The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery.

• Author: Csikszentmihalyi, Mark

To read Robert Eno's The Confucian Creation in Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery and not come across numerous interpretations and conclusions that one disagrees with strongly is not to have read it very carefully. Eno explicitly sets out to revise the "traditional portrait" of early Confucianism, and although there are many instances where Eno's provocative new portrait is no more convincing than the traditions he seeks to displace, in the end Eno's work is notable for the sheer multitude of original, controversial, and at times insightful twists he gives to Confucius, Mencius, and Hsun Tzu.

The book is really two works in one. The heart of the book, and, one assumes, the author's original undertaking, is a careful examination of the use of the character t'ien |Chinese characters~, Heaven, in early Ruist texts (the term Ruist is used throughout most of the book to translate the term ju-chia |Chinese characters~, but not in the title). Appended to this core is a more speculative description of the social and theoretical project of the Ruists, a project which Eno argues is centered around the performance of li |Chinese characters~, or ritual.

The book's portrait of Ruist ritual is rather colorful, albeit somewhat caricatured. In Eno's account, Ruists are notable for their "obsession with li: their archaic dress and scrupulous bearing, their precise speech, their tendency to gather and bring out their zithers, chant poetry, and practice ceremonial dance". The use of such terms as "obsession," "cult," and "eccentric" in describing the Ruists seems calculated to catch the reader's eye. While there do exist descriptions supporting this portrait, especially in the partisan attacks of the Mo Tzu, the evidence for such quirky behavior is rather thin. This is made especially apparent to the reader because Eno's much more precise and well-documented examination of the role of Heaven follows this section directly.

To dwell on the sensationalism of the descriptions is, however, to leave unexamined the underlying claims about the centrality of ritual for Confucius and his followers. On this subject, Eno acknowledges his debt to Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred but elaborates Fingarette's thesis in original ways. One of the claims Eno makes is that Ruist doctrine was organized around two "radically disjoined" halves: ritual self-cultivation and political withdrawal. Leaving aside for the moment the controversial...