Conscious and unconscious placing of ritual (Li) and humanity (Ren).

Neville, Robert Cummings

This essay in contemporary cross-cultural Confucian philosophy raises a question unlikely to arise from either Chinese Confucianism or Western philosophy alone. The Confucian tradition from ancient times has said that both ritual (Li) and humanity (Ren) need to be learned and practiced so much that they become spontaneous responses. Western philosophers would rightly understand this as a kind of learning that requires conscious attention at first but that becomes habituated with practice, like learning to ride a bicycle or being kind to elderly strangers. In addition, however, Western culture understands unconscious behavior to have a structure of its own that sometimes is at odds with the structure of conscious life. Two principal lineages of the Western point about the unconscious have currency now. One is the Freudian, emphasizing unconscious psychological structures that cause us to do things other than what we consciously intend or think we are doing. The other is the Marxist, emphasizing real economic motivations based on social location and class structure that are often different from our conscious motivations structured by a self-serving ideology.

Both Western senses of the unconscious call for a Confucian rectification of names. With regard to the psychological sense of the unconscious, the Confucian project of embedding ritual and humanity in the deepest center of the person requires a transformation of unconscious structures. The techniques of ritual learning and becoming humane are Confucian contributions to psychodynamic procedures for transforming the unconscious, especially transforming it so that it does not mislead or betray important conscious intentions. With regard to the Marxist sociological sense of the unconscious, the Confucian project of education in ritual and humanity requires a transformation of our conscious structures and categories so that we admit honestly our true motivations stemming from social location and come to terms with them. The Confucian tradition also, of course, emphasizes the transformation of social structures and personal social location, although that is a different point from the one I am making here. The sagely project of becoming sincere (Cheng) requires a contemporary Confucian to think through the tasks of transforming the psychological unconscious, so as to be reconciled with conscious intentions, and transforming conscious beliefs about motives that are ideological in disguising real socially structured motivations.

A final preliminary word should be said about why the Confucian virtues of ritual propriety and humaneness are so important in the contemporary world. As in Confucius' time, our world is sorely lacking in rituals needed for diplomacy, for common courtesy among persons and nations of different religions, and for harmonizing societies whose citizens have genuinely different interests and social locations. Part of the contemporary Confucian agenda is the identification and criticism of the dysfunctional rituals that are in place and the areas where rituals are simply lacking. A related part of the agenda is to devise, institutionalize, and teach improved rituals that address the situation. The contemporary promotion of the Confucian virtue of humaneness is especially important now because Confucianism is one of the two influential traditions to emphasize human responsibility for social structures as well as personal action. The other tradition is Western Enlightenment thought that has become attached to the rationalism of the capitalist market economy, which is inhumane. Should capitalists seek to limit their rational profit-making in order to promote justice and humanity in some circumstance, they are ideologically self-deceived because the market is against them. The real market decisions are made by the millions of investors around the world, large and small, who move financial investments by way of the internet to the places that maximize profit. Should a company choose to lower its profit in order to be humane, anonymous investments will be moved away from its production to some other company. Capitalism is not about to be dislodged soon as the world's economic system, and the alternative systems seem so much worse. Perhaps a Confucian promotion of humaneness can be integrated with the practice of market capitalism.

1. Ritual and Humanity

Ritual and humanity are extremely complicated practices within the Confucian tradition or, better, the Confucian traditions. (1) Diverse as Confucianism has become over the centuries, every branch of it needs to give an interpretation of ritual and humanity as cardinal virtues. With the different contributions of such a diverse heritage, the conceptions of ritual and humanity are impossible to describe accurately in a brief compass. As we apply them to new circumstances in global societies, outside the East Asian social and family context in which they originated, those virtues are made even richer. A brief word, however abstract, can indicate their importance.

If we ask what Confucius actually did, the most straightforward answer was that he ran a traveling school for teaching young men rituals for all phases of life, quite a different model from Plato's and Aristotle's seminar system. (2) What was the point of centering a school around the teaching of ritual? Confucius thought the calamitous times in which he lived suffered from such a decay of the ritual structure of life that harmonious and prosperous living was simply impossible. Because the rituals of government and public life had declined, only warlords could keep a peace that was dubious at best. Because the rituals of economic exchange within a deeply divided class society had broken down, the economy was unproductive, and distribution was unjust. Because the rituals of family life had been neglected, people failed to learn how to be humane. Good rituals make possible civilized life. Without good rituals, no matter what the intent or how good the will of people with different interests, civilized life is impossible, according to Confucius. His points about the degeneracy of ritual in government, community, and family life have close analogues today.

The theoretical underpinnings of the ancient Confucian approach to ritual were expressed by Xunzi. According to Xunzi, the natural endowments given to human beings by Heaven and Earth are underdetermined and require human conventions or rituals to give them civilized determination. (3) For instance, our bodies are capable of a very wide range of movements, yet we need to learn and teach our young certain specific ways of walking, eating, making eye contact, and speaking. It matters little whether we walk toes straight forward or angled, eat with forks or chopsticks, greet people with bold eye contact or a deferential downward glance, or speak English or Chinese, as long as we in our community share some one way that works. Higher-level rituals make friendship possible and allow families, communities, and large empires to accommodate different needs, to integrate divergent people into a harmonious social dance, and to provide leisure, deference, and respect so that the arts and practices of high culture can flourish.

Xunzi pointed out that two kinds of ritual learning pretty much take care of themselves. The starry heavens move slowly around us, and we cannot do anything about that except to respond with rituals of admiring deference; many religious rituals today have to do with simple awe and gratitude for the fundamental constitution of the universe. At the other extreme, the peasant society of Xunzi's time had rituals for coping with seasonal life that were learned with the mother's milk, as it were, from direct encounter, like learning a language; just about everybody today learns some language, though not all learn the subtleties so as to express themselves well. In between these extremes are the large problems of social life, such as droughts, floods, and sudden attacks from marauding barbarians. For these, the individuals, communities, and especially governments have to develop ritual institutions of coping. Clearly, today we need to think about rituals for such problems as ecological management, international diplomacy, and global economic interactions, for we do not have successful ones. Politics sometimes is about particular actions, but more often it is about policies and laws that institutionalize rituals, say for the care of the newborn or elderly, for dealing with breaches of contract, for public care of transportation, safety, the economy, and the like.

Western culture since the Enlightenment has had a love affair with grounding human values in nature, so that it has often viewed convention or ritual as merely artificial. The Confucians have the better understanding in their claim that the human completes Heaven and Earth or, to put it in Western terms, that nature needs to be supplemented by human convention or ritual in order to attain to the values of deep civilization. In fact, ritual behavior, especially in family life, was essential to the development of the current human biology that requires a long dependent nurturing period.

Humaneness (Ren), the other Confucian virtue under scrutiny here, seems initially to be more familiar to Western notions. Ren has often been translated "love," with associations with the Christian virtue. The Christian virtue of love is extraordinarily complicated, and good parallels exist at many points. Zhu Xi's "Treatise on Ren" gives it an ontological function similar to the Christian sense that God's creating and loving are the same. (4) Ren has also been translated as "human heartedness," a kind of feeling for others and the whole cosmos that best manifests human greatness and sensitivity. Roger Ames and David Hall translated it as "authoritative conduct or person." (5) Ren also has similarities to the Buddhist notion of compassion, particularly when the Confucian project of "becoming one body with the universe" is in mind.

What is distinctive about the Confucian virtue of humaneness comes from the institution where it primarily is learned, the family. In one sense a person learns to love by coming to understand how his or her parents love him or her. But, in another sense that is closer to the Confucian family practice--you begin to love mainly as a parent. Everyone automatically, almost biologically, loves a baby. As the baby becomes a child, you learn more complicated modes of loving through teaching discipline and coping with that fast-moving and fast-talking bundle of qi. Learning to love your adolescent child requires enormous patience and far greater subtlety. You love your grown children through educating them and setting them up in life, and then they leave you. You have to love them when they do that, too. Your love is full only when you bring up your children so that they are free and virtuous. From their standpoint, the obligation of filial piety is not only to take care of you when you get old, but to become so virtuous themselves that you are released from your obligation to bring them up well: A virtuous grown child sets his or her parents free. Of course a child cannot be fully virtuous, fully humane (Ren) without raising children of his or her own, so the parents' learning to be humane requires at least two more generations. To be sure, not everyone has an extended family or children, or even living parents, and the Confucian glorification of the family is overly romantic on one hand and bordering on totalitarian on the other. Many analogies for families exist in the social order, however.

The upshot of taking the family as the prime analogue for learning humaneness is that the Confucian virtue requires regarding other people as embedded in a multi-generational stream and individuated through a host of social relations that change with different stages of life. Confucian humaneness does not regard people only according to the situation, but construes that situation to be a focus within a field of a much more complex interactive life for those people, and indeed to be an incident in the life of those people that has a past and, hopefully, a future. To put the point more strongly, Confucian humaneness treats as merely abstract the here-and-now situation of others and rejects the vision of others as merely in the situation. It insists that the other persons in the situation be addressed in terms of their larger life history and social network. To be humane to another person is to watch for the clues to that person's whole identity, past and future, filled with these relations and those. To be humane is to defer to that person's larger identity than appears in the situation and to respond appreciatively to the whole.

Capitalism, according to Adam Smith's "invisible hand" theory, makes everyone better off than they were otherwise: The poor get wages they otherwise would not have, the rich get richer, and no one is forced to choose anything among real options that would not be to his or her advantage as best perceived in the economic situation. Confucian humaneness rejects this philosophy of the "optimizing choice points." It says that the real values in the choice points cannot be discerned without taking into account the network of social and cultural relations, the place in the life span of people, and the personal and communal participation in a multi-generational group. Very often, what is best for the individual in terms of contributions to the lives of others affected by his or her actions and for growth in stages of life might not be the choice that optimizes profit. Capitalism brutalizes the sensitivity to life's choices that a Confucian with humane virtue would make. Confucian humaneness can civilize capitalist definitions of optimizing profit.

Both ritual and humaneness can be described externally as behaviors. They also need to be acknowledged as matters of the heart. Mature ritual mastery and humaneness are spontaneous and fresh. Therefore, we must look to their subjective embeddedness.

II. The Freudian Unconscious

Confucian ritual mastery and mature humaneness need to spring from the heart. In the case of ritual mastery this involves first learning the ritual and then practicing it so much that it becomes a matter of unconscious and automatic habit. Rituals are learned in complex ways. Sometimes they are learned unconsciously by imitation, as children [earn to walk and speak without realizing that they are doing so. Often we learn relatively isolated bits of ritual behavior, without realizing until later (if ever) that those bits fit into a larger ritual dance. The Marxist point about ideological self-deception puts a special twist on this common failure to appreciate the extent of the ritual in which we are involved. Sometimes we learn a ritual through a self-conscious search for a pattern of behavior that lets us interact with others, as when we first visit a foreign culture and look for ways to greet people, find lodging and food, buy and sell, without offending them. Actions such as eye contact, body posture, volume of voice, and proximity of approach to people that mean one thing in our own ritual patterns might mean very different things in theirs. When whole cultures interact, as the Muslim and Western cultures are doing with such danger in our day, new integrative rituals need to be devised that respect the differences but enable both sides to dance together. Sometimes rituals are learned in the very invention of them.

A ritual mastered to the point of habit fits in with the other habits of a person's life, or of a group's life for that matter. It needs to be compatible with the other habits already ingrained or to alter those habits so as to make a place for itself. A person's life is articulated by a very great many habits, interpreting aspects of reality and responding in habituated ways. Some of these are tightly connected, others less so. Because habits do engage reality and receive feedback, they are often changing and reshaping themselves. So, for a new habit to fit in with the old ones is not just to find a place but also to find a balancing point so as to keep abreast of the changes in all the other habits. Often habits are contradictory to one another and yet buffered by other habits. For instance, a person can have the habit of being deferential and kind to elderly people and also have the habit of being demeaning to people of another race, with a contradiction in the treatment of elderly people of the other race. Avoiding elderly people of the other race buffers the contradiction. Where confrontation occurs, one habit must give way to the other.

Many situations in life are so filled with ambiguities that the inconsistencies among our habitual responses are bearable. Our social rituals are often inconsistent, speaking respectfully, for instance, while standing in a disrespectful posture. Part of maturity of ritual mastery is making the ritual behaviors consistent. The higher forms of ritual provide behavioral patterns for being able to sustain many kinds of inconsistency such as those rituals that allow us to interact productively with people we hate, whose culture and social location are different from ours, whose objective interests compete with ours, and whom we misunderstand. Many of the paradigms of rituals come from court rituals that allow social inter-course to proceed productively despite various forms of deception, disagreement, hate, and intrigue: "courtesy" (from "court" rituals) does not require that you love your partners as your family.

The Freudian point about the unconscious, however, is that, whereas you consciously believe that you love your family, your unconscious feelings about them are filled with infantile aggressions, jealousies, resentments, slights, and desires to dominate or submit, murder or copulate. The unconscious has a structure of its own, a primary or infantile process that reflects your drive to life reacting to the persons, events, and situations that comprise your context. For most people, the unconscious has an extremely selfish infantile orientation to motives with regard to people, events, and situations. Its habits are not acceptable at the conscious level and are expressed in overt action and speech only "by mistake," in what we, half humorously, call "Freudian slips." Freud's model was that the conscious ego is captivated by an acceptable story it tells itself about proper feelings and motivations, with proper images of other significant people, events and situations. The alternative, unacceptable, unconscious structure of feeling and motivations keeps up a relentless pressure for expression, however, and sometimes breaks through.

A contemporary Confucian contribution is to see ritual as integrating the conscious and unconscious, motivationally different, sets of habits. At a superficial level we have many rituals that allow the underside its day in the light, a time of carnival, a ritualized drinking party, vicarious aggression toward those we unconsciously resent and hate through war or sports, even more through sports fanaticism. By jokes about "Freudian slips" we even ritually make acceptable in polite social intercourse the unacceptable feelings of the unconscious.

The Confucian point, however, is to modify the unacceptable unconscious feelings themselves by having those feelings participate in rituals of harmonization. The psychodynamic Freudian mechanism for modifying the unacceptable unconscious feelings has been to get them expressed and understood in a controlled environment, such as psychoanalytic treatment. This mechanism has not been very successful, and often the goal of treatment is just to learn to live with the unacceptable feelings. The Confucian tradition, too, has emphasized self-analysis and discernment. Nevertheless, it has also emphasized practices of harmonious meditation, movement, and the development of skills such as calligraphy for the purpose of tranquilizing the violent contradictions of the unconscious heart. The ritualized practice of harmonious feeling and movement can bring infantile rage into peaceful repose. Of course, all this must be embedded in larger patterns of harmonious social and personal life, but that, too, is part of the Confucian project.

The next turn in this Confucian argument is to note that the harmonization of the unconscious is itself a condition for making ritual mastery spontaneous. To the degree that the unconscious forces in a person run counter to the social rituals that engage others harmoniously, the person cannot play those social rituals from the heart. Of course, the social rituals can be played, but with a kind of hollowness or false consciousness. This is not a bad thing. It is far better to play productive social rituals hypocritically than not to play them at all. Most of the time we do not realize that we are playing the rituals with a false consciousness and just behave automatically. But, even when we are thrown into a kind of self-loathing by the recognition that we are pretending to respect those we despise, it is a good thing to bear the self-loathing if the situation is made better by the playing of the ritual.

Nevertheless, the cost of self-integration and personal harmony is very high if we cannot participate in important social rituals without self-loathing or a feeling of inner contradiction. For that reason it is important to engage in the rituals that modify the infantile aggressive unconscious so that it harmonizes with the playing of the larger rituals in social life to which we are called. Although a person who has not brought unconscious feelings to harmony with the whole of life can play social rituals successfully, that play cannot be spontaneous as coming from the heart. Often other people will detect this and distrust the maturity of the person's ritual mastery. The Confucian project for this situation is to bring the unconscious into harmony with the whole.

At this point a comment is appropriate about the Confucianism of this argument. Since the Song and Ming Neo-Confucians, it has been common to place Mencius above Xunzi, which means, among other things, placing humaneness above ritual propriety. Tu Wei-ming, a contemporary Confucian in Boston, represents the Mencian line when he argues that humaneness is innate and that ritual is its externalized expression. (6) The argument in this essay, by contrast, comes to humaneness through ritual. Like Xunzi, the Freudian perspective sees the infantile stage of human life and the unconscious infantile part of mature personality to be selfish and in great need of harmonization. Mencius was right that the heart can respond to things in their aesthetic and moral worth when it sees them with clear discernment. He was right that its responses in turn are harmonious and appropriate under the conditions of action that is direct and at ease with itself and the world. However, those conditions, clear discernment, and direct action constitute sincerity (Cheng) and are not natively given. They are the great accomplishments of the sage. Xunzi was right that the developing mastery of rituals is part of the means by which sincerity is accomplished.

As to humaneness in the unconscious, the unconscious needs to be brought into harmony if the heart is to be humane and express itself in humane attitudes and behavior. The West has had two principal models of love, which is part of Confucian humaneness. The Platonic model is that the loveliness in the object arouses eros in the lover. The Freudian model is that love, or sexual energy, is a force within the individual looking for an object on which to cathect. The Confucian model of the self combines both points in a broader picture. The heart innately is the special, Heavenly endowed, human nature that is capable of grasping the worth of things and responding appropriately. On the one hand are the ten thousand things with values to be understood and respected. On the other hand is the heart that can appreciate those values and respond so as to create value and respect the values of the things affected. The grave human difficulty is clearing the path between the heart and the ten thousand things so that they can be seen for what they are worth and so that the heart's responsive actions can be carried out without deflection.

Many obstacles of personality, emotions, cognition, and even physical development, usually summarized as "selfishness" by Confucians, lie in that path. Mencians emphasize the fact that the heart would automatically perceive and respond well if society had not taught selfishness. Xunzians counter that the connection between the ten thousand things and the heart itself needs to be created by appropriate rituals or habitual meaning structures. If the learned rituals are bad, selfishness is reinforced. But, if the person is relatively unritualized, the heart will be like the baby's infantile selfishness. The way to create a path between the world and the heart necessarily includes teaching civilizing rituals. Learning to be humane through the raising of children--and analogues to this, as mentioned earlier--needs to be supplemented by learning the rituals that allow the learner to relate with sincerity to those to be loved. Ritual, of course, is not the whole of learning, but it is a significant part.

III. The Marxist Unconscious

The Marxist point about the unconscious does not focus on the infantile feelings of primary process but, rather, on the real but unacknowledged motivations for behavior that result from social location. Social location is a function of social class, Marx said, and social class is a function of economic structure. In Marx's view the main classes were the owners of the means of production and those who owned nothing but their work and, hence, subsisted on wages. Marxists and other thinkers have made this view of social class far more complex than Marx's original version, but the general point still stands: much of our behavior is motivated unconsciously by the interests of our social location, which includes not only economic class differences but also cultural and age differences. Because the crude selfishness of social-location interest is unacceptable and because we have to get along with others in competing social locations, our conscious thoughts about social relations are captivated by fictions that disguise the real motivations.

The result is that many of us live within a story of morality, social justice, and often religion that seems to give us moral projects and a righteous direction but that, in fact, justifies or leaves untouched real evils of social injustice. Marx was concerned that the poor would be misled by religion to accept their economic condition and that the rich would think they were being moral by doling out charities to people whose poverty was, in fact, was caused by the system that provided most advantages to the rich. The point can be generalized. Some American Christians use the religious ideology of righteousness to justify attacking so-called "evil" Muslim nations with assertive governments when the real motivations are Western dominance for the sake of oil. Some Muslim fundamentalists use the religious ideology of righteousness and divine will for Muslim law to justify attacking the Great Satans of the West when the real motivations are control of the oil and their economy and a longing for lost empire. Most of us live lives motivated in significant ways by unconscious desires for advancement and dominance that are covered over by visions of the roles we play in moral society. In countless ways, the usually unconscious interests determined by our social location give us a false consciousness.

Marx was right that religion often is the teacher and reinforcer of the false consciousness of social location. He put too much emphasis on the theological or ideological parts of religion, however: The effective power of religion to produce false consciousness of social location lies in ritual. Religious rituals usually rehearse a certain approved stereotype of what social relations are, and people come to see those approved relations instead of the actual relations of competition and conflict among social locations. Moreover, many other areas of life involve rituals expressive of ideal social relations. The economic, artistic, entertainment, political, and neighborhood spheres of life are just as ritualized as the religious, and many rehearse the idealized relations of false consciousness as effectively as the religious sphere. In secular societies, those other spheres are far more important ritualizers than religion.

The first Confucian contribution to the problem of ritualized reinforcement of false consciousness of social location is through the analysis of the rituals actually being played. Because of its millennia-long emphasis on rituals and their meaning, Confucians should be adept at discerning just what the rituals do. In line with the Confucian theme of the "rectification of names," rituals need to acknowledge not only differences in social location but also the injustices embodied in systems that allow certain social locations to oppress or exploit others. Marx's analysis, brilliant for its time, is far too unsubtle to grasp the intricacies of exploitation and oppression. Confucians in our time should bring their tradition to bear upon improving his analysis.

Perhaps the most obvious "ritual" act in recent history that exposes, expresses, and reharmonizes injustice between social locations is the "Truth and Reconciliation Trials" in South Africa. In these encounters, staged in public before judges, members of the white South African apparatus for enforcing apartheid were forced to listen to their black victims describe their torture and oppression. The oppressors had to see what they had done from the standpoint of the oppressed. The oppressed, who had been silenced and marginalized so as to become non-people, were able to make their stories heard. The ritualized character of the proceedings allowed the deep emotions to be expressed in purging but peaceful ways. In societies as filled with confusions and injustices as ours, as riddled with secret corruptions and lies, many rituals are needed to bring to light those evils of bad relations among social locations. Not only should they be brought to light, but they should be ritually examined, confessed, and amended. We need Confucian rituals of reconciliation, and those rituals need to be woven through the other rituals of religious, economic, political, artistic, entertainment, and neighborhood spheres of life. This is the second Confucian contribution regarding rituals of overcoming false consciousness.

Confucian humaneness demands that honesty about conflicts among social locations be achieved. False consciousness is a great evil because, among other things, it prevents people from seeing the humanity in persons who occupy competing social locations. Or, rather, it presents a false picture of their humanity, one that does not express the aspects of oppressing and being oppressed that their social location bears. There is a huge and wicked false consciousness in "loving everyone" but not being able to see the details of the consequences of social location in the particular people around oneself. As argued above, humaneness requires knowing people not only in the roles they play in specific situations but also in their life histories and networks. Social location is part of life history and social networking.

In the contemporary world, in any place on the globe, to be humane is, among other things, to be able to relate to people in terms of the truth of their social location, especially as it is defined by one's own location. On the surface, this means being able to stand in the other person's perspective, to see how one looks from someone else's vantage point. More deeply it means having the scientific and historical knowledge to understand the causal connections that constitute interrelated social locations in their economic, political, ethnic, historical, religious, educational, artistic, and other dimensions. Precisely because of Marx's point about the self-deception involved in the ideologies arising from social locations, the other person's own perspective might not be any more truthful about the realities of the social locations than one's own. Pressing forward to genuine humaneness often requires complicated and difficult inquiry. Whereas learning to love one's own children might be the root from which humaneness grows, learning the realities of people very different from ourselves requires study--and often personal change--so as to be able to accept what we learn about other people and our relations to them.

IV. Summary

This essay has sketched how a contemporary Confucian approach to ritual and humaneness might deal with the issues of the unconscious as they have been introduced by Freud on the one hand and Marx on the other. The operative word in that last sentence is "sketched." No rituals have been devised, and humaneness has been articulated as only an ideal. Nevertheless, the essay gives some direction to a Confucianism that grapples with a global society of conflicting cultures, classes, and interests.

(1) Most Western philosophers in the twentieth century, especially those in the analytic tradition, became acquainted with Confucianism as a technical philosophy through Herbert Fingarette's Confucius--The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

(2) See Robert Eno's The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990).

(3) Xunzi discussed ritual throughout his work Perhaps the best discussions are in books 17 and 19 of his writings, translated by John Knoblock as Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, voI. 3, Books 17-32 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). See Edward Machle's Nature and Heaven in the Xunzi: A Study of the Tian Lun (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993) for a close reading of the chapter on nature. My own summary remarks about ritual in this essay are greatly amplified in Robert Cummings Neville, Normative Cultures (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), chap. 7.

(4) A good English translation is in Wing-tsit Chan's A Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).

(5) See the interesting discussion of translation in the "Glossary of Key Terms" in Roger T. Ames and David Hall, Daodejing: "Making This Life Significant"--A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003). pp. 55-71.

(6) See Tu Wei-ming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought, repr. with a new foreword (Boston, MA: Cheng and Tsui Co., 1998; orig.-Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1979, [c] 1978), chap. 2. See my discussion of his theory of ritual and humanity in the foreword. The school of Boston Confucianism to which Tu and I belong has two branches. The one north of the Charles River (at Harvard) emphasizes the Mencian tradition, whereas the one south of the Charles (at Boston University) emphasizes Xunzi's tradition on the point of ritual. These differences are only matters of emphasis.