The Long Road

In 1899, so the story goes, a scholar in Beijing fell ill with malaria. His medicine included "dragon bones", old bones ground into powder by the chemist. Before they were ground, he noticed something scratched into them. Writing. Very old writing.

The dragon bones were oracle bones, more than three thousand years old. The kings of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 to 1046 BCE) used them to ask questions of their ancestors and of the high god Di. The questions were simple and human: Will it rain? Will the harvest be good? Will the king's toothache pass? A diviner pressed a red-hot point into hollows drilled in the back of an ox shoulder-blade or a turtle shell until it cracked with a sharp pop, read the answer in the cracks, and then carved the question beside them.

Picture it. The most powerful man in the land, waiting on the sound of a bone splitting. These are the oldest Chinese writings we have, and they are full of the same worries we carry: weather, health, family, whether tomorrow will be kind.

In 1046 BCE the Zhou people overthrew the last Shang king. Later tradition remembered him as a drunkard who kept "a lake of wine and a forest of meat". The Zhou needed to explain why they had the right to rule, and their answer changed Chinese thought for ever. Heaven (tian), they said, gives the right to rule only to the virtuous. When a ruler becomes cruel, greedy or lazy, Heaven takes that right away and gives it to someone worthier. They called it the Mandate of Heaven.

It was a clever idea, and a dangerous one. If virtue gives you the throne, then losing your virtue can lose you the throne. Every Chinese ruler for the next three thousand years lived with that thought at his shoulder.

The Zhou also watched the sky. The stars wheeled, the sun rose and set, the seasons turned, all in their proper order. Later thinkers would call this the Way of Heaven, Tian Dao. If Heaven moves with such order, they reasoned, then a good kingdom should too. Here, at the very start of the road, is the seed of everything that follows.

In 771 BCE raiders from the west sacked the Zhou capital. The royal family fled east and survived, but from then on the Zhou kings were kings in name only. The real power passed to dozens of local lords, each with his own walled city, his own army and his own ambitions.

Historians call the next three centuries the Spring and Autumn period, after a chronicle of the state of Lu that recorded its events year by year, spring and autumn. It sounds gentle. It was not. The lords fought, swallowed one another, and fought again. Well over a hundred states shrank to a handful.

Something else was changing too. Iron tools and iron weapons spread. Trade grew, and with it a merchant class. In the old world you were born a noble or born a peasant, and that was that. Now rulers in a fight for survival discovered they needed talent: men who could count grain, keep records, plan a campaign, write a treaty. Birth mattered less. Ability mattered more.

Into this gap stepped a new kind of person, the shi. They were educated men, often from minor or fallen families, who could read and write and think. They travelled from court to court offering their advice, a little like wandering doctors, except the patient was a kingdom.

And this is where Chinese philosophy is born. Not in quiet libraries but on dusty roads between quarrelling states, in the minds of men asking: The old order is gone. What should take its place? Where is the way? Out of that question came the greatest age of Chinese thought, which later writers called the Hundred Schools.

He was born in 551 BCE in the small state of Lu, into a family that had come down in the world. His father died when he was a child. He grew up poor, worked as a clerk keeping store-rooms and counting livestock, and taught himself everything he could.

His name was Kong Qiu. His students called him Kongzi, Master Kong. Centuries later, European missionaries turned a more formal version, Kong Fuzi, into Latin as Confucius.

Lu was a state that remembered the old Zhou ceremonies, music and manners better than most, and the young Kong fell in love with them. He came to believe that the world had gone wrong because people had forgotten how to behave towards one another: rulers towards subjects, parents towards children, friends towards friends. Restore that, he thought, and order would follow.

He spent years trying to persuade rulers. In middle age he left Lu and wandered from state to state for more than a decade, offering advice that was mostly ignored. Once he was mistaken for a hated strongman and surrounded by an angry crowd. Once he and his students ran out of food. He returned home an old man, having never found a ruler who would put his Way into practice.

From the man bringing his bundle of dried flesh for my teaching upwards, I have never refused instruction to any one.

Analects 7.7, tr. James Legge

And yet he became the most influential teacher in Chinese history. Why? Because of what he did with his students. He would teach anyone, rich or poor, if they were willing to learn and brought the smallest gift. In a world where learning belonged to the nobility, that was revolutionary.

At the heart of his teaching are two words. Ren (仁) is humanity, goodness, the quality of being truly humane towards others. Li (禮) is ritual: the forms, manners and ceremonies that hold a society together. Confucius insisted the two belong together. Ritual without humanity is empty theatre. Humanity without ritual has no shape.

His sayings were gathered after his death by his followers, and their followers, into a little book, the Analects (Lunyu, "collected sayings"). It is short, conversational and often surprisingly funny. Here is a man who admits mistakes, teases his students, and asks, in its very first line, whether there is anything more pleasant than learning something and then practising it until it becomes part of you.

If a man be without the virtues proper to humanity, what has he to do with the rites of propriety?

Analects 3.3, tr. James Legge

Nobody knows for certain who Laozi was. Even the great historian Sima Qian, writing around 94 BCE, was unsure and gave several possible versions. The name itself simply means "Old Master".

The best-loved story goes like this. Laozi was keeper of the royal archives of Zhou. Seeing the kingdom decline, he decided to leave the world behind and rode west on the back of an ox. At the last mountain pass, the gatekeeper Yin Xi recognised him as a sage and would not let him through until he had written down his wisdom. So Laozi sat down and wrote some five thousand characters, handed them over, rode through the gate, and was never seen again.

Those five thousand characters became the Dao De Jing, "the Classic of the Way and its Power", eighty-one short chapters of poetry. Scholars today think it grew over time, with many hands adding to it; the oldest version we have, written on bamboo strips and covering about two-fifths of the text, was buried in a tomb at Guodian around 300 BCE. But whoever wrote it, few books in history have been translated more often.

The highest excellence is like (that of) water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving (to the contrary), the low place which all men dislike.

Dao De Jing 8, tr. James Legge

Where Confucius said do more (study more, practise ritual more, cultivate yourself more), the Dao De Jing says do less. Its key idea is wu wei, often translated "non-action". It does not mean laziness. It means acting without forcing, the way water acts. Water does not argue with the rock. It goes round, goes under, waits. And in time the water wins.

The book is full of such pictures. The usefulness of a cup is the empty space inside it. The usefulness of a wheel is the empty hole at its hub. The rivers and the sea are kings of a hundred valley streams because they lie lower than all of them. The best leader is one the people hardly know is there: when the work is done, they say, "We did it ourselves."

It begins with one of the most famous lines ever written, Dao ke dao, fei chang dao: the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way. In other words, the moment you think you have it pinned down in words, it has slipped away. The book is a finger pointing at the moon. Do not stare at the finger.

Governing a great state is like cooking small fish.

Dao De Jing 60, tr. James Legge

If the Spring and Autumn period was rough, the Warring States (481 to 221 BCE) were brutal. Seven great kingdoms fought for total victory, with armies of hundreds of thousands. Yet in the middle of the slaughter, Chinese thought blazed brighter than ever before or since. Rulers competed for clever advisers the way football clubs compete for players, and some even built academies to house them.

Here are two of the voices in the argument. Two more, Mencius and Xunzi, wait for us just after.

Of all the thinkers on the road, Zhuangzi is the one you would most like to have a drink with. He was a minor official in the state of Song who preferred poverty and freedom to wealth and a post at court. He wrote, or his followers wrote in his spirit, a book bursting with talking trees, giant birds, philosophical frogs, skilful butchers and very puzzled kings.

When the king of Chu sent two officials to offer him the post of chief minister, Zhuangzi was fishing. He did not even turn round. "I hear," he said, "that Chu has a sacred tortoise, dead these three thousand years, which the king keeps wrapped in silk in his temple. Tell me: would that tortoise rather be dead and honoured, or alive and dragging its tail in the mud?" "Alive in the mud," said the officials. "Then go away," said Zhuangzi. "I will drag my tail in the mud."

One of his finest stories is the Autumn Floods. In autumn the rivers swell, and the River God looks at his great brown waters, so wide you cannot tell an ox from a horse on the far bank, and feels very pleased with himself. He flows east until he reaches the sea, and stops. The ocean stretches to every horizon. Humbled, the River God admits he had thought himself great. The Spirit of the Sea replies kindly: you cannot talk about the ocean with a frog in a well, or about ice with an insect that lives one summer. Now that you have seen how small you are, we can begin to talk.

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzŭ, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly.

Zhuangzi 2, tr. Herbert Giles

That is Zhuangzi's gift. He shows how everything depends on where you stand. Big and small, right and wrong, useful and useless: they shift as your viewpoint shifts. The wise person holds their opinions lightly and stays open.

And then there is the butterfly. Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, fluttering happily about, with no idea he was Zhuangzi. Then he woke, and was Zhuangzi again. But now he did not know: was he Zhuangzi who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it was Zhuangzi?

Zhuangzi also taught something modern writers have called genuine pretending. We all play roles, as parent, worker, student, friend. Play them well, play them sincerely, says Zhuangzi, but do not mistake the role for who you are. Names, he says, are only "guests of reality". Hold them loosely, and you will find a deep kind of ease.

A frog in a well cannot be talked with about the sea;—he is confined to the limits of his hole.

Zhuangzi 17, tr. James Legge

Behind every thinker on this road sits an older book, quietly turning its pages. The I Ching, or Yijing, the Book of Changes, began as a handbook for divination in the Western Zhou, perhaps around the ninth century BCE.

Its building blocks are two kinds of line: a solid line, yang ⚊, and a broken line, yin ⚋. Stack three of them and you have eight trigrams: heaven, earth, thunder, water, mountain, wind, fire and lake. Stack two trigrams and you have sixty-four hexagrams, each one a picture of a situation in motion: Beginning, Waiting, Conflict, Peace, Standstill, Return, Breakthrough and more.

Tradition says the legendary sage Fu Xi first saw the trigrams in the patterns of nature, that King Wen of Zhou wrote the judgements while in prison, and that Confucius loved the book so much in old age that the leather straps binding its bamboo strips wore through three times. Over the centuries a set of commentaries, the Ten Wings, grew around it and turned a fortune-telling manual into a book of philosophy.

Its single great message is this: everything changes. Nothing stays still. Yin grows into yang, yang gives way to yin, the full moon wanes, winter turns to spring. That can be frightening. Each school on the road offered its own anchor in the flood of change: Confucius offered good relationships and ritual, Mozi offered clear standards, the Daoists offered the art of flowing with it.

The I Ching does not tell you what will happen. It helps you see what is happening, so you can meet it wisely, at the right time, in the right way.

Not every voice in the Hundred Schools was gentle. The Legalists thought all this talk of virtue was a waste of time. People, they said, respond to two things: reward and punishment. Make the laws clear, make the rewards generous and the punishments terrible, apply them to everyone, and the state will be strong.

The state of Qin, in the far west, took their advice. The minister Shang Yang rebuilt it into a machine for farming and war. Later the brilliant Han Fei, a former student of Xunzi, wrote the Legalist philosophy down more sharply than anyone. His fellow student Li Si, later Qin's chief minister, so the story goes, had Han Fei poisoned in prison in 233 BCE.

The machine worked. In 221 BCE Qin conquered the last of its rivals, and its king took a new title: Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor. He standardised weights, measures, coins, the width of cart axles and the way Chinese characters were written. He linked up walls along the northern frontier. He was buried with an army of thousands of life-sized clay soldiers, rediscovered by farmers digging a well in 1974.

He also feared ideas. In 213 BCE, on Li Si's advice, he ordered the burning of history and philosophy books, except those on medicine, farming and divination. The historian Sima Qian, writing about a century later, adds that in 212 BCE he had some 460 scholars buried alive. Historians argue about how much of that is true. Either way, the Hundred Schools fell silent.

But the Qin dynasty lasted only fifteen years. Its harshness provoked rebellion, and in 202 BCE a former village official founded the Han dynasty, which lasted four centuries. The Han kept much of the Qin machine, but they softened its face. Under Emperor Wu (141 to 87 BCE), the classics of Confucius became the basis of education and government, and for the next two thousand years anyone who wanted to serve the state had to study them.

Meanwhile the ideas of Laozi and Zhuangzi took a new turn. In 142 CE, so the Celestial Masters' own tradition says, the deified Laozi appeared to a teacher named Zhang Daoling and gave him a new teaching. From his movement, the Way of the Celestial Masters, philosophical Daoism grew into a religion too, with temples, priests, scriptures, and Laozi himself honoured as a god.

In the first century CE, monks and merchants travelling the Silk Roads brought a new teaching into China from India: Buddhism. At first it seemed strange: monks who left their families, talk of rebirth, a teacher from the far west. Translators borrowed Daoist words to explain it, and slowly the two traditions began to talk to each other.

Not always politely. Around 300 CE a Daoist priest named Wang Fu wrote a work called the Hua Hu Jing, "the Scripture of Converting the Barbarians". It claimed that when Laozi rode west through the pass, he went on to India and became the Buddha, so Buddhism was really Daoism in foreign dress. Buddhists were furious. The argument rumbled on for nearly a thousand years, until in 1281 the emperor Kublai Khan ordered the book burned. Fragments survived in the sealed library of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, rediscovered in 1900.

Many readers today know a very different Hua Hu Ching: a gentle book of eighty-one teachings on service, oneness and letting go of the restless mind. That version was published in the twentieth century by Daoist teachers, Ni Hua-Ching in 1979 and Brian Walker in 1992, and most scholars see it as a new work written in the old spirit rather than a translation of the lost text. It is honest to say so, and it does not take away its beauty. One of its images stays with you: trying to fix the Way in a mental picture is like pinning a butterfly. You keep the husk, and lose the flight.

From the meeting of Buddhism and Daoism came something new: Chan, which travelled on to Japan as Zen. Its sixth patriarch, Huineng (638 to 713 CE), was said to be an illiterate firewood-seller who grasped in an instant what scholars had studied for years. Chan masters loved Zhuangzi's humour and his distrust of words: words, he said, are like a fish trap, which you can forget once you have caught the fish. Chan added an image of its own from the Buddhist sutras: teachings are a finger pointing at the moon.

Confucianism answered in its turn. In the Song dynasty, Zhu Xi (1130 to 1200) wove Confucius, Mencius and ideas borrowed from Buddhism and Daoism into a grand system now called Neo-Confucianism. Three centuries later Wang Yangming (1472 to 1529) taught that knowing and doing are one: if you truly know what is good, you do it.

So the road never ended. It branched, crossed itself, and ran on, into Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and eventually into the West, where the philosopher Leibniz admired Confucius and Tolstoy worked on a translation of Laozi. It runs on still, wherever someone opens one of these old books and asks: Where is the way?