Confucian Influence? Are you sure?
The myth named “Confucian Influence”
When the Confucianism is discussed, we see that it is taken for granted it has influenced the East Asian societies "greatly". But, to discuss the influence or impact of a thing, one needs to know what it had been like before to be able to say how much of the change it brought in what way. It seems no such fundamental questions have ever been raised as for the Confucianism. Somehow it has been exempted of the due diligence probe. Before you know it, you have been fed the notion of the “Confucian Influence” to become another propagator of the idea, contributing to its unchallengeability in the course. It is about time we got reminded of the simple principle that things should be subjected to the due diligence before accepted at least closest available to the truth. It is never too late. Here I start with those basic questions that have been long overdue, that the Confucianism has been exempted from somehow, perhaps for the period of more than a millennium.
The Due Diligence Question
Years ago, a trendy writer treated the frequent accidents of the Korean Airline in a chapter of his book and there he pointed out the deep-rooted “cultural legacy of deference to elders” as the culprit that played havoc with proper communication in the cockpit between the flight captain and younger assistant pilot. Whatever his intention may have been there, the deference to the elders was generally taken as from Confucian culture and as the book made another bestseller of his, it seems to have stoked up the trend, if not ignited, among the journalists and intellectual circle to point the finger at Confucianism for almost every social phenomenon, good and bad, taking place in Asia, especially in relatively prosperous countries like Korea, Japan, Singapore and other countries, in endorsement of the newly synthesized expression “Confucian Cultural Sphere”. When some Asian countries were successful in controlling the pandemic in the early stage, the journalists in Europe and the United States cited in unison the Confucian culture, whereby people obey the government’s lead without questioning, as the agent for the impressive but not-so-enviable result. While they had recalled Confucius for the Japanese collectivism that was behind the success of its economy, they referred to the Confucianism acting as a gravity handicapping the social dynamics when it came to the reasoning on the decline of Japanese industrial competitiveness.
The question I am trying to raise here is whether the characteristics of personal and social behaviors in those countries are there really influenced by Confucianism and, if so, how much and in what way, and, if not, what other factors unknown or concealed could be there. Let’s take a look at the events mentioned above from a bit afar. If the Confucianism prevailed in the people’s mind making them obedient to the authority, how were the Koreans able to fill the big square in silent but stern protest and ousted the corrupt government in 2016? If the Confucianism prevailed in Japanese corporate culture, how can it be a cause of their economic success and then become the agent of decline the next day? The reference to the Confucian influence might be a pretty handsome and convenient way to interpret social phenomena in Asian societies, but it is as prone to fallacy as explaining social phenomena in Western societies by citing Christianity as sitting at the core of everything.
Now let’s get down to some fundamental questions about the veracity of the Confucian influence. If the Confucianism, known originated in China, was so influential in the way of life for Asian peoples, why do the contemporary Chinese people look apparently the least Confucian in their way of behavior in daily life, except for their unquestioning obedience to the Communist authority and their pride in Confucius being Chinese? Ready there might be the inference to the Cultural Revolution under Mao that annihilated all Chinese traditions and old values, but it had been not much different before Mao was born.
The dynasties in China lasted the shortest average duration among the three countries for reasons of corruptions and dissipations of the rulers and their court, which were against the teachings of Confucius on the Heavenly Mandate to the rulers. 1) Now at individual level, why do Koreans and Japanese have manners showing profuse respect to others, more so to their seniors, bowing to the others they meet, while Chinese are hard to be found lowering their heads? Why do Korean and Japanese languages have so complicated respect-sensitive speech systems, while the Chinese is the exact opposite, being one void of the respect sensitivity? Had the Koreans and Japanese conjured up the honorific protocols in their language, determined to be better followers of the Confucian teachings? The answer is absolutely no. 2)
1) The average length of the Chinese dynasties is less than 70 years with no single dynasty lasting more than 300 years in good contrast to Korean dynasties with the shortest duration of Koryo’s 475 years. In Korea and Japan, the dissipations and corruptions of the ruling class were not rare, but were not so flagrant and brazen as to directly invite the uprisings and cause dynasty change. Whether it was for the desirable self-restraint on the ruler’s part or for the adaptation by the ruled to the status quo of the social class system, the Korean and Japanese dynasties were much more stable than their Chinese counterparts, evincing no discernible difference before and after the introduction of the Confucianism.
2) All the Transeurasian languages have the honorific system with extensive inflectional changes that comprise nouns, pronouns, verbs, even adjectives and adverbs, from Korean and Japanese to Mongolian, Uighur, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and7 Turkish. Among them, the Korean and Japanese language show the most complicated system of respect-sensitive speech. According to a cross-disciplinary study published in Nature in October 2021, Transeurasian languages traces back to 9,000 BP in agricultural communities based in West Liao Basin area. Chinese, a typical isolating language, that belongs to Sino-Tibetan languages with no respect-sensitive systems except for a few pronouns, originated from the mid-Yellow River area about 7,200 BP according to the multi-disciplinary study by Max Planck Institute published in 2019 in the PNAS Journal.
When we think about it, a few facts we have always known about peoples and social cultures in the Northeast Asian region could have been enough to question the credibility of the Confucian Influence theory, but most people were somehow swept by the new synthecized term of “Confucian Influence” or “Confucian Cultural Sphere” and gave it a free pass with no questioning, even endowing them with a glow of intellectual insight when it comes to the East Asian socio-cultural issues.
An analogy of the Delusion
Perhaps
here we might use some imagination and make an analogy in the Western setting
to facilitate a new perspective regarding this ‘Confucian Influence’. In the New Testament there is an episode of
Jesus praising Samaritans for their unhesitating care for the helpless
strangers and teaching the fellow Jews to follow the Samaritan example. Let’s
imagine that somehow the Samaritan-to-stranger scene had failed to land in the part of the righteousness
teaching and that the Samaritans have survived to our present time as a discrete
group of people happening to be Christian, preserving their pre-Christ heart to
run bee-line to rescue strangers in need. Then it would be highly probable that
you hear that Samaritans are the epitome of the Christ’s teachings on
righteousness, and more so if the people happen to be prosperous, being praised
as an example of the Christian blessings. The situation would be even more
treacherous if the Samaritans, now good Christian, have earned the habit of
making the cross sign before helping the strangers in need.
This analogy may have already rendered a certain possible scenario on the “Confucian Influence” situation. But the truth may not be in sight yet. What if the Samaritans were not just a good example Jesus found useful to enlighten Jews, but were from the beginning the very people who had given the inspiration to Jesus for the way his people should behave? No way? It will come new to most readers that Confucius himself admired a certain people and their way of life so much as to wish to retire there and live with the “big” people. 3)
The land where the people Confucius admired so explicitly lived was where the ancestors of Korean people had been based since long before the time Confucius lived.4) The Confucius’ admiration for the Eastern People was not an isolated one. There survived many other ancient Chinese records describing the Eastern people, who the modern-day Koreans identify as their ancestors that belonged to the polity of Gojoseon, as bearing a very high spiritual and ethical standards to the extent of being described as mythical beings transcending the human boundary.5) Even there are records that suggest that the idea of Jun Zi [君子], the model personality Confucius asked all the men to pursue, carrying all the virtues of the Confucian teachings, had come from the image of the Eastern People, 東夷 or DongYi.6)
3)
[子欲居九夷, 或曰 : 陋, 如之何? 子曰 : 君子居之,何陋之有] 論語 子罕篇 In Nunyu or Analects, the records of conversation between Confucius
and his disciples, when Confucius expressed his wish to live in the land
of Nine-Yi people, someone asked him how he could
live in such shabby place and then Confucius answered back how a place where Gentle
Men ( 君子 Junzi ) live could be
shabby.
4) Many Chinese scholars and historians in the olden time tried to mitigate this part in the Analects later by grafting a Chinese figure named Jizi (箕子) into Gojoseon history as cultural hero, about whom the Analects itself, in another chapter, had just a single line as enslaved as punishment by the King Wu of Zhu in the eleventh century BCE, without no mentioning of Gojoseon. This figure began to gain connection to Gojoseon suddenly from the time of Han Dynasty in 漢書 Hanshu, the Book of Han, twelve centuries after Jizi’s time and seven centuries after Confucius discussed the Yi peoples of his admiration in the analects. Since then episodes were added one by one until he finally was reborn into a figure who taught the civility and enlightened Gojoseon with skills of farming, silkworm raising and fabric making. While the story of Jizi governing Gojoseon has been revealed groundless with no support of evidence, the furtive but tenacious efforts of the ancient Chinese to sneak Jizi into the history of Gojoseon in relation to Confucius’ saying in the Analects confirms, firstly, that the people Confucius admired was the ancient Korean Gojoseon people and, secondly, that the ancient Chinese felt uneasy about the high standard of civility and ethics of DongYi and Gojoseon and attempted to conceal it since the time of Han period.
5) Shan He Jing(山海經), Book of Mountains and Seas, the earliest extant Chinese book on geography, whose first publication is traced back to the 4th century BC, describes the people living near the Bohai Bay, where the ancient Korean kingdom Gojoseon sat, as people respecting and loving each other. [東海之內 北海之隅 有國名曰 朝鮮天毒 其人水居 偎人愛之]
6) In Shuowen jiezi (說文解字), a dictionary published around 100 AD during the Later Han period by Xu Shen (許慎), still kept the highest regard for the Dongyi people and said, “Among the neighboring peoples, DongYi is the only people who are Gentle Men pursuing the Greatness.” [惟東夷從大大人] It follows, “Junzi 君子 means being like Eastern People and the blessings come when following their behavior.” [ 此與君子如夷 有夷之行降福 ] Zun Ji or Gentle Man is an ideal model of personality carrying all the virtues of the Confucian teaching that all men should aspire to be like in their life.
What ancient Koreans were like before the Confucianism
Now let’s
take a look at the way Chinese found the ancient Koreans some centuries later
when they got out of the mythical admiration for the people. From around the third
century BCE the Gojoseon was downhill and in the process of disintegration to
be replaced by the newly rising Korean kingdoms of Buyeo, Koguryo, Baekje and
Shilla in its old territory. It will be
helpful for enriched understanding of the following scenes to remember that
ancient Koreans spoke old Korean that belonged to the Transeurasian
linguistic family, which carried rich honorific protocols in their speech, in
contrast to the Chinese with no respectful expressions in the sentence components,
except for pronouns for “you” and some titles, like "Sir" or "Master", when addressing someone. I took out
the parts describing the personalities and social customs of the ancient Koreans in the following.
Chinese found Buyeo 夫餘 men as being big, strong and brave with sincere and generous character. They used bowls when they ate and they kept the courtesy of serving and washing the cup when they got together and they bowed and deferred to others as they come in and out of the house. Still, what makes this Buyeo people look amazingly like modern Koreans follows that people were around walking on the street deep into the night, they liked to sing so there was no end of singing sound. They liked to wear white clothes. 7)
Kori/Koguryo 高句驪 is the kingdom, from which the name Korea came, and is the most favorite state of the modern-day Koreans. The observation went that they were of a kind with Buyeo, so the language, social practice and law were similar to Buyeo. They straightened one leg backward when they bowed and when they walk, they walk so fast as if running. They were good at soccer. They liked to keep themselves clean. Men and women got together at night and sang in groups. They liked to worship spirits, ancestry and celestials. 8) In later records on this Koguryo people, even the poor people such as the warehouse keepers or shepherds liked to read and study, so there was a big edifice for school on every street and people sent their unmarried children to the school to study and practice archery. Law was strict, so people did not even pick up valuables left on the street.* They wore the grieving garments for three years after the death of parent or husband and for three months for death of their sibling. 9) Another later record goes on that, when they passed their senior, they lowered themselves and walked hurriedly to show respect. Women wore skirt and jacket ( descriptive of Hanbok’s basic form ). During the funeral period they wept in high tone until the funeral ceremony finished.10)
*We don't know it was because of the rigorous law that the ancient Koreans did not pick up other people's valuables left on the street. That is the way the Chinese explained it. In modern Korea it is a norm to leave the cell phones and laptops on the table in the cafe to make orders at the counter. 大體用法嚴峻，少有犯者，乃至路不拾遺。舊唐書 東夷列傳 <translation> The application of the law is rigorous, so there are few crimes. People don't pick up valuables on the street.
As for the Baekje people, who had the direct involvement in the founding of Japan, they observed that the people were big and kept the clothes clean with the language and social practice similar to Koguryo, but they did not straighten one leg backward.11) Shila kingdom was similar to Koguryo and Baekje in social custom, law and wears, but they admired white clothes. When they come across someone, they never failed to sit on their knee and bowed with their hands on the ground. 12)
Ancient Koreans continued to amaze Chinese with their courteous manners and the assiduous way they bowed in respect of each other. History of Song described in great detail the people and society of Koryo around the 11th and 12th century, which had become much Buddhist by then. 13) Koryo replaced the Unified Shilla in 918 AD, but they thought themselves as descendent of the Koguryo Kingdom, reviving the name of the Kingdom that had ceased to be two and half hundred years before. The law had become much lenient, perhaps under Buddhist influence, and people avoided killing animals to eat.
But still they kept the rite of service to the Heaven 14) and while the men and women continues to mix together freely and took bath together in the streams, they kept their courteous protocol with others. They laid matte on the floor and they took off shoes when they get on to the floor. When they met their senior, they made sure to sit on knees and they responded with no delay when their seniors called them. The bow was always returned by the other and even the parents responded to the bow of their child with a half-bow. 15) It is noteworthy here that the Koreans were still mixing freely between men and women at the time of the Koryo Dynasty. While it means that the Koryo society was yet free from the Confucian influence, it is another evidence that the Korean manners of civility and respect for elders had nothing to do with the Confucianism.
7) Book of Later Han, Treatise on DongYi, Buyeo Part 後漢書 東夷列傳 夫餘國
8) Book of Later Han, Treatise on DongYi,
Koguryo Part 後漢書 東夷列傳 高句驪
9) New Book of the Tang 新唐書 東夷列傳 高句驪
10) Book of
Liang or Lianh Shu 梁書 東夷列傳 高句驪 Koreans
kept the practice of making the high-tone mourning during the funeral
period until recently. It can be found practiced in the rural
areas still.
11) Book of Liang or Lianh Shu, Treatise
on DongYi, Baekje, 梁書 東夷列傳 百濟
12)
Book of Liang or Lianh Shu, Treatise on DongYi, Shilla, 梁書 東夷列傳 新羅
13)
Koryo and Japanese societies were deeply influenced by Buddhism. They
seemed to have remained quite similar to each other in the social
atmosphere and customs,
including the gender culture and aristocratic
structure of the society until this time
before the advent of Joseon Dynasty in Korea in
1392 AD.
14) Another social practice common with all the
ancient Korean polities was the worship of Heaven. 'Hananim' has been the
Korean word for the Heaven God. It does not have a physical shape, but is
a being who takes care of the ultimate justice in the human affairs and to
whom the dead souls go back. The Protestant churches took the word to use in
place of Jehovah, making their mission much easier in Korea from late 19th century.
15) Book of Song, Treatise on Foreign Countries, Koryo 宋史 外國列傳 高麗
It is just astonishing that almost all the descriptions on the ancient Koreans can be used to describe modern-day Koreans and their society. Even the detailed manners of wearing hair and clothes were in prevalent practice as close to our time as in 1960s nationwide and until 1980s in rural areas. The stunning likeness of the ancient Korean people and today’s Koreans in their personal behavior and social customs cannot be explained without the homogeneity of the two, not just in terms of the physical genetics, but also, more importantly, in the unbroken cultural continuity.
The people currently living in China in the territory of ancient Korean nation Koguryo are known to be closest to the modern-day Korean in physical DNA, but they don’t carry the cultural legacy anymore in their personal behavior and social customs. Much of the ancient Korean behavior and social customs would not have been able to survive a few generations after Tang China took over the land of Koguryo because of the Tang’s Sinicization policy.16) Ancient Korean social customs were firmly intertwined with their language and dwelling environment, so as soon as the children forget their language, their manners of courteousness and respect to others are bound to get lost.16)
16) Tang China’s measures to dismantle the Koguryo society included the dispersal of the Koguryo people. It should be recorded as one of the earliest diasporas of the Korean people after that of the Go-joseon before and after its fall in the 2nd Century BCE. Tang at that time was an insecure state in terms of border defense. In the north Khitans and Mongols were threatening. In the south the Tibetans were so strong that the Tang court had to send their princesses in marriage there. Go Seonji or Gao Xianzhi, the general who commanded the Tang forces during the Battle of Talas against the Abbasid Caliphate in 751 was born to the refugee family of Koguryo, who were forced to move to the Southeastern China near Tibet . Many went to the Archipelago to join the founding of Japan, with their technologies inclusive of paper making, painting and war skills. Their settlement near modern-time Tokyo is believed to be deeply related to the rise in hegemony of the Tokyo-based local powers and the birth of Samurai class in the Japanese history. The current Chinese-Koreans living Manchuria are not direct descendent of Koguryo, but the descendents by a few generations of the immigrants who migrated to the area near the end of the 19th century. The Chinese Communist government began the Sinicization measures to deter the use of the Korean language by obligatory use of Chinese textbooks at school from 2020, while, on the other hand, asserting that all the Korean cultural legacies and assets in the region and the Korean community are Chinese too because the their current existence in current Chinese territory. With the Northeast History Project they proclaimed that the history of Koguryo was Chinese history. They are now working to claim all the Koguryo’s cultural legacy Chinese, including Hanbok (韓服),the Korean traditional wear. The Chinese bought some pages of the Vogue magazine Instagram in March 2021 to stage the Koguryo style clothes identical to those found in Koryo tomb mural as Hanfu (漢 服), the clothes of Chinese Han, a new combination of words they conjured coming into the New Millennia in response to the rise of the Korean soft power across the world.
What the first clash between Koreans and Chinese tells us
What happened when the Chinese people first came to clash into the Korean society seems to provide an invaluable insight into the cultural sceneries of the time in the region. Around the third century BC when Go-Joseon was in its downhill path of disintegration, bound to be replaced by inheritant Korean kingdoms above mentioned, many Chinese migrated into the Gojoseon territory in the Southern Manchuria surrounding the Bohai bay in the tumultuous period. It did not take long before the society got so disorderly that the written law of eight articles kept for hundreds of years had to increase to sixty in the matter of years to deal with the new wave of diversified delinquencies and crimes. 17)
Here it would be important to remember that the cultural clash happened only about three hundred years after Confucius’ time when he was not yet accepted officially as Great Teacher even in China, more than a millennium before the Confucianism was taken as state philosophy to the Korean society. Combined with the fact that Confucius himself revered the people living to the north this event would be able to present the whole picture clear enough as for the cultural topography of the time, especially in terms of ethical standards, in the Northeast Asia between the two blocks of civilization.
Now, let’s get back to the imaginary Samaritan analogy. Wasn’t the mythical description of the Eastern people in the oldest Chinese literature true enough in the language of their time? Given all the facts that we have come to know about the ancient Koreans from the mythical descriptions, including that by Confucius himself, followed by the records based on the eye-observation, would the analogy of the imaginary Samaritans inspiring Christian teaching totally inapplicable to the Confucianism? While such notion may be too shocking for many to digest yet, I believe that at least we should stop talking the "Confucian Influence" about the personal behavior and social culture of Koreans and Japanese.
17) Book of Later Han, Treatise on DongYi, Ye Part 後漢書 東夷列傳 濊 This treatise laments in the publisher’s note in its closing how the Chinese influx contaminated the DongYi society so quickly, the place where Confucius had wished to live in.
The arrival of the Confucianism in Joseon society and its impact
The Confucianism had been known for long among the Buddhist monks and literati elites, but it was not until 14th century that the Confucianism came to the fore of the Korean society, by around the end of Kogyo Dynasty ( 918–1392 ) and the beginning of Joseon Dynasty. The biggest motive of the Joseon founders in adopting the Confucianism as state ideology was to secure the literati supremacy under the rule of the centralized monarchy and to drive out the Buddhist influence from the politics after series of experience, during the later Koryo Dynasty, of the militarian dominance of the local overloads and Buddhist monks’ engagements in politics.
So, the Confucianism
was delivered to the most mature people and society of the time in terms of
civility and ethical standards, who did not need the Confucian teachings for the social and personal behavior. For Koreans, the respect for
seniors is embedded in their language, so that they just do not know how not to
respect the seniors, bound in the honorific framework of their language. It had
been like that for Koreans from the time way before the birth of Confucius. So,
while for the Chinese the respect for seniors, one of the key teachings of the
Confucianism, was
something that needed
to be taught on top of the language, for Koreans and Japanese, along with the
all the Transeurasian language speakers in the Central Asia, the respect for
the senior is just a part of their
languages.
The
practice of filial piety had been even stricter than Confucianism required, as with the three-year mourning period for
parental decease, the earliest record on the practice from the time of Kori/Koguryeo. The same with the
ancestral service and Gosa (this thing, still practiced widely) did not
even exist in Confucianism.
They also had a strong sense of social order and national integrity. The average length of the major Korean dynasties exceeded six hundred years regardless of the introduction of the Confucianism . And it was more than the Confucian teaching of "royalty" 忠 required that the Korean populace fought for the country voluntarily regardless of one's social position whenever the country was in the crisis from the extraneous attack.
One discernible change in the social
custom though, coming into Joseon Dynasty, was the diminution of the women’s
right and status due to the excessive patriarchal elements in Confucianism. Up until the time of Koryo Dynasty men
and women mixed freely and daughters had
equal share of duty in the ritual service to ancestors, and, accordingly, equal
right for inheritance to that of the sons, but it changed rapidly under
Confucian influence
from the early Joseon period. The separation by gender was imposed
from the early years of age and the chastity to the male spouse was required
rigorously from the female. Only the custom
of the women keeping their family name after the marriage survived to modern
days.
The two other venomous ingredients, apart from the excessive patriarchal element, that the package of the
Confucianism delivered as essential were the sinocentrism and the literati
supremacy over the commerce and technology. It was not a coincidence that the
Joseon Dynasty treaded the path of decline consistently throughout its duration of five
hundred years, systemizing the disregard for the sources of wealth and national strength,
institutionalizing the dependence on the foreign power. In the late 19th century when the West found Joseon between China and Japan, the country was at the lowest point in the 4.5 millennia of its history Koreans claim.
The difference in the way Confucianism worked in Korea and Japan
All the records referred to so far were about the ancient Koreans in early first millennia because the same literatures depict the people living in Japanese archipelago as devoid of much cultural sophistications, half due to their lack of knowledge because of the distance, and half because the Wa -the name before Nippon- was not taken seriously by the Chinese of the time. But all the personal behaviors of civility, familial relationship and value, social mindset and customs and tradition of national cohesion were passed to the archipelago through the waves and waves of immigrants who built the farming communities with rice paddies and Uji, 18) joined later by the horse-riding conquerors who left the huge tomb mounds and artifacts identical to those of ancient Korean kingdoms.
The cultural-linguistic cradles of East Asian Cultures [Click to enlarge] 
The uniqueness of Japanese culture is well known and rightly so. Their Samurai culture was real because throughout the Warring period that lasted more than one hundred years during the 15th to 16th centuries Samurai’s cruel power and prerogatives over the common people left an indelible footprint in Japanese mind and socio-political culture. It would be not that much difficult to agree that in Japanese culture the influence of Confucianism had been limited, if any. All the records and historical facts enumerated here testify that ancient Koreans and the immigrant founders of Japan, had their own civilization and culture well before they were exposed to Confucianism and the current social culture and institutions are more of the legacy from the ancient culture of their own than from Confucianism. The well-known seniority system in Japanese corporations is real, but it came to be there in the Japanese society not by the Confucian influence, but from the culture with the Transeurasian language background the forefathers of Japan carried over to the archipelago two millennia ago. Koreans and Japanese has so ingrained a habit of bowing to others not because of their multi-generational exposure to Confucian teachings, but because of their Transeurasian cultural root that have come passed down generation after generation for millennia preserved so well in the immutable framework of their language system chemically intertwined with their manners of respect.
18) Uji originally meant the fenced farmer community in the Neolithic and Bronze age found in Korean peninsula and Japan. There is a possibility Korean word Uri which means ‘we’ or ‘our’ normally, like in Uri-nara, our country, came from this word. When one means my wife, Koreans say Uri Manura or Uri jipsaram, which literally means our wife or our houseperson, which can sound weird to Western ears. It is interesting Japanese expression Uchi no Mono means my wife.
Anyway, the purpose of this essay is not to deny the Confucian influence at all, but to try to identify its sphere of influences to its right place in interpreting the history and culture, and, through the window thus secured, the social phenomena of modern time in the region. Like the role of the Christianity in the Western culture and history there would be two main routes that a religion or an ideology can affect the human life and society. It can change people’s way of thinking and behaving, their attitude towards the life and society as was meant by the belief or teachings originally. While no one can be sure how much better in person we, the mankind, became after those teachings and how much we have sharpened our ability to please the God with the faith, history remembers clearly how the churches, temples and schools came about to be and then became sources of conflict against each other.
In both Korea and Japan, the most influential thought of extraneous origin in the past two millennia that influenced the people’s mind was Buddhism. Though Confucianism came to be introduced to the scholars and Buddhist monks from around the fifth century in Korea and passed to Japan, the Buddhism had been dominant in the cultural stream, in the form of art, literature and, with more longevity, general interpretation of the “being”, say, popular philosophy and ensuing attitude towards one’s life and other beings, until the beginning of Joseon dynasty around the end of the fourteenth century in Korea and until the start of Edo period in the beginning of the seventeenth century in Japan.
Still Buddhism seems to sit in the center of people’s mind in both countries as so many Buddhism-originated words are used heavily in everyday life in both countries.19) Also, the Shamanism accounts for much of the culture in both countries, though in disparate manners. In Japan much of the Shamanistic elements were formalized into Shinto while Shamanism survived in its raw form in Korea being practiced in rite performance by professional Shamans or by way of direct individual offerings to gods of nature and place. While Japanese get the blessing from monks at the Shinto temple at important events, it is still not hard to find in Seoul the businessmen in suit and necktie doing the ritual of offering by themselves when they move to a new office in a skyscraper, kneeling down to bow to the god of place with a pig’s head as sacrifice as their co-workers standing around watching over.
19) In Ruth Benedict’s book ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’, she elaborated on the Japanese concept of ‘On’ 隱 , which can be interpreted as grace, but Koreans used the expression heavily too under the Buddhist influence. She exhibited the way Japanese use the expression as “wearing On.Koreans use the expression in the same way.
While you may still say Confucianism has a certain influence on the way people think and behave in those countries in some detail level practices, the over-estimation of its impact on the people and their social orientation as being the main force behind the personal civility and social cohesion that led to the economic prosperity of countries like Korea and Japan can generate wrong signs to the people in many countries around the world who may look at the two countries as exemplary for their own future. As we have observed through the Chinese records, the civil manners of Japanese and Koreans and social stability of their society did not come from the Confucianism. Associating their success with Confucianism is equivalent to using the picture of someone unrelated to deceive the audience to promote a brand.
Actually,
Confucianism worked in the two countries more by way of a political ideology
that the rulers used for their political interests than in the capacity of
personal teachings that changed their personal and social orientation and
behavior. Since the start of Tokugawa regime, the adoption of Confucianism
helped stabilize the political scenery in Japan in the aftermath of the warring
period and Invasion War to Korea by helping to appease and disarm the sanguinary
Samurai class. In an ironical twist of history, the Confucian political
ideology, which places the royal ruler at the apex of power legitimate under
the Heavenly Mandate, endowed the power of justification for the declassed Samurai
in the outcast provinces to rise against the Edo establishment about two and half hundred years later, which eventually led to the Meiji
Restoration in 1868 that placed Tenno back in the apex of their nation. 20) Here with Japan, the change the Confucianism helped bring to the political scenery in Japan would turn out to be a catastrophe to
China in later years, by way of the disgraceful defeat to Japan in the Japan-China War of 1894 and the Japanese
invasion into China later in 1930s.
20) The Confucianism arose as the subject of interest and passtime for the Samurai class through a Korean scholar, 姜沆 Gang Hang, who happened to be the war prisoner during the Imjin War with the start of the edo period of the Tokugawa regime. The declassed Samurais in the outcast provinces developed the idea of restoring the authority of Tenno( 尊王攘夷 Sonno Joi そんのうじょうい) based on the Confucianism and led the Meiji Restoration to the success.
The pivotal difference in the ways Korea and Japan accepted the Confucianism derived from the difference in their geographical locations. The Joseon Korea, sharing the border with China, could not afford to ignore the Confucian World Order, whereby the Chinese ruler is issued the license to rule the world in the name of "Heavenly Mandate", when a solidified dynasty came up in China. Different from Japan, for Korea to look the other way was not an option. The choice left to them was only between to accept it, or at least to pretend to do so, and to fight with the country bigger many times over than them in terms of population.
Throughout the most of Koryo dynasty (918-1392 AD) before Joseon though, they liked to think themselves as another center of the world just located to the east shoulder-to-shoulder with China, not much different from the stance Japan took at the time of the Meiji Restoration. But since the start of Joseon dynasty which began with official declaration of the Confucianism as state ideology, the political claws of the Confucianism begin to make its grip felt in the Joseon society, especially with the situation of the new solidified dynasty Ming now entrenched in China.
The subsequent Chinese military engagement called in after the Japanese invasion in 1592 made the court of Joseon dynasty not just a follower but the promoter of the Confucianism to restore its court’s authority in an effort to fend off the ignominy from its abject failure to protect the people and country from the Japanese. To the King Seonjo, who fled the capital Seoul and almost crossed the border to China, it was more than uncomfortable a fact that many civilian heroes rose to fight and stop the Japanese, not to say of Admiral Lee, while he left behind the capital in escape. When the Japanese receded, he tried to look the other way on the contributions of those patriotic heroes and attributed the regained peace to the Chinese military engagement that only his capacity as legitimate monarch of the vassal kingdom under the Confucian Worldly Order could possibly brought. The only luck and consolation for Korea and its people seems to be the fact that all these things happened after King Sejong and his invention of Hangul. 21)
21) Hangul was invented by Sejong the Great and was publicized in 1446 AD. At the center district of Seoul stand the two statues, one for the King Sejong and the one for Admiral Lee. It is generally accepted view that Korea has enjoyed a great advantage over their immediate neighbors in the digitalized envoronment because of their phonetic alphabet system of Hangul, Sejong The Great invented.
Thus, with the position of Confucianism even further fortified by the royal court after the war, Korea under Joseon dynasty was bound to undergo the downward spiral in the period of hundreds of years that followed, with the court volunteering to be the vassal to the Ming dynasty and then to the Qing, though reluctantly after some traumatic events of disgrace because of its blind devotion to Ming, until the mornachy had to wake up to the cruel reality of the late nineteenth-century world, waning and still in trance under the spell of the Confucian worldly outlook.
Confucianism as "important part of China's propaganda set-up"
We know these days the wide network of Confucius Institutes has been being built around the world under the zealous initiatives by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP hereafter). The program under the management of CCP Education Ministry started in 2004. According to Lee Changchun, the former politburo member in charge of CCP publicity, the institutes are “an important part of China’s propaganda set-up." Apart from its suspected conspiratorial engagements that may belong to the underworld, we need to look back to the course how the ideology that had been condemned as enemy of the People as recently as 1970s in China came to be lauded as great teachings and the pride of China by the same Communist regime in the matter of less than thirty years after Mao’s death.
You will remember the reports and editorials how the rising Asian economies in 1990s dubbed Asian Dragons or Tigers, that were Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, shared the Confucian heritage and how often the Confucianism was recalled in explaining the much-desired social stability and economic prosperity in those countries, including Japan. The popularity of such positive views, true or false, on the Confucianism as a common cultural force behind all those Asian successes seems to have come to the Chinese Communists like a windfall. They may have suddenly come to remember how Joseon Dynasty was the unexpected and unforgettably sweet gift from the man named Confucius of more than two millennia ago to the near-modern China under Ming and Qing. They rediscovered the propaganda value of the Confucianism and went ahead shamelessly to dig up the grave and dress and make up the decomposed body of Confucius to use it as “an important part of China’s propaganda set-up”.
Confucianism as propaganda material
written and contributed by Sy Jo
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