Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Most importantly, Confucian education was humanistic and universalist. As the Master said, “A gentleman is not a pot” (or also, “A gentleman is not a tool”) — meaning that his capacity should not have a specific limit, nor his usefulness a narrow application. What matters is not to accumulate technical information and specialised expertise, but to develop one’s humanity. Education is not about having , it is about being .

Confucius once rebuffed quite rudely a disciple who asked him about agronomy: “Better ask any old peasant!” For this reason, it is often alleged now that Confucianism inhibited the development of science and technology in China. But there are no real grounds for such an accusation. Simply, in these matters Confucius’s concerns centred on education and culture — not on training and technique, which are separate issues altogether — and it is difficult to see how one could address these topics any differently, whether in Confucius’s time or in ours. (C.P. Snow’s famous notion of the “Two Cultures” rested on a basic fallacy: it ignored the fact that, like humanity itself, culture can only be one, by its very definition. I have no doubt that a scientist can be — and probably should be — better cultivated than a philosopher, a Latinist or a historian, but if he is, it is because he reads philosophy, Latin and history in his leisure time.)

THE SILENCES OF CONFUCIUS

In the short essay he wrote on Confucius, Elias Canetti (whom I quoted earlier) made a point that had escaped most scholars.[4] He observed that the Analects is a book which is important not only for what it says but also for what it does not say. This remark is illuminating. Indeed, the Analects make a most significant use of the unsaid — which is also a characteristic resource of the Chinese mind; it was eventually to find some of its most expressive applications in the field of aesthetics: the use of silence in music, the use of void in painting, the use of empty spaces in architecture.

Confucius distrusted eloquence; he despised glib talkers, he hated clever word games. For him, it would seem that an agile tongue must reflect a shallow mind; as reflection runs deeper, silence develops. Confucius observed that his favourite disciple used to say so little that, at times, one could have wondered if he was not an idiot. To another disciple who had asked him about the supreme virtue of humanity, Confucius replied characteristically, “He who possesses the supreme virtue of humanity is reluctant to speak.”

The essential is beyond words: all that can be said is superfluous. Therefore a disciple remarked, “We can hear and gather our Master’s teachings in matters of knowledge and culture, but it is impossible to make him speak on the ultimate nature of things, or on the will of Heaven.” This silence reflected no indifference or scepticism regarding the will of Heaven — we know from many passages in the Analects that Confucius regarded it as the supreme guide of his life. But Confucius would have subscribed to Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” He did not deny the reality of what is beyond words, he merely warned against the foolishness of attempting to reach it with words. His silence was an affirmation: there is a realm about which one can say nothing.

Confucius’s silences occurred essentially when his interlocutors tried to draw him into the question of the afterlife. This attitude has often led commentators to conclude that Confucius was an agnostic. Such a conclusion seems to me very shallow. Consider this famous passage: “Zilu asked about death. The Master said, ‘You do not know life; how could you know death?’” Canetti added this comment: “I know of no sages who took death as seriously as Confucius.” Refusal to answer is not a way of evading the issue but, on the contrary, it is its most forceful affirmation, for questions about death, in fact, always “refer to a time after death. Any answer leaps past death, conjuring away both death and its incomprehensibility. If there is something afterwards as there was something before , then death loses some of its weight. Confucius refuses to play along with this most unworthy legerdemain.”

Like the empty space in a painting — which concentrates and radiates all the inner energy of the painting — Confucius’s silence is not a withdrawal or an escape; it leads to a deeper and closer engagement with life and reality. Near the end of his career, Confucius said one day to his disciples: “I wish to speak no more.” The disciples were perplexed. “But, Master, if you do not speak, how will little ones like us still be able to hand down any teachings?” Confucius replied, “Does Heaven speak? Yet the four seasons follow their course and the hundred creatures continue to be born. Does Heaven speak?”

I have certainly spoken too much.

1997

* The Analects of Confucius : translation and notes by Simon Leys (New York: Norton, 1997).

*

Aspects of Chinese Classical Aesthetics

CHASING bits of truth is like catching butterflies: pin them down and they die. “As soon as one has finished saying something, it is no longer true.” This observation by Thomas Merton[1] could serve as a warning for the reader and should indicate the proper way of perusing this little essay.

In Chinese classical studies, it is necessary to specialise. It is also impossible.

Specialisation is necessary. The wealth, scope and diversity of Chinese culture wildly exceed the assimilating capacities and intellectual resources of any individual — and more particularly, they should drive to despair the wretched Western sinologists who, unlike their Chinese colleagues, did not have the chance to start their training in early childhood and thus approach their discipline at least fifteen years late.

Specialisation is impossible. China is an organic entity, in which every element can be understood only when put under the light of other elements; these other elements can be fairly remote from the one that is under consideration — sometimes they do not even present any apparent connection with it. If he is not guided by a global intuition, the specialist remains forever condemned to the fate of the blind men in the well-known Buddhist parable: as they wanted to figure out what an elephant actually looked like, they groped, one for the trunk, one for the foot, one for the tail, and respectively concluded that an elephant was a kind of snake, was a kind of pillar, was a kind of broom.

Conversely, the global intuition that alone can grasp the essential nature of the subject (we shall have much need for it here) is invariably accompanied by a shocking neglect — if not downright ignorance — of surface details. This problem should not worry us too much, if we remember Lie Zi’s story about the connoisseur of horses.[2] This parable was quoted earlier in this volume†: it should be used as an introductory warning whenever we attempt to make general statements, not only on Chinese culture but also on any rich and complex issue in the field of the humanities.

In the course of this inquiry, I may well become guilty of simplifications verging on distortion that could at times induce the reader to suspect that here too the colour and the sex of the beast have been mistaken… Anyway, I shall seek no further excuses; after all, what is an enterprise like this but an attempt to prolong or to echo, however clumsily, those moments of bliss that we sometimes experience in our encounters with poems and paintings? (Can artistic and literary criticism have any other justification?)