The Confucian fiction of heaven

This paper explores how we should understand tian in early Confucian texts and what role it plays in early Confucianism. I examine Robert Eno’s (1990) interpretation of tian as a creation by early Confucians and raise two issues with it: the problem of practice without performance and the problem of incommensurability. I then revise Eno’s account by incorporating Michael Puett’s (2015) idea of the ‘as if’ world of ritual and expanding it into a fictionalist interpretation. This revision avoids the two problems in Eno’s account. I argue that tian plays a key role in the Confucian ‘as if’ world of ritual, where practitioners train skills applicable to the real world. The practice in the fictional world differs from real performance. Once the fictional world is created, it can be continually adopted, allowing tian’s meaning to be grasped by later generations, thereby avoiding incommensurability and enabling modern understanding of tian.