The late Professor Carl Becker of Cornell University once told me that he had on the door of his office this quotation from the Confucian Analects (論語): “Hui gives me no assistance. There is nothing that I say which does not please him.”

Hui was Yen Hui (顏回), the most gifted student of Confucius. The Master on many occasions had no hesitation in regarding Yen Hui as his best student. Yet, he had this one grievance against him: Yen Hui was pleased with everything the Master said—and never questioned or doubted what he said. Therefore, said Confucius, “Hui gives me no assistance.” Becker was so impressed by this passage that he had it posted on the door of his office for all his students to read.

What Confucius expected of his favorite students was the exercise of the right to doubt, to question, and not to be pleased or satisfied with whatever a great master or authority might say. Confucius himself fully exemplified this right to doubt in his teaching. On several occasions, he expressed satisfaction that his students were able to “come back” at him and to “stir me up.”

One of the burning questions of the time was the religious question as to whether dead people had knowledge and feelings. The basic idea underlying the ancient rites of burying expensive utensils and even living human beings with the dead was the belief that a man might retain knowledge and feelings after death. Confucius and his school were quite definite in advocating the use of “token utensils” (ming ch’i 明器), such as “clay carriages and straw effigies,” for burial. “What a pity,” said Confucius, “that the dead should be expected to use the real objects intended for the living! Would that not be Page 277 →tantamount to killing human beings to be buried with the dead? It is inhuman even to make ‘burial puppets’ which are lifelike, for would that not be too close to using real human beings to accompany the dead?”

This question was fully discussed in the “Book of T’ankung” (檀弓), which is linguistically contemporaneous with the Analects. In the Analects, Confucius took an explicitly humanistic and agnostic stand on the question. When a student asked how to serve the gods and the spirits, Confucius said: “We have not yet learned how to serve man; how can we serve the ghosts?” The same student then asked, “What is death?” The Master said: “We do not know life; how do we know death?”

On another occasion, he said to the same student: “Yu (由), shall I teach you what it is to know? To say that you know when you do know, and that do not know when you do not know—that is knowledge.”

This Confucian skepticism was no denial of the possibility of all knowledge, but a frank admission that there are things which we do not or cannot know. It was an assertion of the right to doubt—to maintain an attitude of courageous doubt even in matters traditionally regarded as sacred or sacrosanct.

This seemingly harmless agnosticism was probably more revolutionary than we can now realize. Probably it was meant to be an intellectual veil or shield for a denial of human intelligence after death, and a denial of the existence or reality of all gods, spirits, and ghosts. And probably it was a shield for the more radical naturalistic conception of the universe, as already taught by Lao Tzu (老子) and apparently accepted by Confucius—a conception of the universe in which Nature (t’ien 天) does nothing and yet leaves nothing undone and in which the gods and the spirits play no role and exert no influence.

In the Book of Mo Tzu (墨子), it was definitely recorded that a follower of the school of Confucius actually maintained that there were no gods or spirits. And Confucius himself not only actually used the phrase “government by doing nothing,” but also said, “What does Heaven (t’ien 天) say? All seasons go on and all things grow. What does Heaven say?” And it must be remembered that the naturalistic conception of the universe was eloquently propounded by such an influential Confucian thinker as Hsün Tzu (荀子) in the third century B.C., who said: “The course of Nature (t’ien) is constant. It does not exist for a benevolent ruler like Yao, nor does it cease to work for a despotic ruler like Chieh.”

In short, it was the spirit of doubt—of what Goethe called “creative Page 278 →doubt”—which initiated, inaugurated, and animated the classical age of Chinese thought, the age of Lao Tzu and Confucius, down to Mencius (孟子), Chuang Tzu (莊子), Hsün Tzu, and Han-fei (韓非).

Lao Tzu doubted almost everything: he doubted the benevolence of Heaven and postulated a naturalistic universe; he doubted the efficacy of war and resistance to evil and taught five centuries before Jesus of Nazareth the doctrine that he who resists not is irresistible; he doubted the usefulness of too many laws and too much government, and taught a political philosophy of wu-wei (無為), of doing nothing, of non-interference, of laissez faire; he doubted the utility of all the artificiality and over-refinement of civilization and advocated a return to the simplicity of the state of Nature, in which human inventions “that multiplied the power of man by ten times or a hundred times” shall not be used and man will discard all writing and restore the use of the knotted cords.

Confucius doubted the survival of human intelligence after death and taught man to be intellectually honest and to be contented with services to man. He also doubted the validity of class distinctions and taught a democratic philosophy of education, that men are near to each other by nature, that only practice sets them apart, and that “with education there will be no classes.”

Of the great founders of Chinese classical thought, Mo Tzu was the exception that proved the rule. Mo Tzu doubted the doubters, and wanted to restore faith and belief in the traditional religion of the people—the religion of gods and spirits. He believed that all evil came from doubt, from freedom of thought and belief, especially from diversity in standards of right and wrong. Therefore, Mo Tzu taught the authoritarian doctrine of “Upward Unification” or “Upward Conformity” (shang t’ung尚同) of right and wrong—that “what those above believe to be right must be accepted as right by all those below and that what those above regarded as wrong must be regarded by all those below as wrong.” And the people, hearing of any wrong notion or conduct, must not fail to report it to the authority above. This was called the doctrine of “Upward Unification,” which sounds alarmingly similar to what is now more eulogistically termed “democratic centralism.”

Mo Tzu’s religion of Upward Unification did not exterminate all doubters. The age of Yang Chu (楊朱), Mencius, Hui Shih (惠施), Chuang Tzu, and Hsün Tzu testified that the torch of creative doubt was carried on undimmed and undiminished throughout the fourth and third centuries B.C. To quote two of these great doubters, Mencius and Chuang Tzu: Mencius, the democraticPage 279 → philosopher who believed in the goodness of the nature of man, said: “The great man is he who cannot be corrupted by wealth and honors, cannot be budged by poverty and lowliness, and cannot be bent by power and authority.” And Chuang Tzu, the greatest skeptic of all skeptics, declared: “Even though the entire world sings my praise, I am not a bit more persuaded. Even though the entire world condemns me, I am not a bit more dissuaded.”

It was this spirit of courageous doubt which survived the military conquest, the totalitarian regime, the book-burning, and the great persecution of private teaching under the Ch’in Empire in the last decades of the third century B.C., and which survived and blossomed in the post-classical age of Han (漢) thought—most notably in the critical philosophy of the great Wang Ch’ung (王充) (A.D. 27–100).

Wang Ch’ung was probably the greatest doubter in the entire history of Chinese thought. He, like Lao Tzu, doubted almost everything, including Confucius, Mencius, and the fundamental beliefs of the State-patronized religion of Han Confucianism. He left some 84 essays, which he called Lun-heng (論衡), literally meaning “Essays of Weighing and Measuring,” that is, “Essays in Criticism.” He says of these essays, “These scores of essays can be summed up in one sentence: I hate untruth.”

This ends my brief paper on “The Right to Doubt in Ancient Chinese Thought.” In conclusion, I would like to cite a challenging passage from Professor Kenneth Scott Latourette, who, in reviewing Dr. Wing-tsit Chan’s (陳榮捷) Religious Trends in Modern China, has raised this challenging question:

Why is it that, of the advanced cultures upon which the West has impinged in the past four hundred and fifty years, that of China has suffered the greatest disintegration? Of the high civilizations, namely, those of the Muslim world, of India, of the smaller Buddhist countries, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, . . . and Outer Mongolia, of Japan and of China, that of China has undergone the most profound and sweeping changes. Where are the causes to be found? Are they in the older civilization of China? Can it be that the responsibility must be laid at the door of Confucianism and the manner in which it was inculcated and perpetuated, especially after the T’ang [618–907] or must the reason be sought elsewhere?

I shall attempt to offer an answer to Latourette’s question as the conclusion to this paper.

Page 280 →I presume that by “the most profound and sweeping changes” Latourette did not mean what has been going on in continental China during the past few years, which certainly are not voluntary changes, but temporary barbarization brought about by military conquest.

If by those changes he meant the voluntary changes which have come about, first very slowly and only in the last half-century very rapidly, throughout the four hundred years since the first coming of the Portuguese trader and missionary—then my answer is: The causes are to be sought and found in the thought and civilization of China, and in particular in what I have here discussed as the spirit of doubt, which has ingrained itself in the Chinese mentality ever since the days of Lao Tzu and Confucius. This spirit of doubt has always manifested itself in every age in a critical examination of our own civilization and its ideas and institutions. Such self-critical examination of one’s own civilization is the prerequisite without which no “profound and sweeping” cultural changes are ever possible in any country with an old civilization. All such great and fundamental changes in the history of China—whether they be the result of China’s own reformers or the natural outcome of China’s coming into long contact with a foreign culture—have always been brought about by a critical examination of the older civilization and a profound dissatisfaction with its institutions.

Let us remember how sweepingly Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu criticized and condemned the civilization of their own times. Let us remember how zealously Confucius and almost all the Confucians upheld the utopian social and political ideas of the Golden Age in remote antiquity as the criteria by which to compare and criticize their own age.

And, leaving out the great founders of Chinese Buddhism in the third and fourth centuries A.D., let us remember how the early Chinese Christians like Hsü Kuang-ch’i (徐光啓) and his friends thought that their small Christian community in seventeenth-century China was comparable to the best society of the great Three Dynasties. And let us remember the early admirers of the West—from Wang T’ao (王韜) down to K’ang Yu-wei (康有為)—they, too, were thinking that the modern civilization of the West, in the words of Wang T’ao, “embodied the best ideals of our classical antiquity.”

And, needless to add, the leaders of the intellectual and cultural renaissance of the last sixty years have been men who knew their own cultural heritage intimately but also critically, and who had the moral and intellectual courage to criticize and condemn its weaknesses and shortcomings.

Page 281 →It is therefore the Chinese spirit of doubt and self-criticism which has made possible those voluntary though often “profound and sweeping” cultural changes in China. And I may add that it is the very absence of this tradition of doubt and self-criticism which has made such changes impossible in practically all those other Asian countries mentioned by Latourette in his review.