Daniel Evensen and Dr. David Honey, Asian and Near Eastern Studies
When I first began learning Chinese about three years ago, I was puzzled by how fatalistic Chinese people seemed to me. This struck me strongly during my first visit to China on BYU Study Abroad in Fall 2006, and has remained an interest of mine ever since. After some preliminary reading, I decided that the best way to understand what fate means to the Chinese is to study what it meant in ancient times. Thus, I started studying what “fate” means in the Confucian Analects, which is how this project was born.
My first trouble was finding other scholarly studies to help my project. Other than a single scholarly paper and portions of scholarly books, very few scholars have written about fate in ancient China. Though I was able to consult a number of book reviews to help me develop a more complete view of fate, I was forced to deal almost exclusively with sources written in classical Chinese.
Finding a suitable translation of the Analects was another challenge. Several English translations exist, each of them relying on a different ancient school of commentary. After some research, I primarily used the translations of Edward Slingerland and James Legge, while occasionally consulting other, less traditional translations.
Edward Slingerland’s translation became the most important to me, especially because he consulted many ancient commentators on the Analects. After a while, I came to the conclusion that consulting the ancient commentaries was the best way to get a full understanding of what fate actually meant in the Analects. Luckily, my mentor, Professor David Honey, had access to a work recently done in China that combined the works of several important ancient commentators into one massive volume. By using this work, as well as consulting a number of other ancient texts, I was able to get a comprehensive view of how the ancient Chinese viewed “fate” despite a lack of modern scholarly sources.
One of the interesting things I learned was that the ancient Chinese were simply not fatalistic. Rather, fate in the Analects is used as a sort of boundary, something that limits the scope one’s actions and striving should take place in. If you are a servant, you should not worry about the affairs of the state, and so on. When Confucius advises that the gentleman should “hold the Mandate of Heaven in awe,” he means that man should allow heaven to take care of the things that man can not do. The purpose of life is not to sit back and allow fate to determine everything; rather, it is to do all that you can within the boundaries established by fate.
This has interesting gospel connections as well. Despite what some scholars claim, fate in ancient China was not a passive concept. Rather, fate was an incentive to do all that was within one’s power, to advance as much as possible within the boundaries given by heaven.
Though I’ve done quite a bit of research, it is still not quite complete. I am currently residing in Nanjing, China, where I am participating in the Chinese Flagship program. I plan to do more research on the concept of fate in ancient China while residing here, and am currently in the middle of doing this research. I also plan to speak with scholars on the Confucian Classics who teach at Nanjing University.
References
- See Ted Slingerland, “The Conception of Ming in Early Confucian Thought,” Philosophy East and West 46:4 (October 1996): 567-581.
- For example, see Herrlee G. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Robert Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990);
- Most of these were reviews of Robert Eno’s controversial book The Confucian Creation of Heaven. See, for example, Anne Cheng, “Review: The Confucian Creation of heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery by Robert Eno,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55:1 (1992): 167-169; and Philip J. Ivanhoe, “Review: The Confucian Creation of Heaven by Robert Eno,” The Journal of Asian Studies 50:4 (November 1991): 907-908.
- Edward Slingerland, Confucius: Analects, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2003).
- James Legge, The Chinese Classics: With a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, Volume 1, Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960).
- Though I found it nearly incomprehensible, I tried to refer to Bruce Brooks and Taeko Brooks’ attempt to reconstruct what the Analects were originally like. See Bruce E. Brooks and Taeko A. Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
- This work is three volumes in total. 《论语》,中华书局,1998.
- The most useful resource for this was Donald Strugeon’s online collection of ancient Chinese texts. See Donald Sturgeon, Chinese Text Project, 2007, http://chinese.dsturgeon.net. Last accessed on 06 December 2008.
- Ted Slingerland expounds on this at greater length. See Ted Slingerland, “The Conception of Ming in Early Confucian Thought,” 576.
- Analects 16:8. The “Mandate” part of “Mandate of Heaven” is the same word in classical Chinese as fate: 命 ming.
- Or, as Ted Slingerland puts it, “Ming refers to the forces that lie in the outer realm – that is, the realm beyond the bounds of proper human endeavor[.] … This external world is not the concern of the gentleman, whose efforts are to be concentrated on the self[.] See Ted Slingerland, “The Concept of Ming in Early Confucian Thought,” 568.