Western Zhou: Moments of Origins, Exemplary Acts, and the Genealogical Past

Let us begin with a document from the first decades of the Western Zhou from around the turn of the first millennium BCE. It is the bronze inscription on the Da Yu ding 大盂鼎.Footnote ¹⁰ Discovered in the 1820s, and now housed at the National Museum of China in Beijing, this bronze cauldron is dated by most scholars to the reign of either King Cheng 成王 (r. c.1024–1005 BCE) or King Kang 康王 (r. c.1004–967 BCE).Footnote ¹¹ With 291 characters, it is one of the longest bronze inscriptions we have from the Western Zhou.Footnote ¹² Despite its unusual length, the formal structure of the Da Yu ding inscription is fairly typical among the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou. It begins with a speech by the king charging a subordinate, in this case a certain man named Yu 盂, with a specific set of duties, and it concludes with a list of gifts that the subordinate received as a result.Footnote ¹³

Following is the first half of the inscription, the king’s speech to his subordinate Yu; it involves a specific command, one that is articulated by way of a narrative of the past:

The first thing to note here is that the past plays an integral role in this piece of political rhetoric deployed by the king towards his subject. The apparent political authority that the king had over his subject was wholly constructed on the ground of history. Specifically, the speech begins with a reference to a historical event, namely the Zhou conquest of the Shang, with a series of laudatory citations of the accomplishments of founding rulers King Wen (Wen wang 文王) and King Wu (Wu wang 武王). Touting the accomplishments of one’s forebears is commonplace in all political rhetoric, especially under an aristocratic order, but in the case of the Da Yu ding inscription the attention to this particular piece of the past holds a special significance. The founding moment of the Zhou, and particularly the deeds of King Wen and King Wu, are not just idle, albeit inspiring, historical references, but they constitute the very model of political actions that the Zhou king in the present must emulate faithfully.Footnote ¹⁵

To elaborate on this point, let us return to the king’s speech. After recounting the accomplishments of the founding rulers of the Zhou, the king specifically declared the following: “Now, I have modeled myself after and possessed the correct virtue of King Wen. Just as King Wen commanded two or three government officials, I now command you, Yu, in leading the luminous [Zhou order], respectfully harmonizing the norms of virtue.” The historical knowledge of the work of King Wen and King Wu constitutes a usable past in an eminently practical sense. What they did at the founding moment of the Zhou dynasty provided an exemplary model of actions for later kings, who only needed to emulate (xing 井) and approximate them as closely as possible to ensure that the order they created would perpetuate and continue to prevail.Footnote ¹⁶ Now, if it is the duty of the present-day Zhou king to follow the precedent set by the founding figures King Wen and King Wu, then what is the responsibility of the subject? The answer is, quite straightforwardly, that he too follows the example set by his own forefathers: “The king said, ‘I charge you, Yu, to model yourself after your ancestor the Duke of Nan whom you have succeeded’” (王曰：虖。令女汝盂井（型）乃嗣祖南公).

The exact identity of this “Duke of Nan” (Nan gong 南公) is unknown, but given the exclusive use of the term si (嗣) within the Western Zhou corpus in referring to familial heritance or inheritor, it must be referring to an ancestor of Yu. He is typically identified as Yu’s deceased grandfather in most studies of the Da Yu ding, but Tang Lan 唐蘭 went as far as identifying him as the youngest maternal half-brother of King Wu.Footnote ¹⁷ In any case, the point remains the same: while the Zhou king declares that he is following the precedent of his ancestors, his subordinate Yu is charged with following the precedent of his own forefather, who presumably also served the Zhou court during its founding years. In both cases, they are said to xing, or “model after,” their respective ancestors. The argument here is that the proper way to act in the present is to emulate the examples of our respective forefathers.

The Da Yu ding inscription concludes as follows:

The subordinate Yu, acting under the banner of his grandfather the Duke of Nan, both literally and figuratively, will help the Zhou king maintain the order among the people and land inherited from former kings of the Zhou. Through their respective emulation of the work of their ancestors, they will be able to maintain the order that their ancestors created in the first place. Imitations of the founding political actions by one’s ancestors ensure a continuous extension of the original order to the present.

This pattern of political rhetoric seen on the Da Yu ding is typical among Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. A majority of the inscriptions describe similar official exchanges between a Zhou king and his subject. They almost always begin with the present-day Zhou king recounting the virtues of King Wen, and sometimes those of King Wu, and the founding order that they created through their actions. Then, after declaring that he will model himself after King Wen, he exhorts his subject to similarly model himself after his own ancestors, in order to maintain the Zhou order. Li Feng, in his recent monograph on the state and bureaucracy of the Western Zhou, also noted the ubiquity of this invocation of the founding rulers in the bronze inscriptions throughout this late Bronze Age dynasty. He also made an important observation that in Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, only King Wen and King Wu were ever said to have directly received the so-called “Mandate of Heaven” (tianming 天命). This led Li to posit that the figure of King Wen, and to a lesser extent King Wu, constitute the very source of political authority for the Zhou court.Footnote ¹⁸

There is a purposeful conflation of originary and exemplary actions in these Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. The founding acts of the first rulers were immediately considered exemplary, and emulation or repetition of them could maintain or even expand the very same new order that they had created generations ago. In other words, the particular dynamics at the founding moment of the Zhou are presumed to be paradigmatic and foundational to its rule over time. That is not to say that one must repeat the founding reign of the Zhou dynasty in each generation, down to every act and word, but that the later generation should and can only perpetuate the great order of the Zhou, as initiated by the founding rulers, by emulating their exemplary acts.Footnote ¹⁹

This fascination with moments of origins, and the emulation of past exemplary actions, is not limited only to the bronze inscriptions, but can also be seen in the transmitted corpus from the early first millennium BCE. In the Classic of Poetry, for instance, there is the famous example of the poem “Shengmin” 生民. It recounts not only the legendary birth of Hou Ji 后稷, the mythological progenitor of the Zhou clan, but also the origin of the agricultural practices and sacrificial rituals of the clan. At the very end of the poem, it says that “Hou Ji founded the sacrifices, and without blemish or flaw, they have gone on until now” (后稷肇祀，庶無罪悔，以迄于今).Footnote ²⁰ Here, we see a direct linkage between origin and efficacy. One understands the efficacy of a set of rituals by understanding its origin. Or, the efficacy of the rituals is a result of their originary nature. Moreover, the poem emphasized in its very last line that these rituals, as they were from their moment of origin, had continued to the present day. As in the bronze inscriptions, order can be extended to the present by a repetition of actions constitutive of that very order at its moment of origin.Footnote ²¹

Similar ideas can be seen in other poems in the Poetry. For instance, in the poem “Liangsi” 良耜, after an elaborate description of certain agricultural work which, when done properly, would ensure that “the barns and brim are full, and wife and children at peace” (百室盈止，婦子寧止), the poem exclaims in its conclusion that “we shall succeed, we shall continue, continue the men of old” (以似以續，續古之人).Footnote ²² The poem “Zaishan” 載芟, after an idealized description of how the fields are cleared and seeds are planted in order to produce the harvests for the ancestral sacrifices, concludes with this fact that: “Not only here is it like this, not only now is it so. From long ago it has been thus” (匪且有且，匪今斯今，振古如茲).Footnote ²³ Though less explicitly concerned with identifying the moment of origin for these agricultural and ritual practices, these poems nevertheless do emphasize the importance of faithfully repeating past practices in the present, since what was once efficacious in the past will continue to be efficacious in the present.Footnote ²⁴ Order is maintained by establishing a continuity of practices through their faithful repetition over time.

Representations of similar ideas can also be found in the early stratum of the Classic of Documents.Footnote ²⁵ In the chapter “Li zheng” 立政, for instance, the Duke of Zhou (Zhou gong周公) explained the downfall of Jie 桀, the last ruler of the Xia 夏 dynasty, by his inability to continue the traditional, inherited way of making official appointments: “Jie’s character was such that he did not follow precedents in making appointments, and therefore his character was violent and ruined the future [of his kingdom]” (桀德惟乃弗作往任，是惟暴德，罔後).Footnote ²⁶ In the chapter “Jiu gao” 酒誥, King Cheng argued that the injunction against alcoholic indulgence by King Wen was one of the reasons why the Zhou was able to conquer the Shang, and provides the model for how the Zhou court can continue to maintain the mandate:

Now, after this brief detour into the Poetry and the Documents, let us return to the bronze inscriptions. The Da Yu ding, as we have noted, is from the first decades of the Western Zhou, so to what extent is this argument applicable to later periods in the Western Zhou? Quite remarkably, the type of literary pattern and political rhetoric that we saw in that one early inscription remained quite consistent throughout the Western Zhou. Take, for example, the Ban gui 班簋 from the mid-Western Zhou, roughly a century after the Da Yu ding, in the second half of tenth century BCE during the reign of King Mu (r. 956–918). It records an exchange between King Mu and one of his relatives, Mao Ban 毛班, a descendant of King Wen. Mao Ban had just successfully finished a three-year-long military conquest in the east for the Zhou court, and the inscription commemorates his successful campaign upon his return. The first half of the inscription is a detailed description of the conquest, related as a charge by King Mu to Mao Ban; the second half is a speech by Mao Ban on his understanding of the success of the campaign and his request for a posthumous title for his deceased father, Mao Gong 毛公:

Here, we see once again the language of “modeling” or “emulation” (xing) regarding the work of a past exemplary figure, in this case the speaker’s father, Mao Gong. Moreover, there appears to be this desire to relate, however tenuously, the accomplishment of Mao Gong and his genealogical tie to King Wen, so that this past model for emulation would be clearly linked back to the founding rulers of the Zhou. The idea of emulation, and the concern for continuity with the founding moment of the dynasty, especially the figure of King Wen, still very much inform the political rhetoric in this mid-Western Zhou bronze inscription.

In English-language scholarship on the Western Zhou of the past couple of decades, it has been suggested that there was an expansive ritual reform first underway in the mid-tenth century that then culminated in the early ninth century which radically redefined elite privileges.Footnote ²⁹ The evidence for the historicity of this ritual reform is almost entirely drawn from the bronze inscriptions and stylistic features of the vessels themselves, since it was not mentioned in the transmitted texts, and one of the key pieces of evidence is the Shi Qiang pan 史墻盤 inscription. It is one of the longest inscriptions from the late Western Zhou (at 284 characters), with brief descriptions for the first seven generations of the Zhou kings and five generations of a certain Wei 微 clan, whose present-day head archivist, Qiang, commissioned its casting.Footnote ³⁰ Notwithstanding the historicity of this late Western Zhou ritual reform, I would suggest that the Shi Qiang pan inscription is largely consistent with what we have seen so far in these different Western Zhou texts in terms of how they capitalized the past. It begins, not surprisingly at all, with a description of the founding achievement of King Wen: “It is said that in antiquity, when King Wen first took control and brought harmony to governing the people, the Deity Above sent down refined virtue and grand protection, which King Wen spread out to all the spirits above and below, and thus united and received tribute from the ten thousand states” (曰古文王，初盭龢于政，上帝降懿德大甹，匍（敷）有上下，合受受萬邦).Footnote ³¹ Then, it proceeds to give a similar description of the Zhou king of each subsequent generation: King Wu, King Cheng, King Kang 康, King Zhao 昭, King Mu 穆, and finally King Gong 共, the latter being the reigning ruler when the inscription was cast. For the first five generations of kings, brief descriptions of their work and accomplishments such as the one cited above for King Wen were given in the inscription. For King Mu and the present-day King Gong, it gives the following laudatory description:

Here, once again, the task for the Zhou kings is to follow precedents; for King Gong, it is very specifically the “long-standing glory” (changci 長刺) of the founding rulers King Wen and King Wu. Despite the much longer genealogical span, it is essentially the same relation between past and present that we first saw in the Da Yu ding inscription.

After the descriptions of the Zhou kings, the inscription turned to the parallel generations in the Wei clan. It begins with the “High Ancestor” (gaozu 高祖), who volunteered his service to King Wu in the first years of the Zhou dynasty:

Then, the inscription detailed the work of successive generations of the heads of the Wei clan, concluding with Shi Qiang (“Archivist Qiang”) himself, the current head of the clan, who commissioned the casting of this bronze vessel and the inscription. It ends as follows: “I make a precious sacrificial vessel, an adorned treasure, for expressing reverence to my florious ancestor, my Accomplished Deceased Father, who in turn gives to me, Qiang, blessings and good fortune; and I embrace his spirit, exorcise evil, and gain prosperity to live a long life to a hoary old age, in service to his highness” (用作寶尊彞, 烈祖文考弋（式）寶，受（授）牆爾𪓐（祉）福，懷髮（袯）彔（祿），黃耇彌生，龕(堪)事厥辟). Just as Qiang’s ancestors once served the Zhou court, Qiang himself wishes to be able to do the same in the present, extending the relationship that the two families had enjoyed, from the first years of the Zhou, when the first ancestors volunteered their services to King Wu, to the present. The relationship between King Wu and the Wei ancestor had acquired a paradigmatic significance. Historical continuity to this original moment, at the founding of the dynasty, legitimates the possibility of the continuing relationship between the Wei family and the Zhou court centuries later in the present day.

For the last part of our discussion of the Western Zhou period, I will turn to a negative narrative. Beginning in the mid- to late Western Zhou, we begin to see inscriptions that articulate the opposite of what we have just observed. That is, they bemoan the loss of historical continuity and proper inheritance from the founding rulers of the Zhou. One prominent example is the Shi Xun gui 師訇簋 from sometime in the ninth century BCE.Footnote ³² The inscription begins in a typical fashion; it proclaims the founding achievement of King Wen and King Wu, including the fact that they had received the Mandate from Heaven. It also mentions the great assistance that the ancestors of Shi Xun had provided for them:

After this fairly typical opening, the inscription took an unusual turn: “The king said: ‘Shi Xun! It is sad that today Heaven sends down destruction. Our virtue did not follow the model [of our ancestors], and therefore we did not inherit and continue [the work of] the former kings’” (王曰：師訇，哀才（哉）。今日天疾畏威降喪，首（慎）德不克畫，古（故）亡丞于先王). The king continues to say that because of this dire situation, he will promote Shi Xun and hope that he will be able to provide proper assistance for restoring order to the Zhou world once again. The inscription then concludes, as is customary, with a list of gifts that the king conferred upon Shi Xun and a dedication to Shi Xun’s ancestors.

In the Shi Xun gui inscription, we see a capitalization of the past that is the same as the type that we saw in the other Western Zhou materials, except that it did so in negative terms. Instead of a simple enjoinder to emulate the successful relations that their respective ancestors had with each other, the Zhou king urged Shi Xun to provide services to the court because of the opposite, because there was a rupture in the emulation and continuation of the exemplary work of the founders. Understanding this discontinuity as the cause of disorder in the present underscores the predominance of this particular paradigm in the capitalization of the past during the Western Zhou. It is a model where actions by the Zhou founders were considered exemplary and inherently efficacious, and their emulation by later generations would ensure the continuation of that founding order into the present.Footnote ³⁴

* * *

Now, let us summarize this reading of the Western Zhou materials. First and foremost, we see that the field of the past played an absolutely integral role. Narratives about the past were regularly mobilized as a key resource for legitimizing the political authority and actions of the ruling elite in the present. More specifically, we also saw a particular investment in the founding moment of the dynasty, the work of the founding rulers King Wen, King Wu, and their associates, as exemplary models the emulation and repetition of whom from one generation to the next would ensure the continuance of this founding order. The past, in this context, became relevant as a series of originary, exemplary moments, and a knowledge of them is essential if we wish to emulate them to perpetuate the same political order in the present.

This way of capitalizing the past by the Western Zhou political elite has a number of significant implications. First, it is fair to say that in the Western Zhou, all history must be family history. Given that the historical moments of interest are only those originary actions and the points of continuity within one’s genealogical past or that of the ruling family, the past was essentially delimited to the genealogical field. Second, more implicitly, this use of the past also suggests a relatively circumscribed role for individuals as historical actors. Since the ideal is for one to identify and imitate the exemplary actions of one’s ancestors and those of the ruling family, the realm of meaningful and effective political action was essentially delimited to just the contexts of the family and the state. Proper political actions were necessarily seen as genealogical inheritance, and an individual becomes politically relevant and effective only as a descendant of a family that can establish a history with the ruling family. It is a tightly closed genealogical past that we see in these different narratives that circulated amongst the Western Zhou political elite. The political state was coextensive with this elite network of families, and their collective past was deemed the only meaningful history. Pieces of the past that fall outside the realm of the family or the state had little or no meaning or relevance to this political elite invested in preserving the status quo.

This, moreover, implies a radically conservative political vision amongst the Western Zhou political elite. Political ideals were always attributed to the past actions of one’s ancestors, and therefore the most that an individual could achieve was to repeat past successes. The goal was to conserve what had already been achieved at the moments of origin of the dynasty. With imitation and emulation as the primary mode of political action, there was no theoretical space for any sort of innovation. Innovation would have necessitated deviation from the originary exemplary models, and any such deviation must ultimately lead to disorder, as we saw in the Shi Xun gui inscription. Except for the founding figures, historical individuals who appeared in these Western Zhou materials acquired their significance only as eager imitators of the past actions of their ancestors, and in the end, since they were only allowed to participate in the making of the political order because of their pre-existing membership of their families, they emerged as little more than secondary effects of their genealogical past.

In late Bronze Age China, under the Western Zhou, the genealogical past predominated the historical imagination of the political elite. In a state that was constituted by a complex network of clans, like the Western Zhou, this is hardly surprisingly. Out of the vastness of the past, it was this one piece that mattered to them. The past was invoked as the ground for a demonstration of genealogical continuity, and, by extension, proper membership in the political network of the Western Zhou. But this was not a genealogical past that was supposed to extend indefinitely into distant antiquity; rather it was limited to the founding moments of the Zhou order (including, of course, the triumphant conquest of the Shang). The virtuous and valorous acts of the founders of the dynasty, including King Wen, King Wu, and their associates, provided the authoritative template for political actions; it was an originary political order that is susceptible to corruption through deviation, and therefore it must be continually maintained through faithful emulation. This was another function of the genealogical past, besides demonstrating one’s political membership. It was also the only legitimate and authoritative repository of political action.

The Western Zhou ended in the year 771 BCE. Its disintegration, formally in that year and then gradually in effect in the decades afterwards, also marked the beginning of the end of this singular predominance of the genealogical past. This genealogical mapping of the past would not completely disappear, of course; family histories, in a variety of forms, will continue to be written and serve diverse interests in the centuries afterward.Footnote ³⁵ However, we will also begin to see, in this long period after the collapse of the Western Zhou order, new and alternative ways of making sense of the past. In a way, the rest of this book is about the many new and different ways of remaking the past after the collapse of this late Bronze Age aristocratic order, and with it a dissipation of this singular focus on the genealogical past, originary moments, and exemplary actions. In the rest of this first chapter of the book, I will begin this account with the examples of two key texts from the early Warring States (c. fifth and early fourth centuries BCE), namely the Analects and the Mozi. Why these two texts, one might ask, among all the texts that came along after the fall of the Zhou order? As I hope to demonstrate in the rest of this chapter, there are special interpretive gains to be made by reading across these three sets of materials, namely the Western Zhou texts, the Analects, and the Mozi. They are vastly different texts in many respects, to be certain, yet, if we start looking at how they each relate to the idea of the past, a significant contrast emerges. The materials in the Analects and the Mozi represent two starkly different visions of the past, with two distinct political and ethical agendas; at the same time, they are both subtle, critical responses to the Western Zhou genealogical imagination of the past. Between these three sets of texts, an expansive, contentious landscape of the past emerged.

The Analects: Past Cultural Practices, Moral Interiority, and the Deliberative Self

On first reading, one may very well mistake passages in the Analects as a continuation, however tenuous and imperfect they may be, of the Western Zhou paradigm of capitalizing the past towards the construction of political relations, especially with respect to its conservative stance.Footnote ³⁶ The past, often denoted by the term gu 古 (“antiquity”) in the Analects, is consistently an authoritative standard, a marker for various self-evident political and ethical ideals. Take, for example, the following passage from Book Four of the Analects: “The Master said, ‘People of antiquity were sparing in their words. This was because they were afraid their actions may fall short’” (子曰：古者言之不出，恥躬之不逮也).Footnote ³⁷ Here, an implicit connection, a positive correlation, is established between exemplary behaviors and the field of antiquity. Antiquity is taken as the temporal location for exemplary actions, and just as we are far removed from antiquity, we have also fallen from behaving in exemplary ways. Similarly, in Book Fourteen, the Master said, “In antiquity, people studied for their own sake; nowadays, they do so for the sake of others” (古之學者為己，今之學者為人).Footnote ³⁸ There is a clear division between antiquity and the present, and they are self-evidently correlated with what is considered ideal and what is not.

This positive valorization of antiquity is evident in many passages of the Analects. The Master himself, Confucius, declared his fondness for it time and again. For instance, in Book Seven, he says, “I was not born understanding anything. I love antiquity. I work diligently to comprehend it” (我非生而知之者，好古，敏以求之者也).Footnote ³⁹ Here, there is not even a specification of what exactly was good in antiquity, but the entire field of antiquity was simply considered an enlightening thing. And, of course, the idea of antiquity also figures in one of the most celebrated lines from the Analects: “The Master said, ‘I transmit and do not innovate. I trust and am fond of antiquity. I humbly dare to compare myself to Old Peng’” (子曰：述而不作，信而好古，竊比於我老彭).Footnote ⁴⁰ Not only did Confucius profess his fondness for studying antiquity as a means for self-cultivation, but here he went one step further to claim that he does not innovate at all but only “transmit” (shu 述) what had already been done in the past.

One may argue for a clear resemblance here between the Analects and the Western Zhou materials with respect to their apparent cultural and political conservatism. They both attribute their ideals to a time before the present, for instance, and the notion of “transmission” (shu 述) in the Analects would seem to be quite comparable to the ideal of emulative and imitative actions (xing) espoused in the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. However, upon closer reading of the Analects, it would become clear that in fact these superficial resemblances are no more than structural remains of a subtle but radical deconstruction of the Western Zhou paradigm for capitalizing the past as a genealogical field. These Analects passages, as I will now argue, represent a deliberate departure from the Western Zhou paradigm, by transposing the source of political authority from the genealogical past to the moral center of individuals through a reversal of the relationship between men and history.

To begin with, let us return to this idea of gu, or antiquity, in the Analects. It is clear that Confucius speaks very approvingly of gu, that “antiquity” is something that we should learn from somehow. Suppose one agrees with Confucius; then what and how is this person supposed to learn exactly? What is the actual content of this “antiquity”? If we were to follow Confucius in “trusting” and “loving” antiquity, what exactly are we trusting and loving here? In the world of the Western Zhou, the answer would have been the exemplary actions of one’s ancestors, typically from the founding moments of the dynasty, but nothing of the kind can be identified in the Analects. First of all, unlike the Western Zhou texts, there appears to be virtually no interest in the significance of moments of origins, or originary actions, the type that we see in the poem “Shengmin,” with its emphasis on the first creation of agriculture, or numerous bronze inscriptions in their frequent reiterations of the founding of the Zhou. In the Analects, there is no interest in the founding accomplishments of King Wen and King Wu (or any other dynastic founders) as a point of positive reference. The only mention of King Wen in the Analects is a rumination on his passing.Footnote ⁴¹

Second, despite the importance of familial relations in the Analects for its ethical program, there is not a single mention of an ancestor in it. There are only nuclear families in the Analects, while the families in Western Zhou materials were always the extended (patriarchal) lineages. A Western Zhou official may proclaim that he was emulating his distant ancestor from the first years of the dynasty, while in the Analects, one’s virtue is cultivated through immediate familial (or official) relations.Footnote ⁴² There are no distant ancestors populating the landscape of the past; the family is a much smaller unit in the Analects.

The past – or “antiquity” – matters a great deal in the Analects but it is not at all the same past that we saw in Western Zhou materials. Then what is it exactly? Let us now turn to a few Analects passages that refer specifically to the contents of antiquity:

This is far from an exhaustive inventory of passages from the Analects that refer to the past; more relevant passages will be brought up later. However, even with this limited set, we can already discern a distinct pattern in the articulation of the past in the Analects. Instead of moments of origins or exemplary actions of ancestors, the past is painted as a repertoire of cultural practices.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is interesting to note that although the text does ascribe specific cultural practices to different periods in history, there is no suggestion of a progressive narrative at all. It is not the case that one practice evolved into another one, or that there is a logic at all behind the replacement of one practice by another from one period to the next. It is simply that people did different things at different times (and places), and we, in the present day, have some knowledge of what was done in the past.

The enumeration of these different cultural practices, as in the passages cited above, serves more than just antiquarian curiosity. Rather, they are almost always shot through with an evaluative dimension. For instance, in the second passage cited above (3.21), Zai Wo criticized the Zhou practice, and Confucius criticized him in turn for being unduly critical. In the last passage (15.11), the different past practices mentioned were meant to address the question of how to govern a state, and so the endorsement of the Xia calendar, Yin chariots, and Zhou caps was effectively Confucius’ positive evaluation of them. His warning against “Zheng tunes,” on the other hand, implies a negative evaluation. These are inventories of cultural practices where each item is critically graded. See, for another example: “The Master said, ‘Zhou studied the two [earlier] dynasties. Elegant and refined were its ways. I follow Zhou’” (子曰。周監於二代。郁郁乎文哉。吾從周).Footnote ⁴⁷ The Master studied and assessed past practices in search of efficacious instruments for his own edification in the present.

A knowledge of past cultural practices demands one’s evaluation, in order that one decides which practice to follow in the present. At a very general level, this agrees with the Western Zhou idea that one must always follow precedents. But it also introduces a new intermediary element, namely this evaluative moment. In the Western Zhou paradigm, one identifies and imitates exemplary actions within one’s genealogical past; evaluation is therefore unnecessary and irrelevant. In the Analects, however, one is not bound to just the genealogical past; exemplary actions from any period, by whomever, are all possible models for emulation in the present. Then, after identifying them, one evaluates them against one another in order to decide which one to follow. There is a structural similarity here between the Western Zhou materials and the Analects: wary of harmful innovations and deviations from past practices, one should identify and follow exemplary actions in the past. But the Analects has abandoned the genealogical dimension integral to the Western Zhou paradigm. Moving beyond the confines of the genealogical past, the Analects conceives of an open, much more expansive, historical field with a diverse repository of exemplary cultural practices, all of which are potential candidates as useful models for the present.

This new model in seeing and using the past in the Analects depends on the feasibility of this evaluative component. How does one actually evaluate? What are the criteria for this evaluation? What is the site on which this evaluation takes place? The Analects passages never gesture towards the existence or even the possibility of an objective set of standards for deliberation (unlike the Mozi, as we shall discuss in the next section). Rather, it seems to suggest the exact opposite – the evaluations are always subjective. It is always a personal decision, one that emanates from the moral interiority of an individual. In the end, there is no impersonal, external standard that we can rely on, but the decision ultimately rests with the individual himself. Confucius chose to “follow Zhou,” and not the other two earlier dynasties; the text gave no reason for it except for his own moral certitude.

To posit the possibility of and necessity for these personal evaluations is to attribute a deliberative capacity to the figure of the individual.Footnote ⁴⁸ Individuals had to deliberate too in the Western Zhou, between whether to follow or not to follow their ancestors’ actions. But in the Analects, the individual is no longer confronted with just an either–or decision. He has to weigh alternatives against one another and decide on the one for emulation in the present. In the Western Zhou materials, exemplary actions are simply what one’s ancestors did successfully, particularly the originary actions within one’s genealogical past, but in the Analects, it is an open question on what is indeed exemplary and efficacious in the present; ultimately, each person decides according to moral biases interior to himself. Liberated from the confines and dictates of the genealogical past, one now faces uncertain choices.Footnote ⁴⁹

“The Good Person is That,” as Amy Olberding eloquently encapsulates, in the subtitle of her monograph, her reading of the “exemplarist virtue ethics” in the Analects.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is a moral vision that, according to Olberding, begins not with “precise definition” or “elaborate conceptual schemata” but with our admiration and emulation of one or another moral exemplar. “The virtuous person is that and the theoretical charge rests in devising a satisfying account of what our various instances of that share.”Footnote ⁵¹ This is resonant with my own reading of the Analects, but I would add to it that these exemplars that we choose to emulate – such as the Duke of Zhou – are often figures from the past (or “historical notables,” in Olberding’s formulation).Footnote ⁵² In my reading, there are also disembodied cultural practices from the past that one may emulate. There is a strong historical dimension to this “exemplarist” ethics in the Analects; the search for morally exemplary individuals and practices often prompts one to rummage through the field of the past.

It was in the early Warring States period that we can observe the emergence of this figure of the deliberative individual, across different texts that have survived from this period. It is a new figure whose exercise of his deliberative capacity would have great political consequences. In the case of the Analects passages, we see a great faith in the capability of individuals in effecting changes and establishing order. The self-cultivation program outlined in the text – pivoted around key terms such as “humaneness” (ren 仁) and “rituals” (li 禮) – can be seen as an attempt to cultivate this moral interior of individuals. Once properly cultivated, they would be able to choose and follow the right course of actions based on an educated assessment of the relative efficacy of past cultural practices.

There are many facets and expressions of this deliberative individual in the Analects. For instance, there is this attention to our reflective interiority as an object of cultivation:

This focus on the utility of introspection, the very idea of a reflective “interior” (nei 內) within an individual, has a radical quality that becomes apparent when juxtaposed with materials from the Western Zhou. Once entirely irrelevant in the political imagination of the late Bronze Age under the Western Zhou, the moral interiority of men is now a central concern of ethics and fully integrated into the political discourse in the Analects.

This deliberative capacity of individuals, situated within their moral interiority, is a primary object of cultivation in the Analects. Cultivation practices denoted by terms such as xue 學 (“learning”), sheng 省 (“reflection”), and perhaps most importantly li 禮 (“rituals”), elaborated throughout the text, all ultimately aimed at refining this responsive moral center that resides within each of us. The goal is to achieve ren, or “humaneness,” a proper ethical anchor within a person that enables consistently proper decision making from one context to another. To be cultivated, or to be ren, is not simply to be “ethical” or “good,” whatever those terms may mean in the context of the Analects, but more precisely, it is to have the ability to decide what is good or bad, or what is “likable” or not: “The Master said, ‘Only the humane person is able to like others and is able to hate others’” (子曰：唯仁者能好人能惡人).Footnote ⁵⁵ To be ren is be able to exercise one’s deliberative capacity.Footnote ⁵⁶

In Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, one is said to xing or “emulate” past exemplary actions. That word has all but disappeared in the Analects. Instead, Confucius cong 從 or “follows” past cultural practices (e.g. the aforementioned “I follow Zhou,” 3.14). While the term xing suggests a mechanical imitation of something outside oneself, the term cong connotes choices and deliberation. To follow one thing is to not follow another. The passage from xing to cong, from rote imitation to evaluative adaptation, marked the emergence of the deliberative individual as a legitimate political subject after the fall of the Zhou order.Footnote ⁵⁷

In this new world articulated through these passages of the Analects, individuals and their decisions are now what essentially guarantee continuing order, in contrast to the idea that a most ideal political order always pre-exists an individual in the Western Zhou materials. It is therefore not surprising to see that the Analects attributes tremendous power to individual historical figures. For instance, in one of the best-known passages, Confucius ruminates on the passing of King Wen:

Here, the survival of a particular order, a whole culture, hinges on just one person. Elsewhere, Confucius lavished praise on the character and accomplishments of past sage-kings such as Yao 堯 and Yu 禹 (e.g. 8.18, 8.19, 8.21). More subtly, this is also true in his praise for Boyi and Shuqi, the two figures with whom I started this chapter. They were failed dissidents, but nevertheless, they did forcefully exercise their deliberative capacity to the point of their own death. In the Analects, individuals and their decisions have tremendous historical agency. In turn, past figures and their work all become part of the historical repository of cultural practices that one should study, evaluate, and follow (or not follow).

This sharp turn to individuals as a potential source of order also signals a transposition of the locus of political authority. In the Western Zhou, the recipe for establishing order lies in a set of exemplary actions in the distant genealogical past external to oneself, while in the Analects, the source for political order is ultimately located in the moral center of individuals and the decisions that they make. In this sense, the locus of political authority has shifted from an external set of past actions to the internal deliberative capacity of men in the present. And with this, there is also a reversal in the relation between history and individuals in the Analects. In the Western Zhou materials, history as a series of originary exemplary actions defines and delimits the possible realm of actions, the basic script that one must follow. One is measured by the degree of conformity with or of deviance from them. In the Analects, however, the past is now a function of one’s individual deliberation; one cultivates his ethical center in order to formulate judgments about the past, and decides which particular practice is worthy to be continued in the present. The authority that the past once had over individuals is now transposed to the individuals themselves over the past.

To conclude this discussion of the Analects, let me briefly note the social location of this new figure of the deliberative individual. Earlier, we observed that the Analects has largely forsaken the genealogical dimension that was trenchant in the Western Zhou materials, where one is authorized to act only as a descendant of a certain clan or otherwise bears some genealogical ties to the royal clan. As we also noted in the conclusion to the section on the Western Zhou, the realm of meaningful and effective political actions was essentially reduced to just the contexts of the family and the state. In the Analects, the family and the state are still a very significant context for actions, as is evident in the famous dictum by Confucius: “The ruler should act as a ruler; the subject, a subject; the father, a father, the son, a son” (君君。臣臣。父父。子子).Footnote ⁵⁹ However, while family and state are clearly still viable and important contexts for the cultivation of the self and the establishment of order, they are no longer the only contexts for effective action in the Analects. The decoupling of exemplary precedents and the (absent) genealogical past (in relation to the royal genealogies) in the Analects effectively means that it is no longer a prerequisite to be an heir or an official in order to act in a politically meaningful way. Instead of having to claim membership of a certain family or the state for any political legitimacy, individuals are now authorized to act simply based on their innate deliberative capacity, this ethical potential that we all presumably possess. Authority comes not from our genealogical membership but from the demonstrated refinement of our moral interiority as individuals.

One of the clearest expressions of this opening up of the contexts for politically meaningful action is the idea of friendship in the Analects. Of the different cardinal human relationships that are the means for and expression of one’s ethical cultivation in the Analects, only friendship represents a horizontal association. The others, i.e. parents, rulers, brothers, spouses, are socially hierarchical by definition.Footnote ⁶⁰ The possibility of this voluntary horizontal association, which lies outside one’s family and state, implies that there is a remainder of the self that falls outside the family and the state, that a person can and does have an identity beyond just being his father’s son or his ruler’s subject. Moreover, in the Analects, friendship is considered to be at least as powerful as any of the other cardinal relationships for self-cultivation. Being a good friend is as important as being a filial son or a loyal subject:

This passage clearly indicates that there are three social sites for self-cultivation: family, state, and friendship. The following passage gives a more elaborate description of the ethical utility of friendship. It is a pathway towards achieving the ethical ideal of ren: “Master Zeng said, ‘The gentleman uses the arts in acquiring friends and uses friends in helping him to achieve humaneness’ (曾子曰。君子以文會友。以友輔仁).”Footnote ⁶² This elevation of the significance of friendship to the same level as that of familial and political associations is a new development in the early Warring States period.Footnote ⁶³ There were people who were friends too in the Western Zhou, of course, but with effective political action limited to just the family or the state, as we have discussed, friendship simply did not figure in the Western Zhou political imagination. This positive valorization of friendship in the Analects, however, points back to the primacy of this new figure of the deliberative individual that emerged in this period. It is possible now to conceive of an individual as possessing a singular identity, based upon his deliberative interiority, who can relate horizontally to other individuals, compared with being defined through vertical relations as the descendant of a certain family or the subject of a state. Individuals are now imagined as independent ethical entities who can roam around in a space outside, or between, the family and state, establishing associations with one another without risking political irrelevance or oblivion. Moreover, it is now in this new tertiary space that one can cultivate his moral interiority in order to partake in the making of political orders.Footnote ⁶⁴

In this reading, the seemingly innocuous opening line of the Analects, on the pleasure of seeing a friend from afar, is no longer just an expression of a quotidian sentiment but an eloquent pronouncement for the arrival of a new episteme:

The use of rhetorical questions (i.e. “that’s a pleasure, isn’t it?”) invites and presumes spontaneous agreement from the audience, thus establishing the self-evident quality of this new worldview. In this new world according to the Analects, the past is now imagined as a repertoire of cultural practices that demand evaluation and interpretation for adaptation in the present by deliberative individuals presumed to possess a moral interiority that can and must be cultivated within the family, state, or circle of friends. This deconstruction of the Western Zhou model for the capitalization of the past led to the corrosion of political authority in the originary actions in the genealogical past; the Analects sees in this new figure of the deliberative individual, liberated from the confines of the family and state, a new source of historical agency and political authority for imagining a new order for the future.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Mozi: The Origin of Disorder and the Problem with the Deliberative Self

In this section we turn to the Mozi, not engaging with the entire received text but only with the “Core Chapters” that contain materials that likely date to the first half of the Warring States period (or, more narrowly speaking, the long fourth century BCE).Footnote ⁶⁷ Similar to the preceding discussion of the Analects, we will observe a set of departures from the paradigm embodied in the Western Zhou materials. But more than that, we will also observe a complex set of differences and overlaps between the Mozi and the Analects on how they each imagine the past for their respective political visions. While the Analects never explicitly refers to the Mozi, neither the text nor the eponymous figure, the Mozi formulates many of its arguments as polemics against the ideas and practices of the Confucians (ru 儒) or even the figure of Confucius himself. There are two chapters not so subtly entitled “Against the Confucians” (“Fei Ru” 非儒) (only one of which is still extant as Chapter 39), and there are also two triads of chapters (i.e. the “Fei le” 非樂 and “Fei ming” 非命 triads) that vehemently inveighed against practices of musical performance and the idea of fate, both of which the Mozi attributes to the Confucian tradition of its time.Footnote ⁶⁸ Given its dramatic opposition to the ideas and practices of the Confucians, one might expect to find in the Mozi a very different, if not entirely antithetical, use of the past. This may appear to be the case on a first reading of the Mozi, but in fact, as we delve into the text, we shall discover no such simple diametrical opposition between the two texts at all. Instead, what we will discover first is an ideological common ground, founded on the figure of the deliberative individual that we discussed earlier. Their well-known disagreements on a range of political and ethical issues, as I hope to demonstrate, are not the result of two distinct, rival sets of philosophical beliefs or cultural commitments.Footnote ⁶⁹ Instead, they stemmed from two different interpretations of this common figure of the deliberative individual as a historically and politically significant subject. It is the same basic stuff with which the Mozi and the Analects constructed their own landscape of the past, but the edifices that they each erected in the end would be vastly different and very much at odds with each other.

Please allow me to begin at a somewhat far-fetched place, not immediately the treatment of antiquity in the Core Chapters but the method of its analysis. That, to me, is in fact one of the most striking features of the Mozi.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Core Chapters are a sprawling whole that engages with a very diverse set of topics. They appear to cohere, in the eyes of at least this reader, not over the similarity or relatedness of these different subject matters, but for their consistent method of analysis. To put this even more strongly, the specific arguments about various subjects seem, at times, to be incidental to a demonstration of a certain supposedly universal hermeneutic that is applicable for a proper analysis of any object. One may say, for example, that the chapter “Condemning Music I” (“Fei yue shang” 非樂上) is as much a declaration of the Mohist’s distaste for lavish musical performances as it is more fundamentally a demonstration of the power of the Mohist mode of argumentation that allowed its author(s) to arrive at such an iconoclastic position. In this sense, the Mozi is a text about its own methodology; its teachings in the end lie not in the collective whole of its pronouncements on the various subjects, be it music, ghosts, or fatalism, but in this idea of a systematic methodology, an objective structure of reasoning, that can and should be applied to all things towards an aggregate understanding of the world.

What, then, is this methodology of the Mozi? For such a hermeneutically interested text, it is not surprising to find in it a declaration of its own method of analysis. It is in the chapter “Against Fate III” (“Fei ming xia” 非命下). It begins with an argument for the necessity of a pre-established “standard” (yi 儀) when making statements:

Then, it continues to state the three specific “criteria” (fa 法), constitutive of this common standard (yi), that must be met by any statement:

The three criteria for any argument are therefore based, respectively, on historical exemplars, collective senses, and a calculus of effectiveness. Of course, one should be wary of such an overt declaration of methods; there is always the possibility of a gap between what the text says it is doing and what it actually does. Nevertheless, putting this question aside for the moment, in the context of this study, it is important to note the essential, integral role that history is given in this text the Mozi. It clearly declares that historical knowledge, specifically the deeds of exemplars from the past, is essential for the formulation of any truthful and meaningful statement in the present-day world.

True to its own words, we do find numerous invocations of the past as argumentative means throughout the Mozi. Historical figures and their deeds, often prefaced by temporal markers such as gu 古 (“antiquity”) and xi 昔 (“formerly”), are cited as compelling evidence for whatever arguments the text happens to be making. The ubiquity of this rhetorical strategy, this persistent recourse to the past, substantiates the essential role that historical knowledge is supposed to play in its own method. I am of course not alone in having made this observation. Mark Edward Lewis once remarked that “the Mohist canon routinely, indeed obsessively, inscribes its social program in an imagined antiquity and appeals to the authority of past writings.”Footnote ⁷³ Miranda Brown expanded on this point much further, and made a provocative, persuasive suggestion that the early Mohists may have in fact remade “ancient authority,” by strategically expanding the field of antiquity and elaborating on the legendary sage-kings (shengwang 聖王) of the distant past for their own argumentative ends.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the Core Chapters, invocations of the past are not only pervasive but also purposeful; they are essential and instrumental to the text’s arguments.

This is admittedly a simple observation to make. One only needs to read through the text to discover the ubiquity of the past in the Mozi. The more difficult questions would be, as we had asked of the Analects, what is the content of the past in the Mozi? What, out of the infinitude of the past, was singled out to be recounted as persuasive historical evidence for its arguments? How was the past imagined in the Mozi and to what end? And in this respect, how does it compare to the models in the Western Zhou materials and the near-contemporary Analects? Let us now address these larger questions, by an examination of how the past is represented and made to function in the Core Chapters of the Mozi.

Reading the passages concerning the past in the Mozi, one predominant theme becomes immediately apparent. It is the text’s celebratory invocations of legendary kings and sages from antiquity. References to their civilizing innovations and enlightened conduct in antiquity dominate the accounts of the past in the text. Sometime, these past legendary figures are unspecified, simply referred to as “sages” (sheng 聖) and “kings” (wang 王) from time past (xian 先, xi 昔, or, more commonly, gu 古). Out of the many such passages in the Mozi, the most elaborate would certainly be Chapter Six, “On Eschewing Faults” (“Ciguo” 辭過). It is almost entirely devoted to recounting the civilizing progress made by the “sages” (shengren 聖人) in antiquity, through their introduction of the ideas of shelter, clothing, agriculture, and transportation. In each case, the rationale behind the sage’s invention, his intent to improve the human condition, is described in an approving and laudatory language, followed by a critique against contemporary perversion of the same practices through their superfluous extravagance harmful to the people and the state at large.Footnote ⁷⁵ Elsewhere in the Mozi, these unnamed “sages” are celebrated not only for their introduction of civilizing initiatives, but also for their enlightened conduct and proper rulership. Various Mohist virtues – such as frugality (jie 節) and impartial caring (jian’ai 兼愛) – are said to have been championed by these figures in the distant past. For instance, in the chapter “Moderation in Use II” (“Jie yong zhong” 節用中), the argument for the virtue of frugality was made not only in theoretical terms but also in historical terms through these legendary past figures. It suggested that this virtue was embraced by certain “enlightened kings” (mingwang 明王) and “sages” (shengren) in antiquity, which in turn account for their supposed effectiveness as rulers of their subjects.Footnote ⁷⁶ The implicit but unmistakable criticism is that rulers in the present day had long lapsed into self-indulgent immoderation.

These past sages and kings that appear in the pages of the Mozi are not always unidentified. Occasionally, we do encounter definite historical personalities. For instance, in the following passage from the chapter “Exalting the Worthies III” (“Shang xian xia” 尚賢下), the idea of meritocracy, one of the key Mohist virtues, was said to have been embraced by historical figures from distant antiquity through the Xia dynasty to the early Zhou:

This passage is fairly typical of how the Mozi invokes past historical figures as exemplars of the virtues that it espouses. Moreover, even though this passage cites just six historical figures, namely Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang 湯, Wen, and Wu, this is in fact the entire canon of the legendary “kings” and “sages” in the Mozi. In most passages, only the last four – Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu – are mentioned, and only in some instances, such as this passage, would the even more ancient Yao and Shun be added to this limited canonical cast.Footnote ⁷⁸ These were all great founders of states in antiquity to the time of the Zhou. Other cultural figures outside or peripheral to the history of the states, such as the likes of Boyi and Shuqi who were celebrated in the Analects, are notably absent in the Mozi. That is not to say that the text mentions no other historical individual besides these few legendary kings and sages. On the rare occasions when the text does mention them, usually either famous personalities from the past or individual rulers in the present, they are almost always noted for their negative impact rather than virtuous deeds.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the Core Chapters of the Mozi, we find sustained attention to “sages” and “kings” from antiquity, specifically this sextet from the very distant past to the time of the founding of the Zhou dynasty.Footnote ⁸⁰ The vast expanse of the past is invoked in the Mozi through their historic achievements, be they civilizing innovations or enlightened rulership, for the advancement of the human condition.

This attention to the civilizing innovation and enlightened rulership of past figures carries with it the implication that humanity, as it was in the time before these sagely interventions, was originally disorderly. It required deliberate interventions in order to achieve a semblance of order. The work of these past sage-kings, therefore, was not just gratuitous improvement over an otherwise orderly humanity, but rather essential interventions without which humanity would have lapsed into, or reverted back to, the primitive chaos and brutishness of its original condition. This abiding interest in the civilizing works of the past sage-kings in the Mozi is directly informed by its subscription to the idea of humanity being originally disorderly. The civilizing progress and political order established by sage-kings of the past are but momentary relief from immanent disorder.

This dismal vision of humanity is evident in its many passages on historical declines and the origin of disorder in antiquity. Besides those celebratory accounts of past sage-kings, these account for the majority of the passages concerning the past in the text. No doubt, for the Mozi, the present age is one that has lapsed into chaos (luan 亂), having either abandoned or perverted the sagely innovations and enlightened rulership of the past. “Now, when we come to the present time, the sage-kings of the Three Dynasties of former times are already dead and the world is bereft of righteousness,” (今逮至昔者三代聖王既沒，天下失義), as the text says time and again before it goes on to detail the specific maladies afflicting the present-day world (e.g. 25.169, 31.221).

This is quite a harrowing vision of ourselves; it sees humanity as perpetually bound and susceptible to various forms of disorder of our own making, with only occasional respite thanks to the few accidental sage-kings of the past. It is perhaps a depressing idea to accept, but according to the Mozi it is also a problem that we can ultimately overcome. How would we do that exactly? We begin by understanding the causes of our disorder. Then, with that knowledge, we can devise appropriate solutions to address and overcome them. In other words, the text argues for the utility and necessity of understanding the etiology of disorder:

Then, following this passage, the text drives the point home with a medical analogy:

This medical analogy, likening our chronic disorder to cases of illness, is quite revealing for the text’s larger vision of the basic problems of humanity. As human beings, we are prone to become sick from time to time; one may even say that it is in our very constitution to be susceptible to various forms of illness over time. Yet being sick is certainly not the proper way for us to live; it is something that should be treated, as much as possible, if not altogether, once and for all. To extrapolate from this metaphor, therefore, humanity may be constitutionally susceptible to chaos harmful to itself, yet it is not something that we should accept as part of our natural condition. Instead, it is an aberration from our proper historical course that impedes our flourishing over time. These periodic episodes of disorder must be overcome, and just as with any form of illness, we treat it by understanding its causes. There is a subtle identification here between the nature of disorder and the origin of disorder. To put this differently, the implicit claim here is that a knowledge of a thing’s origin is equivalent to understanding its nature. In the case of an illness, an observation of the physical symptoms in the present would lead to a diagnosis of the causes, and that in turn would lead to a prescription for the appropriate cures. Similarly, disorder in the world today is the apparent effects of a more fundamental, underlying dysfunction, whose proper diagnosis is essential as a first step in finding solutions that will restore order and put us back on the right path towards a more civilized world.

So, for the Mozi, what is this etiology of disorder? On first reading, the text seems to suggest more than one answer to this question. It accuses the rulers of its time of failing at many things; they are not frugal, their systems of government are not meritocratic, or they fail to understand the importance of impartial caring, to name just a few examples. The ignorance and stupidity of the rulers, however, are not the root causes. If only it were that simple, then educating or removing the rulers would have fixed the world. The Mozi does offer a more radical diagnosis, one based on a narrative of antiquity:

The problem, therefore, is the lack of “shared norms,” as Chris Fraser put it in his recent study of the philosophy of the Mozi.Footnote ⁸⁴ Before we enjoyed the benefits of sagely interventions, we were originally prone to quarrel with others, as each of us was naturally committed to our own idiosyncratic standards. That is a fundamental cause of our disorder, once upon a time in antiquity, according to the Mozi. To draw out the significance of this argument, it would be helpful to contrast this to the texts that we looked at earlier, namely the Western Zhou materials and the Analects. That would also allow me to further delineate the landscape of the past in the Mozi, and begin to circle back to the larger theme of this chapter, namely the transition in how the past was imagined from the Western Zhou of the late Bronze Age to the early Warring States period in the Analects and the Mozi.

A comparison between what we have seen in the Mozi so far and the Western Zhou texts is relatively straightforward, for they are largely diametrically opposite. In the latter, as I argued earlier, the focus is on the origins of order; they tended to valorize the founding moment of a new order, such as the actions of the first Zhou kings, and translate their originary nature into a paradigmatic status for the later generations. One identifies and studies the origins of order in the past in order to emulate them and maintain the same order in the present. In the Mozi, however, the focus has shifted from the origins of order to the origins of disorder. Establishing order in the present is no longer a matter of knowing and perpetuating a founding order from a certain point in the past; rather, it depends on understanding the original disorder of humanity. If history figures as a collection of exemplary actions of one’s ancestors for faithful emulation in the Western Zhou world, it is now, at least in part, a series of etiological cases awaiting proper diagnoses in the Mozi.

One might object to this argument by pointing out that the Mozi also focuses on the sage-kings and their civilizing work. So it is not only concerned with etiological moments in history, but also attends to what was positive and exemplary. While it is true that the Mozi does celebrate a small cast of past sage-kings, including King Wen and King Wu, who figure prominently in Western Zhou texts, the way that it contextualizes their historical significance still betrays its etiological investment, with a clear emphasis on the primacy of recognizing and diagnosing disorders. Take, for example, the aforementioned chapter “On Eschewing Faults” (“Ciguo”), which surveys the various civilizing innovations introduced by the sage-kings in antiquity. In each case, whether it was shelter, agriculture, transportation, or clothing, the narrative always begins with the sage-king discerning a particular deficiency in the way that human beings were living, and having understood the cause of that deficiency, he devised an appropriate solution for its fulfillment.Footnote ⁸⁵ These acts of the sage-kings are not meant to be repeated ad infinitum – the idea of transportation only needed to be introduced once. The lesson that we are supposed to learn from these cases of the ancient sage-kings is that we must recognize the particular deficiencies or disorderliness of our own time, in order to arrive at the appropriate measures to create or restore proper order. These achievements of the sage-kings were ultimately grounded in their etiological approach to the world in which they found themselves. They became the sage-kings that we now celebrate precisely because they understood the causes of the disorder they saw in their own time. Both the Western Zhou materials and the Mozi capitalize the past for their respective political visions, but one invests in exemplarity while the other emphasizes etiology.

And what about the Analects? How does it compare to the Mozi? In these two bodies of materials, which are likely near-contemporaries of each other, we see an interesting point of convergence. It is the figure of deliberative individual that we first encountered in our discussion of the Analects. In the last passage that we read from the Mozi, on the cause of disorder in antiquity, the text identifies as the culprit literally everyman. Each of us is born with our own idiosyncratic standard, according to the text, and conflicts always arise when two or more individuals interact. “People had differing principles” (ren yi yi 人異義), as the text emphatically remarks.Footnote ⁸⁶ We always choose to privilege our own “principle” over that of others. That is simply our nature. This understanding of human beings as idiosyncratic ideologues, I would argue, implies an attribution of deliberative capacity to individuals that is comparable to the same process that we saw in the Analects. Both texts subscribe to this figure of the deliberative individual, who chooses between alternatives and decides on one course of action over another, sometimes with great historical consequences for the world.

The question of individualism or the individual subject has received relatively little attention in the scholarship on the Core Chapters of the Mozi in past decades.Footnote ⁸⁷ In a rare exception, Erica Brindley argued recently that there is a radical conception of individuals in the Mozi as authoritative agents capable of independent “decision-making” and “self-determination,” so much so it may have constituted one of the roots of individualism in early China.Footnote ⁸⁸ I very much agree with Brindley’s argument for the centrality of this figure of the deliberative individual in the Mozi. And for the text, it is a problem that must be resolved. The question is not whether this or that individual arrives at the right or wrong standard; the fact that individuals are deliberating at all on their own, formulating their own standards, already constitutes incipient disorder. The authors of the Mozi see this individual and his deliberative capacity, but they hold a fundamentally negative view of them. This is the root cause of disorder in the world. It must be overcome, as the sage-kings once did in the past, before good order can arise and flourish for the benefit of all.

This brings us back to the comparison with the Analects, for this point marks a striking divergence between the two texts. Recall that the Analects, with its dismissal of the privilege of the originary, exemplary models within the genealogical past, turns to this deliberative capacity of individuals as a potential new source for establishing order. Reflecting on the cultural practices of the past, an individual deliberates on the appropriate model to be creatively adopted in the present. The Mozi similarly leaves behind the genealogical past of the Western Zhou, and recognizes the presence and agency of deliberative individuals. However, while the Analects sees this deliberative capacity of individuals as a new source of creating order, the Mozi sees it as the exact opposite, the original source of disorder in the world. In the Analects, this deliberative capacity is one of our endowed faculties that we must cultivate; in the Mozi, it is an innate liability of being human that has to be controlled or perhaps even eradicated altogether.

In other words, both texts recognize the same, new political subject, namely the deliberative individual, but they diverge in their interpretations. The Analects calls on this person to exercise his deliberative capacity to reflect upon the cultural practices of the past in order to imagine a viable new path for the present; the Mozi, on the other hand, chastises this same figure for his idiosyncratic standard and reckless deliberations as the very source of disorder in antiquity, and again now in the early Warring States. The solution that the Analects has discovered is considered to be the very problem in the Mozi.

To fix this problem, the Mozi appeals to the idea of an impersonal, objective standard, denoted in the text by the term “Heaven” (tian 天). Individual principles, cultivated within the recesses of our minds, must be abandoned, by referring to this supra-human standard external to all subjective calculations. In the triad of chapters entitled “Heaven’s Intention” (“Tianzhi” 天志), this idea of “Heaven” is given this description:

This metaphor of compasses and squares for the idea of Heaven drives home the notion that it represents an objective standard that lies outside, and therefore can serve as a corrective to, our own almost always wrongheaded individual deliberations.Footnote ⁹⁰ Much of the Core Chapters of the Mozi is, therefore, an elaboration on how the world should be organized, and how we should conduct ourselves within it, according to an understanding of this objective standard dispensed from Heaven. In order to arrive at an understanding of this “Heaven’s intention,” the text recommended the methodology of the “three criteria” (san fa 三法), as we discussed earlier (i.e. historical exemplars, collective senses, and a calculus of effectiveness). The end result is essentially a hierarchical, but meritocratic, bureaucratic system of laws and punishments designed to provide material subsistence for the maximum number of people at the same time.Footnote ⁹¹ It is headed by the Son of Heaven (tianzi 天子), who comprehends and maintains Heaven’s intention in the world. “It is only that the Son of Heaven is able to make uniform the principles of the world; this is how there is order in the world” (天子唯能壹同天下之義，是以天下治也).Footnote ⁹² Unlike the barbaric chaos in antiquity with each individual having his or her own principle, we now have only “shared norms,” a single impersonal principle for the entire world upheld by the Son of Heaven. A system consistent with Heaven’s intention will flourish, while ones that deviate from it inevitably breed disorder and create the conditions for their own doom, in addition to incurring natural calamities as negative responses from Heaven.Footnote ⁹³

Finally, this metaphor of the compasses and squares is also notable for the ahistoricism that it implies. A square is a square no matter when or where; likewise, “Heaven’s intention,” this objective set of standards for establishing order, is presented as constant across historical contexts. Its efficacy is universal and therefore transhistorical. It means that the various virtuous principles that the text espouses, such as meritocracy, frugality, and impartial caring, all perfectly align with the objective standards of Heaven. They worked at least once before, and will always work in the future. Orders are historically realized, and humanity does fluctuate between times of relative chaos and relative peace, but the idea of order and the means of its constitution have no historical dimension in the Mozi.

This, again, stands in contrast to the Analects. There is an entrenched historical dimension in the imagination of the order of the present in the Analects; every measure we decide to adopt in the present should be a creative, reflective adaptation of a historical precedent.Footnote ⁹⁴ The very notion of a transhistorical order is inconceivable in the Analects, while it is the very ideal that drives the political vision of the Mozi. The Mozi promises what the Analects precludes: an objective standard for establishing good order that is not susceptible to the corruption of time. This desire for a transhistorical order, however, does not diminish the significance of history in the text. In fact, it plays an essential role in the overall political vision of the Mozi. It is, after all, in the study of antiquity that the Mozi discovers the true origin of disorder, namely the contentious arbitrations of men. The past is relevant as a field of etiological investigations; it allows us to see the causes of our disorder, as the Mozi did itself.

Moreover, history is also where we can observe the efficacy of following the intentions of Heaven, through the work of the sage-kings, those who were able to diagnose the problems of their own age, and arrived at the correct solution by appealing to Heaven:

Later on, in the conclusion of the same chapter, the text refers to specific cases of the four sage-kings, Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu:

Conversely, historical figures who went against Heaven’s intentions suffered accordingly:

The past in the Mozi, therefore, is an etiological field, and the study of history allows us to observe the causes of disorder as well as their remedies. More pragmatically, it is also a series of case studies of historical figures who either accorded with or deviated from the intentions of Heaven. The negative cases demonstrate the horrific consequences of going against Heaven; the positive examples, namely the actions of the sage-kings in the past, are specific, partial instantiations of the standards of Heaven. A comprehensive knowledge of sagely deeds from the past may aggregate to a rough outline of the order that Heaven has always intended for us. It is an inferential approximation of Heaven through a survey of exemplary and unexemplary figures and their deeds in history.Footnote ⁹⁸

Finally, let me conclude this section with a speculation on the reason behind the relatively limited canon of sage-kings in the Mozi. Only a handful of dynastic founders are noted in the text, namely the sextet Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu, while many other cultural heroes such as Boyi and Shuqi celebrated in the Analects (and elsewhere in the Warring States corpus) are absent. In light of our argument about the text here, it is not hard to see why the Mozi would find nothing to celebrate about someone such as Boyi or Shuqi. The Analects may see the forceful exercises of their deliberative capacity as evidence of virtue, but the Mozi would certainly regard such stubborn commitment to one’s own arbitrary standard as precisely the seed of disorder. The only ones who are truly worthy of celebration and adherence are the few individuals in history who, in the view of the Mozi, recognized the objective standards of Heaven, and subjugated their own arbitrary principles, in order to create governing institutions that gave the world a proper order. Moreover, only the works of these sages, and perhaps those who gave them significant assistance, provide accurate access to the objective order intended by Heaven. The rest are either irrelevant or negative examples, which the text does occasionally note, as in the case of the “tyrannical kings” (baowang 暴王) in the very last passage cited above.Footnote ⁹⁹

The Mozi recognizes the historical agency of deliberative individuals – they can make or break the order of the world. The good ones, however, are those who exercise their deliberative capacity only to realize that they should subjugate it in order to yield to the objective standards of Heaven outside themselves. What the text demands, therefore, is more than just relinquishment, but a willful subjugation of our deliberative selves.

Conclusion

In the late Bronze Age period, the political elite of the Western Zhou saw the past largely as a genealogical field. It starts from the founding moments of the dynasty and marches forward to the present. Exemplary acts by the founders of the dynasty were the stuff of history. They are to be emulated by the later generations, so that the original order of the dynasty will be perpetuated. With the fall of the dynasty, and with it the hereditary aristocratic order of the political elite, this predominance of the genealogical imagination of the past also declined. In the divided world of the early Warring States, a few centuries after the Western Zhou, we begin to see alternative ways to imagine the past. In this chapter, I discussed two particularly powerful examples, namely the Analects and the Mozi. They are vastly different texts, yet interesting dialogues emerge when they are read together, with a view to their respective capitalization of the past for their political visions.

Both the Analects and the Mozi engaged with this figure of the deliberative individual. In the former, the past has become a repertoire of cultural practices; an individual evaluates and decides which is the most exemplary and efficacious for the present. In the Mozi, on the other hand, the past is where one goes in search of the causes of our disorder, the false and disastrous deliberations of individuals past, in order to surmise the universal, objective standards that will restore order to the world. The Analects sees a powerful resource in this deliberative capacity of men, while the Mozi considers it a key source of our trouble.

In other words, there were three different figurations of the past: genealogical, cultural, and etiological. Given their relative chronological proximity, we can consider the last two – the cultural past and the etiological past – as two competing voices in the debates of the early Warring States period over a range of political and ethical concerns. They both saw few resources in the old model of the genealogical past, but the trajectories of their departures are different. With the Mozi, we can discern a morphological resemblance between its idea of “Heaven” and the originary exemplary actions of the ancestors in the Western Zhou materials. Both represent pre-existing, incontestable ideals external to oneself that predefine the realm of proper action for the present. Perhaps with the ebbing of the genealogical past, and along with it the ideal of an objective standard embodied in the exemplary actions of the ancestors, the Mozi turns to this idea of Heaven as a way to preserve or even radicalize this ideal of an external objective standard.

This preservation of an old ideal through a proxy concept in the Mozi makes the Analects, in comparison, a much more radical departure from the Western Zhou model. The entire edifice built on the foundation of a genealogical past in the Western Zhou has completely vanished in the Analects. There is no genealogical continuity, no exemplary founding moments, or any external objective standard that any individual may rely on. Instead, we have only ourselves, with our reflective minds, looking back on the repertoire of past cultural practices for guidance on what to do in the present. There is a lot more deliberative freedom at the individual level in the Analects, compared to both the Western Zhou paradigm and the Mozi, but with it there is also an uncertainty over the rectitude of one’s choices.

Finally, I would like to briefly comment on an issue that has only been implied but never explicitly discussed throughout this chapter. It is the issue of historical continuity and discontinuity. In the Western Zhou materials, there is a presumption of historical continuity between the past and present. Or, more precisely, there is a tacit understanding that the present order is continuous to the original order inaugurated by one’s ancestors at a particular moment in the past. The task is to maintain a historical knowledge of the founding moments in order extend the original paradigmatic order into the present.

In the early Warring States period, however, at least in these two bodies of materials the Analects and the Mozi, we no longer see this comforting belief in a continuum of order between past and present. If anything, they are both committed to the exact opposite, namely the idea of historical ruptures. The orderly existence that once flourished – whether in the early Zhou or in distant antiquity – was so fully corrupted that we are now completely disconnected from it. It was never a matter of inheriting or restoring an old order, for it is beyond repair by this point in time. This is a time of rupture from a superior past. Historical course was radically disrupted; past and present are disjunct.

Time is out of joint, from the perspectives of both the Analects and the Mozi. In this light, we can appreciate the politics of both texts as driven by a desire to overcome this perceived historical discontinuity. In the Mozi, the exhortation to deduce and abide by the intentions of Heaven comes with the promise that we will be reunited with a long line of sage-kings who succeeded in doing so from distant antiquity. By adhering to the exact same transhistorical standard that they too discovered in the past, we will simply be re-establishing and furthering the order that they created. A new genealogy of sagely individuals is therefore forged, stretching from the distant past to the present. Its membership is not defined by blood ties but by one’s proper understanding of Heaven.

The Analects’ attempt at re-establishing historical continuity is subtler and more circumscribed in its scope. If its strategy is to look back in time and deliberate upon a particular cultural practice to follow, the present would always be an extension of particular pieces of the past. The text does valorize a certain idea of historical continuity, as Confucius himself declares a preference for transmission (shu) over creation (zuo).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Compared to the Mozi, however, this re-established historical continuity in the Analects is much more tenuous and fragmentary. It is contingent on particular individuals, mediated by their idiosyncratic preferences for historical precedents. And in the end, even in the most ideal scenario, there can never be a perfect continuity between the past and present. This is because, for the Analects, the past was always already broken into many separate pieces, an imperfectly recollected repertoire of disparate cultural forms and practices. It does not appeal to anything like the idea of Heaven in the Mozi, which enables the identification and integration of specific historical moments and individuals into a single overarching genealogy that we can help extend into the present. In the Analects, the best that one can hope for is a modular type of historical continuity, where the present is informed by an individual’s interpretation of a choice piece of the past.

Pervasive angst over this perceived historical rupture between the past and present informed the politics of the Analects and the Mozi. In their attempts to re-establish some sense of historical continuity for their world, and to imagine a more orderly and flourishing future, they both looked to the past. In the cultural past of the Analects, we are directed to curate past practices for emulation in the present; in the etiological past of the Mozi, we act as investigators in search of the root cause of our affliction and the components of a good order as dictated by Heaven. Neither saw much use anymore in the genealogical past that was once instrumental to the cultivation of political authority of the late Bronze Age aristocratic order of the Western Zhou.