THE ARTS: A new Parisian exhibition collects what little physical evidence there is of the great Chinese philosopher Confucius, writes Lara Marlowe
They said it was impossible to organise an exhibition about Confucius, but Jean-Paul Desroches, a curator at the Guimet Museum of Asian Art, in Paris, refused to be discouraged.
Nearly 2,500 years have passed since Kongfuze, or Kong the Master ("Confucius" is a Latinised version), died in what is now the Shandong province of China. As Desroches admits, Confucius wrote nothing. "But then neither did Socrates, who was almost his contemporary, or Jesus." Confucius's tomb and the surrounding sanctuary, larger than the Forbidden City, was destroyed and rebuilt 62 times. It is the only physical trace of him, and scholars doubt his bones really lie there. Portraits and statues of Confucius, all executed centuries after his death, are not reliable likenesses. Even his famous book Analects is a semi-apocryphal collection of sayings and anecdotes, recorded by disciples after his death.
So why was Desroches so determined that France's national museum of Asian art celebrate the country's Year of China with a homage to Kong the Master? "He's the only person who came down through China's entire history, through all the dynasties," the curator says. "Everyone has heard of him. Everyone quotes him but few have a clear idea of what he represents."
Learning is the alpha and omega of Confucianism. Kong believed that man was infinitely perfectible through education. The principle took root across Asia as Confucianism spread to Japan, Korea and Vietnam. This explains, Desroches says, why Asian students perform so well at US universities.
In China, Confucianism created a class of mandarins, or senior civil servants. Ten million men were recruited and trained over 20 centuries - the biggest intellectual community in world history - until the system was stopped, in 1906.
The Guimet exhibition includes a gallery of civil servants' portraits from 13 generations of the same family. After 1000, the wives of the men wearing red robes and goatees also posed. The images were placed around altars, in the ritual of ancestor worship.
By the second century BC, Confucianism was proclaimed China's official religion. It was literally etched in stone on 46 stelae, or slabs, in the city of Luoyang, for the benefit of students preparing for imperial exams. But Luoyang was sacked and the stone books broken into pieces, some of which can be seen at the Guimet museum. So deeply was the need to record Confucius's wisdom felt that the laborious stone engravings were repeated six times between the second and 18th centuries.
Kong the Master would probably have objected to being called "the perfect saint" by his biographer Sima Qian, 300 years after his death. Though he was an agnostic, his thoughts were construed as a religion. "He said that earthly problems were so difficult to resolve that it was better not to talk about the hereafter," says Desroches.
Confucius was one of the first humanists. When his disciples asked him what he meant by the word ren, or humanity, "loving others" was his answer. "Is not living what one has learned at all times the source of great pleasure?" he asked in the first saying of the Analects. "Is not the greatest joy receiving a friend who has travelled from afar? Is not being unrecognised by men without taking offence the mark of a good man?"
If Confucius attributed great importance to ritual, it was because he saw Chinese traditions as a form of self-discipline and a way of binding families and community together. Funeral rites had no value if those who performed them did not feel loss, Confucius said. But at the same time they were essential to prevent individuals closing themselves off in their grief.
Learning and harmonious relations with others were what made people human, he said. And the most important relationship was obeisance to one's father and ancestors.
To explain these rites, a set of seven bronze recipients for celebrating the cult of ancestors is shown at the beginning of the exhibition. They were made long before Confucius was born, during the late Shang dynasty in the 13th to 12th centuries BC. The dead were believed to have the same needs as the living, so to maintain contact with their spirits it was important to prepare meals for them.
Leibniz and Voltaire, philosophers of the Enlightenment, saw a parallel between Confucius's concept of the junzi, or man of quality, and the honnête homme, or gentleman. Jesuit missionaries brought Kong's teachings from China, along with the oldest surviving portrait of Confucius. It is a red ink rubbing made in the 17th century from a 12th-century stone engraving, which was itself a copy of a seventh-century painting. The red portrait, which is the emblem for the Confucius exhibition, was given to Louis XIV by the Jesuits. All other copies, and the stone it was made from, were lost.
The junzi had to be proficient in six arts: rituals (including dancing), music (Confucius was himself an accomplished lute player), calligraphy, mathematics, the bow and arrow and chariot driving. The most impressive of the artefacts chosen by the Guimet museum to symbolise these arts is an exquisite statue of a horse, chariot and groom from the second- century Han dynasty.
Confucius was born in 551 BC to a 15-year-old mother who had prayed for a baby boy. His father, already over 60, died when Confucius was three. Mother and son were poor but proud of the family's aristocratic lineage.
Confucius grew up during the era of "spring and autumn", when feudal Chinese warlords constantly fought one another. As a counsellor to noblemen, Confucius tried to stop the barbarism. Around the age of 50, he despaired of politics and devoted the rest of his life to teaching his disciples.
Confucius's belief in the supremacy of intellect over force and conviction that learning, not inherited privilege, should determine a man's place in society are still relevant today. He embodied "the shift from a divine, magical understanding of the world to a rational, human understanding", Desroches says. "For the first time, man - not the gods, demigods and other heroes - was the focus of reflection. Confucius talked about the here and now."
After the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s Mao Zedong tried to wipe out Confucianism, because he believed it perpetuated ancient ruling classes. Desroches, who was a student in China then, was required to take part in symbolic stonings of the portraits of Lin Biao, who had hoped to succeed Mao but died in a plane crash, and Confucius. The Chinese peasants who were ordered to chant "pi-Lin, pi-Kong" ("down with Lin, down with Kong") told Desroches to imitate them in adding softly at the end "pi-Ku" ("my ass"). Mao died, but Confucius lived on in the minds of the Chinese.
In 1989, a few months after the repression of demonstrations on Tiananmen Square, they knew the rehabilitation of Kong the Master was complete when Jiang Zemin, who had just become party chairman, attended a ceremony commemorating 2,450 years of Confucius.
