The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Read Free

a new Machiavellian class. But Confucius carried no Machiavellian message. To every prince, Confucius preached his cliché sermon: Govern for the benefit of the people, reduce taxes, recruit “superior men” of any origin.
    After his frustrating years of vagrancy, he returned to his old sinecure in his native Lu. There among his early disciples he spent the last years of his life. Nowhere had he attained high office or achieved reforms. Still, he had never lost the reverence of his small band of students. Legend reported that when Confucius died in 479 his disciples spent three whole years and Tzu-kung, his leading disciple, spent another three years mourning at his grave. “From the birth of mankind until now,” declared Tzu-kung, “there has never been the equal of Confucius.”
    While Confucius failed as a politician, as a teacher he was a spectacular success. His simple, open-ended maxims speak to us today. He offered no dogma but a way of learning that remained congenial to John Dewey and our most experimental modern American philosophers. In China before Confucius there seem to have been no schools except those to teach archery. Historians credit Confucius with the first effort to organize an educational program to train young men for roles in government. His classic question asked, “What has one who is not able to govern himself to do with governing others?”
    His Socratic method never ended in dogmatic conclusions. When he found his disciple Tzu-kung arrogantly critical of students, “The Master said, ‘Obviously Tzu-kung has become quite perfect himself, to have time to spare for this; I do not have this much leisure.’ ” Wisdom was “when you know a thing, to recognize that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it.” “The mistakes of a gentleman may be compared to the eclipses of the sun or the moon. When he makes a mistake, all men see it; when he corrects it, all men look up to him.” Truth was always to be pursued but never possessed. “Study as if you were following someone you could not overtake, and were afraid of losing.” “When walking in a party of three, I always have teachers. I can select the good qualities of the one for imitation, and the bad ones of the other and correct them in myself.” (
Analects
, VII:21)
    Confucius never pretended to have a divine message of which he was the chosen vehicle. People’s problems could be solved not by supernatural forces but only by their own and their ancestors’ experience. And “Heaven” was Confucius’ name for the natural cosmic order that matched the ethical sense in every man. He would not appeal to any ruling Being up there. He was naturally suspicious of prayer. When he was near death, his earnest disciples asked permission to pray for him. But Confucius objected, “My kind of praying was done long ago”—not in words but in deeds. The example of all the great ancestors should govern a virtuous man. The “will of Heaven” was discovered not through theology but in “the collective experience of the ancestors,” another name for history. In Confucius’ world each man had to find the path for himself.
    Still, there is no way of thought so experimental, and no philosopher so tentative that his suggestions cannot be frozen into a dogma by self-seeking disciples. Confucius was no exception. In the West his simple messages survived in fragmentary, easily remembered maxims. The practical wisdom of Confucius has become so proverbial that the “sayings” of Confucius are found in daily newspapers to whose readers Confucius is a mystery. Alexander Pope described this popular Western Confucius in his
Temple of Fame
(1714):
    Superior and alone, Confucius stood
    Who taught that useful science,—to be good.
    The teachings of Confucius have come down to us through his
Analects
(Conversations), in twenty chapters and 497 verses, a miscellany of aphorisms, maxims, and episodes. Probably