Real Life with Ryuei

A Response to the Politics of Despair

I have been reading online the expressions of outrage and despair coming from some in regard to the outcome of the elections. For now, I am not going to refrain from commenting on the election itself. Rather, I would like to address the despair by sharing the perspective I have been reflecting on over the past few days.

Lately I have been wrestling with Rissho Ankoku Ron and in order to understand parts of it, it has become necessary to gie myself a crash course in Confucianism. So I have been doing nothing but reading about and thinking about Confucianism for a couple of weeks now. In reading various translations of the Analects, Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean one thing has become apparent to me - Confucius and Mencius lived in a political and social climate the "sucked beyond the telling of it" (as Buffy once said about her life). There was actual anarchy and chaos, with the fuedal princes constantly fighting each other, the ministers fighting to control the princes, every clan and even every man (the women didn't count at all) out for himself. People suffered in numbers that would still make the front page of the news even today. No one was interested in even paying lip service to good government. And despite all this, Confucius and Mencius never gave up but persisted in believing that people were perfectable, that Heaven had endowed people with a good nature, and that virtue would eventually triumph over selfishness and shortsightedness. Hundreds of years after their deaths China was united by the tyranical Shih-huang-ti who followed one of the most evil philophies the world has ever seen - Legalism. He and his men slaughtered and tortured any who stood in their way in order to unite China and bring an end to the fighting. They brooked no rivals and killed and banished all the Confucianists and burned all their books. But in the end, just as Confucius or Mencius would have predicted, this dynasty sowed the seeds of its own destruction and didn't even last two decades. It was replaced by the Han dynasty. Under the Han, Confucianism became the ideology of the state and the classics that had been burned were more or less recovered. Civil service examinations were set up to create a meritocracy to replace the law of the fishes which had governed China until then (e.i. the biggest eats the smallest, might is right). So in the end, their efforts paid off even though they did not live to see it, and their optimism and emphasis on benevolence at least tempered those who ruled in the future even if their ideals were never fully realized. I think, like Confucius and Mencius, we should cultivate the same optimism and big picture outlook and never stop striving to create at least within ourselves and among our own friends and family a Way of living that will set a standard for the future - even if it means a lot of soul searching and reformation on our own part.

Here is a quote from the Analects that I find relevant here:

14.38 Zilu spent the night at Stone Gate. The morning gatekeeper asked him, "Where are you from?" "From the residence of Confucius," replied Zilu. "Isn't he the one who keeps trying although he knows that it is in vain?" asked the gatekeeper.

In the first episode of the fourth season of Angel, here is what Angel told his wayward son Conner: "Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It's harsh and cruel. That's why there's us. Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be."

I think Confucius and Mencius would have approved of the vampire-with-a-soul's words.

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei

Posted by at November 3, 2004 02:57 PM