Common Sense Philosophy/Chapter 20

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Chapter 20: What the East Got Right and Wrong -- Confucius, Mencius, Buddhist Ethics

Beyond Orientalism, Beyond Apology

The Western philosophical tradition, as the previous chapter argued, has produced indispensable tools for thinking about justice, liberty, and human dignity -- and has simultaneously suffered from a provincialism so deep that it often mistakes its own particular insights for universal truths. The corrective is not to abandon the Western tradition but to engage seriously with traditions that have developed different insights, different blind spots, and different pathologies.

This chapter examines the major philosophical traditions of Asia -- Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and selected elements of Hindu thought -- with the same combination of respect and ruthlessness that the previous chapter applied to Western thinkers. The goal is neither Orientalist exoticization ("the mysterious East has deeper wisdom than the superficial West") nor apologetic dismissal ("Eastern philosophy is really just religion or poetry, not rigorous thought"). Both attitudes are condescending, and both are wrong.

The traditions examined here are as intellectually rigorous as anything produced in Athens or Konigsberg. They are also, like all human intellectual traditions, products of specific historical circumstances, shaped by specific power relations, and marked by specific failures of moral imagination. To pretend otherwise -- to treat Confucius as a sage beyond criticism or Buddhism as a philosophy without dark chapters -- is not respect but a different form of condescension: the refusal to take other traditions seriously enough to criticize them.

Confucius: The Relational Self

Ren and the Priority of Relationships

The central concept of Confucian ethics is ren (仁) -- a term variously translated as "benevolence," "humaneness," "compassion," or "goodness." None of these translations is adequate, because ren is not a single virtue but an orientation: the disposition to treat others with the care, respect, and attentiveness that their relationship to you demands. Ren is not an abstract principle that applies to all persons equally regardless of context. It is a relational quality that manifests differently depending on whether you are dealing with a parent, a child, a friend, a ruler, a stranger, or an enemy.

This is a genuine philosophical insight, and one that corrects a real deficiency in the Western tradition. Kantian ethics, as noted in the previous chapter, treats the moral agent as a disembodied rational will and moral obligations as universal and impartial. But real human beings are not disembodied rational wills. They are embedded in networks of relationships -- familial, communal, professional, civic -- that generate obligations, expectations, and forms of care that are not reducible to universal principles. The parent who treats her own children with exactly the same care she gives to strangers is not being impartially just; she is being a bad parent. The friend who refuses to give special consideration to his friends on the grounds that impartiality requires treating everyone equally is not being morally superior; he is failing to understand what friendship is.

Confucius understood this. The five fundamental relationships (wulun 五伦) -- ruler-minister, parent-child, husband-wife, elder-younger sibling, and friend-friend -- are not merely social conventions but the structural conditions of moral life. Morality, on this view, is not a set of abstract rules that rational agents apply to situations; it is a quality of relationships that is cultivated through practice, attention, and self-cultivation (xiuyang 修养).

The Confucian emphasis on education (jiao 教) is equally valuable. Confucius insisted, against the aristocratic assumptions of his time, that virtue is not inherited but learned -- that anyone, regardless of birth, can become a junzi (君子), a person of moral cultivation. The Analects are, among other things, a manual of moral education, and their pedagogical insights -- learning by doing, learning through relationship with a teacher, learning as a lifelong process rather than a finite acquisition -- remain profoundly relevant.

Hierarchy as Weakness

But Confucian relational ethics has a structural flaw that has had devastating historical consequences: it is inextricably bound up with hierarchy.

The five relationships are not relationships between equals. Four of the five are explicitly hierarchical: ruler over minister, parent over child, husband over wife, elder over younger. Only the fifth -- friendship -- is a relationship between equals. And even in friendship, Confucius emphasized the importance of associating with moral superiors rather than moral inferiors, which introduces a hierarchical element into the one egalitarian relationship.

The hierarchical structure of Confucian ethics was not incidental to Confucius's thought. It was central. Confucius lived in a period of political chaos (the late Spring and Autumn period, sixth and fifth centuries BCE), and his philosophical project was fundamentally conservative: to restore the social order of the early Zhou dynasty, which he idealized as a golden age of harmonious governance. The five relationships, with their carefully calibrated obligations of deference and care, were the building blocks of this restored order.

The consequences have been profound and, in many cases, terrible. Confucian filial piety (xiao 孝) -- the obligation of children to obey, serve, and honor their parents -- has been one of the most powerful forces shaping East Asian societies for two and a half millennia. At its best, it produces families characterized by mutual care, respect across generations, and deep emotional bonds. At its worst, it produces authoritarian family structures in which children -- especially daughters -- are denied autonomy, forced into unwanted marriages, subjected to physical and psychological abuse, and taught that obedience is a higher virtue than independent judgment.

The extension of filial piety from the family to the state -- the analogy between the ruler-minister relationship and the parent-child relationship -- has provided philosophical legitimacy to some of the most oppressive political systems in East Asian history. If the ruler is like a father and the subjects are like children, then political obedience is a moral duty of the same kind as filial obedience, and political dissent is a form of moral failure analogous to filial impiety. This analogy has been explicitly invoked by Chinese emperors, Confucian bureaucrats, and -- in the twentieth century -- authoritarian leaders from Chiang Kai-shek to Lee Kuan Yew to justify the suppression of political opposition and the restriction of individual liberty.

The treatment of women in the Confucian tradition is another area of deep and consequential failure. The "three obediences" (sancong 三从) -- obedience to father before marriage, to husband during marriage, and to son in widowhood -- reduce women to permanent subordination within a patriarchal hierarchy. While Confucius himself said relatively little about women, the Confucian tradition that developed after him -- particularly as codified in the Book of Rites (Liji), the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing), and later Confucian texts -- constructed an elaborate ideology of female subordination that has shaped gender relations in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam for centuries.

What Common Sense Takes from Confucius

The relational insight: that morality is not merely a matter of abstract principles but of the quality of relationships. The educational imperative: that virtue must be cultivated through lifelong learning. The concept of ren as humaneness in action -- not mere sentiment but practiced care for others.

What Common Sense rejects: the hierarchical structure, the conflation of political authority with paternal authority, the subordination of women, and the tendency to treat social harmony as a higher value than individual liberty.

Mencius: Moral Psychology and the Seeds of Goodness

Mencius (Mengzi 孟子, c. 372-289 BCE), Confucius's most important philosophical heir, made a contribution that is arguably more relevant to this book's project than anything in Confucius himself: the theory that human nature is fundamentally good.

The theory is not naive. Mencius did not claim that people are always good or that goodness comes easily. His claim was subtler and more interesting: that every human being possesses what he called "four sprouts" (siduan 四端) -- innate dispositions toward compassion (ceyin 恻隐), shame (xiuwu 羞恶), deference (cirang 辞让), and moral discernment (shifei 是非) -- that, if properly cultivated, develop into the four cardinal virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom.

The famous "child at the well" thought experiment illustrates the point: anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well will feel an immediate impulse of alarm and compassion -- not because they want a reward, not because they want to impress the child's parents, not because they want to avoid the sound of the child's cries, but because the compassionate response is spontaneous, natural, and universal. This is the "sprout" of benevolence.

This is a powerful and empirically plausible claim. Modern developmental psychology -- the work of Paul Bloom, Michael Tomasello, and others on the moral capacities of infants and young children -- has largely confirmed Mencius's intuition. Human beings do appear to possess innate moral dispositions -- a capacity for empathy, a sense of fairness, a tendency toward prosocial behavior -- that emerge very early in development and that do not require explicit instruction, though they do require cultivation.

Mencius's political philosophy -- the "mandate of heaven" (tianming 天命) doctrine -- also contains a revolutionary element that is often overlooked. The mandate of heaven is not a divine right of kings. It is a conditional authorization: the ruler governs legitimately only so long as he governs well. When a ruler becomes tyrannical, the mandate passes to whoever can overthrow him and govern better. Mencius explicitly argued that killing a tyrant is not regicide but the righteous elimination of a "mere fellow" (yifu 一夫) who has forfeited his claim to authority.

This is not democracy, but it is not simple authoritarianism either. It is a theory of political legitimacy based on performance -- a theory that provides grounds for resistance against unjust rule and that implicitly acknowledges that political authority derives its legitimacy from the welfare of the governed. It is, in its way, closer to the social contract tradition of Locke and Rousseau than to the divine right of kings that prevailed in European political thought until the seventeenth century.

What Common Sense takes from Mencius: the claim that human beings have innate moral capacities that require cultivation, the conditional theory of political legitimacy, and the revolutionary implication that unjust rulers forfeit their right to rule. What it notes with caution: Mencius, like Confucius, embedded these insights within a hierarchical social framework that limited their emancipatory potential.

Buddhism: Compassion and Detachment

The Reduction of Suffering

Buddhism's central insight -- that life is characterized by suffering (dukkha), that suffering arises from craving and attachment, and that the cessation of suffering is possible through the cultivation of wisdom and compassion -- is one of the most profound philosophical achievements in human history. It is also, for the purposes of this book, the Eastern tradition most closely aligned with the Common Sense framework.

The reason is straightforward. This book has argued, from Chapter 5 onward, that the reduction of avoidable suffering is the most fundamental marker of civilizational progress. Buddhism arrived at a similar conclusion twenty-five centuries ago, but by a different route. Where Common Sense approaches suffering empirically -- by examining the measurable conditions that produce and alleviate it -- Buddhism approaches it phenomenologically, through the first-person investigation of the nature of experience itself.

The Buddhist analysis of suffering is not mere pessimism. It is a diagnostic framework of remarkable sophistication. The Four Noble Truths -- suffering exists, suffering has causes, suffering can cease, and there is a path to its cessation -- have the logical structure of a medical diagnosis: symptom, etiology, prognosis, treatment. The Eightfold Path -- right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration -- is not a set of commandments but a practical program for the transformation of consciousness.

Buddhist compassion (karuna) -- the commitment to the alleviation of suffering in all sentient beings -- is a moral orientation of extraordinary power. Unlike Confucian benevolence, which is calibrated to relationships, Buddhist compassion is universal: it extends to all beings capable of suffering, without distinction of species, status, or relationship. The bodhisattva ideal -- the commitment to remain in the cycle of rebirth until all sentient beings have been liberated from suffering -- is one of the most demanding ethical ideals ever formulated, and one of the most beautiful.

Buddhist ethics also has the advantage of being, in principle, non-dogmatic. The Buddha himself, according to the Pali canon, instructed his followers not to accept teachings on the basis of tradition, authority, or logical reasoning alone, but to test them against their own experience and accept only what they found to be true and beneficial. The Kalama Sutta -- sometimes called "the Buddha's charter of free inquiry" -- is a remarkable document of intellectual freedom, and one that places Buddhism closer to the Enlightenment tradition of critical inquiry than to the faith-based traditions of Abrahamic religion.

Detachment and the Problem of Social Engagement

But Buddhism's emphasis on detachment from the world -- on the transcendence of desire, on the cessation of craving, on the recognition that all conditioned phenomena are impermanent and ultimately unsatisfying -- creates a tension with the demands of social and political engagement that this book cannot overlook.

If the root of suffering is craving, and the solution is the cessation of craving, then the most consistent Buddhist response to injustice is not to fight it but to transcend the desire that it be otherwise. If all conditioned phenomena are impermanent, then political institutions, social structures, and material conditions are ultimately unreal -- and the energy spent trying to change them might be better directed toward the transformation of consciousness. If the goal is nirvana -- the cessation of the cycle of birth and death -- then worldly activism, however well-intentioned, is at best a preliminary practice and at worst a distraction from the real work of liberation.

This quietistic tendency is not merely theoretical. Throughout history, Buddhist institutions have frequently accommodated themselves to political power, from the court Buddhism of the Sinhalese kingdoms to the alliance between Zen Buddhism and Japanese militarism in the twentieth century. Brian Victoria's Zen at War documents in devastating detail how prominent Zen masters supported Japanese imperialism, justified killing as compatible with Buddhist teaching, and provided spiritual legitimation for some of the most brutal military campaigns in modern history.

The contemporary "Engaged Buddhism" movement -- associated with Thich Nhat Hanh, Sulak Sivaraksa, and the Dalai Lama -- represents a serious attempt to overcome this quietistic tendency by reinterpreting Buddhist teaching as a mandate for social action. Thich Nhat Hanh's concept of "interbeing" -- the recognition that individual liberation is inseparable from collective liberation -- is a powerful corrective to the individualistic interpretation of Buddhist practice.

But Engaged Buddhism remains a minority position within the broader Buddhist world, and the tension between detachment and engagement has not been fully resolved. The question of whether Buddhism can provide the motivational resources for sustained social activism -- the anger at injustice, the passionate commitment to change, the willingness to fight for a better world -- without betraying its own deepest insights about the nature of suffering and the futility of craving, remains open.

What Common Sense takes from Buddhism: the centrality of suffering reduction, the universality of compassion, the non-dogmatic approach to truth, and the emphasis on mindful self-examination. What it rejects: the quietistic implications of detachment, the tendency toward political accommodation, and the metaphysical framework (karma, rebirth, nirvana) that cannot be empirically verified.

Daoism: Naturalness and Political Quietism

Wuwei and the Critique of Artificiality

Daoism -- the tradition associated with the Daodejing (attributed to Laozi) and the Zhuangzi -- offers the most radical critique of civilizational ambition in the Chinese philosophical tradition, and possibly in the history of philosophy.

The central concept is wuwei (无为) -- "non-action" or, more accurately, "effortless action" or "action without forcing." The claim is not that one should do nothing but that the best action is action that flows naturally, without coercion, without artifice, without the imposition of rigid plans on a reality that is inherently fluid and unpredictable. Water, the recurring metaphor in the Daodejing, does not force its way through obstacles; it flows around them, finding the path of least resistance, and in doing so achieves more than any amount of force could accomplish.

This is a genuinely valuable corrective to the Confucian (and Western) tendency to think of progress as something that must be engineered, planned, and imposed. The Daoist insight -- that complex systems often function best when they are left to self-organize, that intervention frequently produces unintended consequences worse than the problem it was meant to solve, that the desire to control is itself a source of suffering and disorder -- has been vindicated by complexity science, ecological systems theory, and the history of planned economies and societies.

The Zhuangzi adds a dimension of intellectual freedom that is unique in the Chinese philosophical tradition. Zhuangzi's famous dream of the butterfly -- "Am I Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am Zhuangzi?" -- is not merely a charming anecdote but a profound epistemological meditation on the limits of certainty and the perspectival nature of knowledge. Zhuangzi's celebration of spontaneity, his mockery of the Confucian obsession with ritual and propriety, his insistence that the Dao cannot be captured in words or concepts -- these are expressions of an intellectual freedom that has no exact parallel in the Confucian or Buddhist traditions.

The Danger of Political Quietism

But the Daoist critique of civilizational ambition carries a danger that must be honestly acknowledged: it can become a justification for political passivity.

If the best government is the government that governs least, then the logical conclusion is that the best government is no government at all -- and in the meantime, any government, however oppressive, can be tolerated as just another manifestation of the natural order. If the desire to change the world is itself a form of the attachment that produces suffering, then the activist who fights for justice is as misguided as the tyrant she opposes -- both are caught in the futile attempt to impose their will on a reality that resists imposition.

This quietistic reading of Daoism is not a distortion. It is present in the texts themselves. The Daodejing repeatedly advocates a style of governance in which the ruler does as little as possible and the people are kept simple, ignorant, and content -- a political vision that is less anarchist utopia than pastoral authoritarianism. "The sage governs by emptying people's minds and filling their bellies, weakening their wills and strengthening their bones" -- this is not a formula for liberation but for pacification.

The historical record is instructive. Daoist philosophy has rarely, if ever, served as a foundation for social justice movements. It has served, frequently, as a consolation for those who have given up on social justice -- a philosophy of withdrawal, resignation, and private cultivation in the face of public injustice. This is understandable -- the political conditions of imperial China often made activism suicidal rather than merely difficult -- but it is not admirable.

What Common Sense takes from Daoism: the critique of overconfident planning, the respect for complexity and unintended consequences, the celebration of intellectual freedom and the limits of conceptual knowledge. What it rejects: the political quietism, the idealization of simplicity and ignorance, and the implicit nihilism that treats all human projects as equally futile.

Hindu Philosophy: Karma, Dharma, and Ahimsa

The Problem of Karma

Hindu philosophy -- a tradition of extraordinary richness, spanning from the Vedic hymns (c. 1500 BCE) through the Upanishads, the epics, the six orthodox schools (darshana), and the modern reformers -- resists summary even more than the traditions already discussed. A comprehensive treatment would require a separate volume. Here I will focus on two concepts that are directly relevant to the concerns of this book: karma and ahimsa.

Karma -- the principle that every action produces consequences that determine the agent's future condition, including the conditions of future rebirth -- is, in its philosophical form, a sophisticated theory of moral causation. The idea that actions have consequences, that moral choices shape character, and that the quality of one's life is related to the quality of one's conduct is not merely plausible but obvious. To this extent, the karma doctrine is simply the moral equivalent of the scientific principle of cause and effect.

But the karma doctrine, as it has actually functioned in Indian society, has produced consequences that are morally catastrophic. The most devastating is its use to justify the caste system. If your social position is the result of actions in a previous life, then the untouchable who cleans latrines deserves his degradation, the Brahmin who enjoys privilege deserves his elevation, and the entire structure of caste hierarchy is not a human institution that can be criticized and changed but a cosmic moral order that reflects the accumulated karma of individuals across lifetimes. This is a perfect ideology of oppression: it locates the cause of suffering in the sufferer and thereby absolves the social system of responsibility.

B. R. Ambedkar -- the Dalit jurist who was the principal architect of India's constitution and who converted to Buddhism in protest against Hindu caste ideology -- understood this with devastating clarity. "The cardinal principles of Hinduism," he wrote, "are: graded inequality, fixity of occupations, and the fixity of people in occupational classes." Karma, in Ambedkar's analysis, was the metaphysical cement that held this system of graded inequality together.

The reform movements within Hinduism -- from Ram Mohan Roy's Brahmo Samaj to Gandhi's campaign against untouchability to contemporary Dalit activism -- have attempted to separate the moral core of the karma doctrine from its caste-justifying applications. But the connection is not accidental. A doctrine that explains present suffering as the consequence of past moral failure inevitably produces complacency toward that suffering. If the poor are poor because of their karma, then helping them is, at best, an act of charity and, at worst, an interference with the moral order of the universe.

Ahimsa: The Principle of Non-Violence

Ahimsa (अहिंसा) -- non-violence or non-harm -- is a concept that originates in the heterodox (non-Vedic) traditions of Jainism and Buddhism but was incorporated into Hindu thought and brought to world attention by Mahatma Gandhi. It is, in my judgment, one of the most important ethical concepts in the history of human thought.

The principle is simple: do not cause unnecessary harm to any living being. The implications are profound. Applied rigorously, ahimsa challenges not merely interpersonal violence but the institutions that produce violence: war, capital punishment, factory farming, environmental destruction. Gandhi's genius was to recognize that ahimsa was not merely a personal virtue but a political strategy -- that non-violent resistance (satyagraha, "truth-force") could challenge political oppression more effectively than armed struggle, because it exposed the violence of the oppressor without replicating it.

Ahimsa, as a principle, is directly compatible with the Common Sense framework. The reduction of avoidable suffering -- this book's primary civilizational marker -- is simply ahimsa translated into institutional terms. The difference is one of emphasis: ahimsa is primarily a personal virtue, while Common Sense demands institutional structures that reduce harm regardless of individual virtue.

What Common Sense takes from Hindu philosophy: the principle of ahimsa as a fundamental ethical commitment, the recognition that actions have moral consequences, and the rich traditions of philosophical argumentation (particularly the logical rigor of the Nyaya school). What it rejects: the use of karma to justify social hierarchy, the metaphysical framework that places cosmic order above individual welfare, and the caste system as one of the most durable systems of institutionalized oppression in human history.

Synthesis: What the Eastern Traditions Contribute

Drawing the threads together, what do the Eastern traditions contribute to the Common Sense project?

First, a corrective to Western individualism. The Confucian emphasis on relationships, the Buddhist emphasis on interdependence, and the Hindu emphasis on cosmic interconnection all challenge the Western liberal assumption that the autonomous individual is the basic unit of moral and political life. Human beings are not atoms. They are nodes in networks of relationship, and any adequate ethics must account for this.

Second, a richer moral psychology. Mencius's "four sprouts," the Buddhist analysis of the kleshas (mental afflictions), and the Daoist emphasis on spontaneity and naturalness all provide insights into the moral life that the Western tradition, with its emphasis on rational principle and conscious choice, has tended to neglect.

Third, a deeper understanding of suffering. The Buddhist analysis of dukkha -- its causes, its forms, its cessation -- remains the most sophisticated phenomenology of suffering in the philosophical literature. Common Sense is primarily concerned with institutional and material conditions of suffering; Buddhism reminds us that the inner dimension of suffering -- the ways in which the mind creates and perpetuates its own unhappiness -- is equally important.

Fourth, a critique of civilizational hubris. The Daoist insistence on humility before complexity, the Buddhist insistence on impermanence, and the Confucian emphasis on continuous self-cultivation all serve as correctives to the Western Enlightenment's overconfident faith in progress, planning, and rational control.

But the Eastern traditions also have shared limitations that Common Sense must acknowledge. The most important is the insufficient development of institutional safeguards against tyranny. Western political philosophy -- from Locke's separation of powers to Madison's checks and balances to Rawls's constitutional essentials -- has developed sophisticated mechanisms for constraining political power. The Eastern traditions, with some exceptions (Mencius's mandate of heaven, certain Buddhist texts on just governance), have tended to rely on the virtue of rulers rather than the design of institutions. And as the historical record amply demonstrates, virtue without institutional constraint is an unreliable foundation for justice.

The second shared limitation is the treatment of women. Confucian patriarchy, Buddhist misogyny (the claim, present in some early texts, that women must be reborn as men before achieving enlightenment), Hindu patriarchal norms, and the gender hierarchies embedded in all these traditions represent failures of moral imagination that their own best principles should have prevented.

The task, then, is not to choose between Eastern and Western traditions but to take the best of each and subject the worst of each to honest critique. That is the project of Common Sense: not a Western philosophy or an Eastern philosophy but a human philosophy -- one that draws on the full range of human philosophical achievement and refuses to exempt any tradition from the standards of evidence, reason, and compassion that all traditions, at their best, have endorsed.