Ch'en Liang on Public Interest and the Law 9780824846916

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CH'EN LIANG ON PUBLIC INTEREST AND THE LAW

CH'EN LIANG ON PUBLIC INTEREST AND THE LAW Hoyt Cleveland

Tillman

MONOGRAPH NO. 12 SOCIETY FOR ASIAN AND COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY University of Hawaii Press Honolulu

©1994 University of Hawaii Press All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland. Ch'en Liang on public interest and the law / Hoyt Cleveland Ullman p. cm. — (Monograph no. 12, Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-1610-2 1. Ch'en, Liang, 1143-1194 —Contributions in philosophy of law. 2. Law—China—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series: Monograph . . . of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy ; 12. B128.C3474T55 1994 181'.112—dc20 94-20450 CIP

Camera-ready copy prepared by the author Completed with a Pacific Cultural Foundation Subsidy

University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council of Library Resources

For two beloved teachers and persons of integrity TENG KUANG-MING who also had a lifelong interest in Ch'en Liang (1143-1194) and J. JULIUS SCOTT, JR. who has effectively encouraged students to persevere and to the memory of another gentleman CH'IU HAN-SHENG (1912-1993) who contributed to our understanding of Chu Hsi (1130-1200)

Contents Foreword by Roger T. Ames Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

1. Ch'en Liang's Concepts and Their Early Confucian Roots

2. Ch'en Liang and the Legacy of the Northern Sung

3. Practical Governance

4. The Question of Ch'en Liang's Influence

Conclusion Notes

Glossary Bibliography of Works Cited

Index

Foreword Comparative philosophers of culture have no choice but to m a k e generalizations—often broad generalizations w h i c h are inevitably frustrated in some degree by the rich detail of the traditions under examination.

O n e of these philosophical

concerns the importantly different w a y in w h i c h

generalizations philosophical

creativity is expressed in the W e s t e r n experience and that of traditional China. In reviewing the parade of W e s t e r n philosophers

from

classical Greece d o w n to our present century, the historian of philosophy might w a n t to allow that these thinkers, as original as they m a y claim to be, have operated within a shared metaphysical f r a m e w o r k , and that in so doing, they have in significant degree reduplicated the aspirations of systematic philosophy.

A s the

decidedly anti-systematic Nietzsche observes: Under an invisible spell, they a l w a y s revolve once more in the s a m e orbit; h o w e v e r independent of each other they m a y feel themselves w i t h their critical or systematic wills, something within t h e m leads t h e m , something impels t h e m in a definite order, one after the o t h e r — t o w i t , the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. 1 Nietzsche's charge is that these philosophers in constructing their systems have often exaggerated their o w n originality, seemingly u n a w a r e of the limitations of systematic philosophy itself, and hence been ready to overstate their o w n disjunction w i t h the tradition. After all, given that these philosophers achieve their o w n importance

x

FOREWORD

to the extent that they challenge the status quo and stand apart from the tradition to which they are heirs, the Descarteses, Kants, Hegels, and Einsteins have each wanted to bring the philosophical project full-circle—a complete revolution back to that tradition's axiomatic beginnings. Instigating this "revolution" in philosophy by building apparently new and comprehensive systems, they have often generated novel vocabularies to rename all too familiar—but reupholstered—pieces of philosophical furniture. When Whitehead proclaims that all of Western philosophy is little more than a series of footnotes to Plato, he is making the point that w e must give proper attention to the profound continuities which have driven the dominant dialectic. The danger, then, for the historian in reporting on the Western philosophical tradition is buying into the degree of novelty claimed by each thinker without recognizing the deep and abiding overlap that locates them squarely within the tradition.

There is,

more often than not, a donkey behind the horse. As is the case with so many of the defining characteristics of the Chinese tradition, w e are presented, in the comparison between Western and Chinese intellectual history, with something of an inversion—a mirror opposite.

That is, the dominant Chinese

philosophic tradition has tended to be commentarial rather than systematic, with philosophers reinterpreting the classical core in order to accommodate changing historical circumstances. Rarely do w e find a direct and concerted attempt to challenge the canonical center.

Seldom do w e encounter the Freudian denial of the parent

in an effort to establish the independent identity of the philosophical progeny.

Rarely do w e come across the situation captured in

Aristotle's critique: "I love my teacher, Plato, but I love Truth more."

FOREWORD

x¡

With the emergence of a Confucian orthodoxy in the Han dynasty based mainly on the Hsiin-tzu branch of Confucianism, an important point made by Professor Tillman in this study, scholarly dispute was usually tempered by a commitment to mutual accommodation. Even in Hsün-tzu, one of classical China's most rationalistic and "systematic" philosophers, there is a general distaste for contentiousness, and in its place, an active cultivation of the "art of accommodation"—what Hsün-tzu calls chien-shu

St íifí , 2 Ideally,

"dispute" (píen M) is a cooperative exercise among responsible participants that proceeds beyond obstinacy to search for alternatives on which all can agree. There is a fundamental disesteem for coercion of any kind because of the irony it entails: aggressiveness or violence threatens to disrupt rather than reinforce or improve upon what Professor Tillman has felicitously termed the Confucian "fellowship," a sense of academic and often spiritual community which stands as the ultimate end of doctrinal engagement. After all, within this Confucian fellowship, the goal of disputation is not as much victory in contest, which is necessarily divisive, as it is the strengthening of communal harmony. Contentiousness, as opposed to accommodation, betrays a concern for personal advantage. The proper goal of criticism in the "historical rationalism" of imperial China, whether it be scholarly or sociopolitical, is the strengthening of communal harmony. Tony Cua describes rituals as "schemes of mutual accommodation of differences in attitudes, belief, and values in social intercourse."3 These ritual practices are negotiated at the intersection of personal commitments and communally important values. This is not to deny that the Chinese tradition is dialectical, but rather to suggest that the nature of the dialectic is importantly different, informed as it is by

xii

FOREWORD

deep c o m m u n a l sensibilities.

Disagreements are usually pursued in

a more nuanced and indirect w a y . In the Chinese case, authority lies not as m u c h w i t h claims t o originality as w i t h w h a t is persistently authoritative and t h u s remembered by history. The danger for the h i s t o r i a n - p h i l o s o p h e r — these t w o o c c u p a t i o n s are hardly separable in this t r a d i t i o n — i s t o be o v e r w h e l m e d by the clear lines of c o n t i n u i t y while failing t o appreciate the degree of novelty entailed by the commentarial process. This is w h e r e H o y t Tillman has over the years taken his academic stand and made an i m p o r t a n t c o n t r i b u t i o n . w o r k — i n c l u d i n g Utilitarian

Confucianism:

to Chu Hsi ( 1 9 8 2 ) , Confucian

Discourse

Ch'en Liang's and Chu Hsi's

( 1 9 9 2 ) , and this m o s t recent m o n o g r a p h , Ch'en

Interest

and the Law—Professor

In all of his

Liang

Challenge Ascendancy on

Public

Tillman is an archeologist of ideas.

He worries t h a t w e might inadvertently simplify a c o m p l e x discourse by failing t o take adequate inventory of doctrinal differences.

And

the problem is t h a t these differences are not always readily identifiable.

S o m e t i m e s t h e y are masked by conceptual equivocation,

w h e r e a given philosophic locution has a shifting semantic value in its m a n y different c o n t e x t s .

A n example central t o the present

m o n o g r a p h is the distinction b e t w e e n tao-hsueh

¡ ¡ H ^ (Learning of

the Confucian Way) as this expression w a s used in the late eleventh t o the m i d - t h i r t e e n t h centuries by Li Hsin-ch'uan in his Tao ming

lu,

and this same expression as it came t o be used in the f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r y and later. A n o t h e r example is provided by the w o r d ssu For some philosophers it can properly be rendered " s e l f i s h n e s s " ; h o w e v e r , in C h ' e n Liang, w h e r e it is not entirely negative, "selfregard" is more appropriate.

FOREWORD

xiii

Another obstacle to an appreciation of novelty in China's commentarial tradition is the common practice among philosophers of advancing their own arguments, not by disagreement with an authoritative text, but by its co-optation through a creative ^interpretation.

The Ch'eng-Chu appropriation of a relatively non-

speculative pre-Ch'in tradition as a resource for abstract—dare we say cosmological—reflections in li-hsüeh

(School of Principle)

is a case in point. One more problem that the historian must face in giving voice to the crowd of philosophers who constitute a particular period is the tendency within the tradition to allow the notion of orthodoxy (or often, orthopraxis) to lull one into a kind of reductionism. Again, this is where Hoyt Tillman has initiated an important discussion. In looking at Ch'en Liang as a matrix of relationships, Professor Tillman reaches back into history to appreciate Ch'en's indebtedness to Hsün-tzu.

But he does not exaggerate the areas of influence by

overwriting Ch'en Liang with Hsün-tzu.

Instead, respecting the

subtlety that is the usual condition in the transmission of ideas. Professor Tillman moves quickly from points of convergence to the many fundamental differences that separate them. And he does not stop there. The only way the historian can resist the truncating effect of orthodoxy is to insist upon adequate contextualization of any participant in the conversation. To this end, Professor Tillman works to identify the linkages and differences that place Ch'en Liang within the descent of the Ch'eng brothers, the Su family, Wang An-shih, and Ssu-ma Kuang, and then to Ou-yang Hsiu. Again, in accounting for the persistence of Ch'en Liang's ideas within the tradition, Professor Tillman draws a line between the practical commitments

xiv

FOREWORD

characteristic of late Ch'ing reformers, on the one end, and C h ' e n Liang's borrowing from the practical side of Tao-hsueh to develop his historicism, on the other. In assaying the mutual influence that obtains among the philosophers in C h ' e n Liang's world. Professor Tillman resists the easy path of enumerating similarities in order to excavate many revealing differences.

In so doing, a fabric of

multivalent and complex color develops. All of Professor Tillman's scholarship is a corrective to commentators w h o register only the major voices, thereby undervaluing those ideas which have persisted on the periphery d o w n to the t w e n t i e t h century.

After all, these same marginal forces gain

relevance whenever the center weakens. In C h ' e n Liang's attempt to maintain the hierarchically charged complementarity b e t w e e n "public-mindedness" (kung £ ) and "self-regard" issu) through the appropriate application of laws and regulations, in some w a y s he represents an endogenous resource for the development of a decidedly Chinese alternative to Western notions of rights, justice, civil consciousness, and so on. A s China, no longer able to close the door and eject noxious foreign influences, must in this decade confront the possibly corrosive effects of Western modernity, a key issue in the emergence of the n e w civil society will be the relationship b e t w e e n the public and private self. C h ' e n Liang's perception of human regularities—law, social institutions, rituals, Tao, and so on—as emergent in historical processes, and further, as continuous w i t h natural patterns of regularity, might prove to have considerable relevance for t o m o r r o w ' s China.

Honolulu, Hawaii January 1 9 9 4

Roger T. A m e s

Preface Those who have read my publications on Ch'en Liang ( 1 1 4 3 - 1 1 9 4 ) might well ask, "Do we need to hear about this unconventional thinker again?"

Two of the most perceptive and

thorough readers of my earlier writings on Ch'en, however, have presented me with a series of topics to address. This monograph is thus the culmination of my reply to questions originally posed by Robert Hymes of Columbia University and Conrad Schirokauer of the City College of New York. These two friends graciously prodded me to explore more deeply Ch'en Liang's novel pronouncements about the tension between public and private interests and to examine the role of the law within that context. This polarity between public and private is related to others I discussed at length in earlier publications, but it deserves its own inquiry.

They also urged me to

describe in greater detail Ch'en's thought and action in relation to such practical issues as local granaries, academies, and charity work.

Lastly, they challenged me to relate Ch'en's more striking

statements regarding public interest and the law to the established Confucian traditions of governance.

How could I not respond to

such an opportunity, arising from leading scholars who take my work seriously, to say more about a character I find fascinating? When these two friends cited an earlier draft of my study several times in their recently published book, Ordering the World, I found that some of my statements can be read quite differently than they were intended. Taking advantage of a delay in press schedules, I have had an opportunity to make elaborations herein that clarify how I think Ch'en might best be interpreted.

xvi

PREFACE Finding a single English equivalent for the central concept in

this study is problematic.

Kwang-Ching Liu of the University of

California at Davis has made the useful suggestion that kung £ translated as "the common interest."

be

I feel that "the collective

good" and "the commonweal" serve as related glosses in other contexts. Winston Davis of Washington & Lee University reacted to my use of the term "public interest" as bringing the state too much to mind; he preferred "the public good." All of these renderings are useful in bringing out nuances of the term kung.

Ch'en seemingly

used the term to cover a spectrum that would largely correspond to the common, public interest or collective good. meaning gives greater scope to his reflections.

This range of

Nevertheless, the

inclusion of state concerns also made his ideas about collective and private interests, as well as the ideas of other Confucians, vulnerable to reduction to instrumental means toward governmental ends. Use of the term 'Confucian' is becoming increasingly controversial in the East Asian field. A s Lionel Jensen and others argue, "Confucianism"

is a Western

construct,

originating

with

late

sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries, that has no real Chineselanguage equivalent prior to the twentieth century. 1

Of various

terms in classical Chinese referring to what moderns call "Confucian," Ju i l i is the most frequently cited; however, current scholarship demonstrates how uncertain and problematic the origins and meanings of this term are in early Chinese texts. Despite my respect for the case made by such scholars as Professor Jensen, I still find the term useful in my o w n work centered on the Sung ( 9 6 0 - 1 2 7 9 ) era. During the Sung, major intellectuals deliberately imaged a Ju tradition focused on the transmission of the Tao M ("Way") to

PREFACE distinguish it from other competing religious and

xvü philosophical

traditions. There were 71/ before "Confucius" (K'ung-tzu, 5 5 1 - 4 7 9 B.C.), and he w a s not the only major figure in the founding of the tradition known in modern times by the Latinized version of his name. Still, the most dominant Sung intellectuals identifying themselves with this tradition of the Tao did accord him special and unique status therein.

"Confucian" has some advantage over

"Confucianist" and "Confucianism" in lessening expectations of finding an "ism" or a coherent and extensive philosophical or ideological system shared by all members of the tradition.

The

diversity of those conventionally identified as "Confucians" leads some specialists in the field to call for abandoning the term altogether; still others, including myself, seek ways for us to clarify specifically to which "Confucian" circles, groups, and individuals w e are referring in our o w n writings. 2 Although the questions that initiated this inquiry arose from social and intellectual historians, placing this study in the Monograph Series of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy will, I hope, spark interest in C h ' e n Liang's ideas among philosophers. A s an intellectual historian, my analyses and comments differ from those in the discipline of philosophy. Nevertheless, the content of C h ' e n ' s ideas and their relation to classical and later thinkers provide, I believe, material for substantial and rigorous reflection among philosophers. Current attentiveness among such American philosophers as Alasdair Maclntyre and Robert Cummings Neville to the formation of East Asian traditions, suggests a broader potential audience for this monograph.

Acknowledgments

Henry Rosemont, Jr., editor of the SACP Monograph Series, deserves much of the credit for whatever positive attention this monograph attracts. Without his encouragement and assistance, the monograph would not have materialized.

Indeed, this became

affectionately known around my house as "the Henry book" to distinguish it from t w o other current projects.

My editor at the

University of Hawaii Press, Sharon F. Yamamoto, also provided guidelines and advice w i t h her usual expertise and grace.

The

referees for the Series provided helpful questions and pointers for enhancing the quality of the monograph, especially in the chapter discussing Ch'en's ideas in relation to those of Hsun-tzu. Roger T. Ames, editor of Philosophy

East and West, has graciously written

the Foreword from his perspective on comparative philosophy. Without the occasional opportunities to discuss Chinese thought w i t h my mentors, Benjamin I. Schwartz of Harvard and Ying-shih Yu (now at Princeton), as well as w i t h Bunny and Monica, my work and life would be much drier in the Arizona desert.

On

several occasions during the last dozen years, I have had the pleasure of sharing reflections on Ch'en Liang w i t h Teng Kuang-ming of Peking University. Besides asking me the questions that initiated this project, Robert Hymes of Columbia University and Conrad Schirokauer of the City College of New York made numerous suggestions for improving the style and organization of the original version of this study.

I

greatly benefited in the writing of that draft from discussions with l-fan Ch'eng w h o was then a visiting research fellow at Arizona State University

and on leave from Oregon State

University;

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XX

moreover, he read a later draft, too. I also appreciated invitations to present portions of that earlier version to Wm. Theodore de Bary's graduate seminar at Columbia University and to a meeting of the Southern California China Colloquium held at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Particular

thanks are due the designated discussant, Benjamin Elman of UCLA, for his comments. Among other members of that colloquium, Ohcho Ng stood out because of the thoroughness of his reading of that paper and my publications.

David McMullen of the University of

Cambridge and Philip Williams of Arizona State University kindly commented on a draft. I also had opportunities to discuss statecraft with Hao Chang of Ohio State University, Huang Chün-chieh of National Taiwan University, Huang Chin-shing of Academia Sinica, Mizoguchi Yüzö of Tokyo University, Kai-Wing Chow of the University of Illinois, Kwang-Ching Liu of the University of California, Davis, and Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Michael Friedrich, and Joachim Mittag at the University of München. Jacques Gernet of the College of France in Paris made suggestions regarding what is now the chapter on concepts. I greatly miss my discussions with James T.C. Liu (1919-1993). Needless to say, despite their insightful questions and suggestions, I alone am responsible for any mistakes in this monograph. Special thanks are due Deborah Rudolph for her exceptional copyediting skills applied to the body of the text.

Of all the

copyeditors from whom I have benefited over the years, she is the most incisive and wields the sharpest pencil. Richard Everett, Jr., made similar improvements to the front matter.

My daughter

Margaret helped to proofread the final copy. Ai-hwa Wu and Pu Niu proofread the Chinese characters in the Glossary and Bibliography.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research for this monograph w a s conducted

xxi while

teaching at Arizona State University, and I am grateful for the cordiality of numerous colleagues in my department and college. Retha Warnicke, Brian Gratton, Rodney Ito, and Gerald Kleinfeld, as well as my son Langston, deserve special mention for solving almost all of my computer and printing problems.

Colleagues in the A S U

library, especially A i - h w a Wu, have provided years of friendship, encouragement, and library materials.

Wesley Palmer has kindly

sent me xerox copies of a number of Chinese articles in recent years. This study w a s completed with a Pacific Cultural Foundation subsidy in the form of a summer 1 9 9 3 writing grant for which I am very thankful. Without my family, I would not have the energy to do my research and writing in the first place. M o s t significantly, Cristina and our children, Langston and Margaret, fortunately still play a more delightful and lively role in my daily life than even my teaching and research do.

Yet, "talking with the ancients" is so enjoyable

that I am writing this monograph to share my reflections with the fellowship of colleagues elsewhere.

Introduction The relation of the collective good or public interest (kung to private concerns or self-interest (ssu i A ) has been an important and recurrent question in the history of Chinese thought and as such has often been associated with two other hypothetical relationships: first, the opposition between what is right or correct (/' H ) and what is advantageous or profitable (//' i'J); and second, the contrast between the good ruler or true king (wang I ) and the strongman or hegemon (pa f t ) .

Taken together, kung and ssu, /'

and //', and wang and pa formed a core vocabulary for most traditional Confucian discussions of ethics in government, society, and history.

The antithesis of Tightness and advantage was the most

fundamental of the three: the conflict between public and private interest arose from this fundamental antithesis, and any ruler's historical implementation of either public goals or private ambitions revealed whether he was a true king or a selfish despot.

It is not

surprising, then, that Ch'en Liang ( 1 1 4 3 - 1 1 9 4 ) made the relation between public and private the axis of his thinking on society and government.

Declaring the centrality of this theme, he remarked:

"What I've studied all my life are the two terms kung and ssi/." 1 My earlier publications on Ch'en Liang have focused primarily on his revisionist ideas concerning the traditional antithesis between what is right and what is advantageous. Ch'en sought to transcend the moral dichotomy that Confucian theorists had developed, steadily and incrementally, between the conceptions of the morally right and the merely beneficial.

In Ch'en's eyes, that which pos-

sessed utility—that is, satisfied the reasonable desires and needs of

2

INTRODUCTION

the people and was advantageous to the greater good of society and state—validated its o w n correctness. Any course of action should, he argued, be determined by its anticipated consequences, especially in terms of attaining the greatest good. Central to the greatest good was maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain or difficulty for China and the individual households that constituted it. Thus, there are points of similarity between some of Ch'en's ideas and those of the British Utilitarians.

There are, of course, differences, too:

for

example, instead of talking primarily in what he would probably have regarded as generalized terms of happiness and pleasure, Ch'en's utilitarian notions concentrated more concretely on sharing benefits and satisfying common human needs and desires. In any event, Ch'en diverged from the mainstream of Confucian thinking about results. Every Confucian believed that the Tao m (conventionally glossed as "the Way"), once attained, would lead to a happy, flourishing society and thus sought courses of thought or action that would engender good sociopolitical consequences. Nonetheless, Confucians generally claimed that one could not aim at such results directly; good outcomes could be realized only through dedication to virtue per se. Confucians struggled with the fact that their dedication to the good did not assure optimum results. Ch'en Liang's consequentialist ethic was far more radical, for he presented the pursuit of sociopolitical consequences as good in and of itself. Although Ch'en presented his ideal as a unity of practical results and Confucian virtues, the principal Confucian ethical philosopher of his day, Chu Hsi ( 1 1 3 0 - 1 2 0 0 ) , responded with the criticism, "It is obvious that the basic orientation of your mind is toward results and advantage." 2

In other words, Chu

INTRODUCTION

3

rejected Ch'en's claim to be speaking about Confucian

ethical

values. Instead of condemning many of the dynamic and forceful rulers of later dynasties as despots, Ch'en sought to demonstrate his ethic of results through a retelling of historical events and the deeds of heroic individuals. What was right, he argued, was conditioned by the times and situations these heroic people had faced. The Tao itself, therefore, had been evolving through history.

His views of

other polarities (especially Tightness and advantage, sage-kings and historical rulers) are important background to the present topic. To avoid lengthy tangential discussions here, however, I refer the reader to my published studies of Ch'en's utilitarian ideas and philosophy of history. 3 The focus of the present monograph is on Ch'en Liang's statements about the one pair of traditional concepts in Confucian sociopolitical ethics that I have not yet discussed.

In striking and

important ways, Ch'en's views on the relation between public and private diverged, I will seek to show, from the traditions to which he was an heir. He also differed in this from his contemporary Chu Hsi, who eventually became the mainstream thinker to the literati elite and the textual authority for the government's civil service examinations. Most striking of all, perhaps, is Ch'en's assertion that the law could be used to transform self-interest into the collective interest. Taking this claim as my starting point, I will try to clarify Ch'en's statements on private interests and the common good, while placing him in the continuing discourse that extends from classical antiquity into modern times and highlighting his contributions to that discourse.

INTRODUCTION

4

The need to investigate Ch'en's views is made stronger by his omission from standard scholarly accounts of that continuing discourse.

In the most thorough of these studies of the public

interest in traditional and contemporary China, Mizoguchi Yuzo argues that in pre-Sung (960-1279) imperial China, kung evolved as a concept of sociopolitical ethics, limited in application to the realm of rulers and officials.

A s a term, kung came to signify a ruler's

willingness to share, to consider the broader perspective that extended beyond himself and his household.

During the philo-

sophical turn of the Sung era, kung evolved from a concept rooted in an imperial ideal to one more generally applied to the selfcultivation of the literati elite.

In the philosophy of Chu Hsi, as

presented by Mizoguchi, kung meant controlling desires and keeping oneself from selfishness; the opposition between kung and ssu was enhanced by linking the former with moral principles. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Confucians in late imperial China turned away from Chu Hsi's dualism between moral principles and human desires, developing a "naturalistic" view of human nature that affirmed such desires. Mizoguchi sees Chinese Marxism as the logical conclusion of the social and intellectual evolution of the concepts of kung and

ssu in traditional China:

the notion of kung limited sympathy for

private interests to a degree that effectively weakened the ideas of personal liberty and individual rights.4 In contradiction to part of

Mizoguchi's argument,

my

discussion will include passages that clearly suggest that Ch'en Liang and other early Confucians were not all so categorically negative in their views concerning human desires and did not restrict the applicability of their ethics to the elite alone. Still, Mizoguchi's thesis underscores the importance of my subject to understanding

INTRODUCTION

5

the roots of twentieth-century Chinese views of public and private interests, and to understanding some of the differences between Chinese and Western conceptions of the integrity of private interests in relation to the collective good. Further exploring the importance of the concept of kung, Mary Rankin shows how elites during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the concept to refer to a "public" sphere, whose activities were conducted on a level between the "private" ( ssu) and the "official" (kuan "iT).5 Even though clearly an advance over Sung thinkers' identification of "public" w i t h the official realm of the state, the late nineteenthcentury discussion of

"public"

was particularly

noteworthy

in

Chekiang, the province that had been home to Ch'en Liang and other utilitarian-oriented thinkers on statecraft in the t w e l f t h century. Although we do not, as yet, know enough about the local legacies of the twelfth-century thinkers and schools of Chekiang, it is probably not coincidental that their dominant concerns, terms, and concepts resurfaced with particular force in the same geographical area during the Ch'ing ( 1 6 4 4 - 1 9 1 1 ) . Another reason Ch'en Liang is a particularly apropos subject for study is that in comparison with the Confucian mainstream flowing from Chu Hsi during the last eight centuries, Ch'en's ideas are more translatable into the sociopolitical terms dominant today. For example, Hsiao Kung-ch'uan ( 1 8 9 2 - 1 9 8 3 ) has argued that there were t w o meanings for "the commonweal" [kung

fi)

in Ch'en's

reconstruction of the term's history: first, the pure commonweal in which the public directly controlled or influenced the kingship; second, the essential intent or purpose of the commonweal in which the government benefited the people. 6 Hou Wai-lu ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 8 7 ) has observed that Ch'en's theory about the rise of the state was based

6

INTRODUCTION

on notions of historical evolution and the natural rights of individual households. Thus, C h ' e n provided an alternative to Chu Hsi, w h o s e philosophy assumed sacred, unchanging principles. 7 Although these t w o modern scholars' analyses are clearly influenced by modern Western political theories, it might be hard to deny, after reading the present study, that C h ' e n Liang provided considerable substance for such theoretical expositions. Family background and personal experience may partly have shaped C h ' e n Liang's views. The disaster that struck his family with the Jurchen conquest of North China surely contributed to his obsession with liberating the North and recovering the former territories of the Sung dynasty. C h ' e n ' s great-grandfather had been killed around 1 1 2 7 in a battle against the invaders, and it w a s soon thereafter that his family w a s forced to sell t w o hundred (totaling almost twenty-eight acres) of farm land.

mou

Although the

family lived far from the contested border, its fortunes had declined precipitously. By the time C h ' e n reached his early thirties, furthermore, he had mourned the death of his mother, seen his father jailed on murder charges, and watched his grandparents die in anguish over the incrimination of their son. His father, too, died within a few years of his release from jail. A b o u t ten years after this, however, C h ' e n Liang w a s able to repurchase his family's former acreage and thus rise from near poverty to the level of a small-to-middling landlord. J u s t h o w he accomplished this is not clear. His fame as a forceful writer and student at the Imperial University gave him a base for good contacts and helped attract students from locally influential families.

He may even have invested in commerce,

assisted by the greater wealth and mercantile expertise of his wife's family. 8

INTRODUCTION

7

In any case, his family experience certainly heightened his awareness of the economic problems of private households and helped him appreciate that the impingement of national affairs and state institutions on the private sphere was not always beneficial. Moreover, having on different occasions been jailed on charges of lese majesty, manslaughter, and murder, he experienced the legal system in ways that few Confucian scholars did. Judicial torture and state coercion surely enhanced his attention to the importance of the law.

Chapter 1 Ch'en Liang's Concepts and Their Early Confucian Roots Ch'en's views undoubtedly had more than personal roots. Concern with public or collective interest and its relation to private interests and the law had been developing since the Chou era (ca. 1 0 4 5 - 2 5 6 B.C.). The terms kung and ssu date back at least to the early Chou odes in the Book of Poetry (Shih ching), but in such texts kung refers to a duke or the head of a major clan or lineage.1

The

terms first became common in the Warring States period ( 4 0 3 - 2 2 1 B.C.); however, even then they were often still used to distinguish in a concrete sense what belonged to the ruling dukes from what belonged to other people, including the lower echelons of feudal lords. But Confucius' concern for the welfare of the people and his recommendation to "profit people according to what profits them" implicitly provided grounds for a shift in the meaning of kung away from "duke" and toward "public" or "common." 2 Kung and ssu thus began to take on more abstract or general meanings in such writings as the Chuang-tzu and the Han Fei-tzu, but especially in the Hsiintzu. Because Hsun-tzu (fl. 3rd cent. B.C.), above other philosophers of the classical period, apparently had the most significant influence on Ch'en Liang's thinking regarding this particular pair of concepts, our discussion will begin with him, after first considering three pertinent subthemes in the current scholarship. A number of modern Chinese scholars, when discussing ching-shih

("statecraft," i.e., thought on governance), place

10

CONCEPTS

Ch'en Liang in the legacy of Hsun-tzu, but not without qualification. First, some see Ch'en as a lesser thinker w h o has made no philosophical contribution to the Hsun-tzu "school" or lineage of Confucian thought. A renowned specialist in Chinese philosophy, Li Tse-hou, for example, lauds Hsun-tzu's contributions to Chinese thinking, especially his debunking of superstitious traditions and his encouragement of an activist, transformative stance toward the natural world.

In a brief evaluation of Ch'en Liang, Li claims that

Ch'en simply "unconsciously" continued Hsun-tzu's legacy, but "was never able philosophically to progress a step in further development and elaboration."

Moreover, because Ch'en used such

terms as "Heaven's principles" and "human desires," he was "not able to escape the philosophical dominance" exercised by the Chu Hsi mainstream of his o w n day. 3

Such an emphatic judgment by

such a prominent voice seems to call for counterbalance.

With no

intent to belittle Hsun-tzu's contributions, I will still seek to empower Ch'en Liang's o w n voice by identifying what might be regarded as the "steps" by which he moved beyond Hsun-tzu philosophically. Second, there is a conventional tendency to read Ch'en's statements on power and authority in such a way that he is seen to ignore ethical questions and approve all established power structures. Thus, in contrast to Chu Hsi, he would not be a defender of the Confucian Tao. In the most recent major study of the history of statecraft thought that explicitly locates Ch'en in Hsun-tzu's lineage, Li Chi-hsiang cites my first book as grounds for rejecting the proposition that Ch'en's historiography was devoid of the Tao. Yet Li characterizes Ch'en's perspective as shih-shih

kuan

(history-of-power viewpoint) in contrast to Chu Hsi's Tao-shih kuan M ^ f f i (history-of-the-Tao viewpoint). 4 Besides "power," however,

CONCEPTS the w o r d shih

11

can indeed denote "tendencies" or

"trends."

M o r e o v e r , Li points out t h a t C h ' e n ' s historiography did f o c u s , as H s u n - t z u ' s had, on the evolution of cultural history and the practical achievements of later rulers. Still, t o guard against the conventional bias of reading C h ' e n as a mere spokesperson for p o w e r , I will also briefly consider the relationship b e t w e e n history and the Tao in Ch'en's writings. A t h i r d , related issue requiring attention is the coherency of C h ' e n Liang's v i e w of h u m a n nature and morality.

Citing an earlier

draft of a large portion of this m o n o g r a p h , Robert Hymes and Conrad Schirokauer represent one of C h ' e n ' s central statements as perhaps "a mere m o m e n t a r y i n c o n s i s t e n c y , " suggestive of "a man w h o lives and thinks surrounded by a conversation of w h i c h he is not fully or properly a part."

They go on t o establish their a r g u m e n t :

In this case it is a conversation on h o w men and the

Tao-hsueh

w o r l d are t o be t r a n s f o r m e d morally, the question.

It is a conversation w h o s e premises he

does not w h o l l y accept; yet he feels

compelled,

perhaps, at least t o claim t o solve the problem it poses. too."

In e f f e c t he says:

" L o o k , l a w s can do

that,

To propose t o solve the problem t h r o u g h

central laws and institutions w a s t o suggest means t h a t had not figured prominently in the conversation as so far c o n d u c t e d by m o s t participants.

In some

w a y s his answer a m o u n t e d t o changing the subject, but changing it by a particularly clever stratagem. But the claim w a s in any case not one he felt inclined t o pursue or s u p p o r t in later discussions. remains as a sign of the p o w e r of the discourse in his time. 5

It

Tao-hsueh

12

CONCEPTS

Even t h o u g h it is true t h a t the Tao-hsueh

M ^

(Learning of the

Confucian Way) f e l l o w s h i p 6 did strike a particular claim t o this question of h o w t o t r a n s f o r m people and society, m u s t w e regard it as their monopoly?

D i d n ' t any scholar c o m m i t t e d t o the teachings

of Confucius consider this question and hold its resolution as a goal? That a Confucian did not aspire t o the more radical, totalistic transf o r m a t i o n s s o u g h t by f o l l o w e r s of Tao-hsueh should not exclude him f r o m the problématique

initiated by Confucius centuries earlier.

M o r e o v e r , it w a s in one of C h ' e n ' s last w r i t i n g s , dated about six m o n t h s prior t o his death, t h a t he made the s t a t e m e n t t o w h i c h Hymes and Schirokauer are r e f e r r i n g — i t is t h u s unfair t o fault him for not developing the statement in "later discussions." Rather, w e should consider the possibility t h a t

Ch'en's

s t a t e m e n t reflects the culmination of his personal experience w i t h the law and his asserted preoccupation w i t h the concepts of public and private interest.

In response t o professors Schirokauer and

H y m e s ' particular reading of m y manuscript, I will d e m o n s t r a t e h o w C h ' e n ' s s t a t e m e n t regarding the law as a means t o t r a n s f o r m people is grounded in his larger v i e w of h u m a n nature and its relation t o b o t h human laws and Nature's principles. It seems clear t h a t C h ' e n w e n t considerably beyond a merely clever change of subject. Like m a n y Confucian thinkers of the classical period, Hsuntzu traveled t o various states in the hope of persuading those in p o w e r t o improve the material welfare and moral training of their people. Despite the disorder of his day, Mencius (ca. 3 9 1 - 3 0 8 B.C.) had earlier e x p o u n d e d an optimistic c o n c e p t i o n of h u m a n nature

{hsing

14 ) as the rationale for establishing good g o v e r n m e n t and

social welfare.

A s summarized by Benjamin S c h w a r t z , M e n c i u s '

CONCEPTS

13

"burning conviction" was that "human beings can be led to act from pure moral motives only if they realize that the sources of, and capacity for, such behavior lie latent within their o w n individual selves—that is, within an inborn 'natural' tendency or hsing of the human organism." 7

After the succeeding decades of escalating

warfare and destruction, Hsun-tzu confronted even more conflicted circumstances in which to defend the validity of Confucian teachings and sociopolitical ideals.

Responding to these challenges, he

candidly assessed human foibles and acknowledged the need for external controls in an environment where human desires far exceeded available goods.

By inclination of nature, people were

driven to try to satisfy insatiable and conflicting appetites for food and sex, so strife and chaos were endemic. Observing the disorder in the human realm and the order apparent in the seasons of Nature, the sage-kings of antiquity had, according to Hsun-tzu, established rites (//' fH) to serve as norms for behavior and to differentiate the statuses of those with different roles in society. (Originally the supreme sky god, Tien ^

remained

for Hsun-tzu hierarchically above, yet correlative to, the natural world and human norms; thus, it is problematic to translate Tien as either "Nature" or "Heaven." 8 But I will generally follow convention here, rather than leave it without an English gloss.

"Rites" is

equivalent to only one aspect of the complex Chinese word //'.9 Although the major foci within this study are rites, rituals, norms, and propriety, my usage of one gloss or another in a particular context is not meant to deny the holistic character of the word.)

It

was in harmony w i t h Heaven that the sage-kings formulated these rites;

moreover, when people conformed to rites and roles, they

14

CONCEPTS

were responding properly to Heaven. Humans—although by nature dysfunctional and dominated by boundless desires—nonetheless possessed inherent reason enough to abide by these social differentiations and come together in such basic sociopolitical structures as families and simple governments. Although these rites originally were externally imposed restraints on outward behavior, they were to be internalized through socialization in everyday moral practice and education in the cultural heritage, and to be reinforced with proper music.

In this process of cultivation, the rites elevated

ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual sensitivities, thus providing satisfactions that improved the person as an individual and as an interactive member of society.

The optimum social order proved

difficult to maintain because culture contravened the susceptibility of natural desires to run wild.

Disorder was so rampant in his day

that Hsiin-tzu saw need for defensive warfare against exogenous aggressors and the punishment of endogenous recalcitrants. Ch'in's success in attaining order through unmitigated exercise of penal law did not blunt Hsiin-tzu's sensitivity to the people's anxiety or the concomitant long-term instability of the state. Therefore, although he made practical concessions about the need for law and punishments, he still warned against reliance on positive law.

Moreover,

despite his flexibility as to the means that could be used in striving after Confucian ethical goals, he insisted that laws and institutions were secondary to the primacy of socialization through rites and administration by ethically minded scholar-officials.

Returning to

the rites established by the sage-kings was the only way to train people's hearts and natures, bring them culture and satisfaction, and thus enable them to live harmoniously in society and the natural world. 1 0

CONCEPTS

15

Although Hsun-tzu's ideas exerted a major influence on Confucians for centuries, he lost favor in the eyes of many Sung dynasty literati w h o regarded Mencius as the last mainstream Confucian of the classical era. Consequently, even when directly or indirectly influenced by the Hsun-tzu,

most Sung thinkers avoided

overt association w i t h the thinker in name. 11 Similarly, Ch'en did not draw attention to his affinities with Hsun-tzu, but he did on occasion refer to Hsun-tzu in positive terms. In an essay of 1177, he lauded Hsun-tzu's extraordinary role in the Confucian tradition: Either taking office to manage affairs or withdrawing to write books is nothing more than a matter of the opportunities one encounters. The Six Classics had to await Confucius to be compiled; the "book in seven sections" had to await Mencius to be written. It was only after the book of Master Hsun Ch'ing appeared that the contributions of the Confucian scholars began to be brought into full play in the world. 1 2 When the t w o most important Sung editions of the Hsun-tzu

were

printed in 1181, Ch'en Liang was surely among those w h o appreciated them.

He might even have purchased one of the more

cheaply printed bookstore editions that were also in circulation. 13 Coincidentally, it was soon after 1181 that Ch'en challenged Chu Hsi's philosophical s y s t e m — a system that explicitly claimed to inherit the true transmission of the Tao for which Mencius had been the last classical exponent.

(The timing of this radical turn in

Ch'en's thought is, as I have shown elsewhere, more closely related to his career frustrations and to the demise of the moderating influence and leadership of Lu Tsu-ch'ien [ 1 1 3 7 - 1 1 8 1 ] . ) 1 4

16

CONCEPTS When we consider C h ' e n Liang's writings about the public

or common interest and its relation to laws, it is clear that C h ' e n set forth views that were striking and even baffling to his contemporaries. W e may perhaps see this most clearly in a passage from his successful essay for the metropolitan examination of 1 1 9 3 , which captured the attention of both the civil service examiners and the literati. C h ' e n asserted: The human heart/mind [hsin

'll* ] is mostly self-

regarding, but laws and regulations [fa used to make it public-minded [kung].

] can be This is w h y

the prevailing trend in the world is inevitably moving toward laws and institutions. . . .

Laws

and

regulations comprise the collective or commonweal principle [kung li institutions

to

£ 9 ]. run

But to allow laws and

themselves

is

to

be

self-

centered. 15 The word fa is here rendered "laws," "regulations," and "institutions" to s h o w some range of its denotations in the particular contexts. In commenting on the early Chou king, M u (r. ca. 1 0 0 1 9 4 5 B.C.), w h o was regarded as especially rigorous in administering the law, C h ' e n praised his efforts to transform the people: Even in his elderly dotage, King M u admonished and punished, [thereby] to restrain everyone in the four directions so that they would understand that penalties were instruments of the sages' love for the people, not [instruments] for slaying the people. 16 C h ' e n did not restrict such a putatively positive use of punishments

CONCEPTS

17

to a supposed golden age in antiquity, for he saw such a role for law in his o w n times, too. Besides the fact that C h ' e n himself had undergone judicial coercion while incarcerated, his pronouncements are striking for t w o more general reasons: First, after the Chinese experience with the Realpolitik (or "Legalist") school of /a, 17 it is surprising to find a Confucian showing such enthusiasm for the law as a positive instrument for transforming people. Second, more even than earlier Confucians, proponents of Tao-hsueh Confucianism in C h ' e n ' s o w n day looked to self-cultivation and philosophical principles, far more than to the law, to alter character and behavior. If C h ' e n Liang's rather novel pronouncement on laws and the public interest is not to be over-interpreted, it must be seen in its intellectual context and understood in terms of its

conceptual

grounds. I have elsewhere s h o w n the importance, for understanding Confucian thought, of three levels of discourse:

one level of

speculative philosophy about fundamental principles (often labeled "metaphysics"); one level of specific sociopolitical comment; and one philosophically intermediate level compounded of cultural values and ethics. 1 8

Characteristically, C h ' e n ' s thought on the problems

under consideration here is located in this middle level.

Thus,

"grounds" is meant to encompass more than just classical sanction or historical precedent, but less than metaphysical basis. Consistent with his attention to the intermediate level of discourse, C h ' e n ' s statements at times resound with moral judgments but generally do not expound a system established on an abstract and ultimate set of universal principles.

I am not suggesting that C h ' e n had no

philosophical assumptions; moreover, I obviously consider many of his conceptions, such as those about utility, history, and value,

18

CONCEPTS

worthy of philosophical inquiry. Nonetheless, he sought to discuss problems on an immediately practical level and to avoid the overly abstract philosophizing that he condemned in many of his contemporaries. One aspect of the conceptual grounds for Ch'en's perspective on the collective public interest was his understanding of human nature. This is particularly important, given Mizoguchi Yuzo's claim that a naturalistic view of human nature and desires was not developed until late in the Ming (1368-1644) and early in the Ch'ing periods.19 Ch'en began his treatise on human nature in his seventh of ten essays (wen-ta X ? ? ) by quoting the Mencius (7B/24): "The way the mouth is disposed toward tastes, the eyes toward colors, the ears toward sounds, the nose toward smells, and the four limbs toward ease is human nature, yet therein also lies the Decree."20 Mencius had gone on to say that because these desires were also natural urges (i.e., decreed), one should not call them human nature. One should instead refer to human nature as the way human kindness pertains to the relation between father and son, and so on. In other words, Mencius defined human nature essentially in terms of the basic Confucian virtues of human kindness or humaneness [jen t ) , Tightness or duty (/'

propriety (//' Jsi), and wisdom (chih

But Ch'en Liang did not include the second part of Mencius' statement in his own treatise; he thereby reduced human nature to natural human desires, bypassing this crucial passage in the Mencius that provided a textual grounds for some Sung Confucians to engage in metaphysical discussion of human nature. Thus, as is evident in his essay, Ch'en recognized only what Chu Hsi, following Chang Tsai (1020-1077), would call the "physical nature" (ch'i-chih chih hsing

and not the "moral nature" (i-ti chih hsing

tmiL

CONCEPTS

19

14). Elsewhere, C h ' e n even claimed that the Tao itself w a s simply this physical nature in proper order: "Is the Tao anything else? It is nothing but the feelings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, joy, love, and hate attaining their appropriate expression." 2 1

In his debate w i t h

C h u Hsi, C h ' e n Liang also argued that desires are present the m o m e n t a person is born.

Inherent in the existence of the human

heart/mind is a strand of human desire that even the sage-kings in the golden age of the Three Dynasties could not completely expunge. 2 2 It should be noted that in C h ' e n ' s characterization, desires are not intrinsically bad. A t this point a W e s t e r n philosopher might w o n d e r w h y C h ' e n does not simply conclude that some desires are socially problematic; others are not, for they are authentic human needs (food, shelter, sex). A l t h o u g h Chinese thinkers were not oblivious to this distinction, their w o r d yu

(desires) pointed to the disorder w h i c h easily

arose from these basic needs. To comprehend their

problématique

regarding desires, w e should briefly suspend our o w n philosophic resolutions. In his essay on human nature, C h ' e n w e n t on to observe: " S i n c e these instinctive feelings c o m e from human nature, they are something all people share.

Because they yield to the Decree [of

Heaven], there must be some w a y to regulate them, but they cannot be suppressed." 2 3

(This last sentence has some parallels to a

passage in the Hsun-tzu.)24

Continuing, C h ' e n noted that everyone

shares a desire for w h a t enriches and brings esteem, as well as a fear of w h a t impoverishes and demeans. Apparently assuming that things universally desired were limited in quantity, he asserted that people should not simply pursue their individual desires, but should a l w a y s heed their elders and rulers, those responsible for social order.

20

CONCEPTS Nor should superiors and elders exploit their positions, but

base their regulations on the people's natural, material likes and dislikes and rule accordingly.

This is why the Five Classics were

promulgated and the Five Rites set forth: distinct roles in human relations.

to provide models for

Those who practiced these

guidelines were to be rewarded with wealth and status, those who violated them to be penalized.

Social norms and rites, as well as

rewards and punishments, were essentially to be grounded in the order of Nature and human nature; they were not intended to be the product of a superior's whim. The people should then be able, for instance, in obeying the ruler, to follow the likes and dislikes inherent in their inner natures. If the ruler followed his selfish likes and dislikes in ruling, regarding rewards and punishments as something he alone could devise and decide, the realm would be thrown into chaos. Good and bad would be inverted, and people would lose their human natures. 25 This essay clearly shows that Ch'en Liang linked his view of human nature to the function of the law and ritual norms in directing people. Because he regarded human nature to comprise the material, physical desires that all people share, he urged the ruler to use what they innately liked and disliked in order to guide them toward what represented the common good for the society at large. We find an implicit parallel here with the view expressed in Ch'en's metropolitan examination essay of 1193, which held that laws were (i.e., ought to be) kung and therefore could transform a people's inclination toward self-regard into a sense of public-mindedness. Ch'en's receptivity to the naturalness of human desires raises the distinct possibility that self-regard might be mediated to

CONCEPTS

21

balance with, instead of fully transform into, the collective good. Although Ch'en spoke of using laws to transform the desires within the human heart/mind, he argued elsewhere that desires merely needed to be brought into balance with larger public concerns for the collective good. For example, because desires for such pleasures were common to all hearts and minds, the ruler should be free to indulge his fondness for sex and material things as long as the needs of the people had been met.26

Like Mencius, Ch'en was

suggesting that shared human desires are the very basis of morality; moreover, mainstream Sung thinkers left themselves open to later criticism for losing sight of this basic assumption.27 In more general philosophical terms, Ch'en spoke of ssu as a positive good: "If the common good [kung] in the rotation of the heavens [t'ien] and the self-regard [ss