A Teacher Who Said He Invented Nothing

The Spring and Autumn period is the age in which the Zhou king kept his title and lost his power, the great states fought and made alliances without reference to him, and the ritual distinctions that marked rank were used by people not entitled to them. Confucius lived in it, in the state of Lu, and his response was not to propose a new order but to insist on the old one. He described himself as a transmitter and not a maker, and the Analects show him correcting his students on matters that look small, the number of dancers a nobleman may employ, the sacrifice he may perform, the mourning he owes his parents, because he took those things to be where an order either holds or fails. That is the argument of the period compressed into one figure.

If ritual is only decoration, using more dancers than your rank permits is a harmless vanity; if ritual is the substance of the relationships that make a society work, it is the beginning of collapse. Confucius took the second view, and the Chinese tradition that followed him argued about the details for two thousand years without abandoning the premise. The religious content of that position is not belief in gods but the treatment of correct conduct as the point where the human and the cosmic order meet.