Well, all right. To be perfectly truthful, Confucius (aka Kongzi) is not a god, per se. Nonetheless, people worship him, memorize his teachings, and build temples in his honor. Students are still known to stop by Confucian temples before major exams. The pedestal he's standing on is on the lofty side.This week in class, we took a quick look at Confucius, his history, and some of the highlights from "The Analects of Confucius." Then yesterday, we took a field trip to a well-known Confucian temple. It's a cinch to get there; just hop on the 909 to the Yonghegong station -- that's a famous Lama Buddhist temple, also a great field trip. From there, it's not even a quarter mile walk over relatively quiet streets. On an interesting side note, if you take the 909 north instead of south, you end up at Walmart.
Sadly, I left my brain behind that day and didn't bring my camera, but the temple grounds are beautiful. (Yes, that picture above is a random photo from a nearby park. What kind of a post doesn't have a picture?) Educational plaques explain that the temple was built during the Yuan dynasty (that would be the Mongols) in about 1306. Of course, it has been renovated, expanded, redone, improved, repaired, et cetera several times since then, so I'm not sure if anything still survives from the original. The architecture is classic Chinese -- a square courtyard surrounded by long, low buildings, painted red with brilliant, brightly-painted roofs. In the courtyard, there are several very old trees. At first, we thought that the trees were responsible for the fragrant, luxurious lavender and white blossoms covering them like a pastel firework. On closer inspection, it is revealed that the trees themselves are dead and serving as frameworks for massive, woody vines, which are the real source of the flowers. They look a bit like giant, upside-down lupines.
While visiting some well-known sites in Beijing can make you truly appreciate the idiomatic expression "ren shan ren hai" (people from the mountains to the sea), the temple was relatively quiet. Inside the major chamber, where you can, in fact, still kneel and pay tribute to old Confucius, there is a wide variety of traditional vessels for sacrifices, musical instruments for sacrificial rites, and a number of name stones. These are what you'd place on the family altar after a person died, in order to show your continued filial piety and as a place to contribute to their needs in the afterlife. The afterlife, by the bye, is rather disconcertingly like the mortal world -- one still needs food, shelter, and money, which is provided by your still-living family members. Ghosts are angry spirits, often because no one gives them offerings of food or money, so they are hungry and bitter. Of course, if you're being haunted by an angry ghost, it could be because of something you did to the dearly departed. Cruel mother-in-laws, for example, were often haunted by the souls of their dead daughters-in-law.
Getting back to Confucius, for a long while the temple was also the site of the highest level imperial civil service test. To give you an idea of how hard this test was, in all of the Ming and Qing dynasties (that's just shy of 550 years), only about 50,000 people passed it. If you passed, you were eligible for high-level service in the imperial court, and it was the highest achievement your family could accomplish -- we're talking generations of bragging rights. To this end, when you passed, you got your name and the date carved into large stone steles. Your great-great-great grandkids could pop over to the temple, point out your name to their friends, and say "Yeah, my great-great-great grandpa rocked the exam." You can still see these steles today, so theoretically, if you knew the names of your ancestors from the fifteenth century, you could see if they passed the test. Sadly, it seems none of mine did. It's probably because they weren't Chinese.
Ironically, I recall from history class last semester that one of the major problems with the civil service exam by the late Qing was that it was too dependant on memorization of the Confucian classics, and didn't test well for ability to govern, or think independently, at all. I imagine dear Kongzi was none too pleased.
The temple also has some museum-type displays. These were interesting, but a little repetitive, as they described the influence Confucianism has had on greater Asia and the world in general -- I amused myself with reading the sample page of the French civil service exam from the 1790s. Apparently, they got the idea from the Chinese. With the Voltaire and company-led China fanclub in 18th Cent. France, it doesn't surprise me. On the other hand, the general message of the entire exhibit is "Confucianism is the best/China did it first." Now, I realize that this is the general message behind any exhibit anywhere -- in the US it would be "the Founding Fathers were the best/If we didn't do it first, we did it better." Still, it seemed a little forced.
Case in point: one of the Confucian Analects is the Golden Rule (not to be confused with the Golden Ratio, and 'do unto others as you would have done unto you,' for those of you who have forgotten). Now, that's great. It's neat that different societies have similar core values. But the world beyond China doesn't have the golden rule because of Confucius, and even if Confucius is the first person recorded to have said it, China doesn't get to be smug about it. China has plenty of other ancient inventions that no-one else also thought up-- paper and the repeating crossbow jump to mind.
Additionally, it seems several prominent scientists/political figures have declared Confucianism to be the philosophy of the future. I do hope they didn't mean the part where wives are obedient to their husbands and sons. As for Confucian ideals being the ideal educational theory -- well, some of his teachings were good. Hard work and lots of studying are good. Always being open to learning from others, and treating knowledge as limitless, also good. I'm not too sold on obedience to one's teachers or the teaching philosophy "I will not teach until the student has tried to learn and failed." Well of course the student failed -- you didn't teach them.
Was Confucius a cool dude? Yes. Do his teachings still have relevance in the modern world? Definitely. Was J K Rowling thinking of his beard when she dreamed up Albus Dumbledore? I'm going to go with, almost certainly.
In completely other news, we were on our own getting back to campus after the field trip. On the walk back to the bus stop, we got stopped by a fellow laowai (foreigner) who asked if we knew where the entrance of the Lama temple was. We asked a passing Chinese woman for her, and chatted a moment about being students in the city, which she thought was admirable. Then, my classmate complemented me on my mad public transportation skills -- apparently she hasn't yet figured out the Beijing bus system. I'm actually going to miss the ability to get from point A to point B by hopping on the bus. It's dreadfully convenient, and if you use your transit card, it's only 40 mao (40 Chinese cents ... about half a US penny) per ride (normally 1 kuai). It works on the subway, too, at 1.60 kuai per use (2 kuai without). I love the buses so much, in fact, that I'm down to 2 kuai on my transit card -- I've got to go add money to it. That will be a true test of my mad skills. Well, actually, I'm pretty sure I know where to do it. So it will really be a test of my practical Chinese skills. How does one say "add money"? Oh, well, if that fails, we could always talk about Confucius.
