胡适英文论著：中国哲学史(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：胡适

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Confucianism

In later times because of the tremendous influence of the school of Confucius the name ju came to be used to denote his followers as distinguished from Taoists and Buddhists. And ju-kiao became synonymous with the religion of the Confucianists of all ages, including the teaching of Confucius and his early followers as well as the later developments.

Confucius although under the influence of sixth century naturalism was historically minded and a cautious thinker and found it difficult to discard all traditional values. His philosophy was a compromise. Whereas Lao Tzu’s naturalism was radically nihilistic, denying God and knowledge, Confucius taught agnosticism, worshipping the gods and spirits “as if they were present.” Lao Tzu condemned government, advocating laissez faire ; Confucius opposed only “bad” government and tried to formulate correct principles of governing. Whereas Lao Tzu condemned civilization and knowledge as leading to evildoing, Confucius exalted the importance of learning and education as against abstract thinking. Whereas Lao Tzu was highly individualistic, Confucius based his moral philosophy on human relationships—the relation between father and son, between man and wife, between elders and the young, between friend and friend and between ruler and subject.

Confucius has been called the father of Chinese history, not because he was the first known author of a history of his native state but because of the importance he attached to preserving and studying the literary records of the history, institutions and traditions of the ancient Chinese. These records, notably the Book of Odes , the Book of History , the Book of Change and the I Li , became the “Old-Testament” of Confucianism. The Analects , which record his sayings and those of his disciples, the Book of Mencius (Meng Tze 372-289 B.C.), and a few other works of uncertain authorship (e.g. the Book of Filial Piety and the Chung Yung ) form the “New Testament” of Confucianism.

Confucius founded no religion. Contemporary testimony is to the effect that his immediate followers were frankly atheistic. Nevertheless, they laid the basis for a religion on thin precepts of filial piety. They taught three grades of filial piety: the highest ideal was to glorify one’s parents by one’s own effort and action; next, not to degrade their name; and lastly, to give them support and comfort. “Our body is inherited from our parents. How dare we carry on this inheritance without reverence? It is undutiful for a son to live irregularly, to serve his government unfaithfully, to conduct public duties dishonestly, to be unfaithful to his friends, or to be cowardly on the battlefield. Any one of these five failures in life will bring disaster or dishonor to his parents. How dare we live without reverence?”

Filial piety becomes a real religion when one is taught “not to move one step without thinking of one’s parents, not to utter one word without thinking of one’s parents.” The memory of parents took the place of reverence for a deity usual in other religions; conduct was to be guided by the sense of responsibility to them or to their memory. Morality was to radiate from this sense of reverence and love for one’s parents. “He who loves his parents hates no man; he who reveres his parents is discourteous to no man.” Thus was founded the religion of Confucianism without a belief in God or the gods.

But the religious beliefs of ancient China soon began to creep into this new religion, which because of its highly intellectual character could make no mass appeal. As Judaism survives in Christianity through the Old Testament, so the old religious ideas and practises of ancient China were perpetuated through the ancient pre-Confucian classics preserved and taught by the Confucian school. When the Emperor Wu Ti (140-87 B.C.) elevated Confucianism to the position of the national religion of the empire, it had already incorporated all the traditional beliefs and superstitions of ancient China which such naturalistic philosophers as Confucius had tried to destroy or to purify.

The cardinal doctrine of Confucianism as a state religion was the idea that the God of heaven is teleological and that the “will of God” may be influenced by the action of man, in particular by that of the emperor. As a philosopher of the second century B.C. expressed it, “the action of man, when it attains a certain level of goodness or of evil, will flow into the universal course of heaven and earth and will cause reciprocal reverberation in their manifestations.” Evil acts of the government will bring forth warnings from God in one of two forms: catastrophic phenomena, such as earthquakes and mountain slides, or strange anomalies, such as eclipses of the sun and comets. Whenever such a catastrophe or anomaly occurred, it became the duty of the Confucian scholar to interpret its meaning and present a memorial of warning to the emperor. Since these natural phenomena were often capable of diverse interpretations, there developed a science of Confucianist casuistry, to the exposition of which the great historian Pan Ku (32-92 A.D.) devoted over two hundred pages in his History of Han (bk. xxvii).

Absurd and superstitious as this new Confucianism was it nevertheless had its humanizing effects. It was the only means by which the scholarly class in an age of absolute despotism could fight tyrannical rulers and check their powers in the interest of the people. In their political thought Confucius and Mencius were socialistically inclined. Both laid down principles of humanitarianism and benevolent rule by the wisest members of society in a sort of Kantian republic. Confucius opposed price raising by private or fiscal monopolies and favored government regulation of prices, loans, free granaries, aid to transportation and state relief for orphans and the aged in addition to private charities. Taxes were to be equal and universal. Confucius approved an income tax and opposed customs tariffs. Mencius in particular stressed the importance of heeding the voice of the people. He devoted much attention to the problem of land distribution, conservation through closed seasons and other aspects of economic life. He laid down the doctrine that when crime is the result of poverty punishment is improper and that responsibility for such crime rests with the ruler. The later Confucianists carried on this tradition and from time to time brought about political and economic reforms on principles laid down by Confucius and Mencius.

An important distinction between Confucianism and many Western philosophies and religions on their political side is the universality of its doctrine; the object of government is the entire earth and all its inhabitants, not any single local or national group. Another difference is the attitude toward consumption and production. While Confucius lays down many regulations for facilitating the latter he reflects in his attitude toward the former the ideal of satisfying the pressing needs of all before permitting increased consumption by privileged individuals, an ideal which was typical of the family-agrarian economy of China.

During the mediaeval period Confucianism was not thought of as a religion, for in this respect it had long been overshadowed by Buddhism and Taoism. But it continued to produce the scholars, officials and statesmen who carried on the functions of the government and the state. It played a part similar to that of Greco-Roman culture in mediaeval Europe with the important difference that while in mediaeval Europe the scholar had no way of social advancement except through the church the Chinese system of civil service examinations enabled the Confucianist scholars themselves to control the channels of civil and social advancement. Buddhism for the salvation of the soul, Taoism for contemplation but Confucianism for the ordering of society and government.

From time to time Confucianist scholars attempted to rid China of Buddhism. The famous writer Han Yu (768-824), for example proposed this formula of persecution: “Restore all monks and nuns to lay life, burn their books and convert the monasteries to human dwellings.” In 845 the government actually carried out a most drastic persecution of Buddhism destroying over 40,000 monasteries and forcing over 260,000 monks and nuns to return to lay life. But Buddhism soon recovered and its great masters, the Zen (ch’an or dhyana ), continued to influence the nation’s religious and intellectual life for several centuries.

The moral and political philosophy taught by Confucius and Mencius was simple as compared to the complicated machinery of Buddhist psychology, logic and metaphysics. For over eight hundred years Confucianism produced no original thinker of first importance. It occupied itself with practical affairs, having yielded speculative thinking to the Buddhist schools. After long centuries of Buddhist domination there arose under the Sung dynasty a new Confucianist philosophy whose chief representatives were the brothers Ch’eng Hao (1032-85) and Ch’eng I (1033-1107), Lu Kiu-yuan (1139-92), Chu Hsi (1130-1200) and Wang Yang-ming (1472-1528) . They sought to work out a Confucianist cosmology, psychology and logic as the basis of a moral and political philosophy, which has become known as neo-Confucianism.

Neo-Confucianism is classical Confucianism reinterpreted in the light and under the influence of the Buddhist and Taoist mediaeval religions and contains many elements taken from them. Unlike classical Confucianism it is esoteric and speculative; it exalts meditation and quietism. Its attitude toward moral questions is far more rigorous and puritanical than the humane teachings of Confucius and Mencius. While it made no protest against the system of concubinage and the vogue of foot binding which was arising at the time, its great teachers condemned the remarriage of widows. “To die of starvation is a very small matter but (for a widow) to lose chastity is a very great sin.”

Despite these marked traces of mediaeval heritage neo-Confucianism represented the historic tendency of China seeking liberation from the otherworldliness of mediaevalism and a return to the more practical problems of the individual, family and the state. It represented the movement to secularize thought and society. Its esoteric meditation, its study and speculation, were not directed to the attainment of arahatship or Taoist longevity but to the perfection of the individual so he might be better fitted to serve society and the state.

Although neo-Confucianism was at first persecuted by the government because of its uncompromising opposition to some political leaders of the time it spread rapidly and gained a great following. Buddhism and Taoism ceased to command the interest of the intellectuals and gradually died a natural death, surviving today in China merely as the superstitions of the ignorant. Since the fourteenth century Confucianism, patronized by the emperors, has become the orthodox moral and political philosophy of the educated class. For over five hundred years, from 1400 to 1900, the commentaries of Chu Hsi on the Confucian classics were used in all schools and all civil service examinations. Written in lucid and simple language, these texts have had tremendous influence in popularizing the moral and social teachings of the Confucian school as reinterpreted by the Sung philosophers and they have colored all Chinese institutions.

Neo-Confucianism developed in a united empire of absolute rule and as a political philosophy failed to grasp the democratic spirit of classical Confucianism and tended to strengthen the hand of despotism. One of the Sung philosophers said that “parents can do no wrong”; by analogy this dictum has become the unconscious basis of a political philosophy that emperors can do no wrong. In this sense neo-Confucianism has well deserved centuries of imperial patronage. It has been responsible, on the one hand, for long periods of comparative political stability and, on the other, for a lack of political and intellectual freedom.

In the early years of the twentieth century there were some attempts to revive Confucianism and reinterpret it in the light of modern life and thought. After the founding of the Republic of China there was a feeble movement to establish Confucianism as a state religion (partly in the hope of using it as a bulwark against foreign influence) or, failing that, to make it the national system of moral teaching in all schools. But these efforts soon ceased and by an order of the ministry of education official sacrifices at the temple of Confucius were officially abolished in 1928.

From China Confucianism spread to Korea and thence in the third century of the Christian era to Japan. Official schools were opened in the seventh century, and later Confucius attained the stature of a divinity. While its cultural influence was great, Confucianism as a cult never attained the mass support given to Buddhism in Japan. An essential transformation of Confucian teachings took place on Japanese soil, where the importance attached to the family as the institutional basis of life and to filial piety as a virtue were translated into an emphasis on the institution of the state and loyalty to the ruler.

Religion and Philosophy in Chinese History

It has been said that the Chinese people are the least religious among the civilized races, and that Chinese philosophy has been most free from the domination of religious influences. Both of these observations are not true in the light of history. A study of history will convince us that the Chinese people were capable of highly religious emotions; that in certain periods of history, China became so fanatically religious that many monks and nuns would willingly burn themselves to death as the supreme form of sacrifice to some Buddhist deity; and that Chinese philosophy has always been so much conditioned by the religious development of the different periods that the history of Chinese thought cannot be properly understood without being studied together with that of the Chinese religions. If our people to-day do not appear so religious as the other races of the world, it is only because our thinkers, our Voltaires and our Huxleys, had long ago fought hard against the forces of religion. And if China has so far failed to achieve a truly humanistic civilization, it is only because the rationalistic and humanistic tendencies of Chinese thought have been more than once frustrated by the too great powers of religion.

In the following paragraphs, I shall try to present a brief historical survey of the inter-play between religion and philosophy in China.

Ⅰ

Two great religions have played tremendously important roles throughout Chinese history. One is Buddhism which came to China probably before the Christian era but which began to exert nation-wide influence only after the third century A.D. The other great religion has had no generic name, but I propose to call it Siniticism. It is the native religion of the Chinese people: it dates back to time immemorial and includes all such later phases of its development as Moism, Confucianism (as a state religion), and all the various stages of the Taoist religion. Siniticism has been to China what Hinduism has been to India. In its later stages of development, it has taken unto itself many elements from Buddhism; but its basic ideas and belief are traceable to the primitive tenets of ancient China.

The introduction of Buddhism into China was the most important landmark in the history of Chinese philosophy as well as in the history of Chinese religion. Before that, Chinese thought had to deal with the religious influences of ancient China; but after Buddhism had made itself felt throughout the empire, Chinese thought had to face the doubly difficult task of assimilating an alien system of religion and philosophy and of adjusting itself to the demands and perils of the rapidly changing and partially Indianized Sinitic religion.

We may conveniently divide the history of Chinese thought into three main periods. The first period may be called the Sinitic Age which ends with the ascendency of Buddhism in the fourth century A.D. The second period is the Buddhist Age covering the eight centuries from 300 to 1100 A.D. The third period may be called the Age of Chinese Renaissance which began with the rise of secular Neo-Confucian thought in the 11th century and comes down to our own times.

The civilization of ancient China was essentially a combination of the cultures of the Shang and Chou dynasties. The Shang dynasty which flourished in the second millennium B.C. had its political and cultural centre in and about modern Honan, and its territory and influence extended eastward to the sea. Its culture may be called an eastern culture. The Chou people came from the west and, gradually moving eastward, finally conquered the Shangs towards the end of the 12th century B.C. Its political capital remained in western Shensi until it was captured and sacked by the Barbarians in 771 B.C. It was the blending of the eastern and western cultures of the Shangs and the Chous that formed the civilization of ancient China.

What we term the Sinitic religion was the product of this Shang-Chou cultural combination. From the vast number of oracular bones with finely carved ideographical writings which have been found in Anyang, Honan, we may infer that the Shang people were devout worshippers of dead ancestors, that they had apparently no worship of a supreme God, and that they believed in divination and every important activity of the state, from hunting to war, was decided by reading the oracular answers in the burnt crackings on the tortoise shells or animal bones. It was from the Shang people that the worship of ancestors and the belief in divination came to be integral parts of the Sinitic religion.

With the eastward march of the Chou people, there came a new religious force which was almost monotheistic. In many of the songs and odes left by this people, we can see that they worshipped a Shang-ti (Supreme God) or Hao-tien (August Heaven) who was all-seeing and all-powerful and who would protect the just and punish the evil-doers. When the Chou people had conquered the eastern dynasty, the religion of the conquerors was superimposed on the older religion of the vanquished people of the east. The two currents gradually became merged into one national religion which recognized a Supreme God and also accepted the general worship of ancestors. Between the supreme deity and the ancestors, there were the lesser gods of the natural forces—the Sun, the Moon, the Mountains and Rivers—and the deified ancestors of great achievement. Tribal gods of newer races were also brought into this pantheon of the religion of the Shang and Chou peoples.

The belief in divination continued to be in great vogue. But its technique went through many changes. A new process was introduced under the Chou dynasty, which used a fixed number of divination sticks arranged in a definite order and which, instead of the old practice of deciphering the burnt crackings of the oracular bones, had ready-made “judgments” for every possible arrangement or computation of the sticks. The best known book of such divination judgments is the Book of Change , which in later ages came to be accepted as one of the Sacred Books of ancient China.

The importance of divination in the history of Chinese civilization cannot be over-estimated. As far as we know, the earliest writings in China were those engraven on the oracular bones, recording the subject for divination, the date, and the reading of the oracular answer. This was the beginning of writing, of chronology, of history and of literature. This, too, marked the beginning of literary education and of an intellectual class. For the tremendous importance attached to divination and worship and the difficulty in deciphering the mysterious signs on the bones and mastering the art of ideographical writing,—all

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