The subprefect complains of "'Masterless wanderers...'" (p. 36) who:
do no useful work;
beg;
wheedle;
claim tremendous powers;
are said to have cured the sick, exorcised demons, raised the dead etc;
avail themselves of men's purses and women's bodies;
convince their victims that this is the Way;
then move elsewhere.
How many such charlatans have there been?
This is an interesting perspective: society runs as it should only if everyone either has or is a "master"? Yes. That was the idea for a long time.
I knew a guy called Jim who claimed to have founded a new philosophy but it turned out to be a joke.
The new philosophy: attachment to anything material prevents spiritual liberation.
The way to liberation: give all your property to Jim who will self-sacrificingly take all this bad karma on himself.
My doctrinal amendment: everyone's sacrifice will have been in vain unless Jim consumes all of the wealth himself. (He thought that maybe he needed my help with the doctrines. I replied that I would need my cut and he responded that this would be ok.)
Please do not take any of the above seriously!
4 comments:
Note that the teachings of Confucius have dominated Chinese bureaucrats for a long, long time -- in disguise, even during much of the Communist period.
That was why Mao launched his effort at disruption and the Great Leap Forward in the early 60's (which led to unprecedented famine, btw); he saw China fossilizing into a slightly disguised new imperial period.
And Confucians wanted stable, orderly people from stable, orderly families -- a place for everyone and everyone in his place.
Taoist mystics, OTOH, were essentially anti-order in the sense Confucians understood it.
Eg., the overthrow of the Han dynasty in the late 2nd century CE was engineered by Taoists who organized and led the Yellow Turban peasant revolt.
That failed and was crushed -- as is usual for peasant uprisings.
But the successful generals who crushed it became warlords and then declared themselves kings, leading to the Three Kingdoms period and a long interval of civil war in Chibna.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I won't take what you wrote here seriously. But I was reminded of Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, or even the SF writer L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. With Mohammed the only one I believe was not a deliberate, knowing charlatan. And we have seen many such frauds in recent centuries.
Mr. Stirling: Very interesting! Yes, I can see a degraded form of "Confucianism," stripped of its genuinely noble elements, affecting how the Maoists misruled China.
Yes, the Latter Han was fatally weakened by the Yellow Turban rebellion. It led to de facto military rule by generals like Tsao Tsao, whose son force the last Han Emperor to abdicate.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Oddly enough, the names and identities of the Taoists who organized the Yellow Turban rebellion are known... which is a factor in my MAKE THE DARKNESS LIGHT time-travel series. And the names of the generals who defeated the uprising and then turned on the dynasty are known too.
BTW, people don't appreciate how much the Chinese language has changed since then.
Old Chinese, the tail-end of which was coterminous with the Eastern/Later Han, had no tonal system. And it sounded completely different -- the word "jue", which means "two pieces of jade" in modern Mandarin, was then pronounced kw'rock, for example.
Even more different than English is from proto-Germanic.
The fact that the Chinese script isn't alphabetic disguises this.
Of course, the Later Han was over 600 years after the death of Confucius. China be -old-.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Bureaucratic thoroughness and the Chinese passion for historiography (e.g., the 24 dynastic histories) explains why so much is still known about the Yellow Turban leaders and the faithless generals of the Latter Han.
I've been finding out a bit about the complexities of spoken Chinese in the last part of TO TURN THE TIDE.
Pharaohnic Egypt was even older than China. But the Arab/Muslim conquest eventually led to the original people and Coptic language of Egypt being suppressed. The real Egyptians, Coptic Christians, is a despised and oppressed minority.
Ad astra! Sean
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