The Ancient Indian and Chinese Works, Essay Example

For this assignment I have selected the Confucian writings called The Doctrine of the Mean and The Great Learning to discuss whether they are religious or philosophical. I decided to discuss both, since they are both said to be chapters of a larger, equally ancient book .

First, I will explain what I think the differences are between a religious work and a philosophical one. I take a religious work to be one that is about God, or a god, or group of gods, and their use of godlike powers to influence the lives of people on earth. It is about that

God or gods and is the story of the peoples who believe in them. God(s) are actively involved in controlling events. At least that is what I take religion to mean in Western Civilization. There are other definitions and practices in other countries, like Shinto in Japan, but I’ll leave those aside for this paper. As for philosophy, I think that it can mention God or gods, but it is mainly about knowledge itself, or ethics, or some combination of those two broad, general categories.

I accessed both the Doctrine and the Learning online, and did a search for the word God. Both works only have a single use of the word, and no details about that God are given. But the Doctrine has a full 45 references to heaven. (The Learning has only three.) But even so, neither work seems to me to be particularly religious. The heaven being referred to is as much a reference to the sky as it is to what we would think of as a religious kind of heaven, with the exception of the phrase son of heaven, which is found a total of three times in both books. Sometimes heaven is capitalized and sometimes not, but the difference doesn’t seem important.

In reading both the Doctrine and the Learning, the language of both seemed to me to be the same. I can’t sense any real difference in style or tone. The other thing I noticed is that it lacks any distinctive literary quality of its own, like the King James Bible has, and it doesn’t flow like a narrative would. Some paragraphs are clearly linked together in meaning, but others just follow each other, with the subjects unrelated from one to the other. In other words, it is just a jumbled record of the sayings of Confucius and his disciples. It isn’t a Bible or a Koran.

This got me thinking about whether a religious work could be like that, or whether a truly religious doctrine would require both a distinctive literary style and a cohesive, sustained narrative — a beginning, a middle, and an end. And what about philosophy? Would it require the same things? Maybe both religion and philosophy both require the style and narrative, but there is a middle kind of idea that has neither, yet can still be important. To me, these are key questions, maybe even obvious ones, but ones that should be addressed.

At first, you might think that the sayings of Confucius have two things going against them: their age, and their original language. Maybe ancient Chinese just doesn’t translate well into English. But then there are other literary works just as old, or about that old, and spring from languages that are also unrelated to English, and that come from cultures just as alien to the West. Right away the Old Testament and the legends of Gilgamesh and Beowulf come to mind. And Chinese was a language, not a code like the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt. Moving ahead, the sayings of Christ aren’t all linked by a larger narrative either. It’s interesting that a lot of people seriously question whether Confucius and Christ even lived, and offer as their reasoning a lack of historical evidence for either one of them. But of those two, one definitely started a religion. Seen that way, I’m going to say that Confucianism is not a religion, at least not in the Western sense. I doubt it’s a religion for anyone who needs a living God to worship.

So how does the Doctrine and the Learning stack up as a philosophy if it isn’t a religion? Right away, it’s possible that it isn’t a philosophy either. They are presented as either/or a religion or a philosophy for this paper, but that doesn’t mean they actually are one or the other. The problem is like the one we encountered before: the lack of a connecting theme and the lack of a distinctly literary style. By style I mean, does it sound like it was written by the same author, or at least (like the Bible) at least sound like it was edited and translated by the same committee? I think that a philosophy needs both, and these two books of Confucius don’t give the English-language reader that impression. But then again, there is more than one kind of philosophy.

There is the kind of philosophy you learn about when reading a specific treatise by a specific author. Most people probably think of something like Immanuel Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason (which most people, including me, haven’t read) when they think of the word philosophy. But we all know that a philosophy can be a lot looser than that. You might (and probably do) have your own philosophy of life which you try to follow when it isn’t too inconvenient, expensive, or dangerous to do so.

To me, that’s what these sayings of Confucius are. They represent a kind of mindset, one that seeks to be open-minded, wise, respectful, learning, and forgiving — whether it is inconvenient, expensive, or dangerous to do so or not. The path may not be left for an instant. If it could be left, it would not be the path. Anecdotes are given to guide the way, but they are pretty general. I think it would be both easy and difficult to apply them to any given situation today. It just depends on how much detail you need. If you don’t need much, then any precept will do. I looked for an example to guide me in the classroom. Again, the devil is in the details. To be fond of learning is to be near to knowledge is true enough. But only for the knowledge we want. For the other kind, you need a classroom (a word not found in the books) or a Confucius.