Journeys | Confucius, the Fongyi Academy and Cijin Island

Shashwat
Oct 21
4 min read

Updated: Oct 23

Kaohsiung faces the strait, and cranes crisscross the mostly blue skies with paint-coated metal bars. Boats, ships, ferries, and the occasional coast guard patrol rip through the waters that have been the site of much staring down between will, fate, and destiny.

Since the late seventeen hundreds, many from the eastern seaboard have made the journey across rough seas and dire straits. Some have come from Fujian, yet others from many other places on the long shore and the deeper interiors of the continent and islands. They have brought their language and worldviews. Some imposed it with metal, others learnt to live with the confluence at the meeting of peoples and cultures, rivers of time.

On the world map, an Island seems like a small place. Who knows where we learnt to correlate size with significance. How else do we explain the paralytic calm at the annihilation of worlds teeming with life just because they seem small or insignificant from our perspective.

Ask any astronaut, or anyone who gazes at the stars, just how small are our perspectives. Or, take a look at the picture of the earth taken by Voyager, suspended like a mote of dust in a beam of light, a pale blue dot where, Carl Sagan writes, “every superstar and every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived”.

Of the many carried on the waves to its shores are the Hakka people. The Chinese word is Ke Jia Ren (客家人), literally, the guest family people. Sometimes the illusion of our seemingly long lives may convince us otherwise but all of us are just that, Guest Family People, on the face of this earth, a guest planet, revolving around a guest star, the Sun, here for a while, destined to go out.

The Confucians saw something of the need to bring us face to face with this reality that becomes obfuscated because of the blinders we have grown accustomed to wear: blinders of our self-importance, blinders of greed, hatred and delusion. They are not so much interested in imparting knowledge about this or that, but a moral and ethical cultivation of the spirit.

There are no definitions in the Analects, but illustrations that serve as examples, in the hope that we may get to experience the moon and let go of the finger that points in its direction. When asked what ren (仁) is, Confucius does not define it as a concept but indexes where the qualities of benevolence may be found.

Imparted as such, the idea of education is to unshackle the mind and imagination and nourish it with humaneness and kindness towards ourselves and others. In the process, it prepares one for continuous encounter with an ever-changing world to which we are ready to respond not because we have read some theories but because we have cultivated our spirit.

But the graves of all good ideas are dug by institutions that seek to standardize them, and in doing so, bleed them dry of life and vitality. From such a need to standardize is born the bureaucracy, the imperial examination, and the totalitarian world of Hanfei, of which we are unsuspecting denizens.

It might come as a surprise to some of you that Hanfei, a philosopher whom you may not have heard of, is the architect of the world in which we dwell. He did not think highly of human capacity for moral and ethical cultivation. Though he learnt from an eminent Confucian, Xunzi, Hanfei’s bleak view of human nature led him to devise a maze where we are reduced to measures, metrics and binary choices, like switches.

There is a right choice to be rewarded, and a wrong choice to be punished. And that is pretty much all that befalls the lot of a bureaucrat, according to Hanfei. We find echoes of Hanfei throughout the centuries – in the Arthashastra, in The Prince, in Hobbes, and among the many realists of international relations who turn their personal malaise into symptoms of human nature, reducing us all into tiny little bureaucrats of Hanfei's estimation. It is not a long leap, then, from Hanfei’s bureaucrat to Eichmann. The road to hell is paved with death of benevolence.

My friend and I visit the Fongyi Academy in Kaohsiung. It was built during the Qing rule as a site for imperial examinations. Now that the examinations have ceased, it is a joyful sight whose caricatures of student life make you smile with flickers of remembrance, and its quiet halls, temples, and corridors allow a respite of the mind enough for silence and reflection.

Bright sun casts sharp shadows, we linger, listen to a video narration in a classroom, sit in a spot where somebody might have sat down to take an examination that could be the road to upward social mobility. I think of the millions who squander years of their life in India, preparing for examinations, in the same hope of same upward social mobility. Economics has mastered the art of selling tragedies as profundities.

‘If there are three people,’ Confucius says, ‘there must be one who is my teacher.’ He knew we must not look away from what is right before us to nurture the spirit. Yet that is what Confucians in the wake of Confucius have built, a rigidity of spirit, a schism of the self with the world, and institutions of empire. Hu Shih once quipped that India sent two poisons to China, Opium and the Buddha. But the choicest poison happens to be a Chinese invention, the bureaucracy of Hanfei’s imagination and the Kafkaesque life of man under it, who wakes up one morning to find himself become a cockroach who is not so different from those Hanfei deemed vermin to be eliminated.

A wind blows and carries us on a ferry, across the bay, to Cijin. We walk under lanes canopied with fish-shaped lanterns, buy and sip a cup of coffee. The sea foams and ripples. Other wanderers echo our footsteps, and we echo theirs. Road to the sandy beach is a night market, the first one I happen upon in Taiwan. Soon, night markets will become a fascination, almost a place of weekly pilgrimage across so many parts of so many cities on the island.