Ouyang Xiu and Feng Dao another time . . .

*This is my preferred rendition for Watson's "Confucian scholars." At least at this time, they were students not so much of the works of Confucius himself, but of the five Classics held to date from well before Confucius's time. Think of these works as the Torah, Confucius and Mencius as Rabbis Hillel and Akiva, and the "Classicists" as Chinese-style Talmudists and you've basically got it. The main difference was that because China remained politically independent, the Chinese Classicists still read their Classics as basically political, state-building documents. So these "Talmudists" were supposed to actually help build a real empire and bring order to the real world.

What Are We Looking at Here?

What are we looking at here? For starters, that's me. For seconds this is Alkhanai National Park in the Aga Buriat Autonomous Area, in Siberia, Russia.

But what are we looking at? A scene of "nature," to be enjoyed as "beautiful"? Or a scene of a not-so pristine "environment" that needs "protecting"?

Or a "Buddha field" in which we can make merit by circumambulating the Buddha thereof?

Or all three at once?

Alkhanai has all the appurtenances of a national park: a big campgrounds near the entrance packed with campers and trailers, with electric sockets and faucets, concessions stands, even a disco running at night. Like many national parks the world over, Alkhanai has too many visitors. The camping center when I visited this summer was supposed to accomodate 200 campers; it had more like 2,000. The visitors (and the concessions stands owners) are mostly Russian, but the site is in some sense "owned" by the Buriats, for whom it is a sacred site. People come to do two things: first bathe for their health in the pure, frigid waters coming down from the mountain. These are called arshaan, a word that incidentally comes from Sanskrit rashayana "holy water." Second they come to follow one or more of the rather arduous hiking paths up through the mountains to various sites of striking scenery.

As we went further and further up the mountain, I enjoyed the scenery immensely, and found the Russian daytrippers to be rather less annoying than my Buriat hosts did (probably since I couldn't pick up the incessant curse-words that apparently many of the younger ones were flinging). But as we went through the stone arches decorated with blue khadags (scarves; example here), it suddenly occurred to me that this wasn't just some generic "sacred mountain", a concept about which I had gotten a bit blase, since virtually every mountain is sacred in the Mongolian plateau. I knew where I'd heard of specifically this type of site before -- it was the kind of Buddhist pilgrimage site that Toni Huber wrote about here and which is described in this very illuminating autobiography by this nineteenth century Tibetan monk Tsogdug Rangdul, (also known as Shabgar). Perhaps I was a bit slow, but I had not yet come across such sites in Mongolia (you have to remember, when I began in Mongolian studies it was the 1980s, just as the Mongols of Mongolia, Russia, and China were thawing out of Communism).

The climax sites, near the peak, were circumambulating the stupa (reliquary) blessed by the Dalai Lama, crawling through the nügelei nükhe "hole of sin," a narrow crevasse in the rock, which when you do it is both a test of your moral state and a purging, and near the peak a pit or umai "womb," in which the fortunate can dig with their hands and find stones, that will be their blessing. (There was also a shrine of the famous Buriat lama Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov.) Along the way, I took to picking up the trash which was pretty common in the area, but had to be careful, because coins and bottles of vodka were often not trash but votive offerings along with the khadags.

I crawled through the hole of sin, but gave the "womb" and circumambulating the stupa a pass. It was a sight of unforgettable strangeness to watch as the Russian campers, many wearing showy crosses, processing around the stupa with their palms together as the Buriat guide preached to them, "Think about the Buddha here, feel your sins dropping away, all your anger and impatience." The mountain was beautiful, and the pilgrimage trail was satisfyingly arduous, although my aging knees took a while to recover. Of course, as a pilgrimage trail, the arduous hike was part of the point: working hard to show your devotion builds merit.

But the relationship of the mountain to the pilgrimage is deeper than just making it difficult of access. When we went into the freezing waters, it occurred to me that the meaning of the term arshaan nowadays meaning "natural mineral waters" really was not so far from the old Sanskrit "holy water." I'd come to think of turning "holy water" into "mineral water" as some comic modernization, but that was too shallow a viewpoint.

In Hinayana Buddhism, the concept had been that this world is suffering and you have to get out of it through training yourself to really feel that fact and extinguish desire for it. I am "here," and nirvana is "over there." In Mahayana Buddhism, with the concept of everything in the world being empty of inherent existence (which is not saying it doesn't exist), you don't have to go anywhere, you just have to realize that suffering exists precisely because your mind has recreated the world as desire and suffering. Don't change the world around, change the way you think about it. Nirvana isn't "over there"; it's right where you are -- you only have to train your mind to realize it and know it. But in Vajrayana Buddhism, a further inversion takes place: if we perceive the material world around us as painful, turmoil-filled, and fleeting solely because we are subject to delusion and desire, then the more we transform (mentally/magically) the material world around us into that which is delightful, peaceful, and abiding then the more we have eliminated suffering, desire, and delusion in our minds; since the bad world and the bad mind are linked by a necessary and sufficient causal connection, which one is the cause and which one is the effect is irrelevant. So transforming springs into holy waters, mountains into residences of the Buddhas -- all of this makes the pilgrimage not just a way of building merit, but a way of grasping that the mountain already is a Buddha field, a perfect world, and hence, by living in that Buddha field, to eliminate delusion and desire.

While I appreciated hiking this beautiful scenery and delightfully soothed my aching knees in the icy waters in one way, Buddhist pilgrims appreciate it in a whole different way. Arshaan was mineral water/holy water together for them, in a way that it couldn't be for me. Maurice Freedman, an anthropologist in Hong Kong's "New Territories," must have had this happen to him too, suddenly realizing the person next to you is not seeing what you see at all. He describes yet another way of seeing the scenic, neither as a beautiful and sublime creation of God, nor as a Buddha field but as a set of hidden forces ready to bless or blight those connected to the bones buried therein:

One may stand by the side of a Chinese friend and admire the view -- and in the New Territories, as elsewhere in coastal southeastern China, the combination of hills and sea produces splendid vistas. One's own pleasure is aesthetic and in a sense 'objective': the landscape is out there and one enjoys it. One's friend is reacting differently. His appreciation is cosmological. For him the viewer and the viewed are interacting, both being part of some greater system. The cosmos is Heaven, Earth, and Man. Man is in it and of it. So that while my characteristic reaction to a landscape may be to say that I find it beautiful, my friend's may well be to remark that he feels content or comfortable [ -- reminds me of the discussion in Abolition of Man]. . . . The landscape affects him directly, in the ideal case making him feel relaxed and confident. (It is for this reason that English-speaking Chinese in Hong Kong often use the word 'psychological' to refer to the effect of feng-shui. They do not mean, as one might at first suppose, that geomancy is an illusion. They are asserting a human response to forces working in the cosmos.) And just as a landscape affects a man, man may affect it. In a landscape there are mystical [I would prefer to simply say 'concealed'] entities (an Azure Dragon, a White Tiger and so on): as men we may harm them or improve them, weaken them or strengthen them: if we do, the landscape will no longer be the same, and in turn it will differently affect us. The landscape I see and the one seen by my Chinese friend are not, therefore, exactly the same thing . . . (from Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung, pp. 121-122).*

*Don't get the idea this is all "man in harmony with nature and his fellow man" stuff. There are only a limited number of geomantically favorable burial sites, and competition for them is fierce and usually decided by the checkbook, but sometimes by clever subterfuges. Burying, or reburying, your parents or grandparents in a good site (preferably all six, each in a different good site) is a strategy for success.