8. Religions of Man - Confucianism

this is national Educational Television a program distributed by the educational television and radio Center [Music] the religions of man with dr. Houston Smith [Music] tonight we are going to be talking about China and this is going to be difficult it's going to be difficult because everybody's talking about China today the newspapers the politicians and our minds are so full of the way they are talking about China that it's going to be very difficult to think about China in a very different way when the roof of a house is burning it's hard to take thought of the Foundation's when the buds of a tree are being nipped by a late freeze it is difficult to think about the roots when our minds are so full of mouths of dung it's hard to think about Confucius and when our thoughts are so full of paymo and Matsu it's difficult to think about such things as filial piety and the code of the gentleman and yet we do know that the roof rests ultimately upon the houses foundation and the buds draw their vitality and their life itself from the roots it's no different here the things that are happening in China today are related to the roots of Chinese civilization but with only one evening to spend on Confucianism we're not going to be able to spell out too much of this relationship we're going unfortunately to have to stick pretty close close to the roots themselves leaving it to you or to another occasion to spell out the connection between the two Confucianism like Buddhism begins with a man a man of course whom we call Confucius he was born in the sixth century BC that fabulous century in religious history which gave birth to Buddha in India which Zoroaster probably lived in Persia in which some of the greatest greatest prophets of Israel lived in Palestine and some of the greatest thinkers like Pythagoras in Greece Confucius life wasn't particularly interesting his father was a minor government official he had a very good education he held a few minor posts in his late teens and in his 20s he established himself as a teacher where he distinguished himself he is said to have attracted 3,000 students which without means of mass communication television radio and the like was quite a feat for his day at 50 he came to the conclusion that in order for his principles to really take hold he and his disciples would have to get into administration the scholars are divided as to whether he actually did achieve a high government post but we do know that from the age of 55 for about 12 years he entered upon the so called long trek where he went from state to state offering his advice to the rulers as to how they should govern then in the closing years of his life he returned to his own native province of Lu where he spent the remainder of his life in quiet and happiness and editing the classics throughout his life he impressed his followers as a man with a keen mind a strong will man of deep sincerity and humility a man with a fervent sense of responsibility and a desire for reality rather than display and yet if we want the secret of Confucius we're going to have to go beyond his life we're going to have to look to the teachings for his life good though it was exemplary even was not dramatic enough to account for the Manger following which he made the impact he made upon his society so if we wanted infants we must turn as I say beyond the man to the teachings of the man now what we do this I must warn you at the start that he was so concerned with the problem of man's relation to his fellow man and so little concern with the problem of man's relation to God that his teachings sound often more like an ethics than like a religion this doesn't really do him justice we know that he was a religious man he prayed he believed in heaven probably as a very personal force personal being in which he was in intimate communion we know also that in his the clothes of his life he said that if he had another 50 years to live you would like to give that time to the II Ching which dealt with cosmology rather than human affairs but the fact remains that he was so beset with such an acute social problem that this commanded all his attention someone once asked him tell us about death and he said a child before it learns to run must first learn to walk we do not yet understand the meaning of life how then can we yet speak of death now to the teachings themselves to understand the message of Confucius we have to understand the problem which he faced in a phrase this was the problem of social anarchy Confucius lived in those turbulent centuries from about the 7th to the 3rd centuries BC which Toynbee is called the Time of Troubles China was divided during these centuries into a number of warring States raid and counter raid where the order of the day it was a time when a man when he planted a field of rice could never be sure that he would reap that for himself rather than some robber baron coming in to take the proceeds for him and his men during this time the burning question which faced every leader of society was one how can we learn to live together without destroying one another what is the glue which holds society together what is the glue that holds society together let's think about that question for a moment just wholly apart from confusions what holds society together well on the animal level the answer is instinct look at a colony of ants look at a hive of bees fantastic organization fabulous cooperation and yet they don't have to work for this cooperative behavior is built into their very structures through instinct when man emerges however to the and we come to the human level we can no longer rely on instinct to keep us from it to keep us working together rather man has no instincts it's virtually none the psychologist will tell us what then takes over to order society and the answer is that in primitive society what takes over is tradition now traditional a so far in our own society that it's difficult for us to imagine the power which it has in ordering the social life of early peoples and yet we have evidence of the power anthropologists tell us that there are some primitive tribes I believe the Eskimos some of the Eskimo tribes enter here and some of the Australian some of the tribes where there is not even a word for disobedience some of you parents ponder that for a moment where the cake of custom is so rigid and so powerfully channel's the lives of people that they never deviate really substantially from the their expectations in our own life there is I think only one area where we can see the power of tradition and that is the area of dress I'm wearing a tie tonight I didn't debate as to whether I should wear a tie or not I automatically did it why because my producer wouldn't let me up here if I didn't because I would be indecently exposed if I didn't have this piece of cloth around my neck not at all the reason I did it was because all television professors wear ties this is expected and if I came with an open collar why some of you might think that I was strange queer a peculiar bohemian maybe and you see this I can't stand I can't stand to be regarded as peculiar this is the way we behave in terms of our address so we don't give a great deal of attention we simply follow the expectations my wife gives me to understand the to a woman who has the sense that she is wearing exactly the right thing for the occasion there comes a piece which religion can neither give nor take away well we can see then the power of tradition of custom of convention in ordering this aspect of our lives now imagine a society in which everything was ordered by this kind of expectation and we see the power of tradish now in the early stages this tradition is very spontaneous people don't reflect about it but there comes a time in society when spontaneous tradition begins to go to pieces as the ordering way of all one's total life and the fact that other people expected of you the fact that other people are behaving this way is no longer sanction enough when that time comes and society faces the collapse of spontaneous tradition what is going to take over in place of this as the ordering device for human behavior well what would you say see this was a problem that Confucius face basically the collapse of spontaneous tradition some people would say well we turn to force we have policemen who forced people to behave but it's doubtful that force can reach close enough into the intimacy's of human relation to be alone adequate to order society other people say reason but again there's a problem here as to whether reason is adequate particularly in the early stages of the human venture of the civilization that we're talking about now 500 600 years bc i heard a parent say once that the most difficult age to deal with with children is when they are too old to spank and too young to reason with well this perhaps is not a bad picture of the condition of society that confucius reached i don't mean to imply the reason alone is enough to add order even our own society today but certainly at this early time reason alone with force then and reason are inadequate answers what is the adequate hence and Confucius answer in a nutshell was this when spontaneous tradition breaks down as a socializing agency for human culture then we must replace it by deliberate tradition now in a nutshell what that means is this we must search out those values which we want to saturate all society and then we emphasize these values through the educational process so that the children who are growing up and right through their young manhood and right through all life for that matter have hell before them those values which society appreciates and esteem and will honor and this way we perpetuate an enveloping tradition a power of suggestion which the individual citizens of a society will internalize will make their own and this will help them to behave in social ways now what was the content of this deliberate tradition which Confucius wanted to perpetuate I think it can be summarized in these five key Confucian terms and let's look for a moment at each of them generally refers to the basic quality which should prove aid all human relations what is that quality well perhaps the best translation is goodness with a capital G it is goodness in an extremely broad in general an exalted sense it implies quality qualities of unselfishness of generosity the capacity to measure the feelings of other people by one's own feelings the man of djenne will be courteous in all private relationships he will be diligent in all public relationships he will be loyal in whatever relationship he finds himself in this then is goodness in a sublimely exalted sense Confucius thought so highly of this term that and this I think is a very Confucius Confucian phrase he said one cannot speak of it without being cherished in other words one's not glib one's not flip about a term as exalted is this now the next term is the chunsu and this I think we might translate as the gentleman if we think of the gentleman not in superficial terms of tipping of hats and and pushing in of ladies chairs but as a true inner quality of man chunsu the ideal man or the gentleman is the completely adequate man he is so poised that in his relationships he need not be grasping he has the initiative towards life to such an extent that when he meets you his attitude is not what can I get out of you but how can I be of European or service it is the attitude of a man who is an ideal host in his home completely relaxed and because he is so much at home he can be completely at the disposal of others the gentleman then is the one who carries that attitude of an ideal host with him throughout all life because he is at home in the universe the third concept leave this is translated usually propriety the point here is that Confucius wanted to build up a picture in the minds of people as to how they ought to behave in virtually any situation they find themselves if solely through anecdotes through example builds up this picture as to the ideal type of human behavior in every situation the chief ingredients of lead Center in we don't have time to go through them all but let me mention to the five great relationships Confucius said the major relationships of life are five there is on the one hand the relation of the father to the son where the father should be loving the Sun should be reverential then the elder brother and the younger brother where the elder brother should be gentle the younger brother respectful the third great relationship is between the husband and the wife where the husband should be good to the wife and the wife should be well the term really is listening to the husband and then forth between elder friend and younger friend where the elder friend should be gentle and the younger friend deferential and finally between the ruler and the subject where the ruler should be benevolent and the subject should be loyal if then these relationships are maintained Society will prosper the second ingredient which we and we must confine ourselves to this second in regard to lis is filial piety where Confucius felt well someone I heard put it in our culture he said when the meanings of the father no longer become meaningful to the son civilization is endangered this builds society on this key linkage between the parents and the choke now all of this then when you take all these ways of acting propriety together these perform these form a kind of stylized ritual for all life so that they order the life completely and one who understands Li understands how he should behave in every situation every major kind of situation in human life from the way the emperor opens the doors of the temple on the great ceremonial occasions right down to the way you entertain the humblest guest in your home and serve him his teeth the fourth great ingredient in this pattern is pay pay means literally power what Confucius was asking what is the key power in governing men there were lots of answers around during his day some were saying the power basic power is force you have their order society with a key police force with a strong police force others said law Confucius said no he wasn't a pacifist he didn't oppose law but what he did say was the neither of these is basic the key factor in all government he felt was the power of moral example where you have at the top a man who was absolutely devoted to the human to the public welfare this man then would gather around him a cabinet of what Hawking is called unpurchased able men and their devotion to the general good would seep down into the leaders of the local community and down into the local citizens when the final factor means literally the arts of peace and their Confucius said that when dealing with other states you can't rely entirely on the arts of war on violence force again he wasn't a pacifist but he said something else is needed and he thought that ultimately victory would go to the side which succeeded in maintaining the highest culture music literature drama philosophy so that the neighboring states would unconsciously admire these ways of the people who were advanced in the arts of peace well did it work that's always a difficult question is like asking has Christianity worked in Western civilization you can't say yes or no in absolute turn but I think there are a couple of things we can say first if you take it quantitatively China has achieved the greatest civilization human history is known if you take it by the years continuous years which it is lasted and the number of people in his breaks embraced but we're interested in more than quantitative terms what about qualitatively and there I think the power of success is indicated best by the admiration which Chinese culture down through its major years has elicited from even those who invaded it by force time and again the barbarians would come flooding over the northwest barriers and time and again they would find the Chinese a pushover militarily speaking but what happens then well a typical scene is this after the conquerors have made their conquest 10-15 years later what do you find you find the leader sitting by the side of a Chinese teacher who is also his conquered slave and now this invader is devoting all his time to trying to write a poem which his teeth sure would be willing to say was not altogether unworthy of a gentleman and already the invader is hoping to be mistaken for a Chinese and by the time fifty years are over the invaders are not heard of again here here is a true melting pot here was a furnace of an idea which in its heyday worked on the social plane as perhaps no other civilization has work what about Confucianism today well I'm sure we must frankly admit that this is a question that nobody has the answer to we we may be looking here at a dying religion it is quite possible that tonight we should be echoing about Confucianism as a whole the words which Confucius applied to himself when on his deathbed his eyes gazed for the last time on the majestic Dome of the sacred mountain of China Tyshawn and he is said Confucius is said to have uttered to those about him the sacred mountain is Fault the beam is breaking the wise man is withering away maybe that is what's happening to Confucianism today and yet on the other hand moral teachers do have a way of outlasting politicians and even revolutions Gandhi will outlast Nehru and it is more than possible that Confucius will outlast mouths of doom already there intimations that the edifice which Confucius built which receives such rough treatment in the early years under the Communists is already making some comeback but whereas in his early book mouths earth tongue characterise Confucianism as semi-feudal in his recent book he advises his followers to study Confucius as well as Marx and Lenin if then they take their leaders seriously even the Communists tonight may be pondering some words which were uttered 25 centuries ago by the greatest teacher their land has ever known words like Li you asked if there is one word which might serve as a cardinal precept of light is not altruism such a word what you do not want done to yourself do not do to others or within the four seasons all men are brothers [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] religions of man is produced by Washington University and ket C channel 9 the st. Louis educational television station and production Center the preceding program was distributed by the educational television and radio Center this is national Educational Television

Channel: Vedanta Video

Views: 577

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: Vedanta, religion, god, karma, meditation, ramakrishna, vivekananda, brahman, hindu, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam

Id: sxLAc8Oqh1Y

Length: 29min 20sec (1760 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020