he same way as the European
bourgeoisie) continually claimed that there should be access for every
civilized citizen to the highest places in the social pyramid, and the
rules of Confucianism became binding on every member of society if he
was to be considered a gentleman. Only then did Confucianism begin to
develop into the imposing system that dominated China almost down to the
present day. Confucianism did not become a religion. It was comparable
to the later Japanese Shintoism, or to a group of customs among us which
we all observe, if we do not want to find ourselves excluded from our
community, but which we should never describe as religion. We stand up
when the national anthem is played, we give precedency to older people,
we erect war memorials and decorate them with flowers, and by these and
many other things show our sense of belonging. A similar but much more
conscious and much more powerful part was played by Confucianism in the
life of the average Chinese, though he was not necessarily interested in
philosophical ideas.

While the West has set up the ideal of individualism and is suffering
now because it no longer has any ethical system to which individuals
voluntarily submit; while for the Indians the social problem consisted
in the solving of the question how every man could be enabled to live
his life with as little disturbance as possible from his fellow-men,
Confucianism solved the problem of how families with groups of hundreds
of members could live together in peace and co-operation in a densely
populated country. Everyone knew his position in the family and so, in a
broader sense, in the state; and this prescribed his rights and duties.
We may feel that the rules to which he was subjected were pedantic; but
there was no limit to their effectiveness: they reduced to a minimum the
friction that always occurs when great masses of people live close
together; they gave Chinese society the strength through which it has
endured; they gave security to its individuals. China's first real
social crisis after the collapse of feudalism, that is to say, after the
fourth or third century B.C., began only in the present century with the
collapse of the social order of the gentry and the breakdown of the
family system.

7 _Lao Tzu_

In eighteenth-century Europe Confucius was the only Chinese philosopher
held in regard; in the last hundred years, the years of Europe's
internal crisis, the philosopher Lao Tzu st