1.5 Master Zisi: The Person

    From stories recorded in the Mencius and the Record of Rites, we learn that Zisi was much respected as a person of outstanding character by Duke Mu of Lu 鲁穆公(r. 415-383), but was wholly frustrated by the Duke's repeated presentation of gifts and claims to enduring friendship, without promoting him to high office.[i] This same concern is voiced in the Five Modes of Proper Conduct:

Suolu Can in mastering the way of the exemplary person was said to be of superior character.[ii] When exemplary persons recognize such people and promote them, they are said to esteem those of superior character. When exemplary persons recognize them and put them into service, they are said to esteem those of superior character.[iii] This was the former kings and dukes esteeming those of superior character, and later scholars esteeming them too.

In Mencius 5B6, discussing Zisi's rejection of gifts from Duke Mu that were not attended by the offer of a position, Mencius says "If in claiming that one delights in persons of superior character one is neither able to promote them nor take care of them, can they really be said to delight in persons of superior character?" This same passage ends with what might be a direct allusion to this Five Modes of Proper Conduct text:

Therefore it is said: "This was the former dukes and kings esteeming those of superior character."

In 5B3 Mencius makes a distinction that uses precisely the same vocabulary as this Five Modes of Proper Conduct passage:

This is a case of the scholar esteeming those of superior character; it is not the kings and dukes esteeming those of superior character.

The Mencius 5B3 again seems to echo this specific passage from the Five Modes of Proper Conduct:

For the inferior to show respect for the superior is called revering the worthy; for superior to show respect for the inferior is called honoring those of superior character. In their appropriateness they are the same.

The failure of rulers to appoint persons of superior character is also a major theme in the account of Zisi in the Kong Congzi. The persistence of this complaint about not being given office together with the report in the Hanfeizi that Zisi was the patron of one of the eight schools of early Confucianism would suggest that Zisi suffered the same fate as his grandfather, Confucius, in being condemned to the political sidelines as just a friend to the powerful, and the mere teacher of statesmen.

    There is another way in which Zisi is similar in profile to his grandfather, Confucius. In Book 3 of the Analects, much is made of Confucius's detailed knowledge of ritual performance. For example 3.15:

The Master on entering the Grand Ancestral Hall asked questions about everything. Someone remarked: "Who said this son of a man from the Zou village knows about observing ritual propriety? On entering the Grand Ancestral Hall he asks questions about everything." When Confucius heard of this, he said: "To do so is itself observing ritual propriety."

Like Confucius, Zisi was renowned for his expertise on the rites. This association is born out by the fact that several of the documents ascribed to Zisi including the Zhongyong itself were later to be incorporated into the Record of Rites. Many of the anecdotes in which Zisi appears in these chapters of the Record of Rites lend detail to the profile of a classical scholar deferred to by his community as an authority on the subtleties of ritual propriety.

There are stories related in the Record of Rites that have the ascetic Zisi, as poor as Confucius's favorite disciple, Yan Hui, actually criticizing the asceticism of his teacher, Zengzi. These stories about Zisi and his relations with others presents us with a person of courage and character, unafraid to express his strong feelings about the ritualization of the human experience.

There are many anecdotes concerning Zisi in other classical sources as well. In public life, Zisi was at the courts of Wei, Song, Lu, and Bi. There is one story in the Kong Congzi about a life-threatening incident when he was sixteen. Arriving in the state of Song, he managed to insult a high ranking counselor by comparing the observations of the counselor to those of "a commoner in the narrow lanes of Lu." Having been rescued from a certain beating at the hands of the counselor's entourage, Zisi decides that he will follow the examples of King Wen and Confucius who, having similarly escaped from peril, compiled the Book of Changes and the Spring and Autumn Annals respectively. Inspired by their examples, he wrote the Zhongyong in 49 chapters.[iv] This claim is not unexpectedly disputed in other sources.

    The ongoing recovery of the Zisizi as a lost classical text will continue to shed new light on the formative period of Chinese philosophy and culture, adding an important new voice to the early philosophical conversation. For example, a point of contention has centered on the meaning of a central idea in the Zisi corpus: qing 情. Many scholars, including A.C. Graham, have gone on record as denying the direct association of qing 情 with the "emotions" in the early literature, insisting instead that it is closely related to xing 性 as some essential feature of the human endowment. The recovered texts have demonstrated beyond question that qing defined explicitly as emotions played a central role in the earliest records of this tradition. The difficulty becomes one of distinguishing "emotions" within the classical Chinese world, from modern Western assumptions about them.[v] We have discussed the importance of qing to the Zhongyong in some detail in our Introduction.

2. Interpretations of the Zhongyong

2.1 Revisiting the Opening Passage

The standard English rendering of the opening passage of the Zhongyong is the 1861 translation by the British missionary, James Legge. It references the earlier Jesuit translations, and has had a profound influence on most subsequent European-language interpretations of this text. For Legge, the opening passage is a familiar account of cosmic order:

What Heaven has conferred is called THE NATURE; an accordance with this nature is called THE PATH of duty; the regulation of this path is called INSTRUCTION.

Unfortunately, on Legge's reading, this wholly credible beginning gives way to a rambling, and indeed, blasphemous exaltation of human creativity that undermines the very ground of Christian worship. Legge counterbalances the high estimate that the Chinese tradition itself has lavished on the Zhongyong as one of its Four Books, with his own pious reservations about it:

It begins sufficiently well, but the author has hardly enunciated his preliminary apophthegms, when he conducts into an obscurity where we can hardly grope our way, and when we emerge from that, it is to be bewildered by his gorgeous but unsubstantial pictures of sagely perfection. He has eminently contributed to nourish the pride of his countrymen. He has exalted their sages above all that is called God or is worshipped. and taught the masses of the people that with them they have need of nothing from without. In the meantime it is antagonistic to Christianity. By-and-by, when Christianity has prevailed in China, men will refer to it as a striking proof how their fathers by their wisdom know neither God nor themselves.[vi]

What is particularly telling about Legge's evaluation here is that he is entirely aware of the incongruency between the his theistic interpretation of the opening passage and the human-centered thrust of the ideas conveyed in the remainder of the text. Legge's interpretation of the Zhongyong, while wishing that it were otherwise, is that human beings not only have everything necessary to achieve realization without reference to some transcendent deity, but further, the world itself is sufficiently served by human creativity that it need not appeal beyond itself for divine intervention.

    The persistent, uncritical understanding of key philosophical terms such as tian 天 dao 道, and xing 性, conventionally translated as "Heaven," "the Way," and "inborn nature," respectively, continues to underwrite a construal of these ideas as fixed and determinative principles. Such an interpretation vitiates precisely that notion of creativity-in-context which is a basic feature of classical Chinese philosophy. In many ways, what is at issue in pursing an interpretation of the Zhongyong as a seminal text is the pressing need to redefine the key philosophical vocabulary that is used to articulate this classical Chinese world view.

But the interpretive problem is not simply this relatively recent Christianization of the Zhongyong. As we have noted above, many Chinese commentators on this text have, over the centuries, cited a seeming discontinuity between the opening passage and the main body of this text as the basis for questioning its overall integrity. This traditional assessment should alert us to the larger issue.

There is a very real tension in the pre-Qin formative period of Chinese philosophy between a naturalistic understanding of the human experience in which human beings are perceived as the relatively passive product of their circumstances, and a much more existential understanding of the profound contribution that human creativity can have in enchanting the world around us. We have argued that the central argument of the Zhongyong is to provide an understanding of this opening passage and its cluster of philosophical terms. This illuminating text includes a sustained elaboration on the expression, zhongyong 中庸, as the creative process of "focusing the familiar" in the ritualization of the human experience, a protracted discussion of human participation in the "creativity (cheng 诚)" that defines the world around us, a celebration of the virtuosic role that human sagacity (sheng 圣) has in the emerging cosmic order, and an appeal to historical and canonical authority to support this interpretation.

2.2 Why Zhongyong is not a "Doctrine of the Mean"

A particularly unfortunate example of inappropriate translation is the common rendering of Zhongyong as "The Doctrine of the Mean." This rendering was made popular by James Legge in his initial translation of the text. But even Legge himself abandoned this title when he went on to retranslate "Zhongyong" as a chapter in the Record of Rites (Liji). In this 1885 publication, he revised the title as: "The State of Equilibrium and Harmony," a far better indication of its content.[vii]

The locution "Doctrine of the Mean," of course, recalls Aristotle's account of virtues as means located between the two extremes of defect and excess. For example, "courage" is a mean between "cowardice" (defect) and "foolhardiness" (excess). This interpretation of the expression, zhongyong, leads to a misconstrual of what the Zhongyong itself purports to say.

Recourse to a process ontology modeled in terms of focus and field will hardly yield itself to a mean/extremes vocabulary. The understanding of the relationship of distinctive "emotions" (courage, generosity, and so on) and "actions" (acting generously, courageously) to the construction of "character" articulated by Aristotle contrasts dramatically with the Zhongyong's treatment of a more vectoral and dispositional sense of emotions as constituting a sensibility field that is to be focused (zhong 中) and brought into a sustained harmony (he 和) in the routine events of our lives (yong 庸).

Aristotle provides a strategy that enables individual agents to make choices disciplined by habits and rational deliberation. The Zhongyong, by contrast, advocates optimizing the creative possibilities of the ever changing circumstances in which the human experience takes place. The shifting equilibrium that underlies this optimizing process is both embedded within and consistently promotes communal life forms: li. Practice is resolutely communal, and is not governed by deliberative, individual choices, but by those interpersonal dispositions created by coordinating roles and relationships effectively. It is not reason, but li-informed affect, that directs experience. Unstinting attention to proper roles and relationships produces not only appropriate dispositions, but ultimately a profound religious sensibility that comes to characterize a flourishing community.

In such circumstances, the terms of "extremes" and "mean" must be translated into the language of field and focus. The act of focusing a field, and of remaining focused among the familiar affairs of the day, is accomplished through dispositional adjustments in communal li-living rather than through individual choice.[viii]

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