Historical Narrative and Universal Principles in the Confucian Classics

In his magnum opus Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan, Nakamura Hajime (1912-) suggested that the Chinese way of thinking, which prefers particular, concrete, and intuitive explanations, can be seen in the Chinese way of using examples to explain ideas. To most Chinese, he added, ethics is not understood or taught as a matter of universal laws, but is grasped on the basis of particular examples, which are then used to realize human truth. ¹ In line with Nakamura’s observation, Yoshikawa Kojiro (1904-1980) noted that the major parts of the Five Classics describe specific incidents and statements of particulars; they do not state general principles of human behavior. ² This paper offers a counterargument to this characterization of Chinese thought, and argues that in the Confucian classics the narration of concrete historical facts (in particular the deeds of paradigmatic individuals) is intricately and inseparably bound together with the justification of abstract, universal patterns or principles such as dao (way) and li (pattern). Thus the universality found in the Confucian classics is in fact a form of “concrete universality.”