...Mongryong's not in pursuit of a "career" or "relationship." He's training to become what the subtitles translate as an "Ethics Official," the Chosun dynasty equivalent of an undercover judge of the English monarchy's equity court. As such, he will have the authority to remove a Governor and local lords from their offices — and to do so without recourse to trial or even to any investigation beyond his own. For Mongryong to join this very select group of individuals — to become one of his society's most powerful agents of morality and peace — is sufficient reason both for his sacrifices and for those of his wife. "Chunhyang" dramatizes a view of the world in which the love of justice is even more important than romance. And that's really not such an odd idea — unless of course you've grown up believing American film criticism.How does this fit into the larger picture of East Asia?
We have societies built upon notions of DUTY and RESPONSIBILITY of the individual, and our question needs to be: what SUSTAINS that? How do you get people to accept and obey and govern themselves? If you are the government, how do you elicit compliance? How do you rule? And part of the answer lies in the construction and promulgation of ideology.
Two things:So today we inquire into the ethical roots of East Asian societies, how they are transmitted, how they are breached. A lot of the Answer is somewhere in the box conventionally labeled 'Confucianism', which we are challenged to unpack in several ways:
(1) Consider the multivalent natures of power and power relations: coercive, normative, and remunerative (the model is worked out by Amitai Etzioni)(2) Observe the difference between East Asian notions and our own culture's concentration on INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM... recognize that this is our ideology for Society...
So first, Master Kung:
Consider first this collection of depictions of the Sage of Lü, NONE of which have even the slightest shred of "truth". But why are the images created? What functions do they serve? ?icons? ?objects of veneration?There is a respectable line of scholarship at the moment that suggests that Master Kung never even existed, that he's "...a literary trope... a figure who came to stand for certain things" (Lionel Jensen, Univ Colorado at Denver, author of Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization
Could it be that the familiar and beloved figure of Confucius was invented by Jesuit priests? This is a question Jensen asks and with three new translations of Confucius's Analects out, this book is sure to raise a ruckus. In Manufacturing Confucianism, Jensen demonstrates how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western missionaries used translations of the ancient ru tradition to invent the presumably historical figure who has since been globally celebrated as philosopher, prophet, statesman, wise man, and saint. Tracing the history of the Jesuits' invention of Confucius and of themselves as native defenders of Confucius's teaching, Jensen reconstructs the cultural consequences of the encounter between the West and China. For the West, a principal outcome of this encounter was the reconciliation of empirical investigation and theology on the eve of the scientific revolution. Jensen also explains how Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century fashioned a new cosmopolitan Chinese culture through reliance on the Jesuits' Confucius and Confucianism. Challenging both previous scholarship and widespread belief, Jensen uses European letters and memoirs, Christian histories and catechisms written in Chinese, translations and commentaries on the Sishu, and a Latin summary of Chinese culture known as the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus to argue that the national self-consciousness of Europe and China was bred from a cultural ecumenism wherein both were equal contributors.Another line of scholarship says that the Analects were NOT (mostly) written down soon after Confucius' death, but grew (i.e., were fabricated) by accretion as Confucian scholars came and went from Imperial favor and patronage, and reflect changes in philosophy, rather than the received and complete ethical teachings of the Master (see The Original Analects for more details).To some degree these controversies don't matter all that much if we see the Analects and several other elements of the Classics in their context as the heart of literate culture for a good 2000+ years... to understand which, we need to spend a few moments in the time of the putative Master Kung, somewhere around 500 BC --the 'Warring States' period, 300 years before 'China' was brought together into a single political entity. Assuming there was a Master Kung, he seems to have been the son of a soldier, who was famous for his devotion to scholarship with important texts of his time (the Classics), became a teacher, held a few government posts, but was repeatedly disappointed with rulers' virtue... which led him on a peripatetic search for a Lord to employ him. He seems to have eked out a living preparing young men for 'civil service'. He drew upon a long recorded history, semi-mythical in nature, of former kings... which he (and his contemporaries generally) viewed as a Golden Age of wise and benevolent rulers ('men of virtue') ...seen from a perspective of contemporary strife and disorder.
So: a LITERATE tradition (implying 'scholars' or 'literati', of whom Master Kung is an exemplar), and a concern with ETHICAL conduct, with 'virtue', and a notion of The Mandate of Heaven (in which rulers have Justice and Wisdom... but which is lost when Justice and Wisdom lapse...) as a quality that is in flux.
To grasp all of this background to the life and doings of Master Kung, we have to step back in time once more, and ask what Master Kung knew, what his informational world-view consisted of. We can summarize for the moment by looking at "Sacred Books of China" in Legge's translation... one of which record the alleged doings of Shang (successors to the Xia) dynasty kings (see Section One of the Book of Kau for an example). It turns out that there IS archaeological evidence for both of these 'civilizations'... and a brief digression into them is necessary
oracle bones (images, and more, and one, two, three more)... bronze (one, two, three)... I Ching (many links...The pre-Confucian world-view developed on this basis seems to have been essentially magical: there are natural world forces, but notably NO creator myth...The Chinese, among all peoples ancient and recent, primitive and modern, are apparently unique in having no creation myth, that is, they have regarded the world and humans as uncreated, as constituting the central features of a spontaneously self-generating cosmos having no creator, god, ultimate cause, or will external to itself. (Frederick Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China p 13)There are ghosts and spirits of course, and a notion of spiritual essence [ch'i or qi], and a notion that this super-natural realm can all be dealt with by Rites and Auguries in the 'Great Tradition', and by other means in the various 'Little Traditions'... somehow this 'Taoist' world-view transmuted into a proto-scientific and speculative tradition concerned with the workings of the natural world, which we conventionally label as 'Taoism'....and we won't go into detail, but the name Lao Tzu ['old philosopher'] and the texts Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu would be well worth exploring, if only...Another brief digression, into I Ching, one of the Classics and an essential element in most attempts to comprehend Chinese (and therefore East Asian) civilization[s]:
...book of divination texts... heralds a striking cosmology and a philosophy of human potential for creative action and freedom in the cosmic process... the book has grown [by added commentaries] and matured as a philosophy along with Chinese civilization and has remained a bottomless well from which each age of Chinese thought has drawn provocative insight... one of the earliest crystallizations of the Chinese mind... one touchstone of what is peculiarly Chinese... (Frederick Mote, Intellectual Foundations of China pp 11-12)See also Martin Gardner on I Ching, and The Mandate of Heaven: Hidden History in the I Ching (S. J. Marshall PL2464.Z7 M37 2001 ) suggests that this is very much alive as a subject of inquiry.
And here's Karl Jung, in his Foreword to the Wilhelm translation:
For more than 30 years I have interested myself in this oracle technique, or method of explaining the unconscious, for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance... I do not know Chinese and have never been in China. I can assure my reader that it is not altogether easy to find the right access to this monument of Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our ways of thinking. In order to understand what such a book is about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the western mind... The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed... (xxii)See this utility to consult the Oracle (via skepdic.com)
Back to Master Kung and the question of what the text[s] of the Analects say: some extracts and my 2001 Analects page
We have some interesting problems of translation and interpretation, and the question of the order in which the elements were added. But the puzzles aside, we have several ethical concepts to integrate into our understanding of East Asia: filial piety, the humane quality of ren or jen, ritual, and the interesting and tangled question of 'ancestor worship'. One way to deal with this is via Asia for Educators from Columbia
Values
Filial Piety
Humaneness
So we might sum up, most inadequately, but to give us a place to stop, by considering the complementarity of three strains or foci of Thought in East Asia: Taoist [protoscientific/magical/'mystical': The Way], Confucian [ethics and behavior, human society and human nature], and Buddhist [4 Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path]. We can note that these have sometimes been antagonistic to one another, and sometimes have forged alliances... and here we come up to some materials that I've found but only skimmed:
The Buddhist-Confucian Conflict in the Early Chosôn and Kihwa's Syncretic Response: The Hyôn chông non Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, Nov 20, 1994. A. Charles Muller --see also his The Culmination of the East Asian Confucian-Buddhist Debate in Korea, but compare with How Can One Be A Taoist-Buddhist Confucian?-- A Chinese Illustration of Multuple Religious Participation Chenyang Li, from International Review of Chinese Religion & Philosophy Vol. 1, MARCH 1996. pp.29-66.Buddhist and Confucian Traditions links from U. Florida
COMPARING CHINESE PHILOSOPHIES (cached)