Buddhism Arrives in China

A History of Mankind (267)

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In the 2nd century, long memorials urging this or that policy on the Chinese court tended to have a particular focus on what they saw as a weakened military. Wang Fu (82-167), a renowned Confucian essayist from the much-threatened Hexi Corridor who struggled to find appropriate employment, wrote his classic Qianfu Lun – a weighty combination of philosophical and scientific treatise, and old-man political rant – under the big spending Emperor Huan.

His work wasn’t much appreciated in his lifetime, perhaps because Wang Fu had an aggressive streak in him that was a bit too pungent for the court’s standards. At one point, he writes about the attainment of a degree of personal superiority – worthy of rewards, wealth and honor – through virtue, regardless of the ruler’s favor, a dangerous concept for the emperor-whisperers around the throne; elsewhere, he thunders against the greed of “feudal princes and marquises,” precisely the kind of people most essayists tried to not get on the wrong side of.

Wang Fu’s writings were later celebrated, though. Among their more palatable virtues, there’s a rejection of a contemporary stress on having the right ancestry, a trait that this enemy of aristocratic freebooters considered unhealthy and one that many later scholars with no great forebears echoed enthusiastically. In his work, there’s also a particular paragraph that could be described as an all-purpose complaint about society, from elites to the plebes, applicable (perhaps with tiny tweaks) to any human community that ever existed, and thus extremely valuable:

The prompt for this image was “Angry Chinese Confucian.” There are no surviving portraits of Wang Fu.