INTRODUCTION

The king is a sage, and the sage has semi-divine attributes, and the ability to maintain communication with the divine. This, in short, is what we have been talking about in the first two chapters: a sage-king paradigm from the remote past in Chinese history. In the time that followed, this paradigm continued to have relevance, while it was also being appropriated and transformed.

I shall discuss first the appropriation of the sage-king paradigm by scholars and in the name of philosophy. We start with Confucius and his early followers. But we shall not limit ourselves to a description of how this happened and what it meant. We shall also ask some other questions, regarding who Confucius was, and what his role has been in Chinese civilisation. Was he a traditionalist? A social reformer? A revolutionary? To these questions, what were the answers of history, and what are the answers today? These issues have relevance to our main inquiry concerning the sage-king and wisdom.

The classical age of the philosophers, followed by that of Confucian dominance, led to an age of classical exegesis with its own independent momentum and dynamism. Around the same time, the rise of Taoist religion and the introduction of Buddhism brought their own challenges, and their own responses to the sage-king paradigm. Between these events, there were many centuries of intellectual development. This chapter will deal principally with early Confucian thought, and the chapter following, with the neo-Confucian thought that arose very much later.