Noble Creatures: Filial and Righteous Animals in Early Medieval Chinese Thought—a Talk by Keith N. Knapp 2:30 PM Wednesday, April 16, 2014 "Upon first reading moral tales of the early medieval period (A.D. 100-600), I was immediately struck by the fact that a number of these stories focus on animals. This was especially surprising because the anecdotes embody the ideology of Han Dynasty (206 BC —AD 220) Confucianism, which maintains that only humans can practice virtues such as benevolence and righteousness. Why then would anthropocentric Confucian authors attribute what so obviously seem to be human virtues to animals? In what ways were animals morally good? Were virtuous animals in any way distinct from their human counterparts? Most early medieval Confucian authors believed that animals were capable of performing the same virtuous acts as humans. Animals could repay the kindness of strangers and materially support, protect, mourn, and even avenge their parents. According to these tales, animals were morally little different from humans. The stark distinction is that people recognize the relationship between father and child, whereas animals do not. Humans are capable of recognizing more abstract relations, whereas animals only recognize those that are intimate and concrete. One explanation behind the virtuosity of animals is due to the mixing of filiality with the primordial qi that became the ten thousand things. Virtue is inherent within all things; thus, whether a creature becomes upright depends upon the ability to cultivate its natural endowment. Ultimately, tales about virtuous animals reveal a universe in which the ten thousand things are profoundly human: good animals act like decent people, except that they emphasize reciprocity rather than hierarchy." Keith N. Knapp is Professor of East Asian History at The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, who works extensively on Confucianism and social thought in early medieval China (220-589). He is the author of Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), which has been translated into Japanese. Having recently developed an interest in material culture, he is now participating in archaeological excavations in both China and Mongolia. The talk will take place on Wednesday, April 16th, at 2:30 p.m. in MLC 250, and is sponsored by COMPASS, the Comparative Literature Graduate Student Organization, and the Department of Comparative Literature.
